Democratizing Judaism 9781618110916

Citation preview

Democratizing Judaism

Reference Library of Jewish Intellectual History

Democratizing Judaism Jack J. Cohen

BOSTON 2 0 1 0

Cohen, Jack, 1919Democratizing Judaism / Jack J. Cohen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-936235-16-2 (hardback) 1. Reconstructionist Judaism. 2. Kaplan, Mordecai Menahem, 1881-1983. 3. Democracy—Religious aspects—Judaism. 4. Zionism. I. Title. BM197.7.C64 2010 296.8’344092--dc22 2010043242

Copyright © 2010 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-936235-16-2

Book design by Ivan Grave

Published by Academic Studies Press in 2010 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www. academicstudiespress.com

Table of Contents Acknowledgements A Personal Introduction

Part I. M ordecai M. K aplan R eexamined

Ch. 1 Theorist and Activist Ch. 2 The Rational Mystic Ch. 3 Toward a Theology of Experience Ch. 4 Religious Education for Democracy Ch. 5 On the Theology of Election Ch. 6 Other Critics Ch. 7 Naturalism and Supernaturalism Ch. 8 Ethical Values in the Thought of Bertrand Russell and Mordecai M. Kaplan

Part II. R econstructionism R eexamined and A pplied Ch. 9 Reconstructionism Revisited Ch. 10 A State with a Jewish Majority Ch. 11 The Concept of a Jewish State Ch. 12 What Is a Zionist State? Ch. 13 The Western Wall Ch. 14 A Theology of Ethics Ch. 15 “Is This the Meaning of My Life?” Ch. 16 A Rational Approach to the Idea of God Ch. 17 When a Judge Steps off the Bench

  9   10   30   52   67   81 100 120 142 174

184 197 213 222 248 257 273 288 294

Dedicated to the memory of Mordecai M. Kaplan who inspired me to think and practice the Judaism that has blessed my life

Acknowledgements

I extend my deepest appreciation to New York University Press, the Secular Movement for Humanistic Judaism, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and Conservative Judaism (the journal of the Rabbinical Assembly of America), each of which granted me permission to republish a chapter of mine that had appeared in one of their publications. Prof. Raphael Jospe offered wise criticisms of the first draft of my manuscript. I thank him and hope that he will be pleased with my reactions. If readers find their own points of dissatisfaction with what I have written, it is to me that their barbs should be directed. I have no words to describe my appreciation to my daughter-in-law and my son for the help they provided me in wrestling with the world of the computer. This book could not have been published without their help and expertise. And finally, I thank the staff of the Academic Studies Press for their encouragement and patience. I hope that Democratizing Judaism will be worthy of their efforts and kindness.

A Personal Introduction

1 A popular saying informs us that when one tries to grasp too much, one is bound to overlook many aspects of reality. I suppose this is as true of Mordecai M. Kaplan as it is of other thinkers whose vision was equally wide-reaching. In this book, I have three modest objectives in mind. One is to defend my teacher against the critiques of some serious thinkers. A second is to present some of Kaplan’s ideas with occasional references to his Diaries that only recently have been brought to public attention by Prof. Mel Scult. And finally, I include in Part 2 a few of my own essays that illustrate Kaplan’s influence on my own Weltanschauung. One of the difficulties in communicating ideas is that one tends to treat them as if they were disembodied souls. The validity or worth of an idea presumably is not necessarily in keeping with the character of the person who articulates it. The categorical imperative is or is not a helpful rule of ethical behavior, whether or not Kant was a meticulously prompt individual. Kierkegaard’s “theological suspension of the ethical” is or is not theologically sound, regardless of whether or not he was considerate of the woman he loved. So I assume that the personality and character of Mordecai M. Kaplan are irrelevant to his ideas concerning Jewish peoplehood and religion, Zionism, theology and education that are referred to in a good portion of this book. Yet, what I have just written needs qualification. Just as the body and soul cannot be separated — so Kaplan surmised and so I think — ideas and their authors belong to one another. The 10

