Mordecai Kaplan's Theology and the Problem of Evil

Mordecai M. Kaplan is rightly acclaimed as the greatest Jewish thinker to have emerged from the American Jewish context. Though born in Europe, he came to America as a young boy and received his most important schooling in this new environment. It is well known that, as a graduate student at Columbia University between 1900 and 1906, he was deeply influenced by the then-dominant influences of American naturalism and pragmatism—especially William James and John Dewey—which were then reinforced by the ideas of Felix Adler, on the one hand, and Henri Bergson, Émile Durkheim, and French sociology, on the other. As a result, his theological enterprise was essentially an effort to refashion Judaism through the categories supplied by these philosophical and sociological schools of thought.

In making his revaluation, Kaplan showed himself to be a masterful sociologist of religion. His reconstruction of Judaism through social categories is thoughtful and provocative and has been highly influential among all branches of American Jewry. However, his construction, like all primarily sociological analyses of Judaism, is reductive and, ultimately, both deficient and defective. This is because Judaism as a religion is not exhausted in its meaning by its function; that is, functional analyses are neither the only nor the preferred forms of analysis in matters of religion. In consequence, Kaplan—the distinguished, even often fascinating sociologist of Judaism—is a near total failure as a philosopher of Judaism. In preparing this article, I reread Kaplan closely, and I have been surprised at how poor his work is when judged by strict philosophical standards.

Good and Evil

To begin, a brief summary of Kaplan's views on evil and the related problem of evil is required. As to the latter (the "problem of evil"), Kaplan observes that:

None of the theodicies has ever proved convincing. The very idea of a God requiring justification is self-contradictory. The argument that whatever may appear evil to us may, from an objective standpoint, be good is just so much wasted breath, because to the extent that anything is evil, even if it be mistakenly regarded as such, it is evil and nothing else. That it is a means to the good, or that objectively considered it is no longer evil, in no way detracts from the fact that, according to the traditional theologies, it is necessary to conceive God as having to make use of means that are evil and of being the author of experiences that are subjectively not good.¹

In Judaism as a Civilization, in the course of a rebuke of Reform Judaism and in a passage of considerable power, Kaplan writes again:

The fact is that not only Kohler but the Reformist movement as such lacks either the philosophic vigor or the spiritual insight to make any courageous affirmation with regard to the problem of evil. Claude G. Montefiore, in his Outlines of Liberal Judaism, says very frankly: "To these terrible questions, there is and there can be upon earth, no satisfactory answer. We do not know. We can think of a few answers . . . which explain a very little, but we cannot explain the difficulties properly or entirely." In other words, we are called upon to be martyrs for a religion which fails in its raison d'être, that of enabling us to adjust ourselves constructively to the evil in ourselves and in the world.²

One cannot evade the challenge of evil without undermining the intellectual integrity of religion in general and Judaism in particular. Moreover, and importantly, it needs to be explicitly noted that, though Kaplan is unhappy with classical theodicies, he is unwilling to go in the direction of the denial of evil (that is, a doctrine of evil as privation). Rather, writing just after the Holocaust in his The Future of the American Jew, he insists that "It [evil] seems to be a necessary condition of life which we accept as part of existence. 'Good' is no less part of that mystery [of existence]."³

However, Kaplan is not consistent on this important point:

[I]t is essential to...