Reconstructionists define Judaism as an evolving religious civilization, by which we mean that Jewish civilization has continually changed throughout its entire history to adapt to ever changing cultural and political circumstances, influences from surrounding cultures and shifting values and ethical norms. The implication is that ongoing evolution is required to adapt our traditions to emerging developments.
Other Jewish approaches to change often claim that innovations are actually authentic extrapolations from ancient traditions, thus claiming continuity. We don’t. The tradition on which we rely is that of ongoing evolution. All healthy, living beings change and grow; it is our unapologetic claim that this also applies to vibrant traditions.
Thus, it should come as no surprise that beginning with Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, we often find ourselves embroiled in controversy and assailed by those who resist change.
The first bat mitzvah
Much has been written about the first American bat mitzvah, that of Kaplan’s daughter, Judith Kaplan Eisenstein, in 1922 at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism (SAJ) in New York. Her father arranged the ceremony on very short notice. Members of Kaplan’s family wanted to stop it.[1] What followed was consternation from the Conservative and Orthodox side about this elevating of a female role and disagreement from the Reform side, which at that time had elevated confirmation and minimized bar mitzvah. Characteristically, when it came to matters of ethics, Kaplan stood his ground. Members of his congregation were not consulted in advance.
That first bat mitzvah did not open the door to women having aliyot. Kaplan insisted that the SAJ function democratically. When he recognized that women were as entitled to aliyot as men, he brought that proposal to the board repeatedly until a motion finally passed giving women the right to be called to the Torah.[2] Kaplan recognized that such decisions should not simply be up to the rabbi as a legal decisor.[3] And he went further, seeing ethics as trumping halakhah.
In 1941, Kaplan, with help from Rabbis Eugene Kohn and Ira Eisenstein, published “The New Haggadah,” which developed the theme of freedom in a particularly American vein. It emphasized Moshe’s leadership, omitted the plagues, and made other changes throughout. Kaplan had been a member of the faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary since 1909; nevertheless, the faculty formally censured him for this departure from tradition.
Liturgy that embodies our highest values
The omission of the plagues and of chosenness from the Kiddush exemplified what made the Haggadah unacceptable to the JTS faculty. Upsetting as the censure was to Kaplan, he held to the importance of creating liturgy that embodies our highest values and aspirations and that speaks to its generation in a moving way. In 1945, the Reconstructionist Shabbat Prayer Book was published. An ultra-Orthodox group publicly burned it. The rest of the prayer-book series was produced despite the controversy.
In the 1930s and ’40s, the Reconstructionist Magazine was a widely read American Jewish journal. It was a leading intellectual voice for Labor Zionism at a time when the Reform movement was largely anti-Zionist and the Orthodox world was more in line with the Revisionists. That tension never caused the Reconstructionist to back away from expressing its views with clarion clarity. Of course, not every member of the movement was comfortable with the full contents of the magazine, but the Reconstructionist leadership of that day held that it was the duty of the movement to speak out on ethics and policy issues as they arose, even if that put the movement in the position of being a controversial vanguard.[4]
All healthy, living beings change and grow; it is our unapologetic claim that this also applies to vibrant traditions.
Women-initiated divorces
Soon after the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College had its first graduates, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association was formed. Early on, its members decided that women should be able to initiate Jewish divorces. According to Jewish law, only men could initiate divorces (gittin). Within the Reform movement, secular divorces were largely considered sufficient. Once again, the Reconstructionist movement broke controversial new ground. Furthermore, the RRA took for granted that female rabbis could oversee divorce ceremonies, while the Conservative movement had not yet begun to consider that question.
When new thinking about gay and lesbian people gradually emerged, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 1984 became the first Jewish seminary to admit openly gay and lesbian students.[5] That upset a considerable number of our congregation members and rabbis. In 1990, a Reconstructionist commission was created to study the matter in depth. In 1992, it published Homosexuality and Judaism: The Reconstructionist Position, which paved the way for the publication of an educational curriculum. With years of education, full equality for LGBTQ folks became the norm within the Reconstructionist movement. In 1984, several articles lambasted RRC for its new policy. Gradually, other seminaries moved to accept gay rabbinical students, though in some cases, it took longer than 25 years to get there.
