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KAPLAN, MORDECAI 1881-1983

RABBI AND THEOLOGIAN

Youth

Mordecai Kaplan was born in Lithuania in 1881, the year the pogroms began against Jews in czarist Russia. His biographer, Mel Scult, referred to 1881 as "the year of the beginning of the modern Jew," thus making Kaplan's birth in that year appropriate. He would live 102 years and be as representative of modern Jewry, its thought, conflicts, and community as anyone in the twentieth century. He arrived in the United States in 1889, part of the great Jewish immigration to America that had begun a few years before. His father, Orthodox rabbi Israel Kaplan, lacked a stable position in Lithuani and had taken a rabbinical job in New York. The rest of the Kaplan family followed a year later to join New York's burgeoning Jewish immigrant community. In 1895, at the age of thirteen, Mordecai Kaplan began attending the Jewish Theological Seminary as well as the City College of New York, from which he received his B.A. in 1900. Two years later he graduated from the seminary, just prior to the arrival in America of Solomon Schechter, the man who would remake the Jewish Theological Seminary into a graduate institution and a center of Conservative Jewish thought. In 1900 Kaplan had also begun attending graduate school at Columbia University, where he first encountered the modern ideas that would challenge his Orthodox beliefs. Among these ideas were Darwinian evolution, the early development of social sciences such as anthropology and sociology, and the philosophical study of ethics and pragmatism. His master's thesis covered ethical philosopher Henry Sidgwick. Kaplan the dissenter had begun to emerge.

Rabbi

In 1902 Kaplan, recently graduated from the seminary, assumed a rabbinical position at Kehilath Jeshurun, an Orthodox synagogue in New York. Despite his developing thought, Kaplan remained Orthodox in behavior. As early as 1904 he was using the phrase "a theology of Reconstruction" to describe the needs of Jewish thought and practice in the United States in the new century. Yet he remained at Kehilath Jeshurun until 1909, presiding over a divided congregation. The major division of the times was over the questions of keeping the religion preserved as it had been in Europe or adapting it to the New World, for instance by using English in services. Kaplan came down on the side of modernism. "I believe that Judaism need not and must not be afraid to meet and absorb all that is good in modern culture," he wrote in 1904. Yet he was critical of Reform Judaism, which to him discarded too much of Jewish nationalism in favor of a general "cosmopolitanism." While at Kehilath Jeshurun, Kaplan continued his graduate studies at Columbia, coming under the influence of Felix Adler, who had left the Jewish faith to form his own Ethical Culture, a universalist society that eschewed the religious practices of a single ethnicity. Kaplan felt deeply ambivalent about Adler's thought while at the same time absorbing much of its universal emphasis. This emphasis would later appear in Kaplan's controversial Reconstructionist thought, which focused on Judaism more as a culture than as a religion. In 1908 Kaplan married Lena Rubin and planned his honeymoon as a trip to Europe, where he received smicha from Rabbi Jacob Reines, thus making Kaplan an official rabbi.

Teacher and Community Leader

Kaplan began teaching at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1909, marking a turning point in his career. Since his arrival in 1902, Solomon Schechter had remade the JTS from a struggling seminary into an acclaimed graduate school with some of Jewish New York's finest thinkers on the faculty. Kaplan would join the group at the JTS and become a more prominent voice while also beginning to write out the philosophy that would make him so controversial. He was busy during the 1910s, giving speeches and developing the Teaching Institute of the JTS. He would remain at the JTS for fifty-four years. He played a role in the founding of Schechter's United Synagogue in 1913, a group of twenty-two synagogues that were not part of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. Kaplan served as a vice president of the organization. Kaplan also performed services for New York's Young Men's Hebrew Association (YMHA) from 1913 on and worked with New York's Kehilla, a Jewish community organization that tried to "govern" all of the city's Jewish sects and educational institutes. He helped found the Central Jewish Institute in 1915, a combination of social and recreational programs with a school at its center. In all the 1910s were an active decade for Kaplan, but this activity did not prevent him from developing some of the most influential ideas of his long career.

Menorah Journal.

In 1915 Kaplan began to publish a series of articles in the new Menorah Journal that would develop his own ideas about Judaism in America and eventually lead to his magnum opus, Judaism as a Civilization, published in 1934. The first article was titled "What Judaism is Not" and was followed by a second article, "What Is Judaism?" The articles began to spell out Kaplan's controversial views of the Jewish religion as seen through sociological investigation. His views would form the basis of the Reconstructionist movement, which sought a means of being both Jewish and American. In 1920 he published "A Program for the Reconstruction of Judaism" in the Menorah Journal. Many viewed this article as the seminal text in Reconstructionist Judaism, though Kaplan himself resisted calls for a "new" party. He believed strongly in a unified community, not sectarianism. The quest for a community was the major thrust of Kaplan's Judaism, though his definition of the community enraged Orthodox Jews, who thought he was throwing the religion out of Judaism. In a sense they were right. Kaplan had dismissed some of the core beliefs of Orthodox Judaism. He did not believe that Jews were a chosen people, but only one of many civilizations worldwide. He thought that a Jewish homeland in Palestine was needed as a center for this great civilization. This belief in community above synagogue caused him to be active in creating Manhattan's Jewish Center in 1918 as well as the Society for the Advancement of Judaism (SAJ) in 1920. Through the decade of the 1920s, while continuing to teach, Kaplan focused on developing the SAJ, even publishing the SAJ Review, which covered all aspects of Jewish life.

Judaism as a Civilization.

In 1931, in response to a contest that sought essays concerning an "effective functioning of the Jewish community in America," Kaplan wrote his greatest work, Judaism as a Civilization. The book was among three "winners" of the contest, though so controversial that the judges could not agree to sanction its thought. The ideas discussed in Kaplan's Menorah Journal articles were fully developed in Judaism as a Civilization, which was published in 1934. The book is a landmark of Jewish thinking, defining not only Jewish nationalism but also redesigning the Jewish religion for the twentieth century. The book was praised and reviled, though all seemed to recognize its importance. Kaplan followed up its publication by launching a biweekly journal, the Reconstructionist, in January 1935, which served as a forum to debate the ideas in Kaplan's book. Kaplan was fifty-one when he wrote Judaism as a Civilization. He would spend much of the second half of his life detailing his ideas by reworking the faith in Reconstructionist terms. He coedited The New Haggadah, a Passover text, in 1941. In 1945 he published a new Sabbath Prayer Book, which was burned by the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, who promptly excommunicated Kaplan. Undeterred, Kaplan published a succession of reinterpreted prayer books. He meanwhile continued to write original material. His first book remains his most important, but others that followed continued to define his thinking and influence his coreligionists. The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion (1937), The Future of the American Jew (1948), The Faith of America (1951), and The New Zionism (1955) are among his subsequent works. Kaplan retired from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1963, taught at the new Reconstructionist Rabbinical College after 1968, and spent many of his final years living in Israel. Kaplan died in 1983 at the age of 102, among the giants of Judaism in America as well as the world in the twentieth century.