The Spinozistic Spirit in Mordecai Kaplan's Revaluation of Judaism

Biblical criticism can only ruin a faith that has already been weakened. ¹

--Emmanuel Levinas, "The Spinoza Case"

I

Mordecai Kaplan, radical Jew and architect of the only indigenous movement in American Jewry, Reconstructionism, rarely mentions Spinoza in his voluminous writings. ² He is primarily influenced by the philosophical pragmatism of John Dewey, William James, and the nineteenth-century American transcendentalists. ³ In fact, at first glance Kaplan's functionalist utilitarian program shares little with Spinoza's highly idealistic and rigorous method and doctrine. ⁴ Moreover, Kaplan's explicit intent to reconstruct rather than deconstruct Judaism itself seems quite anti-Spinozistic. ⁵ However, the more we distance ourselves from Spinoza's highly critical engagement with Judaism and the more we look for the roots of Kaplan's constructive program, the more Spinoza's ideas can be seen to resonate in Kaplan's thinking. ⁶

Unlike Spinoza, Kaplan does not scrutinize the biblical tradition and its classical interpreters (rabbinic and medieval) in an attempt to unveil the ways in which the biblical message has been misrepresented in the Jewish tradition. Rather he begins his project by deconstructing modern interpretations of Judaism, embodied in twentieth-century Jewish denominations, in an attempt to exhibit how modern Judaism has thus far failed to meet the needs of modern Jewish civilization. ⁷ As a Jewish "insider," Kaplan's goal is to reconstruct Judaism for twentieth-century America. His numerous attempts at reconstruction, however, almost always begin with a deconstructive prelude and utilize what I will argue are Spinozistic premises as the foundation of his religious critique. ⁸

I will attempt to demonstrate this claim in three distinct ways. First, by reviewing the already well documented claim that Spinoza's critique of traditional religion in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was intended to lay the groundwork for the freedom of philosophical inquiry by divorcing religion from philosophy, the former being the model of piety and obedience and the latter the model for the pursuit of (philosophical) truth. Kaplan adopts Spinoza's basic position that the Bible (and Judaism) is not concerned with questions of philosophical truth. However, Kaplan uses this bifurcation of piety and philosophy for very different ends. His concern for the survival of Jewish civilization, as opposed to Spinoza's concern for free philosophical inquiry, leads him to conclude that Judaism needs to be reconstructed from the ashes of the Spinozistic critique in order to serve as the ideological foundation for Jewish survival.

Second, Spinoza's critique of biblical, rabbinic, and medieval stances toward the transcendent and supernatural idea of God will be juxtaposed with Kaplan's adaptation and reformulation of Spinoza's immanentism and the exaltation of nature common in many transcendentalist and scientific interpretations of Spinoza's doctrine. ⁹ Kaplan's God idea, which he called transnaturalism, is presented as an alternative to the idealized God of liberal Judaism and the radically transcendent God of Lithuanian and German Orthodoxy. ¹⁰ Although it is not clear whether Kaplan's transnaturalism constitutes a new chapter in Jewish theological reflection, he claimed that it offered an antidote to the outdated models in both the liberal and traditional camps of early-twentieth-century Judaism. ¹¹

Finally, I will touch upon Spinoza and Kaplan's idea of the sacred in Judaism and upon the ways in which Kaplan adopts Spinoza's relativization of the sacred in order to represent the source of sacrality in the people rather than in the object of worship. Although Kaplan scholars have often viewed his idea of the sacred as emerging from sociological theories of religion from Durkheim to Eliade, Spinoza also plays an important role in Kaplan's understanding of holiness and its place in a reconstructed Judaism.

Most interpretations of Spinoza's critique of traditional religion share the assumption that Spinoza sought to devalue the sacred status of the Bible as transmitting absolute (i.e., philosophical) truth. In other words, he sought to refute the common medieval assumption that...