A Personal Introduction

problem is, in what way or ways? I have not come across a satisfactory answer to my question, any more than I can explain how an anti-Semite like Wagner could compose the beautiful music that he did. Or, to state it differently, how could the composer of the rapturous Liebestod have hated the entire Jewish people? Thus, in recalling the human side of my teacher, I make no claim either that I shall be painting an accurate likeness of the “real” Mordecai Kaplan or that his character “explains” why he thought as he did. Nonetheless, I am convinced that there is some connection between the character and temperament of an individual and the content of his or her thinking. That the educational and social background of a person affects and perhaps conditions his or her mentality is widely accepted, although even this assumption is also very much an educated guess. My purpose, then, in the following, personal account is to add a few images of Kaplan to those already limned by Ira Eisenstein, Mel Scult, Richard Libowitz, Emanuel Goldsmith, Meir Ben-Horin and others. Perhaps someone will put together these scattered descriptions of Kaplan’s character and conduct and give us further insight into his philosophy. Meanwhile, I leave it to the reader to establish his own connections. My first face to face contact with Mordecai Kaplan occurred in 1939, during Labor Day week-end. Kaplan had just returned from a two-year sojourn at the Hebrew University, where he had taught philosophy of education and had been invited to become the head of the University’s School of Education. Kaplan wanted to accept the offer, but his wife, Lena, convinced him that he and she owed it to their four daughters to preserve their family ties in the U.S.A. Kaplan’s decision to return to his post at the Jewish Theological Seminary, in New York, was a fateful one. Who can know what his influence might have been on Israeli Judaism had he introduced some of his provocative ideas in personal contact with a generation or two of Israeli teachers and educators? As soon as Kaplan resumed his life in America, his associates arranged a gathering of Reconstructionists at Cejwin Camps, in Port Jervis, New York, where he related his experiences in pre-State Eretz Yisrael — then known among diaspora Zionists as Palestine — and his impressions of the thinking and direction of the Jews in the developing 11

A Personal Introduction

community in the Jewish homeland. Kaplan’s main talk, critical of the condition of religion in Eretz Yisrael and of the failure of Zionist leadership to formulate an effective policy on civil law, was published in The Reconstructionist in the fall of 1939. At the time, I was twenty years of age, a year before I began my studies in the Rabbinical Department of the Jewish Theological Seminary. I was excited about the opportunity to imbibe Kaplan’s teachings from the living fount. It had been my reading of Judaism As a Civilization, Kaplan’s classic, which inspired me to aspire to a career in the rabbinate, and now I was in the presence of the author himself. However, aside from listening to Kaplan’s lecture and his cogent responses to the many questions that were raised by his audience, nothing happened on that occasion to add to my already firm commitment to Reconstructionism and to the man, Kaplan. Like everyone who ever heard him speak, I was, of course, struck by the timbre of his deep, resonant voice. That voice still rings in my ears. Kaplan proved to be a questionable pedagogue and a great teacher. He was too much of a Tartar to be able, by virtue of his personality, to attract the average student to his ideas. Yet his earnestness and his engaging smile when he was in one of his more relaxed moods made some of us realize that if we could penetrate Kaplan’s hard shell, we would find a warm person. Those of us who succeeded — including some who disagreed with his philosophy — were rewarded by close contact with a man genuinely interested in the welfare and progress of his students, regardless of their views. We also became better acquainted with Kaplan’s sense of humor, a trait which he also employed in the classroom but which was more pronounced on informal occasions. As a pedagogue, Kaplan was hampered by his temper. He could be ruthless in his criticism of students who had not prepared their assignments or who presented ideas that he considered to be wrong or half-baked. He could not bear intellectual sloppiness. To his credit, however, Kaplan regretted his inability to control his temper, and his Diaries are replete with remorse about offenses he had committed through his displays of anger. On almost every one of these occasions, he recorded his regret at his loss of control and proceeded 12

A Personal Introduction

to apologize to his victim the next time he saw him. Nonetheless, Kaplan’s teaching methods were undoubtedly hampered by his occasional outbursts of rage. Further, Kaplan’s pedagogy suffered from his excessive, almost obsessive insistence on receiving answers in the form and wording that he considered to be appropriate. Conversations with him were orchestrated according to his purposes. Sooner or later in such encounters, you were going to talk about what interested him, and if you did not respond as he wanted you to, he would instruct you as to the proper way to think about the subject that concerned him. Given these weaknesses, why did many of his students acknowledge Kaplan’s greatness as a teacher? Certainly, the cogency of his analysis of the problems of Jewish life was incomparable. One could not sit in Kaplan’s class or emerge from those “orchestrated” conversations without having to think about Kaplan’s challenges. But just as influential was his intellectual honesty, which has been confirmed without exception by all his students. That honesty triumphed even over Kaplan’s often exaggerated certainty about the correctness of his views. I can recall a number of occasions when he ranted against students who dared to contradict him. But Kaplan’s instinctive rejection of criticism was not his final reaction. He would leave the classroom, reflect on the criticism and rethink his position. Often, he would return to the next session of the class and either acknowledge his own mistake or explain more clearly the basis of his previous lecture. He was so honest and so fair that he could not permit himself to flee from cogent criticism — even though his initial, emotional tendency was to resist threats to his stand. On such occasions, he was wont to quote, “Nitzhuni banai, nitzhuni banai” — “My sons have defeated Me, My sons have defeated Me.” (These words were put into God’s mouth at the end of a famous talmudic dispute, in which the Rabbis rejected God’s authority and decided the law in accordance with their understanding. God is pictured as being delighted with this display of intellectual independence. See Bava Metzia 59b.) Kaplan’s intellect was never at rest. This characteristic is dramatically illustrated in his Diaries, in which, for over sixty years, he made almost daily entries. Everything interested him, from the most profound to the 13

