Meditacion y la Biblia/ Meditation and the Bible

by Aryeh Kaplan

Una innovadora interpretación de la Biblia, al mismo tiempo sólidamente basada tanto en el propio texto como en las antiguas enseñanzas cabalísticas. Uno de los mayores misterios de la Biblia que encierra los métodos utilizados por los Profetas para alcanzar sus excepcionales estados de consciencia. Prácticamente todos los textos bíblicos fueron escritos por los Profetas mientras se hallaban en tales estados, sin embargo no se menciona penas nada de cómo llegaban a alcanzarlos. En esta notable obra, Aryeh Kaplan extrae todo el espectro de la literatura cabalística, incluyendo numerosos antiguos manuscritos inéditos, para demostrar que la meditación desempeñaba un papel clave en los métodos utilizados por los Profetas. Se citan todas las fuentes y se traducen textualmente muchos de los textos más importantes. Combinando las antiguas enseñanzas cabalísticas con la moderna investigación sobre la teoría de la meditación, el autor explora áreas tales como la postura profética, el misterio de los Querubines, el papel de la música, así como también las diversas disciplinas y mantras empleados por los Profetas. Destaca por su importancia la interpretación que hace de la visión de Ezequiel, paradigma de la experiencia mística, así como la fuente principal de todas las enseñanzas cabalísticas posteriores. Además, se analizan detalladamente las fuentes bíblicas de las Diez Sefirot y de los Cuatro Universos. En la última sección, "Arqueología de la Palabra", intenta reconstruir el vocabulario bíblico empleado para describir los métodos místicos y los estados elevados de consciencia. Sólo esta sección ya promete revolucionar la erudición bíblica contemporánea.

Genres: Judaism, Jewish, Religion, Spirituality, Judaica, Meditation, Nonfiction

216 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1978

About the author

Born in New York City.
Rabbi and Physicist.

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan ZT"L was a world-well-known author. In his short lifetime he wrote over over 50 books. He was born in the Bronx, New York City, and studied to the local Yeshiva. He later continued his training at different Yeshivot in Israel. As a graduate student, Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan was described in a scientific "Who's Who" as the most promising young physicist in America. When he decided to devote his overflowing heart and massive intellect to the writing and teaching of traditional Torah values, the Jewish people gained a prolific and brilliant expositor with the uncommon gift of analyzing and presenting the most complex ideas in accessible terms. And when he passed away suddenly at the age of 48 with decades of productive activity still ahead of him, Jewry lost a priceless, irreplaceable treasure.

Aryeh Kaplan left a legacy of the thousands of people whom he touched and elevated, and of the scores of books and papers that flowed from his pen. "The Aryeh Kaplan Reader" is a collection of his essays reflecting the broad range of his interest and genius. From biography to Kabbalah, from contemporary movements to cosmic speculation, Aryeh Kaplan was at home. His writing is original and incisive. But most of all, it is always clear and to the point. Every appetite for Jewish themes will be whetted and satisfied by this book. True, to read this collection is to feel a keen sense of loss at the premature passing of a bright star in the Jewish literary firmament. But it is an intensely satisfying experience as well, because this book is crammed with substance and enlightenment. We put it down enriched by the intellectual company of Aryeh Kaplan, and grateful for this "gift he left behind. He died in 1983 at the young age of 48 years. May his memory be for a blessing.
http://www.sephardicstudies.org/kapla...

Reviews

[Ona Kiser · Rating 2 out of 5]

Two people suggested this book, probably based on the title. I have been taking a quick read through, and find it has a very mixed appeal.

One the one hand, I find it very interesting to get to know a Jewish understanding of the Bible, since the way in which events and prophecies and such are interpreted is sometimes quite different. So this book offers some of that, though that's not the main point of the book at all.

The main point is to show how the accounts of the ancient prophets (Ezekiel, Moses, Elijah, etc.) can be studied with an eye to understanding what kinds of practices they were doing to train as prophets. The idea being that in ancient times prophecy was a type of practice. There were systematic methods of training involving asceticism, purification, meditations, mantra-like use of special texts, visualizations etc. And all of this can be drawn out of a close study of the accounts in the Bible.

