Dr. Kaplan and Reconstructionism
Questions Jews Ask: Reconstructionist Answers
By Mordecai M. Kaplan
Reconstructionist Press. 532 pp. $4.75.
A New Zionism
By Mordecai M. Kaplan
Theodor Herzl Foundation. 172 pp. $2.00.
For decades the founder of Reconstructionism, Mordecai M. Kaplan—who recently celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday—has shown outstanding courage in talking about questions evaded by others; and he has dated speak of them in plain language, some think in language too plain. But Kaplan rightly insists that—far from being fatal—the clash between the findings of modern science and the strictly literal sense of many articles of Jewish faith can and should be a welcome incentive to a new creative interpretation of our age-old beliefs. Like Nietzsche in the Morgenröte, he is convinced that Judaism is a force in history which need not be ashamed when confronted by modern ideas. And he knows that religion becomes dangerously stale when it is reduced to rigid dogma subscribed to without question or preserved as an heirloom, untouched and unused.
He is certainly right also in insisting that Judaism was never a static religion in its vital days. The Talmud presents itself as a mere commentary on the Bible; but in fact, as Kaplan urges, the Mishnah and the Gemara erected a new religious and legal edifice very different from the mansions of the Old Testament. Fundamentals of the spirit of Judaism—often extremely difficult to characterize adequately—remained unchanged; but the changes in expression are all the more marked. Further, who can deny that the far-reaching reconciliation of Greek and Jewish thought accomplished by medieval Jewish scholasticism opened a world of ideas quite foreign to the assumptions of either the Bible or the Talmud? And again, what could be more graphic than the contrast between the religion centered on animal sacrifice in the Temple of Jerusalem and the religion of prayer followed by a people dispersed throughout the globe? Kaplan does not hesitate to emphasize that the restoration, in the reborn State of Israel, of sacrificial worship for which generations of Jews have ardently prayed for centuries “would evoke no reverence but disgust.” Nevertheless, he believes that the spirit of devotion and collective concentration once active in the sacrificial cult must find and has found new ways of expression in our time. The utterances of that spirit may completely change while the spirit itself remains unaltered.
From the ancient beliefs in God and the immortality of the soul down to the choice of Jewish surnames in Israel, from the relation of labor to the synagogue to the administration of kashrut—almost every aspect of Judaism is in this fashion subjected by Kaplan to a more or less radically modernized interpretation. God he defines as “whatever gives meaning to the world,” as the Power or the Cosmic Process that makes for human salvation and for righteousness, for the interests of “welfare, reason and spirit,” for the “deliverance from frustration,” for the maximum development and integration of mankind’s abilities, and for “self-fulfillment.” “The Godhood … is the fact that the cosmos possesses the sources and man the abilities … to fulfill his destiny as a human being.” “We learn the will of God . . . from man’s salvational behavior.”
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Kaplan warns us against considering God a person, even though we address Him as “Thou,” in the same way that we speak of “my country ’tis of thee.” Prayer he regards in an important sense as “talking to oneself,” to the “higher self” within that “represents the divine Process”; and under no circumstances must the idea of God be primitively “reified,” “thingified.” God cannot be perceived as things or men are perceived. No one ever sees a father or a king; we see a man, and understand only through thought that the man is a father.
“God’s revelation . . . and the discovery of the laws on which man’s salvation depends . . . are but the obverse and reverse of the same process”; “any idea that helps individuals and groups to achieve the full stature of their humanity” Kaplan considers divinely revealed. “Holiness . . . is the quality anything in life possesses insofar as it serves to inspire or guide man in his effort to achieve his destiny.” And the sacred is “any element of human experience which serves as a means of enhancing human life and enabling man to achieve salvation.”
The belief in the literal immortality of the individual soul, as has been said frequently, is incompatible with modern and even with many ancient scientific convictions. Kaplan, therefore, emphasizes that only through our work that lives on after death do “we have a share in the world to come. . . . We will not be there . . . but to ask that we be … is as if the acorn were to complain that, in order to give growth to the oak, it must also lose its identity as an acorn.” The Messiah should no longer be thought a superior personality who brings the millennium, but the image of a more perfect type of man, of a Messianic era in the development of mankind.
