Mordecai Kaplan wanted Jews to choose Judaism — what happened?

Reconstructionist Judaism “comes closer than any other movement or school of thought to articulating the meaning of Judaism for American Jews,” the Jewish sociologist Charles Liebman wrote almost 60 years ago.

By emphasizing belonging over rote observance, personal fulfillment over inherited obligation, and Jewish “civilization” over theology, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s brainchild seemed poised to capture the imaginations and loyalties of Jews who were fully at home in America.

And yet, as Jenna Weissman Joselit notes in her new biography, “Mordecai M. Kaplan: Restless Soul,” Reconstructionism remains the smallest by far of American Jewish denominations. Similarly, the “liberal” Reform and Conservative movements, which absorbed a number of Kaplan’s principles, wrestle with their identities and struggle to hold on to engaged followers. Orthodoxy, meanwhile, a movement of obligations and inherited do’s and don’ts, is the fastest-growing stream.

Joselit’s book is an intimate portrait of a thinker and institution-builder who spent most of his career in the Conservative movement while staging a rear-guard action against many of its tenets. But again and again, frustration haunts his life story: By setting out to rescue Judaism from what he saw as “blind habit,” did Kaplan loosen some of the very bolts that hold religious life together? Four decades after his death in 1983, Jews are still asking: Can community thrive without commandments?

“He’s hopeful that people will take on these things on their own, and one doesn’t need a stick with which to beat them,” Joselit, professor of Judaic studies and history at George Washington University, told me in a Zoom interview last month. Kaplan wanted Jews to engage with Shabbat, the holidays, and the totality of Jewish life “not because grandma said, or because your father will be disappointed, but because it speaks to you,” she said.

As for theology, “he shifts the center of gravity of Jewish life away from trying to appease or speak to God and centers it in the Jewish people.” In “Judaism as a Civilization,” his 1934 magnum opus, Kaplan argued that “Judaism must break the narrow frame of a creed and resume its original function as a culture, as the expression of the Jewish spirit and the whole life of the Jews.”

And yet, even by the 1940s, Kaplan was starting to wonder if Reconstructionism had “blundered” by not making more of ritual and obligation, Joselit writes.

Kaplan, born in present-day Lithuania in 1881 and raised on the Lower East Side, had been brought up steeped in Orthodoxy and traditional Jewish learning — when he wasn’t reading Henry James, Plato, Baruch Spinoza, or John Dewey. At a time when tradition was losing its hold on the children of immigrants eager to assimilate, Kaplan channeled his own rebelliousness into Judaism itself. He was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary when the faculty of what became the Conservative movement’s flagship seminary still mostly called themselves Orthodox. (Kaplan called them “fossils.”) His first pulpit, Kehillat Jeshurun on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, also was Orthodox.

Kaplan was still in his 30s when he forged his own path, first as founding rabbi of the Jewish Center, and then as founder of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, which, despite its name, was and is a synagogue on the Upper West Side. (Catchy branding was not Kaplan’s strong suit.) At the same time, he remained a part of JTS for half a century, heading the Teachers Institute, its undergraduate division, starting in 1909.

In each of these roles, Kaplan believed that if Judaism could be made meaningful enough — intellectually honest, emotionally resonant, compatible with democracy and pluralism — people would embrace it joyfully and voluntarily. He would toss parts of the prayer service that he felt no longer spoke to the American Jewish condition — including the legalistic Kol Nidre prayer that serves as a sort of overture for the Yom Kippur service.

His “New Haggadah,” published in 1941, “comes along like an earthquake,” Joselit said. In his guide to the Passover seder, one of the first to deviate from the centuries-old script, Kaplan jettisoned the 10 plagues, truncated “Dayenu,” and removed the notion of “chosenness,” which he regarded as chauvinistic. An Orthodox group actually burned copies of the haggadah and excommunicated its author.

“He tries to make it modern and consonant and appealing to people for whom the seder is more of an exercise in eating than it is in contemplation,” Joselit said.

But religions don’t just offer meaning; they impose expectations. They depend, at some level, on people showing up — not just when it’s inspiring, but when it’s inconvenient, boring, or hard. Obligation, in other words, may not be a bug of religious life. It may be a feature.

Kaplan knew this tension, even if he never fully resolved it. He looked out at his own sanctuaries and saw empty pews and fidgety congregants. In the diaries from which Joselit draws on heavily, he is constantly lamenting that his followers, his students, and even his own children are not living up to his expansive vision of Jewish life.

What would Kaplan have made of the 21st century, which has seen a resurgence of Orthodox Judaism? He certainly would be disappointed to learn that Reconstructionism, the only major Jewish denomination fully born on American soil, had not grown larger than it has. (And he might be baffled, as a lifelong Zionist, that its seminary has drawn, nearly 80 years after the establishment of Israel, a strong anti-Zionist contingent.) Perhaps he would have recanted his project to reconstruct Judaism as a menu of “wants” as opposed to a litany of “must do’s.”

On the other hand, aspects of Kaplanian thinking are found to various degrees in the other denominations, including segments of Orthodoxy: liturgical creativity; expanding roles for women in Jewish life; the idea that peoplehood, not religion, binds Jews across the globe, and the notion that believing in a supernatural God is less important than “doing Jewish.”

“He’s very much a product of America,” Joselit said. “He want[ed] to create something that is beautifully aligned with American values of democracy and pluralism and expansiveness and joy and laughter.”

Kaplan thought that such an alignment would become a distinctly American Judaism, and in many ways he was right. Yet for all his innovations, Kaplan confronted a hard truth: A civilization built on what people want is harder to sustain than one built on what they feel they must do. When everything is optional, people often opt out.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Andrew Silow-Carroll of Teaneck is the editor at large of the New York Jewish Week and managing editor for Ideas for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He is the former editor in chief and CEO of the New Jersey Jewish News.

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