In his effort to move beyond chosenness, Mordechai Kaplan not only experimented with new liturgy, he also formally removed all ritual traces, including the symbolic ancient caste system of kohein (priest), levi (levite) and yisra’el (all other Jews) from communal practice. No one gets born into spiritual privilege in the Kaplanian system. This under-the-radar move was consistent with building a Judaism without chosenness. After all, the priests and levites were the chosen of the chosen. True egalitarianism had no place for ascribed status that is granted upon birth. The position was logically sound at the time and has gone relatively unchallenged in the Reconstructionist movement over the years. But at what cost?
Before diving into what Kaplan forfeited, we might look at the history of how the kehunah (priesthood) managed to survive to the present day. How can we understand the evolving role of the Jewish Priesthood over the centuries? The earliest biblical Israelite communities were led at various points by different kinds of leaders. We know the most about the judges, kings, prophets and priests, each operating within the political or religious domain and sometimes both. But what made the priesthood unique was that, unlike the judges, kings and prophets, the priests never disappeared completely. Even as the rabbis took the mantle of leadership after the destruction of the Second Temple, the priestly and levitical lines remained intact even as they were forced to adjust their now-diminished roles.
Relating to the religious systems of our desert-dwelling ancestors is actually an essential part of keeping our story alive and requires a multi-tiered approach.
After the destruction of the Second Temple, Judaism became the domain of the rabbis. The kohanim and levi’im became relics who were relegated to a few ritual moments in the Jewish calendar, but they had no authority or decision-making power in the new emerging landscape of rabbinic law. Surely, one would have thought that it was only a matter of time before this ancient status with diminishing influence would become extinct. Yet somehow, the priesthood carved out a place for itself. How did it last?
At its core, the “concept” of priest goes deep into our ancestral psyche. At the moment of Matan Torah, when the Torah was given at Sinai, the Torah refers to the entire Israelite people as a “nation of priests.” When most Jews no longer lived in the land of Israel, this powerful image became a focal point in our national identity, giving us a collective sense of purpose through the centuries of diaspora life. Priesthood morphed into critically symbolic/metaphoric language for the nation at large. As the kohanim had been and continued to be to the Israelites, the Jewish people were to the rest of the world. Separated out. Given a unique task. Chosen. For better or for worse, the Jews as the chosen people, like the priesthood, is an idea that adapted and endured because it gave us strength and endurance.
Yet Mordecai Kaplan understood chosenness — and by extension, the priesthood — not as a source of strength, but as a potential source of harm and spiritual weakness. Given the moment he lived in, there is no denying that his stance gained traction and offered a way back “in” to the widespread exodus of American Jews from Jewish communities. There is no denying that Kaplan’s pioneering of a “chosen-optional” Judaism was an essential contribution to the shape of American Judaism. However, could he have achieved the same ends without severing the place of kohanim and levi’im? There are always costs to ideological pivots, some explicit, some hidden and some only understood down the road. Here are four costs of throwing out the priestly caste alongside chosenness.
Reconstructionist communities are disconnected from the opportunity to learn from other egalitarian movements that embrace different forms and understandings of the priesthood lineage.
The Costs of Eliminating the Priestly Case
- It severs an experiential connection to the Torah. Ridding synagogue life of any practical way of relating to priests and levites renders huge parts of the Torah even harder to relate to in any experiential way. Volumes of Torah text describe the priesthood as the first generation of communal religious leadership during the wilderness. The laws within Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers are filled with duties, expectations and prohibitions related to the priests and levites. For the average contemporary Jew who attends synagogue services and hears the reading of the Torah, establishing a connection to the huge swaths of Torah that describe the priesthood is a tough sell. Relating to the religious systems of our desert-dwelling ancestors is actually an essential part of keeping our story alive and requires a multi-tiered approach. When community members take on the remnant of those roles, even in only a few symbolic ways, they bring to life a huge segment of the Torah. Pedagogically, it is simply more interesting to study priests and levites when there are priests and levites in the room.
- Conversation Stopper. Because of the hardline position he took, Kaplan effectively ended any conversation about what roles a kohen, levi, bat kohen or bat levi could have in the movement today. To this day, there has been no conversation about the role of Reconstructionists who identify as levi’im and kohanim. The ideological stance leaves little room for curiosity and exploration because it is viewed as a threat. The assumption is this: You cannot claim to uphold egalitarian values if you do not categorically reject the caste system. The message is clear: If you have any attachment to or curiosity about a modern understanding of priesthood, then you should probably investigate another movement. Reconstructionism is going to be slightly less hospitable to anyone interested in making a public claim on that aspect of their heritage.
