Introduction
The subtitle of Mordecai Kaplan’s award-winning, groundbreaking 1934 volume Judaism as a Civilization is “Toward a Reconstruction of Jewish-American Life.” The reference to America was critical. In putting forward an understanding of Judaism as the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people, Kaplan aimed to help second-generation American Jews — the children of the waves of Eastern European immigrants — harmonize religion and rationalism. A Reconstructionist approach[1] would allow them to draw deeply on a diverse Jewish heritage to live ethical lives and contribute meaningfully to both the Jewish and American civilizations. Embracing democracy was central to this project.
By the turn of the 20th century, the new possibility of Jews living as individual citizens of nation-states, combined with the disappearance of uncontested rabbinic authority and a burgeoning variety of cultural, political and religious expressions of Jewishness, had led to ever-increasing fragmentation of the Jewish community. Kaplan developed the philosophy of Reconstructionism in part out of a sense of distress at this fragmentation and even more out of his sense of the potential he felt was present in America, an environment far more open and accepting than Jews had long experienced in Europe. In Kaplan’s assessment, the highest values of American culture were its democratic ideals: freedom of speech, religion and conscience; the separation of church and state; and representative participation by all who have a stake in the community. Kaplan sought to articulate Jewish self-understanding and practices that were fully integrated with these ideals for the millions of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and especially for their American-born children.
In their books and in the pages of the influential journal The Reconstructionist, Kaplan and the circle of rabbis, educators, communal leaders and lay people who gathered around him from the 1930s through the 1950s, together urged the forthright application of democratic principles and practices to the full spectrum of Jewish life. At the same time, they assailed forces, both religious and secular, that resisted moving in this direction — from Orthodox Jewish and Catholic authorities resisting democratic reform in the religious realm, to America First supporters advancing political fascism in the years leading up to World War II, to Jewish philanthropists yielding excessive communal power.
They were far from alone. Many American Jews, including both ideologues and laypeople, were enamored by the promises and potential embedded in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the founding documents of American democracy. The Reconstructionists believed that democracy emerged from and pointed towards universal principles. They believed that democracy was compatible with Judaism and enhanced it. Indeed, to Kaplan, democracy represented the next (and best) stage of Jewish self-conception and organization. However, unlike some of the most enthusiastic Jewish polemicists, these Reconstructionist thinkers refrained from suggesting that Judaism and democracy were co-equal or that democracy emerged out of Judaism.
Democracy was the closest moderns could come to revelation, most akin to the teachings that the Torah reports that the Israelites received at Sinai.
Reconstructionist thinkers embraced the principle and practice of democracy as both a key strategy and an ultimate truth. To them, democracy was many things, all of which could be applied to Jewish life to strengthen it, making it relevant in the modern era and compelling to American Jews. This, in turn, would strengthen the complex tapestry of American society and its commitment to democracy.
- Democracy was a political theory based upon principles of liberty, fraternity and equality, enshrining a set of freedoms that should be equally extended to minorities — not least Jewish immigrants to America — and prescribing representative government while limiting authoritarian controls.
- Democracy was a civic theory that fostered voluntarism and neighborliness across political, social, economic and religious lines, promoting diversity instead of elevating one group at the expense of others and nurturing self-reliance, self-respect and overall cultural vitality.
- Especially during the New Deal era, democracy was an economic theory promoting greater access to shared wealth for all people, just as its political theory promoted access to the ballot.
Reconstructionist leaders in the middle decades of the 20th century were aware that democratic principles were imperfectly implemented in American life. Yet they remained completely confident in the potential of democracy. For the Reconstructionists, democracy was ultimately a religious ideal.
These early Reconstructionist ideologues looked to democracy not only because it was the “way of the land,” but also because in their view, in an age of relativism, multivocality and pluralism, democracy was the closest moderns could come to revelation, most akin to the teachings that the Torah reports that the Israelites received at Sinai. Their faith in democracy evinced a deep trust, pragmatic and anti-elitist in orientation, in the agency and wisdom of the common people. They approached democracy both from a sociological perspective, assessing it to be the best system of government for the modern era, and religiously, adopting it as a Divinely inspired and principled stance.
