The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan

Mel Scult

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780253010889
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

"An important and powerful work that speaks to Mordecai M. Kaplan's position as perhaps the most significant Jewish thinker of the twentieth century." (Deborah Dash Moorecoeditor of Gender and Jewish History) Mordecai M. Kaplan, founder of the Jewish Reconstructionist movement, is the only rabbi to have been excommunicated by the Orthodox rabbinical establishment in America. Kaplan was indeed a radical, rejecting such fundamental Jewish beliefs as the concept of the chosen people and a supernatural God. Although he valued the Jewish community and was a committed Zionist, his primary concern was the spiritual fulfillment of the individual. Drawing on Kaplan's 27-volume diary, Mel Scult describes the development of Kaplan's radical theology in dialogue with the thinkers and writers who mattered to him most, from Spinoza to Emerson and from Ahad Ha-Am and Matthew Arnold to Felix Adler, John Dewey, and Abraham Joshua Heschel. This gracefully argued book, with its sensitive insights into the beliefs of a revolutionary Jewish thinker, makes a powerful contribution to modern Judaism and to contemporary American religious thought. "An interesting, stimulating, and well-done analysis of Kaplan's life and thought. All students of contemporary Jewish life will benefit from reading this excellent study." — Jewish Media Review "The book is highly readable?at times almost colloquial in its language and style?and is recommended for anybody with a familiarity with Kaplan but who wants to understand his thought within a broader context." — AJL Reviews

ONE

EXCOMMUNICATIONS: KAPLAN AND SPINOZA

Too bad we had only one Spinoza.

—Mordecai M. Kaplan, 1939

Most of us think of Mordecai Kaplan as the founding father of the Reconstructionist movement. Indeed he was, but his life was marked equally by another, quite different, biographical event: he was the first rabbi in the United States to be excommunicated by the ultra-Orthodox. Excommunication is usually associated with the Catholic Church and not with the Jews, but, alas, this painful act has been part of Jewish life for centuries. Indeed, the enemies of Maimonides—Jews, of course—burned his books after he died in 1204 and excommunicated anyone who read them. The most famous excommunication in Jewish history took place in Amsterdam in 1656. Its recipient was Baruch Spinoza, one of Kaplan’s intellectual inspirations.

The excommunication of Mordecai Kaplan, which occurred as a result of a prayer book he published in 1945, is a good place to begin a study of Kaplan’s thought. Thinking of Kaplan in connection with Spinoza will also raise some fundamental and perhaps disturbing questions about Kaplan. Did Kaplan fully embrace Spinoza’s philosophy, or were there issues on which the two differed? And how do these paired excommunications, nearly three hundred years apart, enable us to understand twentieth-century Jewish thinking?

Spinoza, the best-known Jewish heretic, was born in Amsterdam in 1632. Rather a precocious young man, he began to think independently about religious matters at an early point and did not hesitate to speak with other members of the Jewish community about his beliefs. A herem (literally, ban) or excommunication was pronounced against him in 1656 by the leaders of the Amsterdam Jewish community. Although the herem does not specify the particular beliefs that were at issue, the community leaders certainly had in mind the following: he rejected the immortality of the soul, as well as the providential personal God—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—and claimed that the Hebrew scriptures and Jewish law were neither literally given by God nor binding on the Jewish people. Excommunication meant that the person involved was to be cut off completely from the Jewish community. Jews were to have no contact with him whatsoever.

In the last century, a number of prominent Jews have wanted to reinstate Spinoza as a member of the Jewish people. Among them are Joseph Klausner, the noted Jewish scholar, and David Ben-Gurion. Klausner, who came to the Hebrew University in the late 1920s, advocated bringing back Spinoza in his inaugural lecture at the university. It is perhaps also noteworthy that a course in Spinoza’s thought was taught in 2006 at the Rabbinical School of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Until recently, it was nearly unimaginable that future Conservative rabbis would be studying Spinoza! In addition, Steven Nadler, a well-known Spinoza scholar, asserts in his recent book Spinoza’s Heresy that the whole matter of Spinoza’s status must be reconsidered since the reasons for the excommunication are still unclear.¹ Although Spinoza is still considered a heretic by some, he nonetheless occupies an honored place in Jewish history (at least for most non-Orthodox Jews, and even some Orthodox ones).²

Kaplan’s place in Jewish history is much clearer than Spinoza’s, though Kaplan’s transgressions are no less profound. The actual excommunication of Rabbi Mordecai Menachem Kaplan took place in New York City at the McAlpin Hotel on June 15, 1945. His “crimes” were multiple, as we shall see. In addition to attracting the ire of Orthodox Jews for several decades, two of Kaplan’s actions were particularly objectionable and became the occasion of the ban: the publication of a new prayer book in May 1945, with multiple deletions and additions, and the lesser appreciated but as important act of publishing a new Passover haggadah four years earlier, which also differed significantly from the traditional text.

