By Larry Kaufman
The double whammy of Gardening Grandma's query about outstanding American Jews and William Berkson's analysis of Mordecai Kaplan's thinking sent me surfing to learn more about Kaplan and the Reconstructionist movement he founded. 

Although Kaplan emerged from the Conservative movement, and taught for decades at its Jewish Theological Seminary, there is no gainsaying the impact of  his thought on Reform rabbis and thus on the general theology/cosmology/sociology of the Reform movement. One thing I had not known about Kaplan until this recent bout of Internet research was that he had begun his career in an Orthodox pulpit, and had been a founder of Young Israel, a Modern Orthodox movement that was subsequently party to his excommunication and that has essentially expunged his name from its history.

In founding Young Israel in the early years of the twentieth century, Kaplan was concerned about the generation of new Americans who were "turned off" by their immigrant parents' synagogues where whatever wasn't in Hebrew was in Yiddish - and to attract young Israel, a Young Israel innovation was the Friday night English-language lecture. (Classical Reform doesn't have a monopoly on the idea of relating to young Jews by use of the vernacular.) 

Kaplan was also instrumental in the growth of the Jewish center movement.  The congregation where I grew up was the Kaplan-influenced Cleveland Jewish Center, the shul with the pool, another device to whet (wet?) the interest of the alienated young.

Young Israel today is a movement within Modern Orthodoxy of 150 congregations and 25,000 adherents; the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation has about 100 congregations on its rolls, with about 16,000 adherents, per their respective websites. 

The usual catchphrase definition of Reconstructionist Judaism is to place it somewhere in the middle between Conservative and Reform. While this definition might have had some validity forty years ago, I think Reconstructionism today is much closer to Reform than to its "parent" stream.  Ironically, the Hebrew name the movement applies to itself is mitchadeshet, which suggests not so much the idea of rebuilding as of renewing - but a discussion of Jewish Renewal must wait for another day.

A few years ago, I commented to a rabbi friend (Reform), after reviewing some of the "about" pages on the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation website, that with modest changes, the Reform movement could "sign" those pages.  I identified our differences as relating to their rejection of chosen-ness, their vesting authority in the community rather than in the (autonomous) individual, and emanating from the community focus, their emphasis on process in congregational decision-making.  "What about their quite different concept of God?" the rabbi asked; and before I had a chance to respond, he said, "Actually, I suppose that's an issue that concerns rabbis more than lay people." 

As a lay person in the Reform movement, I'm comfortable, as I suspect many of us are, with the Reconstructionist rejection of a supernatural and intervening deity, although I might not buy fully into the formulation by Kaplan or his disciples of what God is, as opposed to what God is not.   

A recent query on one of the Reform list-servs, probably iWorship, centered on the  alleged growing samenesses among the liberal movements in Judaism, and the according prospects for  Reform to merge with the Conservative and/or Reconstructionist movement. It was pointed out that, following the establishment of the state of Israel,  people suggested that the Zionist movement, having achieved its objective, go out of business. A noted pundit remarked that the suggestion was reasonable yet absurd. No organization in Jewish life goes out of business, he said, while someone still wants to be president and someone still wants to be executive director. 

With that anecdote underpinning my belief that institution trumps ideology, we look at the two very different movements that Kaplan founded, and find an aggregate membership of 250 congregations, 41,000 adherents. But as the saying goes, you can count the apples on the tree, but you can't count the trees in the apples. The Jerusalem Post article that Gardening Grandma called to our attention credits Kaplan with being the single most important figure in the Americanization of Judaism.  As a product of his influence, I'll drink to that.
 

Print

Email

Comment

Comments

Post a comment