Aryeh Kaplan

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Aryeh Kaplan (1934–1983) was an American Orthodox rabbi, translator, and writer who did more than almost anyone of his generation to argue that Kabbalah contained a practical discipline of meditation, and to make that material legible to readers outside the yeshiva. Trained first as a physicist, he came to religious scholarship by a second path, and the precision of the earlier training is visible in the later work: he wrote to be understood, and he documented his sources.

His translations were the foundation. He produced English versions of two of the oldest and most difficult Kabbalistic texts — the Sefer Yetzirah, the terse “Book of Formation” that maps creation onto the Hebrew letters and the numbers, and the Bahir, the medieval work usually taken as the first book of the Kabbalah proper — each carried by a running commentary meant to open the text rather than guard it. Alongside these he made The Living Torah, a fresh and heavily annotated rendering of the Pentateuch that remains in wide use.

The books he is most remembered for set out to recover a lost technique. In Meditation and Kabbalah, Meditation and the Bible, and the later Jewish Meditation, he gathered scattered references across the tradition — the contemplative methods of Abraham Abulafia, the practices attributed to the prophets, the disciplines of breath, letter, and divine name — and presented them as evidence that Judaism possessed a meditative path of its own, one that had largely fallen out of common memory. The claim was partly historical and partly an invitation to practice; he made it as an observant rabbi, from inside the tradition, not as a comparativist looking in.

How far his reconstruction reflects what earlier Kabbalists actually did is a matter scholars still weigh. He read the medieval and early-modern sources as a fairly continuous body of technique, where later academic study tends to stress discontinuity, regional difference, and the gap between a text’s instructions and any documented use. What is not in dispute is the reach of the books: they introduced a large readership, Jewish and otherwise, to the idea that Kabbalah was something to be done and not only studied, and they shaped how Jewish meditation has been taught since.

His output was large and his life short; he died at forty-eight. Much of what circulates today as introductory Jewish contemplative practice traces back, directly or at one remove, to the volumes he wrote in little more than a decade.

→ In the library: Sepher Yetzirah (Westcott translation, 1911) — a text Kaplan later rendered

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