- Reconstructionist have excluded themselves from the conversation. Because of the ideological position that rejects priesthood, Reconstructionist communities are disconnected from the opportunity to learn from other egalitarian movements that embrace different forms and understandings of the priesthood lineage. Two modern-day examples:
- Traditional Egalitarian Judaism: The Trad Egal movement, most associated with the independent minyan movement, is the first movement that categorically accepts daughters and nonbinary descendants of priests or levites with all the ritual duties of a traditional kohen or levi. They see no contradiction in values in maintaining the lineage as long as it is done so in a fully egalitarian way.
- Kohenet: The Kohenet (Priestess) movement of the past 20 years brings to life other important conversations about the role of lost ancient earth-based models of spiritual leadership, particularly as related to feminine leadership. Part of the inspiration of the modern-day priestess came through a reclamation of lesser-known female leadership models in the biblical period. Kohenet also gave voice to a feminist critique that women in seminary were being trained in a system designed to create “male rabbis.” What might it mean, they asked, to anchor contemporary female leadership in ancient Hebrew feminine models? These are questions that might have been embraced and deemed worth exploring, but have generally been repelled in Reconstructionist contexts because of the association with the priesthood. It should come as no surprise that few kohenet leaders, if any, have found a home in Reconstructionist communities.
- Loss of ancient spiritual technology. The priesthood has an ancient relationship to the art of giving and receiving blessings, specifically around the ancient concept of ohavei shalom (Lovers of Peace). Through rituals like Pidyon Haben (Redemption of the First Born), dukhening (blessing the congregation during the service on holy days) and purification rituals, kohanim and levi’im often bring an ancient blessing practice to life.
They do this in a variety of ways — sometimes offering traditional blessings at designated liturgical moments, but also offering spontaneous personalized blessings. This is a practice anyone can do, not just a kohen or a rabbi, but it makes a difference when there is an expectation that there are those in the community who have an extra duty of bringing down blessings for the community. The priesthood was intended to proliferate blessing. When we lose the priesthood, we lose our lay blessing exemplars.
It makes a difference when there is an expectation that there are those in the community who have an extra duty of bringing down blessings for that community.
We also lose some of our history and connection to the concept of spiritual peace-makers within a community. Aaron, the first priest, was considered an Ohev Shalom, a lover of peace. The biblical priests and levites were the only tribe without their own land. As descendants of Aaron, a lesser-known aspect of their role was resolving disputes between the other tribes. Our tradition recognizes, at least in part, that their role as mediators between conflicting tribes was an aspect of our people’s history worth knowing.
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One cannot be a student of the Torah without cultivating some awareness of Aaron and his offspring and their role in the spiritual birth of the Israelite nation. Kaplan himself was a kohen and aware of the customs to which he was personally heir. Nevertheless, his uncompromising commitment to egalitarian principles led him to give up his inherited priestly status. Yet there is value in pointing out some of the unintended consequences of that decision. With any gain, there is loss, and there is value in understanding what was lost. Might it be possible to reject the hierarchical claims of superiority inherent in Chosenness while reclaiming and reconstructing, in a non-hierarchical way, some of the value of the priestly and Levitical roles?
5 Responses
Kol haKavod to Reb Ezra for raising this important topic with sensitivity and courage. When our firstborn son was born, we wrestled with these questions as we explored the ritual of pidyon haben. At that ritual, we used five Susan B Anthony Dollars rather than ‘shekels’ called upon both a ben Levi (Reb Shawn Zevit) and a bat Cohen, Reb Marcia Prager, who while enthusiastically taking part described the challenge as a “double barreled shotgun” – referring to the traditional (privileged?) status of both tribe and sex conferred by birth. Was it perpetuating both tribalism (chosenness) and sexism to celebrate such a ritual, or a ‘kosher’ reconstruction/evolution of a sancta worth perpetuating?
I would frame the central moral question of our time, for reconstructionists in particular, as investing and working to restore the sense of tribal-belonging without succumbing to the very real dangers of tribalism! I for one welcome the invitation to regard actual blood-lines, like patrilineally determined levitical or cohanic identities, as potential sources of heathy tribal-belonging. I feel the same about circumcision. And I say that as one whose father was not born into a Jewish family and as such, I am tribe-less by that normative definition of tribal identity. Why is reclaiming tribal identity a moral issue for me? I have a strong suspicion that the erosion of these ‘blood-line’ or ‘by birth’ identities does more to contribute the rise of tribalistic fervors (like hyper-nationalism or supercessionist religion) than we are wont to admit. I hear a whole lot of overcompensation in the tones and words of those who espouse those toxins — attempts to fill a very real hole, a lack of a sense of belonging and well-rooted identity in a rapidly expanding, multi-centered (physical and moral) universe. Just because ‘bloodlines determined by birth’ have been (and continue to be) abused to make tribalistic and racist claims and promote oppressive policies, does not mean they are inherently evil or incapable to being ‘forces that make for salvation,’ both individually and socially. Would we decry or deny our indigenous [‘first nation’] American friends and neighbors their inherited tribal identities? I would not.
