Mel’s Desk
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Kaplan has been accused of a naive optimism that belongs to a previous era. But the truth is that we desperately need his faith in our ability to overcome the difficulties that life presents to us. We will not survive much less achieve salvation [sheleymut] if we succumb to despair, self-pity and doubt. We must…
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(August 12, 2019) 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…
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A Forgotten Chapter in Denominational History (Proto-Conservative or Proto-Reconstructionist?) by Mel Scult Mordecai Kaplan is known primarily as an ideologue, a man of ideas, but he was also an institution builder of considerable significance. He was the first director (“principal” was his title) of the Teachers Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary. He remained in…
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by Mel Scult [See Chapter 6 of his Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century: A Biography of Mordecai M. Kaplan (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993).] Kaplan’s first congregation, The Jewish Center, was Orthodox. Seating was separate though equal and there was never any question of altering the synagogue ritual to include women. The major question of the…