The American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan

Emanuel Goldsmith, Mel Scult, Robert Seltzer

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1992
• ISBN:
  9780814732571
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología judía

Mordecai M. Kaplan, a pioneering figure in the reinterpretation and redefinition of Judaism in the 20th century, embraced religious liberalism, naturalism, and empiricism, and gave expression to a unique American attitude in philosophy and theology. This volume, the first comprehensive treatment of Kaplan since his death in 1983... illustrates Kaplan's links to traditional Jewish roots and demonstrates his evolutionary philosophy of Jewish culture, his Zionist orientation, and the vast range of his thought and action. The volume also features a complete bibliography of Kaplan's writings.
-- Choice

A must for every serious thinker probing American Jewish culture, history and theology.
-- Alfred GottschalkPresident, Hebrew Union College--Jewish Institute of Religion

These highly knowledgeable essays provide us with a new and more complex image of a central personality in 20th century American Jewish life. They are indispensable for understanding the influences that helped shape Mordecai Kaplan's thought and personality, the nature of his relationships with significant contemporaries, and the various aspects of his ideology and practical program for American Jewry.
-- Professor Michael A. MeyerDepartment of Jewish HistoryHebrew Union College--Jewish Institute of Religion

This leading American Jewish thinker of the pre-war period is still the point of departure for any attempt to construct a Judaism for this new age in the history of the Jewish people. The volume brings them an and this thought to life.
-- Dr. Arthur GreenPresident, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College

PART ONE
Contexts

CHAPTER 1
Kaplan and the Retrieval
of the Haskalah

Emanuel S. Goldsmith

Throughout his long life, Mordecai M. Kaplan devoted his seemingly inexhaustible energy to redefining and reinterpreting Judaism. This activity was born out of an unshakeable faith in the capacity of the Jewish people to reconstruct its historic way of life so as to ensure its survival and the advancement of humanity. Although he is best known for defining Judaism as a civilization, as an evolving civilization, and as an evolving religious civilization, Kaplan’s most far-reaching definition was that of Judaism as “the ongoing life of a people intent upon keeping alive for the highest conceivable purpose, despite changes in the general climate of opinion.”¹ This definition takes into account both the existential dimension (the ongoing life of a people) and the essential dimension (the highest conceivable purpose) of the Jewish phenomenon. It takes into account both peoplehood or nationalism and civilization or culture. Religion is subsumed under the rubric “highest conceivable purpose,” since religion is that aspect of human culture or civilization that consciously seeks cognizance of and contact with the transcendent or highest aspects of human experience. In Judaism, the latter are conceived as divinity, deity, or God. Finally, the words “intent upon keeping alive” remind us that, whatever other objectives it may assume, the survival of the Jewish people (kiyyum ha-umah) remains a sine qua non of Judaism.

In these words one also hears echoes of Kaplan’s polemic against attempts to categorize particular ages in the annals of Jewry as “classical” “normative,” or “axial.” To Kaplan, the designation of any specific period in the history of the Jewish people as preeminent was both an attempt to overemphasize the significance of that period at the expense of others and a denial of the evolutionary character of Judaism. Kaplan took exception, for example, to George Foot Moore’s use of the term “normative Judaism” to refer to the Judaism of the first centuries of the Christian era. He pointed out that Moore identified “normative Judaism” with beliefs and practices that were, in fact, standardized subsequent to the rabbinic period. He also felt that Moore ignored the significance of polity and social structure, which formed the framework within which Jewish life functioned. Kaplan preferred the term “traditional Judaism” for the period Moore discussed in his classic study, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era, because an evolving civilization consists of different stages.² Each stage differs both in form and content from the one preceding it and the one following it. It may be considered normative only for those who live within it. In any event, Kaplan saw the proto-Judaism of the Bible as more authoritative and hence more “normative” than rabbinic Judaism.³

Having said this, however, I must add that Kaplan himself may be justly accused of preferring one age of Jewish history to all others—his own. And Kaplan’s age, the age of modern Jewish history, is dominated by the Haskalah. As with the Enlightenment, which is both a specific period in European history and the beginning of modern history generally, the Haskalah was both a particular phenomenon at a specific period in Jewish history and the beginning of modern Jewish history. It represents a movement within a specific period to which it lent its name and to which it imparted lasting significance, but “its aspirations and anxieties, its debates and methods are still with us in their original form. . . . Though its values have been belittled by subsequent reaction, they appear increasingly meaningful to the survivors of the catastrophes of modern history.⁴

The Haskalah phenomenon, the roots of which reach back to the historical explorations into the Jewish past by Azariah de Rossi in the sixteenth century and the critical analysis of the Bible by Ba-ruch Spinoza in the seventeenth, constitutes the very shaking of the foundations of Jewish life. Although a case may be made for the inappropriateness of a term such as haskalah (rationalism) for a phenomenon that embraces social reconstruction, religious radicalism, philosophical romanticism, and literary innovation, Haskalah as an ideology or movement does involve the application of rational or objective—as opposed to traditional or subjective—criteria to the peoplehood, culture, and religion of Jewry. The Haskalah undermined the spiritual and cultural walls that legitimized the dichotomies of tradition and objectivity, faith and truth, loyalty and criticism, religious and secular, eternal and temporal, and universal and particular.

