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.

The Sefer Yetzirah (“Book of Formation”), Mantua edition of 1562 — one of the oldest Kabbalistic texts and the work Kaplan later rendered into annotated English. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (PD-old)

Two trainings

He was born Aryeh Moshe Eliyahu Kaplan in the Bronx on 23 October 1934, and the two halves of his education sat unusually close together. He studied at the Mesivta Torah Vodaas and at the Mirrer Yeshiva in Brooklyn, and received rabbinic ordination in 1956. In parallel he took a bachelor’s degree from the University of Louisville and a master’s in physics from the University of Maryland, working for a time at the National Bureau of Standards on magneto-hydrodynamics — the behavior of electrically conducting fluids in magnetic fields. As a graduate student he was listed in Who’s Who in Physics among the more promising young researchers in the country. He did not stay in the laboratory. By the late 1960s he had turned the whole of his attention to the Hebrew sources, and the physicist’s habits went with him: the insistence on defining a term before using it, the diagram and the table where a paragraph would blur, the conviction that a difficult system can be set out plainly if one is patient enough with its parts.

That conviction is the through-line of his work. Where much of the literature he inherited treated the obscurity of a mystical text as part of its dignity — something to be approached only after years inside a tradition of oral explanation — Kaplan treated obscurity as a problem to be solved for the reader. He credited the scientific training for the method: a willingness to read a source as a set of operations that could, in principle, be stated, charted, and followed. The same disposition shaped the breadth of his output. In little more than a decade he produced over fifty books and booklets, from one-sitting pamphlets on prayer, kashrut, and the festivals — written for a Jewish public that had grown up with little formal grounding, and widely credited as a spur to the baal teshuvah return-to-observance movement of the 1970s — up to the densest reaches of Kabbalah.

The physics did not merely supply a temperament; it shaped what he thought he was recovering. Kaplan tended to read the mystical sources as a body of exact knowledge — a description of how mind, breath, and language actually work, dimmed by centuries of neglect rather than mythologized into mere symbol — and he was drawn to the rationalist current in the tradition that ran from Maimonides through the systematizing mysticism of Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto, whose Derekh Hashem he translated as a clean, articulated map of the divine economy. That instinct for system over rhapsody set him slightly apart from the more emotive devotional writing of his milieu, and it is one reason his books wore so well: a reader could disagree with the synthesis and still use the scaffolding.

Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon), in a widely reproduced eighteenth-century engraving — the rationalist current Kaplan was drawn to and whose systematizing heir, Luzzatto, he translated. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (PD-old)

The translations

His translations were the foundation, and they reversed a long habit. 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 twenty-two Hebrew letters and the ten sefirot, 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. His Sefer Yetzirah (1990, revised 1997) printed the Gra/Ari recension edited in sixteenth-century Safed as its primary text and appended the rival recensions alongside, so that a reader could see at a glance that the surviving witnesses do not fully agree — a textual frankness the older devotional editions had tended to suppress.

Alongside these he made The Living Torah (1981), a fresh and heavily annotated rendering of the Pentateuch that remains in wide use, completed shortly before his death. It is the work for which he is best known outside mystical circles: a translation built for readability, with the notes drawn from the traditional commentators and the apparatus — maps, diagrams, cross-references, a running glossary of realia — assembled with the same impulse to make a closed text usable. A companion rendering of the Prophets and Writings, The Living Nach, was assembled posthumously by other hands from his method and notes and published across the 1990s. He also translated Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto’s Derekh Hashem (“The Way of God”) and worked, in his last years, on an English Me’am Lo’ez, the vast eighteenth-century Ladino Torah anthology. Earlier, with Rabbi Zvi Aryeh Rosenfeld, he had rendered works of Nachman of Breslov into English, including the first complete English Sichot HaRan — the connection that anchors his standing among the Breslov (Bratslav) Hasidim, who keep his books in print and in use.

The recovery of a technique

The books he is most remembered for set out to recover a lost technique. In Meditation and the Bible (1978), Meditation and Kabbalah (1982), and the later, more popular Jewish Meditation: A Practical Guide (1985), he gathered scattered references across the whole sweep of the tradition — the throne-vision literature of the Hekhalot, the contemplative methods of Abraham Abulafia, the letter-mysticism of Joseph Gikatilla, the disciplines of Isaac of Acco and Eleazar of Worms, the practices of the later Safed and Hasidic masters — and presented them as evidence that Judaism possessed a meditative path of its own, one that had largely fallen out of common memory.