That said, the author, Kaplan, is a Kabbalist, so he has a particular interest in levels of symbolism, numerology etc that are more complicated than I am interested in. THAT said, at the end of each chapter he quotes source material from various famous Kabbalists that relates to the material in the chapter, and this is kind of interesting to read, at least as a peek into another worldview and epoch.

Finally, I think the part where I find the book not quite convincing is in Kaplan's understanding around divine union, enlightenment, prophecy, mysticism, and how all these things relate. Worldview stuff. His approach (which may be simply the norm for Judaism or at least Kabbala, I don't know) is very heavy on "ascension", with layers of realms one has to conquer through very elaborate practices and such. This kind of approach doesn't resonate much for me. Though I can see the practical use of the various exercises in most cases (at a minimum, supernatural effects aside, they certain train concentration, intention, self-discipline, filtering out the lazy, and so forth), at the same time they seem like a lot of Making Complicated. Then again, Catholicism has it's own layers of Making Complicated, and I like those, but they are familiar.

And sometimes Making Complicated turns into a Big Thing you hang on to, and you never get across the river because you are too busy endlessly re-decorating your raft or showing off how many cool dance moves you can do from the middle of the river. Not a huge fan of the river metaphor either, but I figure it's probably familiar. Anyway.

There also doesn't seem to be a lot of clarity around effort vs grace. That is, while he seems to imply that the "skill" of prophecy is something one has to train for by using very specific methods and studying under a master (and there are no more masters since the Babylonian Exile anyway, so....), at the same time he admits that prophecy is God-sent, something that is given as a gift at any given moment. So you doing the years of training and then asking for a prophetic vision can never be guaranteed to cause one, because it's God who decides if He feels like doing it at that moment. And all this, of course, must be done in a completely ego-free state. And yet the emphasis on mastery, special powers and skills seems to me to teeter around the edges of maintaining quite a bit of ego. I'm not sure Kaplan is clear on all this, or it may be that it's not an important angle on the subject for him, but sometimes he seems to lean more towards "gift" and sometimes more towards "special power".

[Dorum · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I expressed numerous times up to now, it is rather important to have an understanding of the people of the past when interpreting what they said. This is necessary because we are often using the same words with different meanings. Aryeh Kaplan does a very good job at actually furthering this understanding.

I had no idea of the meditative tradition of the Hebrews. I knew that it existed, as it is alluded by various people that have a passion for Kabbalah and so on. They for sure has a New Age feeling to it though, so I generally didn't put too much trust in them. Mostly because they were some really different schools of thought which were rather modern in their interpretation and practice of these concepts. As such, it was not in my opinion in any way possible related to anything they did in ancient times.

However, enter Aryeh Kaplan. He seems in a way very down to earth scholar, but in other ways a mystic. He explains some of the more intriguing passages in the Bible, and also partly explains the jewish meditative tradition.

To give an example, there is in the first book of Samuel this passage:
19 Word came to Saul: “David is in Naioth at Ramah”; 20 so he sent men to capture him. But when they saw a group of prophets prophesying, with Samuel standing there as their leader, the Spirit of God came on Saul’s men, and they also prophesied. 21 Saul was told about it, and he sent more men, and they prophesied too. Saul sent men a third time, and they also prophesied.

What the hell is going on there? Prophecy, in the meaning that we generally use today means to tell the future. But this is not the actual meaning of the word. Aryeh Kaplan makes a strong point that it means focusing the spiritual power. As such, when they prophesied it meant that they were in a trance, and that they forced the men of Saul to also enter into a trance.

Of course, the words "trance" and "meditation" are not used. But the concept is the same.

However, don't expect a really rigorous demonstration that what we call meditation NOW is the same as what they did. It probably isn't quite the same. Nevertheless, Kaplan shows quite convincingly that there is a tradition which seems uninterrupted through the last 2000 years at least. So I think that is good.

Another thing that I got from reading this book is a deeper understanding of how this people understood their relationship with the divinity. There is a certain current that seems to induce the belief that basically God, or the divinity, or whatever, generally gave the prophets of the Old Testament their visions "just like that". So without any work, or preparation, or anything like that. You just have it or you don't. There is a very strong feeling that this was not true.