A Personal Introduction

most trivial. He surprised us in one of his seminars when he devoted considerable time to a discussion of what he had heard about the behavior of ordinary people on a popular radio program of the time — Mr. Anthony. Most of us “intellectuals” would have been embarrassed had we been discovered listening to this airing of simple, every-day personal problems. But Kaplan regarded the stories as reflecting average human behavior and therefore worthy of examination. I am sure that none of us became fans of Mr. Anthony, but we did learn that rabbis have to know a good deal more about life than what is contained in the classic texts. Kaplan, the educator, was never better than when he tried to teach us how to think. In my years as a student, Kaplan taught courses in homiletics, Midrash and philosophies of religion. Each subject was an opportunity, which he never overlooked, to sharpen our ability to think straight. One incident remains in the minds of all my colleagues and myself who were present at the time. However, before recounting what happened on that memorable day in the course on homiletics, I have to record Kaplan’s method of teaching the art of sermonizing. Kaplan saw the construction of a sermon as a great challenge, in the choice of a theme worth preaching about, in the selection of appropriate texts, in the formulation of the body of the sermon and in insuring the logical order of the presentation. While he attached importance to the manner of delivery, he left this aspect of homiletics to the instructor of elocution. Every student was expected to prepare a sermon that was to be delivered in its final form at a Shabbat morning service at the Seminary, attended by some of the faculty and students. In preparing the sermon, we had to follow Kaplan’s standard procedure. Each of us had to bring to Kaplan a few suggested subjects and the texts on which they were to be based. At a private session in Kaplan’s home, we were expected to explain what we had in mind in regard to each theme and to formulate our interpretation of the text. Then, in a conversation with Kaplan, we would come to an agreement about the best subject. The next step was for the student to prepare an outline which would have to undergo approval at another session with Kaplan. 14

A Personal Introduction

Following this, we wrote up the sermon and delivered it in class. Our colleagues were then asked by Kaplan to offer comments and criticisms or to raise relevant questions. After the students had their turn, Kaplan would make his final comments and summary. Manifestly, Kaplan went to many pains with every student, and while he could be very biting at any or all of the stages of this rigorous procedure, all of us appreciated the experience and the discipline it demanded. Now to the incident. One of our colleagues, having gone through the preliminary steps, delivered his sermon before Kaplan and the class in homiletics. When he was through and the students had made their comments, Kaplan proceeded to tear the poor student apart, criticizing the outline and leaving hardly a paragraph intact. The student turned to Kaplan and pleaded that he had followed the outline agreed upon in their interview. Kaplan turned to his victim and, with a broad smile, said, “Indeed, but I have grown since then.” How many lessons did we learn from that about face on the part of our teacher? We saw a flash of his sense of humor and his restless mind. We learned how much effort has to go into the fine-honing of ideas. And we were reinforced in our appreciation of the value of traditional Judaism’s advocacy of studying with a companion. Kaplan exhibited his commitment to this insight of the Sages, who probably would have agreed that the companion be both loving and critical. I myself was the victim and the beneficiary of Kaplan’s insistence on rigorous thinking. My first lesson came when I prepared my inaugural sermon for Kaplan’s class in homiletics. After I submitted the draft of my talk to Kaplan, he returned it to me with a number of critical comments. Next to the heading of the sermon, he wrote, “I hope you do better next time.” I have kept those pages as a precaution against my ever forgetting my humble origin. When I succeeded Ira Eisenstein in the pulpit of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, the synagogue that Kaplan had founded, I had had virtually no experience in preaching. After graduation from the Seminary, I had devoted myself to Jewish education, which I preferred to the pulpit. My first rabbinical post was at the Cleveland Jewish Center-Park Synagogue, where I served as Educational Director. 15

