Kaplan has been accused of a naive optimism that belongs to a previous era. But the truth is that we desperately need his faith in our ability to overcome the difficulties that life presents to us. We will not survive much less achieve salvation [sheleymut] if we succumb to despair, self-pity and doubt. We must rise above such feelings, and it is when we transcend ourselves in this sense that we grasp the true meaning of the divine in our lives. Kaplan puts it this way: “Every time we rise above corroding doubt, we grow in the awareness that what obtains in the depth of our personality is but an infinitesimal fraction of the creative and redemptive forces in the cosmos that spell God.”
December 16, 1942, Kaplan Diary. Communings of the Spirit, Volume III, 1942-1951, edited by Mel Scult (Wayne State University Press, 2020).