The Old & the New

"How can anyone who edits a prayer book be an atheist?" To stocky, white-haired Dr. Mordecai M. (for Menahem) Kaplan, 64, dean of the Teachers Institute of Manhattan's Jewish Theological Seminary, the question was rhetorical. But the Union of Orthodox Rabbis had a flat answer. For years the Union had regarded Dr. Kaplan with suspicion. Last week it came right out and called him an '"atheist."

Mordecai Kaplan, always an unorthodox thinker, began outraging Jewish fundamentalists a decade ago by launching the "reconstructionist" movement to liberalize Hebrew doctrine. The issue last week was a newly published Sabbath

Prayer Book, for which Dr. Kaplan had edited traditional prayers to give "modern Jews a form of worship in which they could participate. . . . Defying basic Orthodox tenets, Dr. Kaplan stated in his introduction that: i) Jews are not a divinely chosen people; and 2) the Torah is not "supernaturally inspired."

In solemn session in Manhattan last week, the Union called the prayer book a compound of "atheism, heresy and disbelief . . ." and hurled at Dr. Kaplan (who is not a member of the Union) a proclamation of excommunication* --first in its history. Then, after Rabbi Israel Rosenberg, president of the Union, banned the Kaplan-edited prayers from all synagogues, an excited young rabbi set fire to a copy of the book.

Undismayed by the Union's edict ("As I am not a member ... I was excommunicated from nothing"), Mordecai Kaplan retorted that the rabbis were "merely making themselves ridiculous. . . . The Union . . . speaks in medieval terms."

* The now obsolete cherem, dating from 516 B.C., and most severe of three forms of Jewish excommunication. It totally ostracized the person at whom it was directed and last made history in 1656, when invoked against the Dutch philosopher, Spinoza.

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