The architecture he described had three recurring instruments, each treated as a structural type rather than a set of directions: the controlled regulation of the breath; the contemplation of the Hebrew letters, taken singly or permuted in ordered series; and the recitation and inner turning-over of the divine names — above all the techniques of prophecy-oriented meditation that Abulafia called the hokhmat ha-tzeruf, the “science of combination,” in which the names of God are worked through their permutations as a way of loosening the mind from ordinary thought. Kaplan read these not as curiosities but as a graded discipline, and he placed them inside a tripartite scheme he found in his sources and made his own: Kabbalah, on his account, divides into a theoretical branch (the doctrine of the sefirot and the structure of the worlds), a meditative branch (the contemplative ascent), and a practical or magical branch — and it was the middle term, the meditative, that he judged most thoroughly forgotten and most worth restoring.

Frontispiece of the 1516 Latin Portae Lucis (“Gates of Light”), Paulus Ricius’s version of Joseph Gikatilla’s Sha’arei Orah — the first printed diagram of the ten sefirot, the theoretical branch of the Kabbalah that Kaplan set beside the meditative one. Woodcut attributed to Leonhard Beck, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (PD-old)

The claim was partly historical and partly an invitation. He made it as an observant rabbi, from inside the tradition, not as a comparativist looking in; and he made it for a generation that, finding little contemplative instruction in the synagogues of its youth, was looking eastward to Hindu and Buddhist disciplines for what it could not find at home. Kaplan’s argument, in effect, was that it had been there all along — that a Jew seeking a practice of stillness and ascent need not convert the vocabulary of another tradition but could recover one native to this one. The pull of that argument, for his readers, was exactly its claim of continuity: not a borrowing dressed in Hebrew, but a thread picked up where it had been dropped.

Textual study and the historiography

How far that reconstruction reflects what earlier Kabbalists actually did is a matter scholars still weigh, and the question turns on a single seam in the evidence: the distance between a text that describes a technique and any record of the technique being performed. Kaplan read the medieval and early-modern sources as a fairly continuous body of practice, transmitted however thinly from the Hekhalot mystics through Abulafia and his school to Safed and the Hasidic courts. Much of the academic study that frames the field reads the same material the other way, stressing discontinuity, regional difference, sharp breaks in transmission, and the gap between an instruction preserved on a page and any documented community that lived by it.

The contrast is sharpest against the two scholars who set the modern terms. Gershom Scholem, whose Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) founded the academic study of the subject, organized the field around the theosophic, sefirot-centered Kabbalah of the Zohar and treated Abulafia’s ecstatic, name-centered stream as a powerful but somewhat marginal current. Moshe Idel, beginning in the 1980s with Kabbalah: New Perspectives (1988) and The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia (1988), pushed back — moving the ecstatic-prophetic stream toward the center and recovering Abulafia as a major figure. Kaplan’s books, written in the same years on the practitioner’s side of the wall, ran parallel to Idel’s recovery; readers who knew both have called Kaplan, with only some exaggeration, an Orthodox counterpart to Idel’s academic case, building the contemplative tradition back up from the inside while Idel reconstructed it from the archive. The two projects share a quarry and part on method: Idel writes as a historian who can grant that a text attests an aim without granting that the aim was reliably reached or widely practiced; Kaplan writes as a teacher who treats the surviving instructions as a discipline meant to be taken up again. Neither his continuity reading nor the academic stress on rupture has the field to itself; the seam between description and use remains the place the argument is fought.

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 habit of citing chapter and verse, of telling the reader where a claim came from, gave the volumes a durability that more rhapsodic treatments of the same material did not earn: even where a specialist disputes his synthesis, the sources he points to are real and checkable, and a reader can follow them back.

The critical literature has begun to take his project seriously on its own terms. Alan Brill’s study of Kaplan’s experience, consciousness, and method sets out the tripartite scheme — theoretical, meditative, practical — and traces how Kaplan glosses the older sources in modern psychological language, casting the inner ascent in terms his readers could recognize; it is also where the “Orthodox Idel” comparison is laid out most carefully. The textual ground under the meditation books — the Hekhalot literature, Abulafia’s name-mysticism, Gikatilla’s Gates of Light, the Safed and Hasidic continuators — is the same ground the academic study of ecstatic Kabbalah has cultivated since the 1980s, so that Kaplan’s volumes and the scholarship now read as two passes over one field. A full census of his translations, pamphlets, and the posthumous completions is catalogued with their dates and later editions, a useful map of how much one decade held.

A short life, a long reach

His output was large and his life short; he died of a heart attack at his home on 28 January 1983, at forty-eight. The choice that organized the whole effort was the unusual one announced in the work itself: to make the difficult texts open rather than guard them. Where the learned convention had treated the meditative material as something to be approached only with a teacher and a lifetime, Kaplan built his translations to be entered directly — a decision about access, not only about scholarship, and the one that distinguishes him from the tradition of careful concealment he drew on.

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

→ Related: Bratslav · Abraham Abulafia · Sefer Yetzirah · Pentateuch · Kabbalah · Meditation · Prophecy · Gershom Scholem · Nachman Of Breslov · Maimonides