A Personal Introduction

In that capacity, I had relatively few opportunities to preach. However, if I were to be the Rabbi of the SAJ, I realized that I should have to master the art of preaching. In those days, Kaplan attended every service, although he would deliver a sermon only on the High Holy Days. His presence, however, was obviously very threatening to the new pulpiteer. It was clear to me, after my first few sermons, that Kaplan was not pleased. The day I dreaded arrived. I was working in my office one week-day, when there was a knock on the door. Kaplan entered and asked me if I had time for a little walk. I knew the moment of execution had arrived. Walking with Kaplan was a challenge in itself. He trudged along at a fast clip and covered great distances. On this day, he began with a few stabs at chit-chat and then turned to me with the following dagger-like question — or better, accusation: “What were you trying to say last Shabbat morning?” That was all. We spent the rest of the walk with my trying to put into one sentence the proposition that I had tried to communicate in my ill-fated sermon. Kaplan insisted that if I could not formulate the idea in one statement, it could not be clear in my mind. He was right, of course, and I have endeavored to act accordingly ever since. Kaplan’s long career at the Jewish Theological Seminary is a story in itself. Prof. Mel Scult has recounted much of it in his excellent biography of Kaplan. I wish only to add a few comments and to relate two incidents which bear on the inner struggle that raged through all of Kaplan’s tenure at the Seminary. From the start, Kaplan was an outsider. He was regarded by his colleagues as an iconoclast, an attitude which they never concealed. What, then, accounts for the continuity of this stormy marriage? On the part of the Seminary, all credit must be given to its successive presidents: Solomon Schechter, who first recognized Kaplan’s talents and appointed him to head the Seminary’s Teachers Institute, Cyrus Adler and Louis Finkelstein. Despite their unanimous opposition to many of Kaplan’s ideas, they respected his original mind and his dedication to the cause of creative Jewish survival. They chose the path of academic freedom. Kaplan acknowledged their fairness and was always grateful to the Seminary for giving him a platform for 16

A Personal Introduction

disseminating his philosophy of religion, in general, and of Jewish religion, in particular. On the other hand, Kaplan suffered from the constant sniping of his colleagues. They not only opposed his ideas but frequently derided him for what they deemed to be his lack of scholarship. To them, anyone who did not devote himself completely to the scientific study of classic texts could have only a questionable status as a member of the Seminary’s faculty. Kaplan himself several times mentions in his Diaries his sense of inferiority in regard to the study of Talmud and the rest of halakhic literature. In his earlier years, Kaplan loved to study Gemara with his father, who was a learned Talmudist. It should also be mentioned that, in 1908, Kaplan received semikhah, a traditional ordination as a Talmudic scholar, from the noted Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines. But as time went on, he chose to devote his intellectual energy to subjects that bore more directly on the problems of Jewish life under modern conditions. Nevertheless, he never overcame completely his guilt-feeling at not having made his mark as a biblical or talmudic scholar. Every once in a while, he would spend a week or two in intensive study of Gemara, only to end up with a sense of having wasted precious time on material which could not help him in his confrontation with contemporary Jewish problems. It was not that he thought Rabbinic literature to be worthless. Quite the contrary. He attributed great importance to knowledge of major sections of halakhic texts and the way in which they should be studied. Every Jew should regard such knowledge as essential to his appreciation of the evolution of Judaism. However, Kaplan had the background that enabled him to research that literature whenever it was relevant to the understanding or solution of the problems that concerned him. Kaplan added an important dimension of relevance to the education of generations of rabbis for American pulpits. It was he who was able to apply the latest scholarly findings and interpretations to current Jewish life. It was he who rescued classic texts from gathering dust on the book shelves and put them to work in the cause of Jewish survival. I witnessed one encounter which illustrates Kaplan’s insight into the Seminary’s contribution to Jewish life. After a particularly 17

A Personal Introduction

bitter attack on Kaplan by his Seminary colleagues, the Board of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism begged him to resign from the Seminary. They told Kaplan that he was not appreciated and that there was no point to his fighting windmills. Kaplan then delivered a spirited defense of the Seminary, in which he pointed out that he could not do his work without the kind of informed reading of the Jewish past that his colleagues provided. One must start the reconstruction of Jewish tradition with an accurate understanding of Jewish history and the evolution of Jewish religion and culture. He praised the scientific objectivity and dispassion of the faculty and thereby demonstrated his magnanimity, modesty and intellectual integrity. My personal relationship with Mordecai Kaplan was one of growing closeness and affection. He was not easy to get to know. Kaplan’s mind was always at work, and he resisted any interference with his train of thought. While Kaplan could be cordial and engage in light conversation, his attention span in such moments was brief. He easily became impatient, eager to return to his work. Obviously, this characteristic did not make for warm relations with others. Yet Kaplan knew that his reticence about spending more time with his fellows was a weakness. His outlook on life, after all, was an affirmation of the primacy of redemptive love and friendship. Kaplan carried this dilemma to the grave. But those of us who managed, for whatever reason, to gain his affection and confidence were able time and again to observe his solicitude and concern for our welfare. Kaplan’s Diaries are indispensable for insight into his character. The Diaries indicate that while Kaplan avoided close personal contacts with all but a handful of persons, he cared about people. Although they occupy a relatively small space in his voluminous reflections, Kaplan’s sketches of men and women whom he liked or disliked reveal as much about Kaplan as they do about these individuals. He was prone to harshness in his judgments of human failings, but he reserved his severest criticisms for himself. I have already referred to his constant remorse for his loss of temper. But he also berated himself for being a “mediocrity,” for being indecisive, for moral weakness, and other deviations from what he considered to be proper behavior. His evaluations of others were frequently altered as the result of further 18

