The Future of the American Jew

Mordecai M. Kaplan, founder of the Reconstruction­ist branch of Judaism in the United States, was born in the Lithuanian region of the Russian Empire and immigrated to America when he was nine years old. He studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary but was ordained privately in 1908 by Rabbi Yitsḥak Ya‘akov Reines and initially served on the pulpit of Orthodox con­gregations in New York City. However, he embraced theological and historical views about Judaism and advocated a vision of its transformation that put him radically at odds with Orthodoxy and even with the mi­lieu of American Conservative Judaism where he found a home. Kaplan elaborated his ideas into what became a distinct branch of American Judaism, Reconstruc­tionist Judaism, the ideological foundation of which was the idea that Judaism had to be understood and embraced neither as a narrow confession or faith in the modern sense of religion nor as the produce of divine revelation and commandment, but as a civilization—a unique system of values, obligations, cultural forms, and institutions formed by human creativity. Not divine revelations but the Jewish people had created and rec­reated this civilization in an evolving fashion through history, and not only Torah and Law but also the Hebrew language, everything created in it, and Jewish ethical and cultural traditions of all sorts were equally part of Judaism. Kaplan developed these ideas not only in the context of what he saw as a galloping crisis of Jewish disaffiliation and irrelevance in the modern world generally and America particularly, but also from an embrace of modern life and thought as liberatory. He argued particularly that America’s largely uncondi­tional offer of full Jewish integration and partnership in a multiethnic democratic experiment should lead Jews to reject any idea of chosenness and exclusive religious truth while allowing them to expand and deepen engagement with the Jewish tradition on their own critical, searching, and modern terms.