The Haskalah was the Jewish version of the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, which substituted this-worldliness, rationalism, and universalism for the other-worldliness, authoritarianism, and exclusivism of the medieval world. The Enlightenment has been characterized as “the hinge on which the European nations turned from the Middle Ages to ‘modern’ times, marking the passage from a supernaturalistic-mythical-authoritative to a naturalistic-scientific-individualistic type of thinking.”⁵

In its first, rationalist phase, the Enlightenment held that men should enjoy such rights as freedom of information, freedom of speech, and freedom from arbitrary arrest. Some of its spokesmen also claimed economic liberty as a natural right. The men of the Enlightenment believed that people would have greater dignity and be happier if their social institutions were based on reason and science rather than on tradition. The second phase of the Enlightenment, associated with Rousseau, “insisted that ‘reason’ must accommodate itself to an inner moral sense, which in turn implied the duty of the individual to sacrifice his personal advantage to the moral welfare of the living community on which he depended. Although this community was the source of his own existence as a moral being, its legitimacy was, in the last resort, dependent on its satisfying the moral and material needs of the individuals who composed it.”⁶ In sum, the Enlightenment “promoted the cause of freedom more widely, directly, positively than any age before it. . . . For the first time in history it carried out a concerted attack on the vested interests that opposed the diffusion of knowledge and the free exercise of reason.”⁷

Mordecai M. Kaplan viewed the Enlightenment as both the most adventurous reliance upon reason and experience and the most daring revolt against political and religious authoritarianism that mankind had ever known.⁸ In The Greater Judaism in the Making, he quotes Carl L. Becker’s summation of the essential articles of the religion of the Enlightenment: “i) Man is not natively depraved; 2) the end of life itself is the good life on earth instead of the beatific life after death; 3) man is capable of being guided solely by the light of reason and experience, of perfecting the good life on earth; and 4) the first and essential condition of the good life on earth is the freeing of men’s minds from the bonds of ignorance and superstition.” Kaplan believed that each of these principles had contributed to the radical transformation of the inner and outer conditions of human life, in general, and Jewish life, in particular. In the attempt to survive such transformation, Judaism was experiencing a metamorphosis.⁹

The Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah, which began as the Jewish wing of the general European Enlightenment, was of crucial moment for modern Jewish history. The Maskilim, or advocates of enlightenment, sought through education, religious reform, and communal reorganization to alter the contours of Jewish existence and thus modernize and “Europeanize” the Jewish people. The modern transformation of Jewish society, they hoped, would, in turn, lead to emancipation, integration, and enfranchisement. The Maskilim have long been held accountable for paving the road to assimilation and for the ills of modern Jewish life. The truth of the matter is, however, that they were, by and large, loyal and committed Jews who struggled valiantly against overwhelming odds, both within and without the Jewish community, to prove that a synthesis of Judaism with modernity was necessary, desirable, and feasible. “Every thinker,” writes John Dewey, “puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril, and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.”¹⁰

The Haskalah was essentially a social and cultural trend with strong political, economic, and religious overtones that effected a significant aesthetic and literary awakening. It embraced rationalism, romanticism, scholarly research (Wissenschaft) and the rethinking, reevaluation, reformulation, and reinterpretation of Judaism. It was also a messianic movement inasmuch as it sought to redeem the Jew from alienation and homelessness by encouraging him to become part of the countries of Europe and embrace the culture and mores of the European peoples. The Maskilim eventually succeeded in preparing European Jewry for emancipation and citizenship in the countries of Europe. They were responsible for the flowering of Hebrew and Yiddish letters; for the emergence of the modern trends in Jewish religion; for the development of modern Jewish literary and historical research; for the growth of Jewish socialism, nationalism, and Zionism; and, ultimately, for the rees-tablishment of Jewish sovereignty in the twentieth century. They brought about both a secular and religious revolution in Jewish life and cleared the way for modern Judaism.