A Personal Introduction

experience. When that happened, he hastened to enter corrective comments about the person he had misjudged. This rigid honesty often made it distasteful for Kaplan to function as a pastor. He disliked officiating at funerals, first because he found it difficult to control his emotions when the deceased was a person he loved or admired, but also because at times he had to eulogize a person of poor character. He knew that he had to comfort the mourners, but he refused to be dishonest in his appraisal of the deceased. He would spend hours preparing a service that would enable him to provide solace for the mourners, while not forcing him to violate his conscience. Kaplan spells out this dilemma in several entries in his Diaries, thereby revealing the mind and heart of a deeply emotional man who fought a constant battle with himself in order to insure that his feelings be properly controlled and directed. Since he knew how unfair he sometimes was in his comments about others, he insisted that anyone whom he permitted to read sections of the Diaries must not quote derogatory remarks he had written about any living person. Kaplan’s entire philosophy was directed to enhancing life. He never avoided the reality of death, but he did not give it much thought. Since death is one of the inevitable but inscrutable facts of existence, about which nothing can be done — except perhaps to put it off for a short time — why waste energy philosophizing about it? Better to be concerned about the meaning of life and about ways to live with dignity, creativity and relish. Toward the end of his life, Kaplan broke a hip. He was operated upon successfully and recovered the ability to move around a bit. But he was unable to take his daily walk and to function freely. Only then did I hear him speak about death. He pleaded for it to come soon. For him, a constricted life was not worth living. He would ask me, “Jack, why does it take so long?,” and he would beg his second wife, Rivkah, to give him the pills that would enable him to depart in peace. Yet, even during those last years, when he gradually sank into a state of torpor and lost touch with a good deal of reality, an occasional flash of Kaplan’s concern for others and his sense of humor would break through the cloud that increasingly enveloped him. Two examples will suffice. 19

A Personal Introduction

Around the age of ninety, Kaplan finally settled in Israel, with the intention of living here to the end. But after his operation some years later and the subsequent need for round-the-clock nursing care, it became apparent that the burden on his wife was becoming too strenuous. Kaplan’s daughters begged him to return to the United States, where they could have him close by and assist in his care. He was reluctant to do so. The family solicited the aid of Prof. Moshe Davis and myself. We, too, found it hard to persuade our teacher to accede to his children’s request, until we pulled out the argument that he had to do it for Rivkah’s sake. His love for her triumphed over his romance with Eretz Yisrael. Just as land sometimes has to be relinquished for peace, so must personal predilections be surrendered for the welfare of those we love. This act of Kaplan has to be cast against the unresolved question that disturbed him throughout his intellectual career. Is there a future for the Jewish people in the free Diaspora? He continued to be ambivalent about the answer, although most of his published writings give the impression that he had no doubts about the possibility of Jewish survival in many lands. The Diaries, however, disclose what Kaplan actually thought. He agonized over whether he should contribute his energies to the building of Eretz Yisrael or, as he put it in a number of entries that spanned many years, whether he should continue to invest them in a Jewry doomed to extinction. As I have said, Kaplan never reached a final conclusion or prediction. He was too alert to the imponderables and to the uncertain outcomes of current behavior to take a decisive stand. However, on one point he did not waver. Without a thriving Jewish life in Eretz Yisrael, there could be no creative and exciting future for the Jewish people. Hence, the decision to leave Jerusalem and to end his days away from Eretz Yisrael was a hard one for him to make. Kaplan believed in the power of symbols, and he wanted his death to occur on the soil of Eretz Yisrael. Such an ending would symbolize his view that the Land holds the key to the Jewish future. Kaplan carried his ambivalence to the grave. Those closest to him knew that he wished to be buried in the United States next to his first wife, Lena, just as his second wife, Rivkah, wished to be interred in 20

