Download The Theology of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan

The Theology of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan
by Ian Ellis-Jones
A REVISED COPY OF AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE SYDNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
SUNDAY, 4 SEPTEMBER 2005
Many prominent religious leaders over the years have promoted humanistic
ideals in their theologies and teachings. Some of these leaders have
profoundly influenced successive generations of persons, religious and nonreligious alike. One such leader was the religious naturalist and humanist
Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan (1881-1983), the founder of the Reconstructionist
movement and denomination in Judaism.
Kaplan was perhaps the pre-eminent American Jewish thinker and rabbi of
the twentieth century. Obsessed by the need to modernise Judaism in order
to “save” the Jewish people, Kaplan repudiated supernaturalism in its entirety.
Unitarians and other religious liberals can, in my opinion, gain greatly from a
close study of his writings and ideas, particularly in our search for a greater
sense of the importance of community and civilization.
Despite, or perhaps partly because of, its strict but uncomplicated
monotheism (“only one god away from atheism”), the religion of Judaism is a
religion that is quite humanistic in character, probably even more so than
Buddhism. Judaism, in common with Humanism and Unitarianism, asserts
that life is better than death, that there is nothing evil about the body and its
appetites, and that “pleasures” are meant to be enjoyed (at least in
moderation). This is altogether unlike Christianity and Islam with their rigid
asceticism and unyielding polemics on the so-called “sins of the flesh”. It is
also quite unlike Buddhism, the teachings of which are directed at the
predicament of sense organs coming into contact with the outside world with
resultant sensations and feelings of unsatisfied longing (tanha).
Judaism, for the most part a non-creedal religion, asserts that action is more
important than belief. “Deeds, not creeds,” in the words of Ethical Culture
founder Felix Adler. Unlike Christianity, Judaism is not so much a religion of
personal salvation but of social justice, and human beings are not born in
“total depravity” but are essentially good.
Rabbi Rudolph Brasch (1912-2004), the author of the first book to be
published in Australia on Judaism, The Star of David (1955), and for 30 years
the chief minister of Temple Emanuel, Sydney, as well as serving as acting
minister of the Sydney Unitarian Church for a time when the Church was
without a regular fulltime minister, has aptly written:
Judaism is rational, logical and moral. It is not a creed, but a way of life. It demands
righteous living and not acceptance of dogma. Beliefs as such are only significant if
they serve as a means to foster goodness and holiness.
In the words of Rabbi Stuart E Rosenberg, Jewish theology is “inevitably
earthbound”. Arthur A Cohen, in The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition
(1970), writes that Judaism is a “realistic humanism”, in which man, “the
benoni, neither saint nor monster”, is “neither evil beyond measure nor good
beyond credibility”. Jews believe that life, which is to be fully enjoyed and
honoured above all else, is better than death, that there is nothing dirty or evil
about the human body, and that actions speak louder than words and are
also more important than belief. Indeed, Judaism teaches that, if a life is
endangered, it is permissible to break every law in the books.
The roots of Judaism in its more humanistic forms go way back to Biblical
times, when, for example, Micah, who has been described by Unitarian
minister George N Marshall as “the great prophet of ethical conduct and
personal integrity”, set out what he saw as real religion:
“Wherewith shall I come before HaShem, and bow myself before G-d on high? Shall I
come before Him with burnt-offerings, with calves of a year old?
Will HaShem be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my
soul?”
It hath been told thee, O man, what is good, and what HaShem doth require of thee:
only to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy G-d. (Mi 6:6-8
[Jewish Publication Society ed, 1917])
George Marshall, in Challenge of a Liberal Faith (1970), has written:
These three verses from the sixth chapter of the book of Micah have been called by
many liberal religious persons the high point of Old Testament religion because they
turn religion from the external forms to the internal faith which propels and guides a
man. There is nothing more required than to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk
humbly. In this sense Micah gives us an adequate definition of religion.
In the Jewish Bible, God was the very first humanist, who created humanity
and everything else, “and, behold, it was very good” (Gen 1:31). God
considered human beings so sacred that he issued a commandment that they
not be murdered. Further, there is no doctrine of original sin in Judaism,
nothing of the “total depravity” of man that is so much a part of certain
versions of Christianity. There is an evil inclination (yetzer ha’ra) as well as a
good inclination (yetzer ha’tov), but throughout Judaism in all of its forms
there is a solid emphasis on the human capacity for doing good. Rabbi
Brasch has written:
Judaism believes that man was “created in the image of God”. A Divine spirit dwells
in every individual. This endows him with potentialities for good, a yearning for the
infinite and a longing for an ideal. Through it God and man are no longer far apart, but
become closest and nearest.
