The Teachings of Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan

(1881-1983), founder of reconstructionism

According of Kaplan, Judaism is the dynamic and evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people, finding expression in history, culture and religion. Judaism has exhibited remarkable ability to endure throughout history in accordance with the highest ethical purposes despite changes in philosophical and theological opinion. What links the Jews together is not so much a static uniformity of ideas as a dynamic continuity of experience. The Jews constitute a permanent human society based on common hopes, fears and yearnings. They are a community of historical recollection expressed in their sancta (sacred texts, events, customs, places, and persons) rather than a community of mind or uniform ideology. It is not theology but rather collective identity or peoplehood that is central to Judaism. This sense of peoplehood originates in an intimate and intense collective sentiment for the ancestral national homeland in the Land of Israel.

Because of the deeply moral and spiritual culture and religion that their forbears developed there, the authors of the Bible erased memories of any brutal force and rapacious instincts through which the land may have been actually acquired. Nevertheless, despite its rootedness in a specific territory, Judaism evolved into a national civilization that was universal in content and reference and capable of giving birth to both Christianity and Islam. The sense of peoplehood, among those who survived as Jews through the ages, expressed itself in the will to self-government and self-education for the purpose of self- perpetuation.

Central to the Five Books of Moses (the Torah) is concern for the principle of law and order in human relations (Genesis 18:19). This concern, together with details for the implementation of the principle of law and order in the life of ancient Israel, constitutes the expression of what God means to the Jewish people. It is the humanness of biblical law which reveals God (in opposition to the traditional notion that it is God who reveals the law).

The historical uniqueness of the Jewish people derives from its will to self-perpetuation expressed in both the biblical name for God, YHWH (Eternality) and in the idea of the various covenants between God and Israel related in the Bible. Like the Greek philosophers, the Israelites were obsessed with the quest for permanence, stability and authenticity in a world of change and mortality. Revelation, according to Kaplan, may be identified with the sense of collective consciousness and collective conscience of a people, church, or society expressed in manifestations of responsibility, honesty, loyalty (love) and creativity.

The sense of peoplehood echoes and responds to the vital human need to have something permanent to belong to and to be proud of. The modern ethical notion of the equality of all individuals and groups before God necessitates abandonment of the biblical and rabbinic doctrine of the “chosen people” and the substitution for it of the concept of religious vocation – the universal task of transforming one’s society into a group motivated by the principle of active moral responsibility. A “people in the image of God.”

A confirmed rationalist, Kaplan insisted that for it to be both enlightening and liberating, religion should be based on faith in reason. A religious humanist, he believed that the primary concern of religion should be humanity rather than God. More important in religion than the idea of God is the concept of salvation since whatever a religious community conceives salvation to be determines its idea of God. Salvation in the modern world is synonymous with durable happiness, life abundant, self-realization, or continuous growth and progressive approximation by the individual and society to the ideal of perfection. The salvation which religion should strive for consists of the advancement of the ideals of reliability or moral responsibility, integrity, loyalty or love, and creativity or spiritual growth.