A Personal Introduction

Jerusalem beside her first husband, Dr. Eliezer Rieger. The Kaplans and Riegers had been friends and mutual admirers for many years, so that the union of Mordecai Kaplan and Rivkah Rieger was built on an already comfortable relationship. The friendship of Mordecai and Rivkah developed into love when the circumstances of their respective widowhood brought them together. Aside from the emotional turmoil that must have disturbed both Mordecai and Rivkah, their decisions as to the locale of their burial bespoke two different mind-sets. Rivkah had lived most of her life in Israel. She would remain here in death, as a natural and logical denouement. Kaplan saw Israel solely in terms of its life-giving power. Contrary to traditional-minded Jews, who regarded contact with the soil of Eretz Yisrael, even in death, as an essential step in the process of redemption, Kaplan regarded death as the ultimate end. The remains of a human being, no matter where they may be, are joined eternally to the material universe and will suffer the fate of its evolution. Hence, Kaplan’s request to be interred next to his first wife, Lena, can be a subject for fascinating speculation as to its bearing on his love for two women. It is a subject for psychologists and novelists. Here, however, it is pertinent simply to note Kaplan’s consistent affirmation of life. I have mentioned Kaplan’s wry sense of humor. Even when his mind had been beclouded by the mist of forgetfulness, a flash of that humor would break through. I mention just one incident, which was told to me by Marjorie Wyler, then an executive of The Eternal Light radio program, with whom Kaplan had been friendly for many years. I had been invited to be interviewed on the Eternal Light radio program, and it was then that I heard the following story, as told by Mrs. Wyler. Marjorie had a teen-age niece, whom she wanted to introduce to Kaplan. It was three months before Kaplan’s death at the age of 102. He was in the special-care unit of the Hebrew Home for the Aged, in Riverdale, New York. Marjorie called Rivkah and inquired whether it would be permissible for her to visit that afternoon with her niece. Rivkah replied that Kaplan was having a good day and that Marjorie and her niece should come. When they arrived, Kaplan was asleep in his wheel-chair. Over Marjorie’s objection, Rivkah said 21

A Personal Introduction

she would awaken her husband. She surmised that he would want to see Marjorie. Rivkah shook Kaplan awake. He was furious. Rivkah explained to him that Marjorie Wyler had come to visit him. She was sure that he would like to see her. Whereupon Kaplan, who was bent over, looked up and saw his two visitors. Peering at the young girl, he waved his arm and said, “I don’t care about Marjorie, but who is this gorgeous creature?” More than many other great philosophers of Judaism, Kaplan readily acknowledged his reservations about his own positions on general and Jewish matters. As we might expect, the Diaries overflow with such expressions of indecision. I have already mentioned his troubled loveaffair with Eretz Yisrael and his indecision, until late in life, as to where he belonged, in Israel or in the United States. He affirmed the need to strengthen diaspora communities, but he feared for their viability. He loved American democracy, but he could not come to terms with American economic inequities, for which he held the American form of capitalism responsible. Kaplan was a rationalist who had a strong streak of mysticism. That mystical element in his make-up was indicative of his inability to adopt any intellectual position as an absolute. There is scarcely a subject in the enormous corpus that he produced, about which he was satisfied. His greatest frustration was his inability to formulate for publication his theory of soterics, an attempt to develop a well-founded theology and philosophy of salvation or human fulfillment. Kaplan wanted to understand scientifically the problem of human needs and their satisfaction. What are the real needs of humans, as opposed to their idle wants and greeds? How can they best be met? What role does and should society play in enabling men and women to achieve their fulfillment? And what does all this have to do with the idea of God? Kaplan sought to find the most effective way to formulate these and a host of other questions in logical and orderly fashion, so that they would become not only normative issues but subjects for the human sciences. There are many hundreds of pages in his Diaries devoted to these efforts, many of which are brilliant and suggestive. But Kaplan remained dissatisfied. 22

A Personal Introduction

I once asked Kaplan how he accounted for his forthright position on women’s rights. He had no ready answer, but he conceded that his strong-willed mother and hebraically-educated sister had much to do with his attitude toward the role of women in society. He could not justify the idea that such persons should be deprived by law or custom of the right to share equally with men in the affairs of family and community. Similarly, the fact that all his four children were daughters challenged his sense of fairness. But I do not wish to press this biographical data too far. Kaplan was critical of his mother, claiming that her overbearing piety prevented her from ever becoming a happy woman. Given his relationship with his mother, he might just as easily have argued that women should be kept in their place, or that his daughters should follow in the path of their grandmother. Was Kaplan born to be a liberal, or were his life-experience and education the determining factors? This is the kind of question which is likely to remain unanswered and unanswerable. A true liberal is often hesitant and ambivalent, because his honesty checks all pretensions at certainty. In the minds of some, this is taken to be a weakness. “On one hand” and “on the other hand” are the catch words of the liberal mind. One has to see all sides of a question and to leave room for the emergence of facts that are not manifest. However, this awareness of man’s propensity to err need not eventuate in passivity. The liberal mind is also ready to take chances, to gamble that one’s convictions are to be trusted at least as much as one’s doubts. Consequently, one must take a stand and hold it until proved wrong. This is one of the ways in which I account for the moral courage of my teacher. However, even the courageous falter. I recall, for instance, Kaplan’s temporary surrender to his colleagues who bitterly criticized the type of analytic sermons that students were preaching in the Seminary synagogue, as a result of the intellectual discipline imbibed from Kaplan. The faculty thought that a sermon should consist of a theme that would be substantiated by or would shed light on a series of texts culled from the Bible, Talmud, Midrash and other Rabbinic sources. As I described above, Kaplan wanted us to deal with the problems that we would be facing in the rabbinate and in our lives as American 23

