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The Jewish Philosophy of Mordecai Kaplan

By Jacob Lumbroso

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 22Dec2010 Word count: 472 Viewed: 470 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Of all the Jewish thinkers that arose in the twentieth century, none stands out as revolutionary and as controversial as Mordecai Kaplan. Kaplan was paradoxical to say the least. He maintained high levels of personal religious observance and in addition to his studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary he also obtained traditional ordination. He served as an Orthodox rabbi for a short duration and was also participated in the founding of the Young Israel movement.

For Kaplan Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative versions of Judaism and additional subsections not mentioned are based upon the view that the key differences between Jews and non-Jews lie solely or primarily in the area of religious thought. For the aforementioned versions, the challenge of Jewish life in light of modernity is the appropriate adaption of Jewish beliefs and practices -even as was noted in the case of Neo-Orthodoxy.

For Kaplan however, the challenge of Jewish life and its survival in the modern era is based on far more than the issue of Jewish religion. Jewish faith is only one element in the life of a Jew that is challenged by modernity. Yet despite his commitment to Jewish life as recognizable to traditionally oriented Jews, his theological predilections were such that the fundamental nature of Jewish theological identity was transformed in his reconstruction of Judaism. His work "Judaism as as Civilization and The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion" and the philosophy behind them highlight very different notions of God, Torah, and Israel when compared to classical Jewish perspectives. Yet while Kaplan was vilified by many Orthodox and finally excommunicated by the rabbis of Agudath Israel, not all his right of center critics were ready to completely dismiss if not the motivation behind Kaplan's restructuring or reconstruction of Judaism, the very issues he addressed

In his quest to define what Judaism is, Kaplan took issue with all the movements existent in his day. While acknowledging the "success" of the Reform movement if in nothing else, preventing the flow of thousands of Jews in Western Europe and in the United States from abandoning Jewish identity, Kaplan saw Reform Judaism as espousing a religious philosophy devoid of the meaning of the Jewish people and its distinctive culture. Kaplan argued for the idea that Judaism reflected "Jewish consciousness"; Judaism was the "soul of the Jewish people."

For Kaplan then, a Judaism based solely on the idea of ethical monotheism was unsustainable. Reform Judaism was in essence asking Jews to be the "apostles" of what was for all practical matters a religious philosophy. Furthermore the Reformers assumed that Jews had always embraced theological ideas that were advanced beyond that of other nations. Having rejected a supernatural revelation as the source of this claim, Kaplan saw inherent weakness in any attempt to appeal to history as the arbiter of such a view.

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