Mordecai M. Kaplan (1881-1983) was one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the 20th century. We believe that his thought may be even more important in the 21st century.
Mordecai M. Kaplan (1881-1983) was one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the 20th century. We believe that his thought may be even more important in the 21st century.
“Reconstructionism is a method, rather than a series of affirmations or conclusions concerning Jewish life or thought. … Reconstructionism is not the ideas about God, ritual, community … which anyone may hold. It is a method of dealing with Judaism, or with that which unites Jews in time and space, and differentiates them as a group from non-Jews.” — Mordecai M. Kaplan, Questions Jews Ask (1956), pp. 80-81.
Kaplan on Creation, Creativity, and Us
Kaplan is much undervalued as a theologian. We think of him as a sociological thinker, with his central concept of “Judaism as a Civilization.” But, of course, he is much more than that. We might refer to him as the sociologist become theologian. Below we will see the theologian at work.
Kaplan understands that when we talk of creation we mean to refer to the order and unity that comes out of the chaos – out of the Tohu va-Vohu as the Torah puts it. (I love this expression, not the chaos but the words, because there is so much chaos in my life and in the world that I need to remove.) The order and the unity that are the primary qualities of creation may be found not only in the outer universe but also in the inner life of each of us. The inner life is always a reflection of the larger cosmos. We are connected. Thus, whenever we create, we are in a sense contributing to the greater order and unity that is the ongoing process of creation. Our creative acts are a manifestation of the Divine. ...
To order Mel's third volume of Kaplan's journals, click below (and use the discount code FW20):
For Mel's second volume of Kaplan's journals, including a discount code, click below:
Mel discusses his book The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan in a podcast.
For that book, click below:
For an interview with Mel in the New Jersey Jewish News, titled "Judaism should serve the Jewish people," click here.
Why a Kaplan Center?
More than 80 years ago, at the very beginning of the very first issue of The Reconstructionist journal, Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan and his colleagues reprinted an editorial from a 1928 issue of that journal’s predecessor, The S.A.J. Review, succinctly explaining their reasons for the creation of a new movement. “[T]he problem of Jewish life is just th[e] problem of unity,” the editorial stated. “A solution to the problem of Jewish life depends upon finding, or making, a positive ideology which will enable both Orthodox and Reform, both believers and nonbelievers, to meet in common and to work together. It is only by conceiving Judaism as a civilization, and not as a general religious movement embracing many sects, that we will be able to construct such an ideology and reconstruct the Jewish civilization." ...
Conference: "Do Religious Naturalists Really Believe in God?"
(9-13 to 9-14-20)
Mordecai Kaplan at The Jewish Center (5-24-20)
Communings of the Spirit: Exploring the Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan, Part I (4-26-20)
Saving Shavuot, Counting the Omer, and Family Engagement (4-19-20)
A New Haggadah for a Time of Crisis? The Radical 1941 Haggadah of Mordecai M. Kaplan (4-5-20)
The Future of the American Jew: Mordecai Kaplan’s Vision Reappraised (3-29-20)
Shaul Magid on Meir Kahane (3-22-20)
For other program recordings, please click here.
Kaplan and Birmingham (1963)
While working on a project for The Ira and Judith Kaplan Eisenstein Reconstructionist Archives of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (here), I came across a letter to Mordecai Kaplan from Rabbi Everett Gendler, a prominent student of Kaplan’s who is still living, thanking Kaplan for his speech to the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly (RA) convention of 1963 and for his role in “ma[king] it possible for the Rabbinical Assembly to speak as it should have on the Birmingham Situation.”
Gendler, a member of the convention’s program committee, had in the previous year participated in prayer vigils and protests in Albany, Georgia, in support of Civil Rights. He led a group of 19 Conservative rabbis who left the 1963 RA convention to go to Birmingham, Alabama to support Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in their on-going efforts to desegregate the city. (To learn more about Rabbi Gendler, click here.) King’s campaign was front-page news at the time because of the city’s use of attack dogs and high-pressure water cannons on protesters of all ages and its arrest of more than a thousand activists.