All dogmas—that is, “doctrines adopted on authority”—should be dispensed with, and replaced by religious principles voluntarily adhered to, such as belief in God, faith in the responsibility of man, and acceptance of the great historic role of the Jewish people. Reverence for the sancta of Judaism, for the Sabbath and the Holy Days, the Torah, the Hebrew Language, and Eretz Yisrael can assure the preservation of Jewish religion far better than an uncritical submission to dogmas. It is natural and sound, Kaplan points out, that a people—like an individual and like modern psychology in general—should attach the greatest importance to the experiences of early childhood, the formative years, because these experiences determine the whole future course of the nation or individual. But new sancta may also come into being in the future development of Judaism.
Religions, Kaplan argues, are no more endangered by the turn from an autocratic system to a democratic regime of free thought than governments. On the contrary, a religious community, like a state, can in the end only gain in strength by this change. As Kaplan urges, his protest against orthodox absolutism, his plea for “relativism” in religion, is in no way an expression of religious skepticism. For both in physics and in religion to view phenomena in their “relative” context of time, space, and thought is to achieve a far greater approximation to absolute truth than can be obtained by insistence on fixed, definitely stabilized articles of faith which stifle all critical thought and feeling.
The prophet Isaiah proclaimed that “from Zion shall go forth Torah”; the highest aim of Zionism today, according to Kaplan, must be the return of the Torah (though a “reconstructed” one) to the secular State of Israel. Yet the claim of the Torah that the Jews are God’s chosen people is theoretically obsolete and practically “objectionable as barring the way to peace and harmony among the religious and making for . . . cant.”
No one can pledge political allegiance to more than one national government; but a man may well identify himself “with more than one spiritual or cultural people.” By participating actively in Jewish civilization an American Jew does not weaken his loyalty to his country. On the contrary, his Americanism will be improved by his Judaism and his Judaism by his Americanism. Kaplan refers in this connection to a noteworthy Talmudic passage, “according to which the Prophet Ezekiel is represented as rebuking his People both for having followed the objectionable customs of the non-Jews among whom they lived and for not having adopted their good customs.” The Scylla of unconditioned assimilation and the Charybdis of ghetto isolationism are equally great dangers to Jewish life in the Diaspora.
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These are only a few of Kaplan’s most characteristic teachings. He himself would be the first to deny that many individual elements of his thought were unknown to the world before he launched the Reconstructionist movement. Many a thinker—Jewish and Gentile—has contributed to the philosophy of religion and nationalism offered here. Nor does Kaplan present his answers to the vital questions he raises as final solutions; they are, in his opinion, only the best possible preliminary applications of his general “Reconstructionist method.”
But there is no doubt that all these ideas are developed with extraordinary pedagogic skill. They form a comparatively coherent systematic whole, and they have helped thousands of Americans who have sought a viable approach to Judaism to overcome theoretical obstacles which had seemed to them insuperable. Reconstructionism represents far more than an eclectic synthesis of Conservative and Reform Judaism. In this country it has become the most influential independent Jewish movement of the last two decades.
Thus Kaplan’s religious and cultural leadership is so secure in contemporary Jewry that to omit a critical evaluation of the reach and the depth of his teaching would be to do him scant honor. In his forthright manner he himself has given some hints in this direction. He grants, for instance, that a mystical attitude is essential to the religious Jew, and adds that “to some people, the substitution of the ‘thirteen wants’ publicized by Reconstructionism for the thirteen articles of the Maimonidean creed may seem like the replacement of mysticism with a commonplace, platitudinous clarity devoid of all religious or mystical appeal.” Kaplan, of course, tries to meet this criticism by stressing that all his teachings presuppose the recognition of “the divine mystery of life.” And in a similar connection he warns against using the mystical “awe and ecstasy” which a religion “elicits from the multitude” as a criterion of its value.