The Haskalah movement began in the age of Moses Mendelssohn in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In the 1860s and 1870s, and especially after 1881, the leading advocates of Haskalah preferred to be called Socialists, Lovers of Zion, and Zionists. Contrary to popular misconception, however, the Haskalah continues to this very day. The leading representatives of the Haskalah phenomenon from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries have as much if not more in common than the various books in the Hebrew Bible have with each other. A representative list of leading Maskilim from Moses Mendelssohn to Mordecai Kaplan would have to include Nahman Krochmal, Isaac Baer Levinsohn, Peretz Smolenskin, Yitzkhok Ley bush Peretz, Ahad Ha’am, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Simon Dubnow, Martin Buber, and David Ben-Gurion. Geographically, the Haskalah spread from central to eastern Europe, western Europe, America, and Israel.

The Maskilim advocated changes in Jewish occupations and economic practices as well as educational and religious reforms in order to “rectify the alleged backwardness of Jewry and eliminate the supposed irrational features of Judaism at that time.”¹¹ They helped make Jews more self-aware and self-critical, attacking both the normal human failings of the Jewish community and the excesses of the Kabbalah and Hasidism. They fostered the emergence of a modern Jewish literature (including philosophy and history) in the Hebrew language and, later, in Yiddish as well, which could vie with the traditional religious culture. Manifestly, by supplanting belief with reason and the ideal of the traditional scholar-hero or Hasidic saint with that of the secular moral individual, the Haskalah gradually helped render traditional values and concerns extraneous to the modern thinking Jew.¹²

The essence of traditional Judaism as a unique life style and culture style had been that every aspect of life and culture was interpenetrated with religion. According to Yehezkel Kaufmann, “Jewish culture in its entirety was Torah. Jewish learning was the study of Torah. . . . Torah was not simply sacred creativity that occupied a place alongside other cultural values. It was Jewish creativity in toto. . . . Other disciplines and sciences, to the extent that they were not forbidden or disaparaged, were considered of no real value; they had their place only if they were of practical use—otherwise they were relegated to insignificance.”¹³

The Haskalah was the Jewish counterpart of the attempts of the Renaissance and European Enlightenment to limit the domination of life by religion, to put an end to religious coercion, to assign to religion a delimited area of life so that a new secular, humanistic culture and life style could emerge. The intellectuals of the Enlightenment were tired of the conflicts and polemics of religious groupings that considered themselves orthodox, or “right-thinking,” as James L. Adams writes. “It [the Enlightenment] wished to dissolve the myths that had sanctioned arbitrariness and pretentiousness. It wished to do away with the beliefs in the gods of the competing absolutes . . . and with belief in supernatural interventions in human affairs. . . . The desire for autonomy is the nerve of the myth of the Enlightenment; and its guide is reason, not calculating, utilitarian reason, but substantial reason—in the human mind and in the cosmos.”¹⁴

The ideal of the Haskalah, which it shared with the European Enlightenment, was the confinement of religion to its own sphere. It saw cultural creativity as essentially autonomous and sought to make room in Jewish life for nonreligious values as no less significant than religious values.¹⁵ The Haskalah opposed the idea that all spiritual activity belonged to religion and had to be subjugated to it. Yehezkel Kaufmann describes the Haskalah in the following way: “The Maskilim advocated the study of arts and sciences, native languages, practical trades, and the development of Hebrew poetry and prose. They opposed the forcing of all culture and life into the four ells of halakhah or Torah.”¹⁶ The significance of the Haskalah lies, therefore, not in its advocating the pursuit of the secular arts and sciences in Jewish life alongside religion but in its conferring upon such pursuits a significance equal to that of the sacred pursuit of Torah.

We have become accustomed to view Kaplan’s definition of Judaism as a civilization primarily as an attempt to correct the Reform, Orthodox, and Conservative reductions of Judaism to a cree-dal, legislative, or historical religion. It would be more correct to see it as an attempt to counter the traditionalist assumption that all of Judaism must be subsumed under the concept of religion or Torah, and that Torah in that sense is the only worthy form of Jewish interest. “Paradoxical as it may sound,” writes Kaplan, “the spiritual regeneration of the Jewish people demands that religion cease to be its sole preoccupation.”¹⁷

Kaplan’s thought represents a highly significant contemporary attempt to deal with the modern redefinition of Torah or Judaism that began with Moses Mendelssohn and subsequent leaders of the Haskalah. Mendelssohn drew a distinction between the truths of religion that were universally acknowledged and the divine legislation t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction: Kaplan and Jewish Modernity
• PART I. CONTEXTS
• PART 2. STAGES IN A LIFE
• PART 3. INTELLECTUAL CONTEMPORARIES
• PART 4. REINTERPRETING JUDAISM
• PART 5. THE IDEOLOGIST
• Complete Bibliography of the Writings of Mordecai M. Kaplan
• Index