Mordechai Kaplan (1881-1983) was born in Lithuania. His parents, Rabbi Israel and Haya Kaplan, gave him a traditional Jewish education. In 1889, the family emigrated to the United States and settled in New York. He attended public schools, graduated from the City College of New York, then was ordained as a rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) and received his master’s degree from Columbia University.

He was hired as an associate rabbi at Kehillath Jeshurun, an Orthodox synagogue in New York, where he remained until 1909, when he resigned and Salomon Schechter appointed him director of the JTS Teachers’ Institute and later professor of homiletics (preparing and delivering sermons), midrash, and philosophy of religion. He remained a teacher at JTS for 54 years, and during those years, virtually all of the rabbinical students were his students.

He and his family continued to practice Judaism in a traditional way, although over time, Kaplan began to become disillusioned with Orthodoxy and interested in non-Orthodox approaches to Judaism. He promoted the concept of the Jewish Community Center (JCC), which would have a synagogue but would also be a center for study, the development of the arts, and even sports. In 1922, when his eldest daughter turned twelve, Kaplan allowed her to say the blessing at the beginning of the Torah reading (he gave her an «aliya»), marking the first bat mitzvah for a woman, a ceremony that is now commonplace.

In 1935, he wrote «Judaism as a Civilization,» his most important work. In it, he argued for the need to rebuild Judaism. He argued that despite the geographical dispersion of the Jewish people and cultural differences, we are united by a common religious civilization, along with a common history. Kaplan argued that Judaism was not simply a religion, a form of behavior and belief, or a people. It was all of these and more. It was a civilization that included language, history, institutions, beliefs, practices, arts, literature, ethics, symbols, customs, ties to a land, and a religion that gave structure to everything and that evolved over time.

He rejected several classic concepts of traditional Judaism, such as that of being the chosen people, the concept of the Messiah as a human being, and the resurrection of the dead in the Messianic era. In 1945, Kaplan published a prayer book, a siddur, in which he eliminated references to these concepts he rejected. In response, a group of Orthodox rabbis gathered in a formal session, excommunicated him and burned his siddur.

Kaplan studied social sciences, especially William James, Emil Durkheim, and John Dewey, and their work in the fields of psychology, sociology, and philosophy applied to religion. He realized that virtually all religions had similar characteristics, for example, a great prophet and a holy book. He argued that religion is a product that emerges from within a healthy community and not from outside. When asked if there is only one true religion and the others are false, he replied that religions are the natural product of the intuition of each community, and therefore, each religion is true for the community that produced it. For him, Judaism is the creation of the Jewish people and no one else. Judaism is what the Jewish people want it to be. Judaism is more than a religion; it is a civilization.

By: Marcos Gojman

Bibliography: Conservative Judaism by Neil Gillman and other sources.