This diary entry from Kaplan illustrates the spiritual doubts of a number of rabbinical students from the early forties. The entry is significant on many levels not the least of which is the fact that Jack Cohen and Sidney Morgenbesser were in the group. Kaplan’s response is significant in that it illustrates that though he was a naturalist, yet his belief in God was profound and deeply felt. The concept of correlative is an important one but complex. It refers to a situation where one concept implies another as parent implies child, as donut implies hole. Kaplan uses this concept here to great advantage.
Friday, March 19, 1943
Last night four Seminary students, second-year men, came to see me. They were Jack J. Cohen,[1] [Sidney] Morgenbesser,[2] Spiro, and Gaynor. The first two had attended the Seminary College before they entered the Seminary. Spiro came from Minneapolis, where he studied with Dr. Gordon, and Gaynor had studied in Herzliah and the Yeshiva College. The purpose of their visit was to air their inner conflicts. They find it difficult to believe in God, and yet they want to serve the Jewish people. Can they conscientiously do so as rabbis? They had of course long ago given up the traditional basis for the belief in the existence of God—namely, revelation. But they have so far found no substitute. What I have been teaching as the alternative to the traditional basis for the belief in God does not convince them. I evidently have not succeeded in communicating to them my own experience of a transcendent correlative to man’s will to salvation. They admit the existence of a will to salvation, but they see no need for positing a transcendent correlative of that will. Of course, my contention is not that I intellectually posit it but that I experience it with the same immediacy as I do my own self. Intellectually, I cannot posit the existence of a self, for the little I know of psychology tells me that self is an illusion. Yet if I were to deny the reality of the existence of self as [the] center of initiative, I would cut the ground from under the element of responsibility, without which human life is inconceivable. The same holds true of otherhood, with its element of loyalty, and of godhood, with its element of piety.
These students intimated that they found Ame’s[3] presentation of the conception of God more acceptable than mine. When I elicited that from them, I told them that I would by no means insist on their accepting what I regard as the basis for the belief in God to be justified in taking up the rabbinic calling. The main question which they must answer to themselves is this: Am I able to take the idea of God as found in Jewish tradition and transpose it into the key of modern religion? They have been told by Milton Steinberg in the series of lectures on theology which he is now giving that there are two kinds of religion, theistic and nontheistic religion. What they would like to be told is that they could be rabbis on the basis of nontheistic religion. This, I told them plainly, they could not do, since as rabbis their main function was to maintain the identity and continuity of the Jewish tradition. That tradition minus the God belief is like the play of Hamlet without Hamlet.
Perhaps I would be more successful in conveying my meaning if I were to find anchorage in the spiritual values of responsibility, loyalty, and piety, concerning the reality of which, both as experiences and as indispensable elements in human life, there can be no question. As experiences they are the doors, respectively, to self, the other, and God.
————-
Found in Communings of the Spirit – The Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan, Volume III: 1942–1951, edited by Mel Scult, p. 159 (Wayne State University Press, 2020).
[1] Jack Cohen (1919–2012), ordained JTS, was an educational director and rabbi at SAJ, director of Hillel at HU, and founder of Mevakshe Derech. Cohen made Aliyah in 1961. A lifelong Kaplan disciple, he is the author of Judaism in a Post-Halakhic Age and Guides for an Age of Confusion: Studies in the Thinking of Avraham I. Kook and Mordecai M. Kaplan.
[2] Sidney Morgenbesser (1921–2004), a popular and influential professor of philosophy, studied with Nelson Goodman, professor of philosophy at Columbia University.
[3] The work Kaplan refers to here is most likely by Edward Ames (1870–1958), a Christian theologian from the University of Chicago. The book was probably The Psychology of Religious Experience (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940). This work presents a nontheistic view of God, which the students seemed to have preferred to that which Kaplan offered them in class. But my sense is that he gave them Ames to read.
