Avrohom Eliyahu Kaplan

Rabbi Avrohom Eliyahu [Avraham Elya] Kaplan was a prominent Orthodox rabbi. He was born around the year 1890 in Kėdainiai, a town in the Kaunas County in Lithuania. He was born an orphan, and named Avrohom Elya for his deceased father, who had passed away suddenly at the age of 33 several months before his son's birth. At about this time, Reb Avraham Elya's mother remarried a man from Telshe (Reb Avraham Elya was very close to his stepfather, and called him "The Father".

Rabbi Avraham Elya studied for several years in the renowned Yeshiva of Telshe. His poetic and pasionate nature became legendary even at a young age. At 16, Avraham Elya was drawn to the spirit of the Mussar movement, and went to learn in the "Talmud Torah" in Kelm, the yeshiva founded by Rabbi Simcha Zisel Ziv He left Kelm, however, shortly after his arrival. He then went to the famed yeshiva in Slabodka headed by Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel, known as the "Alter of Slabodka", and Rabbi Moshe Mordechai Epstein, known by his penname, "Levush Mordechai". Avraham Elya studied in Slabodka for seven years, until the outbreak of World War I left him stranded in his mother's home in Telshe. In Slabodka, Reb Avraham Elya found the path that he had sought, in triying to reconcile the Mussar philosophy of Lithuanian Haredi Judaism with the philosophy of Hasidic Judaism. At the age of 30 he was appointed as Rosh Yeshiva of the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin.

He died suddenly when he was only 34 years old, about the same age as his father. In his youth (at the age of seventeen), his fiery nature induced him to compose a poem portraying impending doom and angst. This famous poem, "Shak'a Chama", contains a sense of depression and searching. It begins: "The sun has set... my soul has set / In the depth of its sorrow as great as the sea..." (B'Ikvot, p. 171).

Works

"B'Ikvot HaYir'a", Mosad HaRav Kook, 1956. Reprinted in 1988 in an expanded edition, and again in 2002.

"Divrei Talmud", 2 volumes, Mosad HaRav Kook, 1958. Reprinted in 1970.

"Mivchar Ketavim", privately published by the Kaplan family, 2006.

These works were all compiled and edited by Rabbi Kaplan's son, the noted author Rabbi Tzvi Kaplan.

External links

* [http://www.aishdas.org/rygb/raek.htm Biography of Rabbi Avrohom Eliyahu Kaplan]
* [http://www.aishdas.org/raek/yirah.pdf Be'ikvos haYir'ah, the title essay]
* [http://www.aishdas.org/raek/yirah.pdf Essays, Lyrics and Songs (mp3) from Bei'kvos haYir;ah]
* [http://www.aishdas.org/raek/2derachim.pdf Shtei Derachim] a comparison of Mussar and Chassidus
* [http://www.daat.ac.il/daat/kitveyet/beyt/16.doc Some poems by Rabbi Avrohom Eliya Kaplan] including Shak'a Chamah
* [http://www.aishdas.org/rygb/elul.htm Elul in Slabodka] from his diary