Judaism does not believe in “original sin”. Man is born pure. Sin is the result of his
freedom and a condition of his moral responsibility. Man’s will is unfettered and
completely free. He himself chooses between right and wrong, good and evil, and must
therefore be ready to accept the consequences of his choice. Yet there is always the
possibility of return. No evil is final. Suffering is not merely punishment, but a means
of purification and a test of faith. Nothing in man is innately evil. Even his instincts
and passions can be made instruments of sanctification. Judaism teaches neither
asceticism not celibacy. It demands the control of human passion: not its mortification,
but its consecration.
Judaism teaches the three very human virtues of self-reliance, self-giving,
and living and acting in the now:
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now – when? (Rabbi Hillel, Sayings of the Fathers, I:14)
Modern liberal Jewish theology - very much a “theology of man” - owes to a
great debt to what is known as “predicate theology”. This school of theology,
which has contributed to a new understanding of the nature of God and
religion not only in Judaism but also in liberal Christianity, was initially
developed by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan and has been popularized and further
developed by one of Kaplan’s former students Rabbi Harold M Schulweis, the
emeritus rabbi at a Conservative congregation in Southern California.
Mordeaci Menahem Kaplan was born in Lithuania on 11 June 1881. Nine
years later his family immigrated to the United States of America. He studied
at the City College of New York and Columbia University. He was ordained at
the Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative) (“JTS”) in 1902 and was
elected Rabbi of Kehillat Jeshurun, an Orthodox synagogue in New York. In
1909 he became the Dean of the Teachers Institute of JTS. He also taught
homiletics, Midrash, and the philosophy of religion. Later, he organized the
Jewish Center, where he served as Rabbi from 1917 to 1922. While
continuing to teach at JTS for five decades, Kaplan edited and translated the
writings of Moses Luzzatto (an 18th century poet and Kabbalist), published
essays on Hermann Cohen (a 19th century German philosopher), and
founded The Reconstructionist magazine in 1935, a periodical that espoused
his evolving liberal philosophy and religious humanism. After retiring in 1963,
Kaplan taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He returned to the
USA shortly before his death on 8 November 1983, at the age of 102.
Kaplan was a religious naturalist who rejected all traditional forms of theism,
along with all notions of supernaturalism. He asserted that God was the sum
of all natural processes that allowed a person to become self-fulfilled as a
human being.
For Kaplan, personal salvation was understood as the
“worthwhileness of life”. God, according to Kaplan, is “the sum of all the
animating organizing forces and relationships which are forever making a
cosmos out of chaos”.
Kaplan’s many publications include Judaism as a Civilization (New York:
Macmillan, 1934), The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion (New York:
Jewish Reconstructionist Press, 1937), The Future of the American Jew (New
York: Macmillan, 1948), Questions Jews Ask (New York: Jewish
Reconstructionist Press, 1956), and Judaism Without Supernaturalism (New
York: Jewish Reconstructionist Press, 1958). Kaplan also created the
ceremony of bat mitzvah. (See, generally, Ian Ellis-Jones “The Religious
Humanism
of
Mordecai
Kaplan”
42:6
Humanist
Viewpoints
November/December 2003.)
In predicate theology God, as opposed to the “qualities” of God, is essentially
unknowable; the emphasis must therefore be on “godliness” and those
qualities or virtues that are “godlike” or “divine”. In that regard, Kaplan firmly
believed that if belief in God was to continue to serve a useful purpose for
those who believed in science, the belief had to be reconstructed in
naturalistic and humanistic terms. Ever the pragmatist, Kaplan opined that
what it gets changed to doesn’t matter so long as a suitable number of people
could believe in it and base their lives upon it.