But in fact this argument evades the issue. It may be frankly conceded that there is much superstition and much misplaced mysticism and ecstasy in the world. Yet this only makes it all the more necessary for religion to cultivate true mystical feeling—free of all superstitions. The abstract, prosaic, and sometimes rather pale language and argument of Reconstructionism, however, does only insufficient justice to the profundity of mystical feeling that emanates from all the greatest utterances in our religious heritage. Indeed the very word “salvation”—perhaps the most frequently used term in Kaplan’s work—is so laden with emotional connotations, with deepest longing and even despair, that it often seems out of place in the sober, balanced, rational mood of Kaplan’s reflections, and in the context of his poised definitions.
At moments the literature of Reconstructionism reads more like a party platform than an aid to religious edification, and just as the party platform, with all its generalities, makes us forget the heat of real political conflicts, so the coolness of some of Kaplan’s well-weighed religious counsels may scarcely be able to remove the grave doubts that arise in the great tensions of man’s religious life.
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My second marginal note on the gaps in Reconstructionist teaching is related to the first. It is true that Kierkegaard, many German and Russian thinkers, monks and nuns of the Middle Ages, and many ancient testimonies may have overrated the role of the lonely genius in the opening of new vistas of religious experience, but one cannot help saying that Reconstructionism seriously undervalues the importance of the isolated religious individual. In Kaplan’s characterization of Catholicism and its differences from Judaism, the historical and spiritual significance of such a basic phenomenon as Christian monasticism is hardly appraised adequately. But in Judaism too, the greatness of the solitary stand of Amos and Jeremiah, of Moses and Elijah is obviously underestimated. Instead, Kaplan voices an extremely optimistic—if not Utopian—trust in the value of group activities, in the power of learned bodies and institutions, of religious “parliaments” and councils “to disentangle the knottiest human—and religious problems.” He even outlines the steps to be taken in setting up such organizations. But, unfortunately, what councils of this kind have generally performed can in no way rival the work of seemingly forlorn and even desperate individuals on lonely nights, in garrets and deserts, far away from comfortable assembly rooms. Even the Talmud, the outstanding group achievement in Jewish history, was created by loosely organized groups of rather independent sages; and the Talmud is, to a large extent, a legal code rather than a merely religious creation.
My third and final feeling of uneasiness about Reconstructionism concerns its position on the problem of suffering and evil. Professor Kaplan assures us that he has “long been wrestling with the problem” and has arrived at a solution satisfactory to him, while the answers of tradition and of contemporaries such as the late Leo Baeck and Martin Buber seem to him untenable. But in fact what Reconstructionism offers on this point are rather traditional views, as, for example, the Neo-Platonic and Augustinian observation that we cannot “become aware of God except against a background of darkness,” or the “faith that all evils which we can identify as such, we can, by the application of . . . mental and spiritual powers . . . eventually overcome,” or the assurance that “evil systems destroy themselves.” Considerations of such theoretical aloofness as these generally do not carry too much religious weight when applied to truly stark and lasting suffering.
Moreover it seems to me that any such optimistic interpretation of man’s tribulations is not fully consonant with the spirit of a religion that in its sacred writings gives so much place to Job’s powerful revolt against the martyrdom of the innocent, to Koheleth’s lament over the evils of the world, to the Book of Lamentations, and to so many similar passages in the prophets and Psalms. In one of his earlier works, The Future of the American Jew, Kaplan offers considerably more on the problems of evil, suffering, and religious doubts. Still I would question whether even there he provides an adequate answer to a religion of despair such as that of Pascal or Kierkegaard.
But it would be an act of ingratitude to allow criticism to overshadow the abundant achievements of Reconstructionism. Not without reason has Mordecai Kaplan been called the Ahad Ha’am of American Jewry. His concept of Judaism is much closer to the wisdom of Proverbs than to the ardor of the Song of Songs or the fervor of Isaiah’s mystic visions, but we certainly are in urgent need of both: the world of well-channeled and ordered theoretical clarification and the world of mystical devotion.
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