Coercion precipitated or accompanied totalitarianism, which they defined as an insistence on one uniform standard that did not tolerate diversity.
Democracy as Religion
The Reconstructionist embrace of democracy overtly rejected coercive authority from any source. From their study of Jewish history and contemporary geopolitics and their grounding in the philosophy of pragmatism,[2] the founders of the Reconstructionist movement assessed that coercion precipitated or accompanied totalitarianism, which they defined as an insistence on one uniform standard that did not tolerate diversity. They sought both to bolster democracy in its own right and to strengthen it in a period of rising authoritarianism.
In the years leading up to and following World War II, Reconstructionist leaders repeatedly asserted that democracy was “religion in its secular applications.” They worked to flesh out the content of democracy — always malleable and multiple due to its foundations in free inquiry and commitment to pluralism — and to generate rituals and liturgies to support and celebrate democracy. Kaplan quipped in 1949, “Insofar as democracy is essential to man’s becoming fully human, it is a religious no less than a political ideal.”
On the 10th anniversary of The Reconstructionist, in February 1945, Kaplan’s son-in-law, the Reconstructionist expositor Ira Eisenstein, argued similarly in an essay titled “Toward a Religion of Democracy in America:”
[Creating a religion of democracy] means becoming keenly aware of the full potentialities of democracy…. It means so believing in democracy as to ascribe to it the validity of natural law; believing that the principles of democracy correspond to the very structure of human society, that the realization of its principles spells the realization of all that makes life worthwhile, and the denial of its principles spells destruction for the human race…It…means…conceiving of God as the Power in the Universe and in ourselves, that makes for freedom, justice, peace, the dignity and worth of the individual and harmonious cooperation among individuals and groups. In other words, it means identifying God with the sum total of all the forces making for the realization of democratic ideals.
Through these many efforts, Reconstructionist ideologues hoped to expand democracy’s influence in the face of such competing ideologies as communism, fascism and other contemporary expressions of authoritarianism. In addition to their efforts to influence the American Jewish community, they also aimed to provide resources for all Americans across religious faiths and ethnic communities. Most notably, the 1951 publication The Faith of America: Readings, Songs and Prayers for the Celebration of American Holidays aimed to provide resources for all Americans, across religious faiths and ethnic communities. The Faith of America made concrete their understanding of the centrality of education in ensuring that democracy didn’t devolve into populism and offered what they hoped would be an essential civics text towards this end.
Democratizing Jewish Communal Organization
In contrast to the authoritarian trends Reconstructionists stood against, these thinkers put great energy into conceiving of democratic models for the future of Jewish life. In their view, the longstanding models of religious authority and community organization brought over from Europe did not translate effectively into modern American life. Reconstructionist Jews saw the organization of the Jewish community as sorely in need of democratization. Assessing the increasingly fragmented Jewish community, they borrowed two principles of American democratic practice. A celebration of diversity — as captured by the American motto e pluribus unum, “out of many, one” — became the Reconstructionist refrain “unity in diversity,” and the principle of voluntarism replaced coercive authority.
Reconstructionist Jews saw the organization of the Jewish community as sorely in need of democratization.
They combined these ideas to define the boundaries of communal Judaism in the most inclusive manner: A Jew was anyone who wished to identify him or herself with the Jewish people for constructive ends, regardless of his or her personal philosophy, and who was willing to work for Jewish survival. Authority, in the Reconstructionist vision, would be organically generated by the Jews governed by it, worked out by methods of suasion rather than force. Authority would be willingly accepted and applied in a values-driven and planful manner within “organic” Jewish communities, organized on local, regional and ultimately international levels and guided by democratic means, rather than by inequitable distribution of financial resources or the power of one agency or communal sector over another.[3] This new vision for communal organization would stem the “chaos” that had afflicted Jewish communal and religious life since emancipation and would communicate to modern Jews minimum expectations of what it would mean to be Jewish.
