Search - Richard Kaplan :: The Hidden One: Jewish Mystical Songs

Description (3900 characters maximum): A wide-ranging collection of contemplative, devotional, meditative and healing songs for spiritual practice and pure enjoyment - songs from Greece, Turkey, Spain, Eastern Europe and Inner Asia. Vocalist and Cantor Richard Kaplan is accompanied by an ensemble of stellar musicians. A twenty-four page booklet is included with song descriptions and lyrics. The Hidden One: Jewish Mystical Songs, two years in the making, is a recording which contains songs meant to take the singer and listener to realms beyond the five senses, into deeper and deeper levels of inner space, into greater and greater depths of consciousness. Great care and expense were put forth to create the 24-page booklet that accompanies the CD. We hope that listeners will avail themselves of this booklet, with its contemplative artwork by painter Michael Sgan-Cohen that so wonderfully expresses the underlying themes of the recording, with its important notes regarding each track, and with all of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish lyrics provided in both English translation and in transliteration. The booklet adds an added dimension to the overall experience of this powerful music. The term mysticism implies an experiential spirituality, one that is beyond thought, but one that uses thought to reach extremely imaginative and intuitive levels of the human mind and heart. The CD contains 18 songs (total running time: 75:42) which emphasize different stages of this inner journey, and is based upon the five souls model taught by the Jewish mystical tradition. The model includes the journeying into subtle levels of so-called materiality; secondly the diving into the hidden love within all of our hearts for our Ultimate Source; thirdly, the moving toward an apprehension of a Mind behind the mind; and fourthly, the going up into a transpersonal level , where the image of the same moonlight being reflected in millions of bodies of water is used to describe the Higher Mind that we all share, a Consciousness that could be termed impersonal or non-personal, and one that could eventually be felt as an indwelling Transcendent Subject. Finally, a fifth level of the soul is envisioned as actually being outside of the individual, but which is accessible to the person whose receptivity has reached a highly refined level. To use music to connect with, identify, distinguish, and ultimately live from these five levels is a great gift to the human being. It is the intent of the songs on this recording to be effective vehicles for such an evolution of Consciousness. From the inside of the digipak: At the centre of each human being, each animal, each plant, each cell, and each atom, there is a complete stillness. A seemingly empty stillness, but one which contains the divine energies and the divine idea for that thing.
--- Paul Brunton It is particularly though song that a soul can ascend to its root on high and the Source from which it was hewn.
--- Rabbi Dov Ber of Lubavitch