Book

Jewish Meditation

People are often surprised to hear the phrase Jewish meditation, and Aryeh Kaplan opens this book by taking that surprise seriously: most modern guides to the subject give the tradition no room at all, even though Judaism carries disciplined methods of its own, developed in detail across the centuries. Kaplan, a rabbi and a physicist, wrote this practical guide to put those techniques back in reach, and it appeared from Schocken in 1985, a short time after his early death. The book is organized as a course in method rather than a history. Early chapters define meditation and argue for it from inside Jewish sources; then the techniques arrive one at a time, from mantra meditation with ordinary Hebrew phrases through contemplation and visualization to the practice of nothingness, in which attention rests on the letters of the divine name seen, as it were, behind the nothingness itself. Kaplan cites the Midrash and the Zohar the way an instructor uses a lab notebook, reading Jacob's wrestling with the angel as a documented case of what happens when a person contends with the spiritual directly. The closing chapters turn the practice toward ordinary life: prayer, the commandments, the relationship between man and woman, and the slow remolding of the self that the training is for. Written for readers who feel the gap Kaplan names, and for any meditator curious what a strictly monotheistic meditation tradition looks like from the inside, it stays short, plain and practical throughout. It remains the standard entrance to the subject.

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