The Reconstructionist embrace of democracy elevated individual interests far beyond pre-modern Judaism’s collectivist understanding (though, unlike the Reform movement, they never centered personal religious autonomy). In the new Jewish communities that Reconstructionist thinkers envisioned, all Jews who affirmatively committed themselves to participation in and the furtherance of the Jewish civilization — whatever their individual interests, theological beliefs, political views or religious practice — would be eligible for membership. Through democratic processes that included debate and experimentation, standards of Jewish behavior appropriate to the modern era could be generated and — in some as-yet-undetermined fashion consistent with democracy — enforced by the community. In keeping with the American approach, belief would never be legislated or policed. In its most idealized form, “organic Jewish community” would enable American Jews to bolster the American civilization through their pursuit of this-worldly salvation: individual and collective well-being.
Authority, in the Reconstructionist vision, would be organically generated by the Jews governed by it, worked out by methods of suasion rather than force.
Democratizing Religion
Reconstructionist efforts to democratize the religious element of Judaism yielded great changes, as well as generated great resistance. In pre-modern Judaism, religious authority rested entirely with rabbis, an elite group of highly trained men who were considered masters of traditional Jewish law and who interpreted it for everyday living. Yet in modern-day America, the conditions that created that system of authority no longer existed. Other systems competed with Jewish law in a compelling fashion, and elite decision-making was problematic, offensive or simply irrelevant to growing numbers of liberal Jews.
Reconstructionist leaders sought to open up Jewish religious participation and decision-making, making it a joint enterprise among rabbis and lay people alike and encouraging “self-government” by the people. In Judaism as a Civilization, Kaplan urged a serious reconsideration of halakhah, or post-biblical Jewish law, to distinguish between ritual and civil practices. He was convinced that the conditions of modernity had so disrupted the halakhic decision-making process that it was moribund. He urged modern Jews to employ the category of “folkways”[4] and the methods of democracy to determine and demonstrate authentically Jewish forms of behavior. He later famously quipped, “The ancient authorities are entitled to a vote — but not to a veto.”
From its founding, Reconstructionist Judaism sought to broaden understandings of belonging — from repudiating traditional religious hierarchies within the Jewish people to expanding communal membership and participation. Reconstructionists abolished the hereditary hierarchy dividing Jews between descendants of the priestly caste (Kohens and Levites) and Israelites; Kaplan deemed the distinction “a contradiction of [Reconstructionism’s] faith in democracy.” The Reconstructionist commitment to organic, democratically representative communities led to a keen awareness of the range of voices included in communal conversations and decision-making. Against those who insisted that Judaism was solely a religion, either from an Orthodox or classical Reform perspective, Reconstructionists argued for the inclusion of ethnic and cultural expressions; against both secularists and strictly halakhic perspectives, they argued for inclusion of non-Orthodox religious perspectives; and more.
One of the most prominent areas in which the early leaders expanded Jewish participation was through embracing women’s religious equality along with their social equality, sharing this commitment with the Reform movement but employing different strategies to achieve it. Where classical Reform Judaism rejected the bar mitzvah as too “Oriental” and adopted group confirmation in part out of a commitment to egalitarianism, Kaplan and his circle reconstructed long-standing Jewish rituals that previously had been restricted to males to expand them to females. The first bat mitzvah was Mordecai Kaplan’s eldest daughter, Judith, in 1922, at her father’s newly established synagogue, the Society for the Advancement of Judaism. The Reconstructionists continued to expand religious equality for women in the following decades as they worked out the implementation of democracy in Jewish religious life.
In their most far-reaching and provocative application of democracy to Jewish religious thought, Reconstructionists challenged the deeply held belief that Jews were the “chosen people.” To many liberal Jews, the precept which had sustained Jews for nearly two millennia in the face of persecution and suffering remained compelling under modern conditions of freedom. To Reconstructionists, however, chosenness was fundamentally incompatible with democratic principles and too easily risked deteriorating into chauvinism. They objected not only on a theological basis, having set aside the idea of a personal God who commands and chooses in favor of a transnatural view of God as Cosmic Process, the “Power that Makes for Salvation,” but also out of commitment to democratic principles.
