It is often observed that for Mordecai Kaplan (and others) democracy was the religion of America.
The Kaplan Center appreciates our grant from the Jewish Partnership for Democracy: A More Perfect Union. This grant allowed us to embark on a “religious” journey from February through October 2024. Each month we selected a passage from Mordecai Kaplan or one of his students and collaborators.
FEBRUARY 2024
This month features Rabbi Manny Goldsmith, zichrono l’veracha.
For Kaplan, the idea underlying democracy is that the interests uniting human beings, if they become truly aware of those interests, are strong enough to ward off the divisive influence of people’s differences. The crucial problem of freedom is how to guard our individuality and the capacity to think for ourselves and yet cooperate with those whose backgrounds, upbringings and outlooks are different from our own. This is an art, said Kaplan, that human beings are slow to learn. Democracy should be conceived as a process of social experimentation by which people are seeking to learn that art and to apply, step by step, the wisdom acquired as a result of such experimentation. That is why the art of free, voluntary cooperation, the ultimate objective of democracy, must constantly be cultivated.
-Rabbi Manny Goldsmith, Reconstructionism Today, Spring 2003
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MARCH 2024
This month features Kaplan’s diary entry from Thursday, Dec 24, 1942
The contribution which Judaism has made and should continue to make to democracy and the American way of life is best summarized in the motto enunciated by the prophet Zachariah. [ 4:6 ] “Not by might nor by power but by my Spirit saith the Lord of Hosts,” and to add the supplement of Hillel’s famous summary of Judaism, “the rest is commentary, go and learn.”
The importance of Zachariah’s motto is that it furnishes the key to that inner freedom without which democracy is merely a hollow form. “Not by might nor by power but by my spirit” sets forth the mental attitude which is a prerequisite to the building of a world on the foundations of peace. Before we can have democracy in action, we must will it…
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APRIL 2024
This month features Kaplan’s diary entry from August 10, 1939 on Facism, Mobocracy, and Democracy
After mentioning the two factors which have contributed to the rise of mobocracy, viz: a) the stupendous machinery of communication which unites millions into a seething sea of human emotion, and b) the failure of democracy to make good its promise of bringing special privilege under control.
The rulers in a mobocracy know that they can gain control of the masses by instilling in them hate and fears of some common enemy who has to be augmented to gigantic proportions if he is comparatively insignificant and harmless, and who has to be invented if he is non-existent. For their purposes, mankind must be treated as broken up into classes or nations or tribes that are engaged in a mutual life and death struggle. The purpose of propaganda is to fan the flames of hate.
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Dr. Elliot Dorff
Join Dr. Jeffrey Schein in conversation with Dr. Elliot Dorff, author of recently published Ethics at the Center: Jewish Theory and Practice for Living a Moral Life, for reflections on Judaism and Democracy
JUNE 2024
This month features an excerpt from Kaplan’s The Future of the American Jew
On Democracy and Education
What the democratic peoples then lacked and still lack, is a clear recognition of power as that around the use of which any educational system, that is to help them live, must be built. A democratic system of education should train the young to regard all power which the individual possesses and acquires as misused, unless, it is somehow shared with all mankind. That is to be taken literally, and not merely as a pious wish.
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JULY 2024
This month features an excerpt from Kaplan’s 1945 Siddur: That America Fulfill the Promise of Its Founding, a prayer for Independence Day
May America remain loyal to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and extend their application to ever-widening areas of life.
Keep out of our life all manner of oppression, persecution, and unjust discrimination; save us from religious, racial and class conflicts; may our country be a haven of refuge to the victims of injustice and misrule.
Instruct us in the art of living together, of reconciling differences of opinion and averting clashes of interest, of helping one another to achieve a harmonious and abundant life. …
May America be ever hospitable to new revelations of truth in science and philosophy, ever sensitive to the appeal of beauty in nature and art, ever responsive to the call of duty and the spirit of religious consecration and worship; And may Americans so love their country that they shall withhold no sacrifice required to safeguard its life and to fulfill its promise.
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AUGUST 2024
This month features an excerpt from Kaplan’s The New Haggadah For the Pesach Seder
For our forefathers, Pharoah was the symbol of all those tyrants who ever acted as though they were gods, and whose will had to be obeyed without question, on penalty of torture or death. And that is why Pesach means more than that first emancipation the Israelites won from Pharaoh when they left Egypt. It means the emancipation the serfs in the Middle Ages won from their overlords; the freedom the slaves won from their masters; the freedom the common people of countries won, when their kings were overthrown; it means the guarantee of the sacred rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The first emancipation was thus only a foreshadowing of all the emancipations that were to follow, and which will yet follow in the days to come.
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SEPTEMBER 2024
This month features an excerpt from Kaplan’s “Salvation through Labor,” a prayer for the Sabbath before Labor Day, adapted from the writings of A.D. Gordon (1945).
In the day that is to come, you will be given, O man, a new spirit, and be stirred by new feelings, by a new hunger, not a hunger for bread nor a thirst for riches, but a hunger and thirst for work.
And you will take pleasure in all the work that you do.
You will give heed to do all your work as part of Nature, as part of the work of the universe and its expansiveness.
And when you pause for a moment to straighten your back, and to take a deep breath, it is not only air that you will inhale; you will breathe in also a subtle something that will fructify your feeling and thinking, and add life and light to your spirit.
You will have moments when your whole being seems to dissolve into the Infinite.
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OCTOBER 2024
“The role of American Jewry in relation to Eretz Israel is similar to the role of the American home front in relation to the battle front during the recent world war. Were it not for the backing of the home front, or for the fact that America proved to be the ‘arsenal of democracy,’ the most clever strategy and the most arduous valor on the battle line would have been of no avail. Similarly, American Jewry will for a long time have to give moral, political, and economic support to the Eretz Israel enterprise, which is the deciding factor in Israel’s struggle for survival in the modern world.”