The Torah portion for the week of Kaplan’s excommunication was Korah, which contains the narrative of the quintessential biblical dissenter who challenged the authority and wisdom of Moses. The rabbis’ rush to judgment (the herem was issued only a month after Kaplan’s prayer book appeared) was certainly influenced by their desire to classify Kaplan with Korah, that most “despicable” of biblical rebels, but was also a result of the concentration camp revelations from Europe then appearing.³ The ultra-Orthodox organization of rabbis, calling itself the “Agudat Harabbanim [Society of Rabbis] of the United States and Canada,” came together a month after V-E day to issue a formal ban against Kaplan. Kaplan, thus, occupies a singular place in American Jewish history, for no other figure has been condemned so fiercely, much less made the object of a ban.

How could it happen that a well-known and generally respected rabbi in the American Jewish community was excommunicated? How could it happen in the mid-twentieth century that a group of respected rabbis would decide not just to criticize one of its brethren but to burn his offending book? The incident makes little sense to us today but reveals something crucial about the power of Kaplan’s thinking and the dilemmas of mid-century American Jewry. The explanation for this bizarre set of circumstances lies not only in the early years of Kaplan’s life but also in the evolution of his intellectual and religious development. It would also help if we understand the fears and concerns of the Orthodox community during this period.

Kaplan was born not far from Vilna, the Lithuanian center of Ashkenazic Jewry, in June of 1881. He claims that he was so firmly located in the traditional Jewish world that he did not know the English date for his birth until he came to America and decided one day to look it up in the Jewish collection of the New York Public Library.⁴

Rabbi Israel Kaplan, Mordecai’s father, was a well-educated, traditional Ashkenazi Jew. In 1888, he was invited by Jacob Joseph, the newly appointed chief rabbi of New York City, to become a member of the chief rabbi’s entourage. The creation of the office of chief rabbi reflected the deep concern of a group of New York Jews to bring some order into traditional Judaism in the city. The massive immigrations of the late nineteenth century exposed rifts and conflicts within the Orthodox population. Some of the new immigrants were much more observant of Jewish law than others. The function of the chief rabbi was to help preserve Orthodox life, to unify the various Orthodox communities, and to increase their self-respect.⁵

Kaplan senior enrolled his son in a local yeshiva on the Lower East Side soon after arriving in New York City. Rabbi Israel Kaplan, however, remained his son’s most important teacher until Mordecai was well into his twenties.⁶ Though he lived within the Orthodox tradition, not known for its receptiveness to outsiders, Israel Kaplan was an unusually tolerant person. Arnold Ehrlich (1848–1919), a biblical critic who was shunned by much of New York Jewry, was a regular visitor to the Kaplan household. Ehrlich had converted to Christianity in Europe and aided Christian missionaries in their Hebrew translation of the New Testament. Though he eventually returned to the Jewish fold, it was difficult for him to integrate into the Jewish community. Ehrlich accepted the canons of biblical criticism—which in the late nineteenth century meant post-Mosaic authorship of the five books of Moses and the existence of multiple biblical documents that were forged by an editor into the final Pentateuchal text. There is no doubt that Ehrlich had a significant “heretical” influence on the teenage Kaplan.⁷

Another very significant influence during Kaplan’s teenage years was the famous cultural Zionist Ahad Ha-Am. Though Ahad Ha-Am (Asher Hirsch Ginsberg, 1856–1927), was a deeply dedicated Jew from a traditional background, he had no place in his Zionist ideology for God or the synagogue. He was accurately referred to as the “secular rabbi,” and the young Kaplan was strongly attracted to his philosophy.⁸

Kaplan’s conflicts with the ultra-Orthodox began when he applied for his first rabbinical position in 1903. It was just about this time that the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada, which would excommunicate him in 1945, had come into being. The ultra-Orthodox were deeply troubled by the many immigrants who were calling themselves rabbis but who lacked credentials and appropriate knowledge.

The Jewish Theological Seminary, founded in 1886, was reorganized under Solomon Schechter in 1902 with the goal of helping to Americanize these immigrants.⁹ The ultra-Orthodox were highly critical of the Seminary and its nontraditional curriculum. These Orthodox rabbis attempted to prevent congregations from hiring Seminary graduates. When they learned that Kehilath Jeshurun, an established Orthodox congregation on the Upper East Side, was going to hire a graduate of the Seminary as its rabbi, they strongly condemned this action. The Seminary graduate involved was Mordecai Kaplan.¹⁰