Kaplan defined his concept of God in a number of ways over the years. God
was variously the Creative Goodness in us and around us (and not a person
in heaven), a Value in the universe, the “sum of everything in the world that
renders life significant worthwhile - or holy”, the “totality of those forces in life
that render human life worthwhile”, the “Power that impels [human beings] to
become fully human”, the “sum of the animating, organizing forces and
relationships which are forever making a cosmos out of chaos”, and the
“Power that makes for the fulfilment of all valid ideals”. Kaplan spoke in terms
of God, not as a person, but as “the Power”, “the Process”, and the very life of
Nature:
God is the Process by which the universe produces persons, and persons are the
process by which God is manifest in the individual. (Questions Jews Ask (1956))
God is the Oneness … the sameness … the unity of all that is … the uniformity of all
that moves … the rhythm of all things … the mystery of life … the creative flame …
God is in the face by which we overcome the fear of loneliness, of helplessness, of
failure and of death … God is in the love which creates, protects, forgives. (Cited in
Joshua Loth Liebman, Peace of Mind (1946))
In a similar vein, Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman, in his wonderful book Peace of
Mind (1946), writes:
I believe that God is the Power for salvation revealing Himself in nature and in
human nature, in networks of relationships, in countless situations and fields of
operation where evil is vanquished and goodness triumphs. God is in the pain of
growth, in the seed of sorrow, in the lure of thought, and in all the laws of fulfillment
which bind men and stars together.
Similar to the views of the Kabbalists who see God as Ein Sof (the Endless
One), an ongoing process, God was not so much the name of a “thing” or the
name of a “person”. God is a verb, not a noun. God is the livingness of life.
(That does not refer to some supposed “life force”, a fundamentally flawed
concept so popular these days with many New Agers.) God is the oneness of
Life, not in any monistic sense, but in the empirical recognition that there is
only one order or level of reality in which all things live and move and having
their being. God is the “givingness” of life to itself, the process and means by
which life perpetuates itself. In short, God is life with a capital “L” and
goodness with a capital “G”.
Is it wrong to redefine God in such terms? Those who answer that question
in the affirmative often fail to recognise that redefining the concept of God is
nothing new in religion. Regrettably, many famous humanists such as Sir
Julian Huxley and Corliss Lamont were simply unable to admit the legitimacy
of any God concept that was free of, to use Huxley’s words, the “spatial,
material, mythological, Freudian and anthropomorphic aspects” of traditional
Judeo-Christian images of God. Nevertheless, the process of defining and
redefining God has been going on since the beginning of time and no belief
system has a monopoly of who or what God is. The human concept of God
has changed from generation to generation, and redefinitions of God are not
necessarily “semantic cheating” (Lamont’s words). Christianity preaches that
Jesus brought a different concept of God than had been known in Old
Testament times. Insofar as Judaism is concerned, as Rabbis Rifat Sonsino
and Daniel B Syme have pointed out, “No single interpretation qualifies as
‘the’ Jewish God concept” (Sonsino and Syme, Finding God (2002)).
Rabbi Kaplan's idea of Reconstructionism views Judaism as not just a
religion, but a culture, the ever-evolving product of the collective experience
of the Jewish people over time. The idea of Reconstructionism, which is not
just a philosophy and theology but also a way of thinking and behaving, was
drawn from a number of disparate sources including traditional Jewish
sources, Haskalah (“Enlightenment”) thinkers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Josiah
Royce, and American philosophical pragmatism (as expounded by the
philosophers Dewey, James and Peirce), which he generally endorsed.
Kaplan was also influenced by the Social Gospel movement of American
Protestantism.
Kaplan’s philosophy of life has been described as “religious naturalism”,
“religious humanism” and “Jewish atheism”. As regards the latter, whilst
Kaplan has been labelled a “Jewish atheist”, that is not strictly correct. He
was simply of the view that modern scientific explanation did not permit
appeal to superhuman persons such as God. Consequently, Kaplan rejected
all notion of supernaturalism, and sought to redefine God in ways that were
consistent with the discoveries of modern scientific knowledge and otherwise
“useful” to the Jewish people. As a religious naturalist, whose religious
thought was rooted entirely in the natural world, Kaplan sought to expound
the virtues and benefits of religious traditions and develop their ethical and
spiritual implications and interpretations of reality in an essentially secular
world.
Kaplan wrote much about “civilization” as well as “community”. Culture plus
religion equalled civilization. For Kaplan civilization embraced the
accumulation of all knowledge, skills, tools, arts, literatures, laws, religions
and philosophies which stood between a particular community and external
nature and which served as a bulwark against the hostility of forces that
would otherwise destroy the community. He saw community as “that form of
social organization in which the welfare of each is the concern of all, and the
life of the whole is the concern of each” (The Future of the American Jew
(1948)). Unitarians and Humanists would have difficulty in arriving at a better
statement of our stated purpose.
As regards the Jewish civilization and community, Kaplan’s reconstruction
saw Jews not as a people of God - he never attributed to them superiority or
supernatural status (“chosenness”) - but rather a people with a common
cultural consciousness, whose “salvation” was to be achieved by obtaining
social and economic welfare in this world. His version of pragmatism
adjudged religious concepts by how useful they were to the Jewish
civilization, and his primary concern was that the Jewish civilization survive.