The Excommunication of Kaplan: A Case Study of Democracy as a Bulwark Against Authoritarianism
In May 1945, as the war ended on the European front, Kaplan and Eisenstein joined with Kaplan’s frequent collaborator, Eugene Kohn, and renowned author, Milton Steinberg, to produce the Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation’s The Sabbath Prayer Book. Within it, alongside other Reconstructionist theological and ideological commitments, they included liturgy that incorporated the rejection of chosenness. The book sparked a strong reaction from the Agudat Harabbanim, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, which placed Mordecai Kaplan in herem (excommunication) and burned a copy of the siddur. The Reconstructionists, along with many other Jewish observers, saw these actions, and especially the book burning, as an affront to democracy. A searing editorial in The New Orleans Jewish Ledger argued:
The formula is quite simple. If you object to a man’s political, religious or scientific views, you don’t argue about and try to prove these views wrong. You don’t even give the holder of the, to you, objectional [sic] views an opportunity to defend them. You just damn him to hell and you finish off the ceremony by burning the book which you don’t like. You don’t write a criticism of the book showing wherein it offends against the standards of taste, logic or morals. You burn the book. Of course, in this way, you refute its errors of logic, taste and morals. That is, you do these things if you are a Nazi or if you represent the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada. You do this, not in the year 1492 CE but in the year 1945 which is the 170th year of the Declaration of Independence. Needless to say, in so doing, you prove that you haven’t the faintest conception of what democracy, decency and justice mean.
Upholding their commitment to democratic principles, the Reconstructionists insisted on Agudat Harabbanim’s right to hold such misguided opinions (though they were certain these views would lead the Jewish people in unfruitful directions). Through extensive argumentation and other democratic methods, they sought to persuade others of the validity of their own analysis and the outdated nature of the Orthodox perspective. However, the Reconstructionists objected vociferously to the zealotry they saw at play. To Agudah members, their worldview gave them the prerogative (even obligation) to impose that worldview on others. Reconstructionists understood that the belief itself, however pernicious and anti-democratic, was protected; however, the Agudah’s efforts to translate that belief into practice and force it onto unwilling or unknowing others smacked, in their estimation, of totalitarianism.
The most widely disseminated response to the herem was an article in The Reconstructionist by Sidney Morgenbesser titled “Is Orthodoxy Consistent With Democracy?” In a section titled “The Case for Democracy in Religion,” Morgenbesser — an ordained Conservative rabbi, student (and later professor) of philosophy, and famously sharp-tongued — laid out what he considered to be the key issue: Experimentation must be tolerated with no threat of coercion to the experimenters. To achieve this freedom, wrote Morgenbesser, required fostering democracy, which he defined as a set of compromises and negotiations. He dismissed a common critique that democracy was inaptly applied to religious life. The issue, he repeated, was about experimentation and innovation. “The defenders of the old have no right to proclaim to the protagonists of the new that, by definition, they are wrong.”
In a special communication to Reconstructionists, Kaplan called his excommunication the “symptom of a malignant cancer in the body of Jewish life” — namely, religious authoritarianism, or “the tendency of the Orthodox rabbinate … to reinstate the use of force as a legitimate means of keeping the Jewish religion alive.” He asserted that the herem exceeded any protected right to protest and was a rejection of the concept of freedom of religion. Instead, it revealed an intention that, if and when conditions presented themselves, Orthodox authorities would seize power “to compel obedience and conformity.” Kaplan urged his readers not to underestimate the full implications of the herem, traditionally understood to countenance even assassination.
Discomfited by the growth in America of Orthodox ranks due to an influx of European refugees, Kaplan was positively alarmed at Orthodox control in the yishuv (pre-state Jewish settlement in Palestine). Should Israeli statehood be achieved while the Orthodox retained control of religious life, Kaplan foresaw that an outbreak of violent cultural war between Orthodox Jews and militant secular Zionists could result in “self-inflicted annihilation.” The future of Judaism, Kaplan insisted, must be based on religious freedom that accommodated and even fostered religious diversity. The basis of Judaism must be shifted so that coercion was no longer tolerated, for the sake of Judaism and so that Jews could “find a place for ourselves in the future order of mankind, which we hope will be one of universal freedom, justice and peace.” Kaplan ended his reflections on the excommunication with a prayer for wisdom:
… We cannot live as human beings unless we keep on growing, and we cannot grow unless we outgrow whatever time has rendered obsolete. If the bitter experience of the herem episode will help us mature as a people, it will come within the category of those evils for which we have to be as grateful to God as for the blessings which He [sic] confers on us.
