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6. Kaplan and His God: An Ambivalent Relationship
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110 According to Maimonides, “it is not correct to say that God is living, or that God knows or wills. The truth is that God is life, God is knowledge, and God is will.” From the standpoint of knowledge, God is at the same time the known and the process of knowing. Theologically or philosophically speaking, there is little, if any, difference between Maimonides’ conception of God and the conception of God that makes for man’s salvation. —Mordecai Kaplan, “Soterics” Some say that Mordecai Kaplan had no theology, while others say that he did not believe in God. Both are mistaken. Kaplan was a courageous man, and if he considered himself an atheist, he would have said so. He was a passionate believer, a naturalist to be sure, but a believer nonetheless . It is quite clear that he would never agree to the derogatory slur that “there is no God and Kaplan is his prophet”; yet, in a certain paradoxical sense, this statement is true. ThoughKaplandismissedsupernaturalismearlyinlife,hewasGodobsessed . He thought about God all the time. Nonetheless, he rejected a providentialGodwhoconcernsHimselfwithhumanbeings,whodirects history, and who lays down laws for us to follow. In a 1905 journal entry, Kaplan rhapsodizes on the infinite, even while emphatically rejecting a “super self” as part of the great beyond: “There is a kind of mysticism which is essential to thought and without which thought is both barren and heartless,” Kaplan tells us, “it is of the very essence of literature to embody this sense of the infinite, this longing for the eternal universal beyond. To call this beyond a person [however] is meaningless, as [Matthew ] Arnold has so well proved.”1 K APLAN AND HIS GOD: AN AMBIVALENT RELATIONSHIP S I X Kaplan and His God 111 The rejection of God as a “super self” or a supreme being is consistent throughout Kaplan’s writings. In Questions Jews Ask, a half century later, Kaplan put it this way: “When, for example, we are told that God is living, we should not take that to mean that God is a being who possesses the attributes of life, which He shares with other living beings, but that He is life itself. God and life are one and the same.”2 If God is not a person, a self, or a mind, then God has no will, can give no laws, and cannot communicate with people in any significant sense. Kaplan does sometimes speak of knowing God, but it is only in a highly metaphorical sense. The problems this image creates for traditional Judaism are numerous. If God is not a self and has no will, then how can we speak of God as directing history? Yet the first commandment asserts such direction as a truth:“ItheLordamyourGodwhobroughtyououtofthelandof Egypt . . . you shall have no other gods beside Me.” God’s action, the salvation of his people from bondage, is a central tenet of Israelite monotheism. Primary loyalty is due to Him. Even Kaplan noted this when he asserted that the Shemah (Deuteronomy 6:4) is not a statement announcing that God is one but rather an oath that we owe allegiance to Him alone.3 Some considered Kaplan’s beliefs a species of atheism. Rabbi Bernard Drachman, Kaplan’s former teacher from his Jewish Theological Seminary days, writing in 1921, put it this way: The utterances of Kaplan . . . on some of the fundamental doctrines of religion and his proposals for the Reconstruction of Judaism . . . have come as a great shock to all Jews who believe in the traditional faith of Israel and desire its perpetuation. . . . True Jews, that is to say, believers in a Supreme Being and a genuine Divine Law interpreted by authoritative tradition, cannot look upon such theories and proposals otherwise than with feelings of horror.4 Kaplan, however, was utterly emphatic in his rejection of atheism. In an early journal entry that discussed the theological issue of immanence and transcendence, Kaplan makes his position clear and goes so far as to identify belief in immanence with atheism: “The moment God is merely identified with the world and conceived as being immanent but not transcendent, His divinity is denied and He is dissolved into the world. Thisistheatheismandpantheismwhichreligionsovigorouslycontends against.”5 [35.153.106.141] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:52 GMT) 112 The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan Still, I wonder about a situation where a belief in a Supreme Being is required for membership in an organization. Some time ago, there was an article in...