The RA delegation to Birmingham, the first to be sent to the South by a major American Jewish religious denomination, has a storied place in the history of American Jews and the Civil Rights movement. Kaplan, however, is never associated with it. I wondered: What is Gendler’s letter referring to? I found the answer in Kaplan’s diaries and in the 1963 volume of the Proceedings of the Rabbinical Assembly. ...
Jeffrey Schein
Pandemic, Pods, and Havurot
Jonathan Rosen in The Talmud and the Internet (2000) explored the meandering, highly associational nature of Talmudic thought. A word or phrase in one context is connected with lightning-like speed with the same word or phrase in a different passage, and a new meaning is often derived from the connection.
I had this quintessentially Talmudic experience over breakfast the other day. My wife, who shares the newspaper with me (how quaint, I know), passed on the article In Pod We Trust from the November 11 Minneapolis Star Tribune. As I read of the four criteria for forming a good pod, my mind was cascading back to both my own experiences and the literature about Jewish Havurot (friendship circles). Eventually, I hope to create a dialogue between the list of criteria for establishing pandemic pods from the Star Tribune article with a list of criteria for establishing Jewish Havurot.
PODS: INTIMATE AND SAFE DURING THE PANDEMIC
Thoroughly assess potential pod mates;The four criteria offered for forming an effective pod during the pandemic were:
In a very real way, the desire to establish real time pods also reflects Zoom fatigue. With all due appreciation for the essential zoom connections Zoom is providing the pandemic, people are now resonating to the tropes heard from David Sax in The Revenge of Analogue (2016) and Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our Brain (2011). From the shadows of the surreal life we have been experiencing, people hunger for the real. People are longing for intimacy that includes feeling and touching as well as seeing and hearing. The guidelines in the Star Tribune article are largely about restoring this intimacy in ways that are both physically and emotionally safe.
Havurot: A Different Kind of Search for Intimacy and Contact
In 1961, Rabbi Jacob Neusner responded to a different kind of problem with not being seen or heard. In his monograph on The Havurah Idea published by the Reconstructionist Press, Neusner outlined a program for establishing a new kind of pod, a group of like-minded Jews looking to study and celebrate Judaism together. These were Jews who were lost in the largeness of mega-synagogues, hence neither seen nor heard in institutional Jewish life. The pandemic of their time was of the neshama (soul) and lev (heart) and not the guf (body).
We might call this the formation of “spiritual and cultural pods”. Neusner suggested that the formation of these pods would be marked by five guiding principles:
Comparison and Contrast of Criteria for Pods and Havurot
Comparing and contrasting the criteria for the formation of pods and Havurot leads to some insights and, ultimately, a proposal for when we return to the “new normal” in Jewish life.
When will that new normal emerge: in 2021? 2022? 2023? This very uncertainty points to the importance of adaptability embodied in both sets of criteria. It also echoes the focus on goals that are “mundane, tentative, and austere”. One might add “nimble” to that short list as well. Expectations that are so ambitious as to be unrealizable in this pandemic era are not helpful. Projecting a full Jewish life immediately for a Havurah that requires three to five years of nurturing (Rosen, 1995, Stroiman, 1984) is similarly unhelpful.
The imagery of a pod is also striking and applies to both types of communities. The outer shell of strict rules and procedures for the living-together pod allows immune systems to adjust and keeps out intrusions of disease. Jews joining a Havurah are often at a delicate stage of their own Jewish journey and need the protection of small size and intimacy to grow apart from other demanding exigencies of Jewish life.
An Ending Big Idea
I end with a “big idea”. I encourage our rabbis, professional educators, and volunteer leaders to think creatively about the “new normal” that will come to our congregations and other Jewish institutions (bimheirah b’yameinu, speedily in our time). Let’s not be deceived by the rejoicing that will occur as we can move beyond pandemic-restricted groups of 25 or ten to a happy hamon (throng) of 100 or more Jews. Let’s have in place for this return small-group and other community structures that can sustain the joy and intimacy in the long run. This unique moment on the horizon is full of potential to address a long-standing issue in Jewish life.
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