Abraham Kaplan Quotes

Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding. It comes as no particular surprise to discover that a scientist formulates problems in a way which requires for their solution just those techniques in which he himself is especially skilled.

We are forever asking Nature whether it has stopped beating its wife.

The price of training is always a certain "trained incapacity": the more we know how to do something, the harder it is to learn to do it differently.

CONVERSATION in which neither party is listening to the other was dubbed a “duologue” by Abraham Kaplan, a philosopher who died in 1993. A duologue, he suggested, is more than a monologue but less than a dialogue. (Multiply a duologue by a roomful of people, he cynically added, and you have a conference.)

The main method of meditation as outlined by Rabbi Abraham, thus involves the contemplation of nature. A person can contemplate the greatness of the sea, marveling at the many creatures that live in it. One can gaze at a clear night sky, allowing his mind to be completely absorbed by the glory of the stars. Through such intense contemplation, one can attain a meditative state directed toward the Divine. This is seen as the level of Aseph, one of the co-authors of the Psalms, who purified his heart and mind, cleansing it of all things other than the Divine. It is regarding this state that he said, "My flesh and heart fade away," When he divorced his consciousness from everything but God, he said, "Who have I in heaven? And with You, I have no desire on earth" (Psalm 73)

To get at the meaning of a statement the logical positivist asks, "What would the world be like if it were true?" The operationist asks, "What would we have to do to come to believe it?" For the pragmatist the question is, "What would we do if we did believe it?

Heschel began with a dedication “to the martyrs of 1940-45” and ended the dedication with the bitterest question to God: “Why dost Thou hide Thy face?” He was continuing to ask, as he had a decade earlier in Man Is Not Alone: What is the meaning, if any, of the Nazi genocide?

How will history judge Heschel’s actions? While we cannot justify the humiliation Heschel inadvertently inflicted on the American Jewish Committee and its Vatican partners through his interview with Geula Cohen, we can try to understand why he appears to have panicked and been rendered speechless, unable to protest Cohen’s outrageous comparison of church officials to Nazis.