When the Sun Set

Location: Berlin, Germany

Document: HaNe’eman Fifth Yahrtzeit Tribute (Telz)

Time: May 1924

There was a man,

A man whose life was creation,

A man whose creation was life.

There was a man who sang and who learned and who taught,

And who thought and who rejoiced

And who loved and who grieved.

And all of his words were alive and illuminated

With the light of Avraham Avinu’s furnace,

A brilliant light that escapes from between his words;

That like a hammer shatters rock,

The light of the secrets of Yisrael,

The light of the secret of the world.

And the light became life,

The light of life, a life of light.

“And he is no longer.”

Is he no longer?

Wasn’t the brilliance of his smiling eyes absorbed

In the light of my eyes, in the light of your eyes,

You, my brother in sorrow, who knew him?

Will it not happen that his image will flash out and illumine us?

Will it not happen that we will see him smiling at us?

Accompanying us in our determined pursuits, in attempts to be “alive,”

In our ascents, in the joy of our creations?

Let us impart to all who come within our precincts

From the light of his eyes, from the light of his soul.

And they will live by them.

And he will live in them.

—Professor Feivel Meltzer (brother-in-law of Rav Avraham Elya Kaplan). Published in the HaNe’eman Fifth Yahrtzeit Tribute Edition in 1929
(Translation by Rabbi Yosef Gavriel Bechhofer)

Avraham Eliyahu Kaplan was born in 1889 in Keidan, Lithuania, just a few months after his father was suddenly niftar, and he was duly named for him. His first rebbi was his uncle, Rav Yitzchak Eliyahu Geffen of Riteve, who took great pride in educating his nephew. His mother remarried and settled in Telz, and Avraham Elya attended the yeshivah there for several years.

Following a short stint in Kelm, he joined the Slabodka yeshivah of Rav Nosson Tzvi Finkel, the Alter of Slabodka, in 1907. He’d remain there for seven years, until the outbreak of World War I, emerging as one of the Alter’s prized students and one of the brightest lights produced by the storied institution.

Possessing a brilliant mind and a lofty, poetic soul, Rav Avraham Elya was among the yeshivah elite who enjoyed an especially close relationship with the Alter. A talented writer, he recorded detailed descriptions of Slabodka, mussar, his relationship with the Alter, and his personal struggles in a diary, in correspondence he maintained with acquaintances, in essays, and in poetry. At the beginning of Elul zeman 1910, he dispatched a letter to a friend in which he passionately described the yeshivah atmosphere and implored his friend to join him in Slabodka.