The Reconstructionist

At the age of 22. Rabbi Kaplan was so miserable with the hidebound orthodoxy of his first congregation (Manhattan's Kehilath Jeshurun) that he asked the president of the Jewish Theological Seminary to recommend him to a life insurance company as salesman. He was persuaded to stick it out. and instead of insurance, he has been selling his own conception of Judaism ever since. It has been a long pull; Mordecai Kaplan was feted by 600 well-wishers last week on his 80th birthday. And his conception of Judaism has grown into a thriving movement: Reconstructionism.

The essential idea of the Reconstructionist movement is that Judaism is neither religion, race nor culture, but a combination of all three, in what Dr. Kaplan calls "peoplehood." The three groupings of U.S. Jews--Torah-centered Orthodox, ethics-centered Reform, and the Conservatives who lie between them--can unite, says Dr. Kaplan, in this sense of peoplehood. "Jews must become spiritually united, though theologically diverse."

His blue eyes flashing, his white goatee wagging. Octogenarian Kaplan eagerly expounded the principles of Reconstructionism last week in Manhattan for what is at least the 100,000th time. Judaism, he thinks, has passed through three evolutionary stages--national, ecclesiastical, rabbinic--and is now on the threshold of a fourth stage, democracy. The emergence of this democratic stage demands the reconstitution of the Jewish people--in Israel, their historic homeland, in the countries of the dispersion, and in a renewed covenant binding all the world's Jews together, with Israel as the center.

Also necessary is the revitalization of the Jewish religion, not in terms of dogma but in terms of human experience. Dr. Kaplan has no patience, for instance, with the ancient doctrine of the Jews as God's chosen people; he banishes this from Reconstructionist education with the same gusto that he eliminated a "bloodthirsty" Jehovah who would slay the Egyptians' firstborn.

The traditional concept of Torah (Biblical law), the Reconstructionists maintain, "should be expanded" to include 1) ethical culture, "the fostering of love and justice"; 2) sancta, the heroes, events, texts, places and seasons that are symbolically significant to a people; and 3) "esthetic culture, the arts as a means of expressing the emotional values of Jewish life."

Mordecai Kaplan's Reconstructionist movement is not large--some 5,500 Jews, largely in the Conservative ranks. But he feels that this is a potent core for the adaptation of Judaism to "the political, economic, cultural and social changes which have taken place in the world."

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