Copyright Ian Ellis-Jones 2005 - All Rights Reserved.

1. The Theology of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan
by The Rev. Dr Ian Ellis-Jones
A Revised Copy of an Address Delivered Before the Sydney Unitarian Church
on 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 non-religious 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

2. (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 [JPS 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.
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3. 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’.
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4. 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.
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5. 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
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6. 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
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7. 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.
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8. 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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