Mordecai Kaplan - Relationship With Orthodox Judaism

Relationship With Orthodox Judaism

Kaplan began his career as an Orthodox rabbi at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in New York City, was a founder in 1912 of the Young Israel movement of Modern Orthodox Judaism, and was the first rabbi hired by the new (Orthodox) Jewish Center in Manhattan when it was founded in 1918. He proved too progressive in his religious and political views and resigned in 1921. He was the subject of a number of polemical articles published by Rabbi Leo Jung (who became the rabbi of the Jewish Center in 1922) in the Orthodox Jewish press.

He then became involved in the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, where on March 18, 1922, he held the first public celebration of a Bat Mitzvah in America, for his daughter Judith. This led to considerable criticism of Kaplan in the Orthodox Jewish press.

Kaplan's central idea of understanding Judaism as a religious civilization was an easily accepted position within Conservative Judaism, but his naturalistic conception of God was not as acceptable. Even at JTS, as The Forward writes, "he was an outsider, and often privately considered leaving the institution. In 1941, the faculty illustrated its distaste with Kaplan by penning a unanimous letter to the professor of homiletics, expressing complete disgust with Kaplan's The New Haggadah for the Passover Seder. Four years later, seminary professors Alexander Marx, Louis Ginzberg and Saul Lieberman went public with their rebuke by writing a letter to the Hebrew newspaper Hadoar, lambasting Kaplan's prayer book and his entire career as a rabbi." In 1945 the Union of Orthodox Rabbis "formally assembled to excommunicate from Judaism what it deemed to be the community's most heretical voice: Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the man who eventually would become the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism. Kaplan, a critic of both Orthodox and Reform Judaism, believed that Jewish practice should be reconciled with modern thought, a philosophy reflected in his Sabbath Prayer Book..." Due to Kaplan's evolving position on Jewish theology and the liturgy, he was also condemned as a heretic by members of Young Israel. His followers attempted to induce him to formally leave Conservative Judaism, but he stayed with JTS until he retired in 1963. Finally, in 1968, his closest disciple and son-in-law Ira Eisenstein founded a separate school, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC), in which Kaplan's philosophy, Reconstructionist Judaism, would be promoted as a separate religious movement.