The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan

2. Self-Reliance: Kaplan and Emerson

28 Know your soul and you will come to know your creator. —Joseph Albo, as quoted by Mordecai Kaplan, 1954 For the modern Jew, the needs of the autonomous self threaten the coherence of the Jewish community. Individualism is the greatest problem facing the Jewish people. For Mordecai Kaplan, as for so many other twentieth-century Jewish leaders, the primary problem was how to deal withthenewsenseofselfthatisattherootofbothAmericancultureand modernity. We cannot flee from it. It is precious and yet problematical. We cannot simply dismiss it. If we are to rise above its lowest expression —as narcissism and self-absorption—we must understand it.1 Kaplan’s theology is complex, but I believe that the place of the individual holds the key to understanding his system. As we know, he was a fierce, lifelong advocate of the notion of Judaism as a civilization; he championed the concept of community and of the collective consciousness of the Jewish people. He devoted almost a decade of his life to organizing and running the Jewish Center, and he was a follower of that great cultural Zionist Ahad Ha-Am. While all these are significant, his views on individualism and individual fulfillment are the linchpins that hold the elaborate structure of his thought together. Kaplan, of course, is not alone. When we speak historically of the individual in American religious life, we naturally think of Ralph Waldo Emerson; we shall see that Emerson plays a major part in molding Kaplan ’s religious views. Let me put it another way. There are several voices in Kaplan’s head, voices that are quite disparate. We have called this SELF-RELIANCE: K APLAN AND EMERSON T W O Self-Reliance 29 a philosophy of mood. There is Henri Bergson and John Dewey and Baruch Spinoza. There is Emile Durkheim and Rudolf Otto. There is Ahad Ha-Am and Ralph Waldo Emerson. These advocates of the collective and the individual, of the mystical and the rational, are all held in a creative tension by Kaplan throughout his life. Kaplan moves back and forth. He rarely resides in one mood for very long, and his moves from one to the other are always provocative. Understanding Kaplan’s theology and his reinterpretation of salvation means to see him within his American context, within the broad outlines of religionin America. Salvation isa very oldconceptthat refers to the goal and purpose of religion and is usually associated with Christianity . Throughout the Middle Ages, the term was taken to mean life everlasting in the next world. Kaplan was comfortable with the concept and reinterpreted it in a very American way, to refer to self-fulfillment in this world. This reconstructed notion of salvation is one of the foundational concepts of Kaplan’s system. ReligioninAmericameansEmerson.AsSidneyAhlstrom,thegreat scholar of American religion, puts it, “Emerson is in fact the theologian of something we may almost term ‘the American Religion.’”2 At first glance, Kaplan and Emerson seem an unlikely pair, a very odd couple: Jew and Christian, rationalist and near mystic, one devoted to peoplehood, the other elevating the individual to divine status. They seemdivergentintheextreme.YetKaplannotonlyappreciatedEmerson but used him freely. I first happened on the vast and poignant connection between Kaplan and Emerson purely by accident, while studying Kaplan’s diary. In the summer of 1942, Kaplan was eagerly logging his thoughts about the prayer book that would come out in 1945 and would lead to his excommunication .3 Kaplan finally decided to take seriously a piece of advice hehad given manyyearsbefore to one of hisstudents, Louis Finkelstein. To create liturgy, he told Finkelstein in the early 1920s, you must take a theological essay and turn it into a prayer. Throughout the summer of 1942, Kaplan did just that, pondering essays by Leo Baeck, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.4 His entries on the first two writers made immediate sense to me, as Kaplan shares his Jewish commitment and liberal theology with both Baeck and Heschel. But when I 30 The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan came across his first references to Emerson, I was confounded. Kaplan a transcendentalist—how was this possible? Yet Emerson’s presence is undeniable, both in Kaplan’s journal and in numerous published writings. I can think of no better example of the pluralistic nature of Kaplan’s mind. Heschel and Baeck made it into the final edition of 1945 prayer book. Emerson did not. It should...