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KAPLAN'S JUDAISM AT SIXTY: A REAPPRAISAL ARNOLD EISEN One of my favorite paragraphs in this wonderful book-full to overflowing with trenchant analyses and critiques, bristling with anger and indignation, enlivened at every step by passionate intelligence-is the very last, where Mordecai Kaplan, after some five-hundred-twenty-two pages, finally takes leave of his reader. He does so, characteristically, with an exhortation-directed first of all at himself. Those who look to Judaism in its present state for their salvation, he writes, are bound to be disappointed: "The Jew will have to save Judaism before Judaism will be in a position to save the Jew." Our wells must be replenished. Jewish civilization must be rediscovered, reinterpreted, reconstructed. "Such a program calls for a degree of honesty that abhors all forms of self-delusion, for a temper that reaches out to new consummations, for the type of courage that is not deterred by uncharted regions." Kaplan has by this point in the book demonstrated that kind of honesty in abundance, evinced that sort of temper (and other temper, too) more than a few times; he has persistently drawn on-and sought to elicit from his reader-the courage needed to make great changes. And now, at the end, Moses gazing from the mountain, Kaplan can only plead one final time for action. We can do this, he says in effect; I have proven that to you in a thousand irrefutable arguments. You can do this; I can do this. The "contemporary crisis in Jewish life" can "prove to be the birth-throes of a new era in the civilization of the Jewish people." Will it, and it is no dream! The only requirement is adherents so concerned for their own "salvation" that they dedicate themselves to the cause on which it depends: the salvation here and now, in this world and no other, of their Judaism. One sometimes forgets, given the accumulated impact over time of Kaplan's masterpiece, that when he finally sat down to write it in 1929, the project of Judaism's reconstruction had already preoccupied Kaplan for most of half a century. Born to pious parents in Lithuania in 1881, an immigrant to America at the age of eight, educated in public schools as well as IJ.eder, City College and Columbia University as well as The Jewish Theological Seminary, Kaplan was well prepared to pioneer the path that would soon be well traveled by an entire generation of American Jews. The conflicts and opportunities that came with living in two civilizations were well known to him. For close to a quarter century he xi xii KAPLAN'S JUDAISM AT SIXTY: A REAPPRAISAL had directed the Teachers' Institute of The Jewish Theological Seminary and taught homiletics to the Seminary's rabbis. He had inspired (and intimidated) countless students, challenged (and battled) distinguished colleagues. He had served as the rabbi of two major Orthodox congregations in New York City and had left the second (and Orthodoxy) in 1922 to found the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, a prototype for the new sort of progressive synagogue-center that he envisioned. Kaplan had trained many of American Jewry's leaders, moved in the company of its donors and its activists, engaged the community's greatest minds, helped to set the communal agenda with dozens of articles and speeches. And, throughout these years, he had accumulated the scars of the pioneer upon his person: loneliness and self-doubt, grandiosity in rhetoric and expectation, achievement outstripped by frustration. Perhaps the greatest frustration of all to Kaplan was the fact that, for all his many achievements, he had no book. Several lay begun but unfinished in a drawer; at least one-on rabbinic Judaism-had been completed but never submitted for publication. Then came the prod of an essay contest seeking programs aimed at the "fullest spiritual development of the individual Jew and the most effective functioning of the Jewish community in America." Kaplan determinedly finished his long manuscript, submitted it on time, and eagerly awaited the verdict of the judges. We learn from Mel Scult's recent fine biography that for Kaplan far more than the prize money (ten thousand dollars) was at stake. He considered the contest a referendum on the likelihood that his ideas would be accepted. "It won't be long now, and I shall know whether my conception of Judaism has a fighting chance or not," Kaplan confided to his diary. Happily, he won...

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