So, whatever tended to conserve the Jewish civilization was deemed of value,
and whatever tended to diminish it was deemed to be of disvalue.
Kaplan’s version of pragmatism was concerned with what was collectively
useful, that is, useful to the Jewish community and civilization. He thought
there were powerful forces working against the survival of the Jewish
civilization. Democratic nationalism was one such force, which permitted
Jews to be full members of civil society without embracing any religious
identity. Scientific Humanism also threatened the Jewish civilization because
it made a traditional belief in God difficult for many Jews of today.
Kaplan also identified a number of powerful forces that worked in favour of
the survival of Jewish civilization. Those factors included the tendency of
Jews to aggregate in large cities and in specific neighbourhoods, a tendency
against intermarriage, Jewish communal centres, religious activities, Jewish
education, cultural and philanthropic activities, and Zionism. (The Jewish
community in Israel was considered by Kaplan central to Jewish life.)
Kaplan advocated an "affirmative and realistic philosophy" in order to actively
promote Jewish identity as well as a Judaism that could flourish in today’s
environment. In the opinion of Kaplan the traditional versions of Judaism
were no longer adequate to form the basis of a flourishing Jewish civilization.
In particular, he asserted that creeds, rituals, and ceremonies in all of the
historical religions - not just Judaism - had lost their value by becoming
detached from the basic interests of the life of the individual. Since, in
Kaplan’s view, individuals could no longer connect with traditional religions,
the traditional religions could no longer serve as the basis of a flourishing
civilization. (Having said that, Kaplan introduced a number of innovations,
religious and otherwise, including the bat mitzvah, the Jewish Community
centre, and the chavurah.)
According to Rabbi Kaplan, “spirituality” referred to everything that had to do
with whatever was not transient (that is, the things we can’t see but which
nevertheless naturally exist and which we can otherwise apprehend, without
necessarily being able to intellectually comprehend them) and, specifically,
the interconnectedness and interrelationship of human beings. Spirituality
can only be spoken of in terms of relationship and the natural processes of
body and mind. A spiritual movement, in the sense mentioned above, should
be judged according to such criteria as its success or otherwise in bringing
"order into [humans’] inner life" that "is spiritually compelling" and "socially
practical", the degree to which its adherents live according to professed
ideals, the relevance of the movement’s ideas and practices to its adherents,
the ability of the movement to adjust to changing circumstances, and
integration of its members into the larger society.
Kaplan stated that religion, if reconstructed, could still be of value to a
civilization, provided it was not contrary to science. In his book The Meaning
of God in Modern Jewish Religion (1962) Kaplan wrote:
The only kind of religion that can help [human beings] live and get the most out of
life will be the one which will teach [them] to identify as divine or holy whatever
in human nature or in the world about [them] enhances human life.
Humanist Sir Julian Huzley said as much in his Religion Without Revelation
(1957) and Essays of a Humanist (1964) (see, in particular, “The New
Divinity” in the latter compendium).
As Unitarians, what, then, can we learn from Kaplan? A number of things,
including the following:
1. Unitarianism must always remain non-dogmatic and non-creedal.
Our views must always be open to revision and new interpretation.
2. Supernaturalism, as ordinarily understood, must be rejected in favour
of a naturalistic spirituality that aims to meet fundamental human
needs, such as a sense of belonging and being “at home” in the
universe.
3. Unitarians and other religious liberals are a distinctive community,
and as a community with a distinctive life stance and ethical values
the welfare of each one of us, and of each member of the wider
community in which we all live, should be the concern of all, and the
life of the whole should be the concern of each one of us.
4. In years to come our movement will be judged according to our
success or otherwise in bringing meaning and purpose to peoples’
lives, the degree to which we do more than pay lip service to our
professed ideals, the relevance of our ideas and practices, our ability
to adapt to changing circumstances, and the extent to which we can
integrate into the larger society.
5. Although not necessarily our primary concern, we should
nevertheless aim to survive as a community with an ability to adjust
to changing circumstances, not because it is intrinsically important
that our community flourish or even survive but because the
underlying values and ideas of Unitarianism are of lasting importance
to civilization.
The cornerstone of Kaplan’s theology and philosophical system was the
notion of peoplehood in the Jewish religion. As Unitarians, we too are a
people, and we should never lose sight of the fact that, along with the “voice”
of Nature itself, it is people that matter and have lasting significance.
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