I write these last paragraphs not as an historian but as the current leader of the Reconstructionist movement. The contemporary Jewish community writ large struggles with post-modern challenges that Mordecai Kaplan never could have anticipated. At the same time, we continue to grapple with monumental questions raised by modernity. Neither Jewish religious movements (Reconstructionism, Reform, Conservative, Modern Orthodox) nor our political expressions (Zionism or any version of diasporism) nor universalizing political expressions such as socialism or communism have answered these questions sufficiently.
The circle that gathered around Kaplan worked to bolster democracy in both the Jewish and American civilizations in ways that resonate powerfully to this day. Once again, democracy as a political system is under siege, and those of us who believe in its principles and its corollary commitment to pluralism are working strenuously — with mixed success — to make the case against authoritarianism. Like them, we struggle with how to use suasion and education — those bedrocks of democratic practice — against opponents who are operating in an unprecedented “post-truth” landscape where individual perspectives can be exponentially and thunderously amplified and populism can prevail.
Most chilling, perhaps, is Kaplan’s prescience around what happens when religious authority is combined with state power. This is the liberal and progressive Jewish battle in America: Our struggle for democracy is against a gendered ethnonationalist supremacism that limits, if not erases, Jewish particularity, along with the rights of anyone who is not white, male, Christian and heteronormative. At the same time, this is what is prevailing in Israel. Jewish religious supremacists have been empowered since the November 2022 election and have used a Jewish rationale to pursue a similarly restrictive agenda with a Jewish lens — most aggressively by proposing judicial reforms, privileging religious Jews and curtailing Palestinian rights, especially in the West Bank. The dreadful events of Oct. 7, 2023, have so far tightened this faction’s hold on power. The current military campaign in Gaza has emboldened their rhetoric about expelling Palestinians or resettling Gaza, their actions to expropriate Palestinian land and their acceptance or even promotion of settler violence in the West Bank. In America, where the early Reconstructionist vision of “organic community” never prevailed, much of the Jewish communal establishment is demanding political conformity around “loyalty to Israel” in a way that ignores or radically underplays the threats to democracy and other justice commitments, while silencing and even punishing voices on the margins.
Like the circle gathered around him in the earliest days of Reconstructionism, may we all be energized by Mordecai Kaplan’s commitment, activism and blessings in the service of democracy.
Editor’s Note: This essay is being published simultaneously in Emor.
[1] Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan (1881-1983), the founding thinker of Reconstructionism, understood himself first and foremost as an educator. Kaplan and his disciples developed their school of thought in the 1920s, taking language and inspiration from the work of progressive educator John Dewey (1859-1952), who had recently published his 1920 collection Reconstruction in Philosophy. Dewey was a champion of pragmatism and democracy, asserting in his 1897 Pedagogical Creed, “I believe … that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience, that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.”
[2] Pragmatism is a school of thought that emerged in America following the Civil War that assesses ideas on the success of their function or implementation rather than intrinsic quality or eternal nature.
[3] “Organic unity” is prevalent in John Dewey’s political thinking and the Reconstructionist conception of “organic community” draws on the conception of Judaism as a civilization. An organic community should first and foremost be organized on democratic principles, and always be open to reform and evolution. It should make space for all the constituent parts of the Jewish civilization, which prioritizes religion but includes diverse elements and expressions, including, in Kaplan’s words, “that nexus of a history, literature, language, social organization, folk sanction, standards of conduct, social and spiritual ideals, esthetic values” (“Judaism as a Civilization,” p. 178).
[4] Kaplan drew on clergyman and sociologist William Graham Sumner’s 1906 Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals to propose Judaism as a “social heritage” and to articulate a rationale for collective Jewish practice after belief in a supernatural God who mandates commands is no longer compelling and after communal authority has been shattered ( Judaism as a Civilization, p. 179, p. 535 note 2).