The Reconstructionist Rabbinical College faculty devoted significant time to studying the shifting facts about intermarriage and concluded in 2015 that it should start admitting intermarried rabbinical students. There were strong objections from older Reconstructionist rabbis and many other Jews, but those objections eventually faded away as other seminaries followed RRC’s example.[6]
There are other examples of Reconstructionist firsts that have been based on the movement’s commitment to maintaining its strong moral voice and its commitment to adapting as the moral, political and social situation of the Jewish people evolves.
If the past is any indication, there’s a good chance that many of our current critics will sooner, rather than later, follow our lead.
Generational shift about Israel
Most recently, many people have been upset about the presence of non-Zionist students in RRC’s student body. We are amid an enormous generational shift. People like me, who remember when Israel was a militarily fragile and economically unstable fledgling state, have a hard time reckoning with this generation of young people. This generation sees a militarily dominant state with a per capita income higher than several European countries. They see that the Israeli government is complicit in the crimes committed against Palestinians in the West Bank. They hear Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, indicted for corruption, saying Israel needs to periodically “mow the lawn.” It is hard not to be alienated by the rhetoric and actions of cabinet members like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
In that light, the younger generation uses values we share — democracy, inclusion, justice, egalitarianism — to critique Israel, which has now been an occupier since 1967, about 60 years. Their view is held by a rapidly increasingly number of American Jews. These rabbinical students support our values, and they can Jewishly reach the large number of Jews being turned off by the rhetoric and actions of legacy Jewish organizations. Once again, people are upset with the Reconstructionist movement. I believe that over time, more and more Jews will see it our way. We can support the citizens of Israel and help our allies there to work for peace and for the triumph of our values. But that does not require us to be die-hard Zionists.
We should expect that Reconstructionist Judaism will be at the center of new controversies in the future. The movement will again be the target of accusations that we are destroying Judaism by upsetting the current status quo. This is not because we seek controversy. It is rather that we believe it is imperative to face the issues of the times we live in and to seek responses that accord with our values and principles. We believe that justice delayed is justice denied, and that change will never occur if the Jewish community only changes policies when a broad communal consensus supports that change. Someone has to go first. And if the past is any indication, there’s a good chance that many of our current critics will sooner, rather than later, follow our lead.
[1] See, for example Mel Scult, Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century: A Biography of Mordecai M. Kaplan (Wayne State University Press, 1993) pp. 301-302.
[2] See Deborah Waxman, Ethnicity and Faith in American Judaism: Reconstructionism as Ideology and Institution, 1935-1959, Doctoral Dissertation, Temple University.
[3] See Mel Scult, The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan (Indiana University Press, 2013), pp. 226-248, and A Guide to Jewish Ritual, published in 1962 by the Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation.
[4] See my article “Reconstructionism and the Public Square: A Multicultural Approach to Judaism in America” in Jewish Polity and American Civil Society Edited by Alan Mittleman, Jonathan Sarna and Robert Licht (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), pp. 337-361.
[5] See Rebecca T. Alpert and Jacob J. Staub, “The Making of Gay and Lesbian Rabbis in Reconstructionist Judaism, 1979-1992,” in Devotions and Desires: Histories of Religion and Sexuality in the Twentieth Century United States, chapter 11, edited by Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton and Heather White. University of North Carolina Press, 2017, pp. 214-233. Reprinted on Evolve (Feb. 1, 2025).
[6] See Bryan Schwartzman, “Six Years Removed from Policy Shift, Rabbis with Non-Jewish Partners Continue to Embody Reconstructionist Values, Even As Challenges Persist,” reconstructingjudaism.org (Feb. 9, 2022).
