Kaplan’s Nation and Kaplan’s God: A Jew’s Search for Salvation

The paper, which will be given in Hebrew, will survey Kaplan’s political ideas – as they are reflected in ‘Judaism as a Civilization’ – and his ideas about God.

Mordecai Menahem Kaplan (1881 – 1983) the founding father of reconstructionist Judaism and one of the leading American Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century, was motivated by a profound sense of religious and cultural crisis, which led him to try and ‘save’ the Jews and their Judaism, through reconstructing Jewish salvation.

A pragmatist who followed James’s and Dewey’s empirical and naturalistic orientations, Kaplan`s project of the reconstruction of Judaism focused on how believing in God functions, rather than philosophically examining the concept itself, or His ontological existence. The paper will analyze Kaplan`s pragmatic concept of God, using definitions formulated by John Hick, one of the prominent voices in the study of religious realism and pluralism. The paper’s argument will claim that Kaplan was a religious realist who affirmed the ontological existence of God, even though his epistemology dictated the use of a nonrealistic and functionalistic religious language.

Along with reading Kaplan`s salvational theology through current debates on religious realism, the paper will study his understanding of the Jewish polity, mainly his idea about Jewish nationhood – the political frame Kaplan describes as crucial to private and public Jewish redemption. Describing the Jew`s salvation as a process that must occur within both the personal and social constellations, Kaplan portrays the nation as a multilayered and multifunctional political structure, which allows its members to work towards their own improvement and deliverance, while making peace with the public aspects of their Jewishness. Portrayed thusly, Kaplan`s depiction of Jewish nationhood will be presented as an attempt to envision a new way of being Jewish in the modern world.