Mordecai Kaplan as Hermeneut: History, Memory, and His God-Idea

In an insightful article on Mordecai M. Kaplan and process theology, Jacob Staub, past academic dean of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, rightfully notes that "any attempt to extract a single, consistent, 'authentic' essence from all of the various theological formulations by Jewish teachers through the ages is a perilous task indeed."¹ As students of Jewish thought and intellectual history know, not only are there a wide variety of Jewish theological expressions but many, if not most, of these expressions preclude, by their own self-understandings, other Jewish theological views. Just to mention one twentieth-century example, Martin Buber's (1878–1965) description of the dialogical encounter between the human being and God is fundamentally opposed to Hermann Cohen's (1842–1918) notion that God is and cannot be anything but an idea that regulates human moral action.² In the context of Kaplan, and specifically Kaplan's God-idea, Staub takes the diversity of Jewish theological views of God to show that the question to be asked about Kaplan's theology is not whether it is authentically Jewish but whether it "provides a meaningful system of Jewish living."³

In what follows, I do not attempt to answer the question of whether Kaplan's theology and specifically his God-idea provide a meaningful system of Jewish living. The issue I will consider in this article is more modest yet, I argue, fundamental for thinking about the theological meaning of Kaplan's God-idea. Although Staub is certainly right that Jewish thought, taken as a whole, is multifaceted and not easily synthesized, I suggest that Kaplan's God-idea is nonetheless different from much if not all of ancient, medieval, and, perhaps most important, modern Jewish thought. This difference, however, is not metaphysical, nor is it even necessarily philosophical; rather, it is hermeneutical. This means that Kaplan's God-idea is unique in the Jewish theological tradition neither because of Kaplan's claim that God is the power that makes for salvation nor because of Kaplan's explicit rejection of a supernatural God. Instead, Kaplan's God-idea is theologically unique in Kaplan's absolutely explicit claim that his God-idea, and his theology, is a radical break with the Jewish past.

Thinkers and movements as diverse as the medieval Aristotelians, the Kabbalists, the modern Reform Movement, the neo-Kantians, and the existentialists all differ from Kaplan in their insistence that their view of Judaism is the true and even original meaning of the tradition. Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) claimed that the rational god of Aristotle and the God revealed in the Torah are not philosophically opposed but complementary, whereas Abraham Abulafia (1240–91) emphasized the centrality of mystical experience by way of numerological and other mediations.⁴ Abraham Geiger (1810–74) contended that Judaism's essence is its religious-universal element, whereas Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) maintained that Judaism is a blood community, transmitted from generation to generation.⁵ Yet for all their differences, what all of these figures have in common is their shared claim that their respective views are not novel but representative of the true tradition. Perhaps most blatantly, as Gershom Scholem first noted, the Kabbalah, which literally means "received tradition," is often quite subversive.⁶

Kaplan's attempt to rethink Jewish theology in terms of liturgical practices, particularly in his The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion, is arguably as creative and novel as the attempts to rethink Jewish theology in the medieval and modern periods mentioned above. Rejecting at every turn any notion of a supernatural deity, Kaplan claims, for instance, that the concept of God's sovereignty can be understood with reference to the evolution of the tension between the necessity of individuality and mutual aid in the human species and that this tension is borne out in the liturgy of Rosh Hashanah.⁷ Yet where Kaplan differs most from his historical predecessors is perhaps not in the degree of creative content of his thought but in the fact that he makes no claim for continuity with the past—that is, for presenting...