Isn’t true that our universal concerns (freedom for all) arise out of our particular story of our exodus, and our particular memory of our family, our tribe’s suffering, the Nazi holocaust against the our people? Particular tribal identity, even as determined by birth (but not only by birth) can be an powerful, and may indeed be an indispensable asset, in our universal, egalitarian aims.
Likewise, we set aside Shabbat for particular holiness, to help us as mere humans, strive to treat every day as holy. Same with our holy land, which i invest with holiness as part of the effort to realize the sanctity of all lands. Time. sppce and Soul,
There is one more aspect of the biblical ‘legacy of Aaron the Levites’ that I would add to Ezra’s compelling list. In Number 16:48, Torah has Aaron “standing between the living and the dead.” In addition to being ‘lovers of peace’ as exemplified in a positive spin on the Golden Calf incident, Aaron passed on to his descendants this role which can be linked to both the holy work of the [egalitarian and gendered] cHavrei Kaddisha [voluntary groups tending to the body between death and being ‘returned to the dust of the earth,’] as well as to folks in the medical field (currently under literal and figurative assault) to combat the dangers of contagious disease with vaccines and the like.
And, lastly, though as reconstructionists we reject the call for the rebuilding of the Temple of old and its cultic system built around animal sacrifice, surely we could all benefit (especially as movement with a tendency to be hyper-rational) to work towards restoring a communal ritual life that celebrates the body in all its beautiful physicality and goes beyond rising, bowing, sitting, and mere words, but gets messy – like what happens in a taharah room.
I was brought up by my Levite grandfather, an ardent Zionist, that I had special responsibilities to the community of Jews and to the greater community because I was a descendant of Aaron. He, my grandmother, mother, and my maternal uncle were active in the Unitarian movement. After my grandfather’s death, I became a Reconstructionist at age 13 in 1962, consistent with the books by Kaplan I read which were in my grandfather’s library, and attended services at the Reconstructionist synagogue in Pacific Palisades, California. In attending Conservative services, I consider it an honor as a Levite to give the blessing over the Torah for the second reading. I miss that in Reconstructionist services.
Key to the preservation of the priestly line over the centuries is the messianic hope that the Temple in Jerusalem will be rebuilt and the Kohanim can return to their sacrificial duties. Kaplan’s rejection of that kind of messianism is an additional significant reason why Reconstructionists have moved away from the ancient inherited hierarchy.
That in no way prevents any wisdom coming from the kohenet group from flowing into Reconstructionism. The leaders in that movement are trained. There is no inheriting that kind of leadership as that group defines itself.
There is no reason that the Diaspora rituals still done by Kohanim in many places could not be translated into a more egalitarian mode. It is worth exploring why that has not happened.
I disagree with just about everything Rabbi Weinberg wrote — but I want to concentrate on his conjecturing about why Kaplan rejected choseness. Following Ahad Haam, Kaplan stressed the need for a Jewish cultural center where Jews living in a multicultural society would nonetheless live Judaism as their “primary civilization”. For both Ahad Haam and Mordecai Kaplan, the purpose of a Jewish cultural center in Palestine would be to invigorate Jewish life throughout the Diaspora. Kaplan and the Reconstructionist stream in American Judaism was the earliest religious stream to fully embrace Zionism. And it was in this context, following Buber’s speech in 192? to the Zionist Congress on nationalism, that Kaplan rejected the concept of “chosenness” and excised this notion form the siddur. Kaplan was aware of the dangers of nationalism and he was acutely aware of the dangers of the right-wing nationalism among Jabotinsky and his followers and among the followers of Rav Kook.
For Kaplan and Buber, it was important to develop a Zionist project that was resistant to this kind of nationalism.
And as we see the consequences of the domination of fascism and right-wing nationalism today in Israel, we can see how prescient Kaplan and Buber (and many others) were. With the rise of right-wing nationalism and Jewish supremacist politics, this is perhaps the time to go even further than Kaplan in removing Jewish supremacist and Israeli nationalist themes from our liturgy. It is certainly not the time to put references to “chosenness” back into the liturgy.
I appreciate the historical and political context that you provide here and agree with your assessment of its prescient import for today. I also do not see (as you seem to) Reb Ezra arguing for the our movement to reclaim the language of ‘chosenness’ or our commitment to egalitarianism. I do hear him inviting us to ask of chosenness can be decoupled with aspects of kohanut that (like the concern about the rise of supremacist nationalism) seem morally relevant for our time – like loving peace and facilitating rituals that fully engage and celebrate our physicality.