The American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan

2. The Reconstruction of Jewish Religion Out of Secular Culture

CHAPTER 2 The Reconstruction of jewish Religion Out of Secular Culture * Eliezer Schweid As early as the beginning of the nineteenth century several attempts were made to derive the basic concepts of the Jewish religion (faith in God as creator and overseer who reveals himself, instructs his people in his Torah, and designates a messianic reward for his followers) from the elements of secular ethics, society, and culture. Nevertheless, one should not term such attempts the "reconstruction of religion." They are still aimed at replacing (or retreating from) religious Judaism, in its old traditional sense, with the concepts and forms of the new secular culture. The problem is still how to purify secular culture and dull the edges of the conflict between its values and forms and the values and ways of the jewish religion. In other words, the objective of "liberal" jewish thought is to prove that the concepts and values of humanistic secular culture are in harmony with the original contents of the jewish religion-if we remove distortions, confusions, and incorrect interpretations rooted in an earlier cultural level and understand them properly. It is easy to prove, however, that the basic assumptions of secular humanism provide the point of departure for thinkers like Nahman Krochmal *This essay first appeared in Eliezer Schweid, judaism and Secular Culture (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz ha-Me'uhad, 1981), and was translated for this volume by Emanuel S. Goldsmith. 35 36 ELIEZER SCHWEID (the author of Guide for the Perplexed of Our Time), Solomon Formstecher, Samuel Hirsch, and Abraham Geiger-the founders of the thought of the Jewish Reform movement.1 These men investigated , clarified, and interpreted the contents of the Jewish religion in terms of its sources in the Torah according to these assumptions. It is therefore not surprising that they identify religion with a specific set of ethical values and the symbols that embody them, while removing from religion all independent content that might be preferable to the general principles of humanism. The concept of God is the ideal of the unity of human reason. Revelation in its varied meanings is the form of rational self-awareness; Providence is the law of moral existence in human society; worship is expressed essentially in ethics and in the commandments that relate man to God, which are only educational means to strengthen the feelings of human moral obligation. Nevertheless, this idealist understanding of reality has still not brought about an identification of religion with natural human abilities. The transcendence of God as an absolute spiritual-autonomous being who rules over nature and in so doing reveals himself and issues commandments is upheld in this thought by drawing a sharp distinction between the realm of nature and the realm of spirit. Nature is the domain of physical and mechanical causality, while spirit is the domain of ethical will operating according to the idea of purpose.2 Spirit attempts to impose moral unity on nature, and this explains the tension between man's ethical will and his natural physical impulses. In any event, on the basis of the distinction between nature and spirit, the concept of God is still the concept of a supernatural being-the supreme source of both nature and spirit, destined to dominate nature. For humanity, God is both the original idea and the idea of purpose for which it strives. This is an infinite ideal, which dwells within and beyond humanity so that humanistic culture is conceived as guided by a religious ideal. This is a continuation of the early religious character of humanism. In Jewish thinking, which continued this trend of thought in our century, the tension between the realm of nature and the realm of spirit gradually disappears. The ideal of humanity emerges from the nature of man. The point of departure is, therefore, a secular culture that has managed to assimilate completely the special catego- RECONSTRUCTION OF JEWISH RELIGION 37 ries of religious thought, feeling, and behavior.3 But then an annoying deficiency reveals itself, and the need to overcome this deficiency produces a reconstructive thought that attempts to discover religion anew from the contents of secular humanistic culture (as if to cause it to expunge what appeared to have been completely assimilated). The most developed effort in this direction is the thought of Mordecai Kaplan. Kaplan's teaching begins with an enthusiastic affirmation of the achievements of secular culture.4 He evaluates these...