The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan

Introduction

1 Mordecai M. Kaplan was one of the most radical Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. When it came to expressing his opinions, Kaplan had much courage and never hesitated to speak his mind. He vehemently rejected the belief in the Jews as the chosen people of God. The center of his radicalism focuses on his theology and his concept of God. Kaplan rejected the belief in a supernatural being and did not envision God as a super self. God, Kaplan firmly believed, does not issue commandments or speak to anyone or direct history. In his commitment to a religion of naturalism, Kaplan denied the reality of the traditional biblical miracles—from the parting of the Red Sea to the extraordinary powers granted to the lost Ark. Though the Torah is central to the religious life, he felt it was the creation of the Jewish people and not from the “mouth of God.” Kaplan was an ardent disciple of Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenthcentury Dutch philosopher (“Too bad we only had one Spinoza,” he once wrote). If he had his druthers, he would have employed Spinoza in saving the Jewish people. Kaplan was a process thinker and, like another of his intellectual mentors, Ralph Waldo Emerson, believed that we are dominated by the tyranny of nouns. To free us from this tyranny, he advocated that we think with verbs, that is, in terms of process and action. Kaplan lived the Emersonian ideal of self-reliance. Though he does not often mention Emerson’s name, he was clearly influenced by the great Sage of Concord. Self-reliance, for our purposes, is the ability to stand back from one’s culture, so that intelligence and rationality triINTRODUCTION 2 The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan umph over conformity and tradition. It is about having the courage of one’s convictions, regardless of the consequences. There are some who have branded Kaplan an atheist because of his rejection of the supernatural. Nothing could be further from the truth, and our impulse to see him as an atheist reveals the depth of our misunderstandings .Kaplan,likehisforefatherSpinoza,wasGod-obsessed.He contemplated the divine all the time. The fact that Kaplan was excommunicated in 1945 because of his “heretical” prayer book reveals the extent of the anger that he generated among traditional Jews, even among his “friends” and colleagues at the Jewish Theological Seminary. The story is told that, in the 1950s, when Chaim Herzog, the chief rabbi of Israel, came to New York, he would not even step inside the seminary building because Kaplan was on the faculty. * * * Theoriginof Kaplan’srevolutionaryideologyisassociatedwithhisteachers , Emile Durkheim and John Dewey, and with the sociological view of religion as embodying the collective consciousness of the group. It would, however, be a distortion to think of Kaplan’s ideology solely in societal and naturalist terms. Kaplan was indeed a naturalist and a sociological thinker, but he went beyond naturalism and consistently attempted to articulate a vision of the intertwining of the spiritual and natural worlds, a vision he termed transnaturalism. As we shall see, we can think of this mode of experiencing as a realm between naturalism and supernaturalism, a realm that has much in common with contemporary spiritual concerns. It transcended the natural realm yet was not supernaturalist; in other words, it did not involve miracles or any phenomena beyond the natural. We can call it supranaturalism, or a naturalism pushed to the limit. Despite Kaplan’s naturalist, antitraditionalist tendencies, he must, I believe, be described as a pious man. Although he and Abraham Joshua Heschel became rivals, it should not surprise us that Kaplan deeply appreciated Heschel and was instrumental in bringing him to the Jewish Theological Seminary. The best way to approach Kaplan is to keep in mind that he was a rabbi obsessed with the survival of the Jewish people. He was not a phi- Introduction 3 losopher; if we look to him for a consistent and rigorous philosophy, we will be confused and disappointed. Inevitably, he stands on both sides of a question; we might describe his approach as a philosophy of mood. He is the dedicated Zionist who edits a book of prayers for American holidays; he is the religious naturalist par excellence yet has no problem inresortingtotraditionalGod-languagewhenheneedsto;heisthecommittedpragmatistwho ,ingeneraloutline,acceptstheviewsofHermann Cohen, the famous neo-Kantian. This notion of a philosophy of mood will play a major role in our analysis of...