“The Pious Man” is a prayer-poem first published in The Sabbath Prayer Book (New York: The Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation, 1945) and originally composed by Mordecai Kaplan in a diary entry, September 19, 1942,^[1] The digital images for Mordecai Kaplan’s Diaries are accessible at the JTS Library system. This is a direct link to the resource, and if that does not work, search their Makor library system for “Papers, 1910-1975; Mordecai Menahem Kaplan 1881-1983.” and then select “View Online” at the entry, “Papers, 1910-1975.” This only worked for us using the Microsoft Edge browser.  on the virtue of piety as expressed in an essay published earlier that year by Abraham Joshua Heschel. Piety was a Roman virtue, but in this essay, A.J. Heschel appears to be describing an idealization of Ḥasidut. I am grateful to Mel Scult for bringing my attention to this prayer-poem via his autobiography of Kaplan The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan (Indiana University Press 2013), ch. 10 “Mordecai the Pious,” p. 209-210. Scult writes (p. 208-209):

In the spring of 1942, the young Heschel wrote a very fine essay in English, “An Analysis of Piety,” that appeared in The Review of Religion.^[2] Abraham Joshua Heschel, “An Analysis of Piety,” The Review of Religion 6, no. 3 (March 1942): 293-307, reprinted in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays — Abraham Joshua Heschel, ed. Susannah Heschel (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1996), 305-18.  The essay caught Kaplan’s eye. Kaplan had been contemplating the ontological issue of whether the rational and the spiritual were reducible to the psychological or whether these realms of our thought actually exist beyond the bounds of our brains. In other words, are our ideas merely mental constructs, or do they reflect an outside reality? His concern could be formulated in what medieval philosophers called the nominalist- realist problem-are the particulars or the universals the most real? Do our concepts merely name a group of particulars, they asked, or does the name itself stand for something, independent of the particulars? Kaplan was reassured that Hesch el shared his belief in the independent reality of the spiritual or, as he put it, “the need of viewing the spiritual dimension apart from the other two dimensions of experience.” Kaplan’s diary entry reads as follows:

Mon. Apr.6/1942…. The following from Abraham Heschel’s “An Analysis of Piety” (The Review of Religion March /1942) is in line with the need of viewing the spiritual dimension apart from the other two dimensions of experience: “[Ideas are not to be confused with the psychical setting in which they appear. It is fallacious to identify knowledge with the process of its acquisition or realization.]^[3] The text inside the square bracket is in Heschel’s essay but not quoted by Kaplan in his diary.  The spiritual content is not identical with the act itself, nor are concepts tantamount to functions of the mind. The spiritual objective content is universal, and should be distinguished from subjective psychical function. Piety is an objective spiritual entity. [There have been times in which piety was as common as knowledge of the multiplication table is today.]”

Kaplan’s concern with the spiritual comes to us as a surprise. We tend to think of him as concerned primarily with community and with “Judaism as a Civilization.” Yet there is another side to Kaplan that centers on the spiritual and its expression. His religiosity is complex, and, as we have seen again and again, it is a mistake to believe that his thought can be reduced to the naturalistic and the pragmatic. Though a thoroughgoing rationalist, Kaplan valued piety. I would go so far as to say, amid the numerous accusations of heresy and blasphemy waged against him, Kaplan was a pious man.

Kaplan had always believed that one way to compose new liturgy was to take an inspiring essay and turn it into a prayer. After reading Heschel’s essay on piety, Kaplan composed a prayer based on Heschel’s thoughts and a few years later inserted it into his 1945 prayer book. It is a skillful transformation of an essay into a poem.Not a simple translation, nor a cut-and-paste job, the poem illustrates Kaplan’s keen spiritual sense and the clarity of his thought.

[Above] is the first half of Kaplan’s poem/prayer. Nearly all the words are taken directly from Heschel’s essay, though Kaplan has inserted a few key changes of his own. Readers of Heschel will feel the familiar cadences of his prose.

Source(s)

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“The Pious Man, a prayer-poem by Mordecai Kaplan adapted from the essay “An Analysis of Piety” by Abraham Joshua Heschel (1942)” is shared through the Open Siddur Project with a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication 1.0 Universal license.

Mordecai Kaplan

Mordecai Menahem Kaplan (June 11, 1881 – November 8, 1983), was a rabbi, essayist and Jewish educator and the co-founder of Reconstructionist Judaism along with his son-in-law Ira Eisenstein.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Abraham Joshua Heschel (January 11, 1907 – December 23, 1972) was a Polish-born American rabbi and one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century. Heschel, a professor of Jewish mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, authored a number of widely read books on Jewish philosophy and was active in the civil rights movement.

Aharon N. Varady (transcription)

Aharon Varady (M.A.J.Ed./JTSA Davidson) is a volunteer transcriber for the Open Siddur Project. If you find any mistakes in his transcriptions, please let him know. Shgiyot mi yavin; Ministarot naqeni שְׁגִיאוֹת מִי־יָבִין; מִנִּסְתָּרוֹת נַקֵּנִי "Who can know all one's flaws? From hidden errors, correct me" (Psalms 19:13). If you'd like to directly support his work, please consider donating via his Patreon account. (Varady also translates prayers and contributes his own original work besides serving as the primary shammes of the Open Siddur Project and its website, opensiddur.org.)

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ויהי נעם אדני אלהינו עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננה עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננהו "May the pleasantness of אדֹני our elo’ah be upon us; may our handiwork be established for us — our handiwork, may it be established." –Psalms 90:17