The title of this volume reflects its contents - Immortality, Resurrection, and the Age of the Universe: A Kabbalistic view. In addition, there is a discussion of the place of astrology within Jewish thinking and a mystical view of the relationship between the two sexes.
Rabbi Kaplan was one of the most creative personalities to bless the Jewish scene in the last generation. His prolific and multifaceted output include books on the bible, Jewish law, mysticism (including books on meditation and prayer, in which he was particularly interested), and Jewish thought.
This collection contains some of the most searching and provocative of his works. They combine the insights of ancient Kabbalistic teaching with the discoveries of modern science. Drawing on the Kabbalah, for example, Kaplan shows how modern science’s findings regarding the age of the universe may be reconciled with the chronology of the creation of Genesis 1, how the longevity of the patriarchs before the Flood and the resurrection of the dead may be explained in biological terms.
In addition, as an appendix, the volume contains an annotated translation of the article Or-ha-Hayyim, by Rabbi Israel Lipschitz, the author of the classic Tiferet Israel commentary on the Mishnah. The article discusses fossils and evolution and was written in 1845. It has never before been available in English in its entirety. Rabbi Lipschitz was among the first, if not the first to rise to the challenge of the then new discovery of fossils in the first half of the nineteenth century.