A Personal Introduction

Jews and as members of the international Jewish people. Kaplan also insisted that each student scour the tradition for texts that shed light on the theme of the sermon, but he differed from his colleagues in urging us to confront vital issues and to cite texts that could illuminate the problem under discussion. One year, we returned to class after the High Holy Days and were treated to an outrageous trial sermon by the first scheduled preacher among us. The sermon, a paean of praise to the Hebrew language, consisted of a long series of quotations from every possible source of the sayings of sages throughout the ages about the virtues and importance of Hebrew. We went through the usual procedure of commenting on our colleague’s effort. All those who spoke criticized our friend for having given us what was obviously a parody. When Kaplan’s turn came to sum up and to deliver his evaluation, he proceeded, to our amazement, to offer hardly a word of criticism. His only comments had to do with the order of the quotations and the possibility of eliminating some of them in the interest of time. He remarked, however, that henceforth, he would be teaching homiletics with stress on form rather than content. A committee of three students, including myself, was selected to plead with Kaplan not to give in to the faculty demand. We explained to him that we would boycott his class unless he lived up to his convictions. Whether we agreed or disagreed with his opinions, we were unanimous in wanting his inspiration and challenge. Kaplan was deeply moved. Armed with this show of confidence, he returned to his natural method. That was the end of that spell of weakness. There was another period when Kaplan’s hesitancy might be attributed to a failure of courage, although the evidence is not altogether conclusive. I refer to the efforts of Stephen S. Wise to induce Kaplan to teach at and possibly direct the Jewish Institute of Religion which he (Wise) had established and which was dedicated to an open, pluralistic approach to the training of rabbis. The story is well-known. Kaplan twice accepted and reneged. How are we to account for Kaplan’s indecisiveness? Did he fear the uncertainty attached to all moves from the known to the unknown? At the Seminary, despite the strained relations with the other members of the faculty, his position was 24

A Personal Introduction

secure. He also had the satisfaction of knowing that his teaching was appreciated by his students. On the other hand, at the Jewish Institute of Religion, there could be no guarantees, either as regards the quality of the faculty or the students. Would he be able to get along with Wise? If not, what advantage would there be in the change of venue? In the end, Kaplan was unwilling to endanger his career or to give the impression that he had surrendered to his critics. But Kaplan had other reasons which illustrate the complexity of his psyche. On various occasions, he told his close associates that while he was attracted by the liberal atmosphere of the JIR, his heart was still at the Seminary. Despite all his disappointments there, the JTS was, in his mind, a great institution. He was proud of his association with it, even though its emphasis was on an accurate understanding of the Jewish past rather than creating a vision for the future of the Jewish people. At the time, the JIR had not yet matured and had not proved itself as a center of Jewish scholarship. Having spent two decades in building the Teachers Institute of the Seminary, he knew of the enormous effort he would have to exert at the JIR to raise it to the level of his own standards. Evidently, the project was too forbidding. A decade or so later, Kaplan’s services were sought by the Hebrew University. From 1937 to 1939, Kaplan taught courses there in the philosophy of education. During this period, he was invited to become the head of the School of Education. The temptation was great. Kaplan wanted to accept the offer, but family considerations and his loyalty to the Jewish Theological Seminary stood in the way. The University then made a compromise suggestion that Kaplan teach in Jerusalem one out of every four semesters. Kaplan agreed, provided that the JTS would release him for those semesters. He wrote to Cyrus Adler, then President of the JTS, asking him for his permission to respond positively to the University’s proposal. However, as Kaplan recorded in his Diaries, “Adler froze to the occasion” and refused to release him. The foregoing simple explanations of Kaplan’s rejection of the offer is not the complete story. Kaplan foresaw many of the problems that the Yishuv would have to overcome before its Jewishness could meet the needs of modernity. Were he to move to Jerusalem, he would, 25

