Plato

The Athenian who put Western thought in a cave and asked how anyone gets out. Student of Socrates, teacher of Aristotle, founder of the Academy — and the ultimate forebear of this whole bench: the Hermetica breathe his cosmos, Plotinus calls himself nothing but Plato's reader, and the emanation scheme the Kabbalah inherited begins in his sentence that the Good is beyond being (Republic 509b). He never met a Hebrew letter; the rhymes are rhymes. But the cave — the world as an architecture of concealment, and education as a turning-around of the whole soul — is as close as Greek ever came to writing olam and teshuvah without the words.