That DOES NOT MEAN that it was all up to you. The final decision was, as far as I am able to understand up to the divinity. But you had to do the work. There was nothing like "just let it be", as I have seen it described. You need to refine yourself, to train, to get better and then MAYBE you had a chance to actually be worthy of prophecy. Which partly meant that you had an above average understanding of the reality, you had a focused mind. Partly it meant that you were able to receive a powerful and crystal clear message that you were able to take it back to the rest of the world and change it in some important and beneficial way.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kaplan’s idea here is that Jewish prayer used to be ad hoc and informal, meditation was common, and enlightenment was its aim.  Meditation was called prayer, and enlightenment was understood as receiving ruach hakodesh — the holy spirit, a sort of insight into God, into what is. I think. 

Why was this lost? Why are these ideas largely unknown in Jewish tradition? Kaplan suggests that these old practices were rooted around Solomon's Temple, the people, and the land of Israel. The destruction of the Temple and the Babylonian exile interrupted the traditions, and it is unclear how they were continued. Centuries later, further destruction and dispossession led Rabbis to worry for the loss of all continuity. They compiled the Mishna and the Talmud over several centuries. While doing so, they obscured or made 'secret' whatever was left of those older, mystical traditions. They understood those older traditions to have led people astray and to false prophesy. More practically, however, the Rabbis were trying to set up communal practices that could sustain a people without a land. Requiring a minyan to have at least 10 people, for example, helps create community, which helps create continuity. It works as an anchor. A temple and a land could serve as anchors around more individualistic practices, but with no temple and no land — and with a population that had suffered massive loss after wars with Rome — new anchors were needed. More formalized prayer and practices were prioritized. The older mysticism and spirituality was not gotten rid of, but it was kept oral, made secret, or buried in the texts. Kaplan says it's all still there: meditation, enlightenment, and practices leading to prophecy. He does what he calls textual archaeology, trying to unearth whatever remains.

The first half or so of the book describes the above. The latter half gets into a lot of parsing of words, which rather lost me.

[Benjamin Fasching-Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had no idea that the prophets engaged in a kind of spiritual warfare with each other that reads like some kind of fantasy wizard battle. Probably the most exciting stuff in here for me were the bits about meditative heresies. So meditating the way the prophets do is the correct path to the Jewish version of enlightenment but apparently in biblical times you had groups of people worshiping (?) trees (!) and I *need* more info on that, ASAP. Also there were necromancers who would meditate on the dead and they were something different than mediums: you had some people who could hear the voices of the dead and others who were outright possessed... but of course the rabbis now and the priests then say it's all nonsense. There wasn't much practical advice about how to meditate here, and the evidence of meditation in the bible proves to be pretty thin. Kaplan does a lot of Gemara kop when he gets into how different words in the bible have been translated one way, but might actually refer to meditation practices. On the one hand, there's no proof one way or the other what the authors of the bible meant, why they chose particular words. On the other hand, Kaplan shows kabbalistic masters interpret those texts and words to describe meditative practices and for me it doesn't really matter if a Jewish meditative practice goes back "only" to the middle ages or if it goes all the way back to secret societies that preserved these secrets since the time of the prophets. OK, yeah, the secret societies are cooler. Kaplan also brings in a story from the Talmud about a guy who was going to all the famous prostitutes of the ancient world, and then while he's having sex with the last one on his list, she makes fun of him or something or he belches(?) and then he decides to repent and his repentance consists of sitting with his head between his knees (apparently a traditional Jewish meditation practice that connects the head with the circumcision as both symbol of the covenant and symbol of the spiritual nature of righteous sex) ... so he sits there and has all these hallucinatory meditation experiences and then is finally forgiven at the moment of his death. I think that might make a cool movie.

[Gedalia Penner Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kind of got lost by the word-parsing at the end. But really appreciated the source excerpts at the end of each chapter.

[Patrick Tettey Terkpertey11 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful

Insightful and thought provoking. There is the Holy Spirit (Ruach HaKodesh) and false spirits. The difference is very well spelt out and documented. Let's beware!

[Martin Devon · Rating 5 out of 5]

IYNYN