Kaplan had received his B.A. from City College in 1900 and was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1902. He was hired at Kehilath Jeshurun in 1903 and officiated there from 1903 until 1909. During this period, he also studied for his Master’s at Columbia University, majoring in philosophy and sociology. It is clear from his writings of this period that he had profound conflicts about his religious faith. Though he strictly adhered to the daily round of prayers and rituals, he felt cast adrift from his moorings as a traditional Jew and grew impatient with the traditional prayer texts. In an early diary entry from May 1905, we find the following: “[A]re not these [entries in the journal] more truly prayer and confession than the infinite repetition of the daily prayers in our ritual, from which I find it necessary to desist occasionally in order to be able to recite it all without getting nausea.” His religious conflicts would give him no respite. “Oh God what anguish of soul! How doubt tortures me,” he wrote in his journal in 1905.¹¹ Or again: “I little thought that at this time of my life, I would find myself so aimless…. I find a perfect ‘photograph’ of my mental life in the book of Koheleth [Ecclesiastes], in its skepticism, in its fear of God, in its worldliness and in its threadbare spirituality.”¹²

Kaplan was rescued from this intolerable existential situation by Solomon Schechter, who in 1909 hired him to direct the Teachers Institute at the Seminary. For the next decade, Kaplan devoted himself to his duties at the seminary and, toward the end of that decade, also helped organize the Jewish Center. The Jewish Center, founded in 1918 in a magnificent building still standing on West 86th Street in Manhattan, was a combination of an orthodox synagogue and a Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA). The “shul with a pool and a school,” as the Jewish Center was called, was the perfect embodiment of Kaplan’s concept of Judaism as a civilization.¹³ The Center, however, was an Orthodox institution, and we should not be surprised that, as time went on, Kaplan developed significant disagreements with the its leadership.

A major incendiary event was an article Kaplan published in 1920 in which he expressed his belief that Orthodoxy had no future in America.¹⁴ The article appeared in the Menorah Journal, a leading liberal monthly of the time and became a cause celebre in the Orthodox community. How he expected to continue as rabbi of an Orthodox institution after he published this article I still do not understand. In the article, Kaplan states his conviction that, if Orthodox Judaism was to survive, it had to adjust to democratic culture in America. One might say that, with this article and Kaplan’s exodus from the Jewish Center, he ceased to be an Orthodox rabbi.¹⁵ In the winter of 1922, Kaplan moved one block down the street from the Center and organized the Society for the Advancement of Judaism.

Kaplan’s crowning achievement during this period was his magnum opus, Judaism as a Civilization, published in 1934. This foundational work is crucial in understanding his alienation from the Orthodox. Though few Orthodox rabbis were likely to read it, Kaplan’s hard-hitting theological naturalism and his dismissal of the concept that Jews are a “chosen people” received much publicity.¹⁶

One of Kaplan’s most radical proposals in Judaism as a Civilization is that rituals be considered as customs or folkways, instead of laws. In explaining the way that the concept of custom might be applied to kashrut (dietary laws), Kaplan states the following:

Once these practices lose their character as laws and become folkways, Jews will be able to exercise better judgment as to the manner of their observance. There need not be the feeling of sin in the case of the occasional remissness nor the self-complacency which results from scrupulous observance…. from the standpoint observed here it would not be amiss for a Jew to eat freely in the house of a Gentile, and to refrain from eating trefe [non-Kosher food] in the house of a fellow Jew.¹⁷

As a consequence of such “heresy”—that is, considering mitzvot as custom and not law—Kaplan was strongly criticized by prominent Orthodox leaders, including Rabbi Leo Jung (who succeeded him at the Jewish Center) and Rabbi Joseph Lookstein (who succeeded him at Kehilath Jeshurun). Kaplan did not think this proposal regarding kashrut particularly extreme, since he did not “give outright license to violate kashrut,” but only wanted to illustrate what it meant to treat rituals as folkways instead of as legal certainties.¹⁸ Rabbi Jung believed that Kaplanism reduced the Jews to the level of “Eskimos, Poles and Magyars.” He maintained that nationalism plus reform was the essence of Kaplanism and a most dangerous threat to Orthodoxy. He did not deny that Orthodoxy was in trouble and indeed felt that the Orthodox were indebted to Kaplan, who by his threat helped to whip the remnant of Israel back into shape.¹⁹

With respect to kashrut and his own religious regimen, Kaplan for the most part continued traditional observances. To be accurate, however, we should say that the matter of Kaplan’s personal religious life was complex and not strictly Orthodox. As important as the minutiae of kashrut were, it is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Excommunications: Kaplan and Spinoza
• 2 Self-Reliance: Kaplan and Emerson
• 3 Nationalism and Righteousness: Ahad Ha-Am and Matthew Arnold
• 4 Universalism and Pragmatism: Felix Adler, William James, and John Dewey
• 5 Kaplan and Peoplehood: Judaism as a Civilization and Zionism
• 6 Kaplan and His God: An Ambivalent Relationship
• 7 Kaplan’s Theology: Beyond Supernaturalism
• 8 Salvation: The Goal of Religion
• 9 Salvation Embodied: The Vehicle of Mitzvot
• 10 Mordecai the Pious: Kaplan and Heschel
• 11 The Law: Halakhah and Ethics
• 12 Kaplan and the Problem of Evil: Cutting the Gordian Knot
• Conclusion
• Appendix: “Thirteen Wants” of Mordecai Kaplan Reconstructed
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography and Note on Sources
• Index