Can I Be a Rabbi without Believing in God?
This diary entry from Kaplan illustrates the spiritual doubts of a number of rabbinical students from the early forties. The entry is significant on many levels not the least of which is the fact that Jack Cohen and Sidney Morgenbesser were in the group. Kaplan’s response is significant in that it illustrates that though he was a naturalist, yet his belief in God was profound and deeply felt. The concept of correlative is an important one but complex. It refers to a situation where one concept implies another as parent implies child, as donut implies hole. Kaplan uses this concept here to great advantage.
Friday, March 19, 1943
Last night four Seminary students, second-year men, came to see me. They were Jack J. Cohen,[1] [Sidney] Morgenbesser,[2] Spiro, and Gaynor. The first two had attended the Seminary College before they entered the Seminary. Spiro came from Minneapolis, where he studied with Dr. Gordon, and Gaynor had studied in Herzliah and the Yeshiva College. The purpose of their visit was to air their inner conflicts. They find it difficult to believe in God, and yet they want to serve the Jewish people. Can they conscientiously do so as rabbis? They had of course long ago given up the traditional basis for the belief in the existence of God—namely, revelation. But they have so far found no substitute. What I have been teaching as the alternative to the traditional basis for the belief in God does not convince them. I evidently have not succeeded in communicating to them my own experience of a transcendent correlative to man’s will to salvation. They admit the existence of a will to salvation, but they see no need for positing a transcendent correlative of that will. Of course, my contention is not that I intellectually posit it but that I experience it with the same immediacy as I do my own self. Intellectually, I cannot posit the existence of a self, for the little I know of psychology tells me that self is an illusion. Yet if I were to deny the reality of the existence of self as [the] center of initiative, I would cut the ground from under the element of responsibility, without which human life is inconceivable. The same holds true of otherhood, with its element of loyalty, and of godhood, with its element of piety.
These students intimated that they found Ame’s[3] presentation of the conception of God more acceptable than mine. When I elicited that from them, I told them that I would by no means insist on their accepting what I regard as the basis for the belief in God to be justified in taking up the rabbinic calling. The main question which they must answer to themselves is this: Am I able to take the idea of God as found in Jewish tradition and transpose it into the key of modern religion? They have been told by Milton Steinberg in the series of lectures on theology which he is now giving that there are two kinds of religion, theistic and nontheistic religion. What they would like to be told is that they could be rabbis on the basis of nontheistic religion. This, I told them plainly, they could not do, since as rabbis their main function was to maintain the identity and continuity of the Jewish tradition. That tradition minus the God belief is like the play of Hamlet without Hamlet.
Perhaps I would be more successful in conveying my meaning if I were to find anchorage in the spiritual values of responsibility, loyalty, and piety, concerning the reality of which, both as experiences and as indispensable elements in human life, there can be no question. As experiences they are the doors, respectively, to self, the other, and God.
————-
Found in Communings of the Spirit – The Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan, Volume III: 1942–1951, edited by Mel Scult, p. 159 (Wayne State University Press, 2020).
[1] Jack Cohen (1919–2012), ordained JTS, was an educational director and rabbi at SAJ, director of Hillel at HU, and founder of Mevakshe Derech. Cohen made Aliyah in 1961. A lifelong Kaplan disciple, he is the author of Judaism in a Post-Halakhic Age and Guides for an Age of Confusion: Studies in the Thinking of Avraham I. Kook and Mordecai M. Kaplan.
[2] Sidney Morgenbesser (1921–2004), a popular and influential professor of philosophy, studied with Nelson Goodman, professor of philosophy at Columbia University.
[3] The work Kaplan refers to here is most likely by Edward Ames (1870–1958), a Christian theologian from the University of Chicago. The book was probably The Psychology of Religious Experience (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940). This work presents a nontheistic view of God, which the students seemed to have preferred to that which Kaplan offered them in class. But my sense is that he gave them Ames to read.