A Personal Introduction

in essence, have to begin his intellectual career all over again. At the Seminary, as I intimated above, he was on surer ground. Only in the last decade of his life, when he knew that his involvement in the tempestuous life in Israel would necessarily be minimal, did he feel fully prepared for aliyah. Who knows what would have happened had Kaplan made the break when he was still at the height of his intellectual and physical power? Kaplan’s ambivalence was brought home to me dramatically when I told him, early in 1961, that my family and I were planning to move to Israel. He was deeply upset and tried to convince me that my contribution to Jewish life would be better accomplished in America. All my arguments failed to impress him. I explained that my wife and I had fallen in love with Jerusalem when we had studied at the Hebrew University. I said that we wanted to live where the reconstruction of Jewish civilization was occurring. We wanted to be active participants in this endeavor in Eretz Yisrael. I argued, too, that my wife and I wanted a different and richer Jewish environment for our children than could be experienced anywhere in the United States. My teacher acknowledged the force of all these assertions, but he still urged me to reconsider. Only when I stated that it was his teaching that had brought me to my decision did he surrender and give me his blessing. I assume that he must have asked himself why he had not acted similarly decades before. As I have tried to describe, Kaplan was an unusual blend of rationality and emotionalism, certainty and reserve, activism and reticence, determination and indecisiveness, aloofness and warmth. He was, in other words, a person of many contradictions. Above all, he was ruled by a rigid honesty that made him impervious to absolute selfassurance and open to the reality of cosmic mystery and the vagaries of human behavior. Such a person is bound to attract or repel. I feel sorry for those who experienced only the negative aspects of his nature. As for myself, I am able to serve as a witness to the wisdom of Joshua the son of Perahyah, who said: “Acquire a teacher, get yourself an associate, and judge every person charitably.” (M. Avot 1:6) Kaplan was my teacher before I met him. And during our forty years of association, He blessed me with his friendship and love. 26

A Personal Introduction

2 Being a disciple can be embarrassing both to one’s master and to oneself. To the master, the disciple can easily become a burden, if he misinterprets, misconstrues, exaggerates or misemploys the teacher’s message. If the disciple is a fawning type of person, he can also embarrass his or her teacher by excessive and uncritical adoration. A true spiritual or intellectual master appreciates understanding and respect but not blind adoration. For their part, disciples, who want to be independent and intellectually free and creative, are frequently unable to treat the ideas of their mentors with the same degree of objectivity and critical acumen as they employ in their treatment of other, less favored thinkers. Furthermore, disciples often underestimate how deeply their masters have influenced them. Inevitably, they discover that ideas which they thought were original with themselves were proclaimed many years before by their teachers. In the second part of this book, I put together a number of essays, some previously published and others written for this selection. All of them were inspired by Mordecai M. Kaplan. As one of his disciples, I hope that I have been true to the spirit of his thinking in covering issues that were important to him. At the same time, these essays express my own way of looking at the problems at hand. My assessment of Reconstructionism as it appears today should be seen as a bridge between the two sections of this book. I hope that the essays I have included will be an expression of my indebtedness to my teacher and of my own independence of mind. I have tried to follow the dictum of Nietzsche to the effect that the best way of honoring a teacher is not to remain only a pupil. Much of what follows in Part 2 is devoted to a consideration of the special problems of the State of Israel and its place in Jewish life. In the last analysis, as far as the State of Israel is concerned, the solutions to our many problems will depend on how we understand and articulate them. In this endeavor, the study of Mordecai Kaplan’s thought can be of tremendous help. 27

A Personal Introduction

I have also included a few pieces that deal with some of the major ethical and theological concerns that exercised Kaplan throughout his life and that still require thoughtful consideration. Much of what I write below about Zionism, Eretz Yisrael and the State of Israel might seem to be of purely historical interest by the time this book is published. I hope that this will be the case and that peace will be achieved between Israel and the Palestinians. Nonetheless, I think it is important for an understanding of Reconstructionism and its bearing on the future of democracy in Israel that its particular line of reasoning be set forth for the record. The Jewish people can ill afford to repeat some of the sloppy thinking and social and political mistakes that have contributed to the current conflict between Israel and the Arab world and more so between Jews and Arabs within Israel itself.

Chapter 1

Theorist and Activist

In a life that spanned over a century (1881-1983), Mordecai M. Kaplan frequently anticipated the decades to come. His mind was always on the future, but he never lost sight of the fact that the future is hewn out of the past and present. Consequently, his thought paid careful attention to the demands of history and to the possibilities and dangers that inhere in the decisions of today. Kaplan’s perspective on time enabled him to avoid much of the surrender to intellectual faddism that characterizes less careful thinkers. He was, of course, no less a product of his time than anyone else, but his involvement in the affairs of his Jewish and general environments distanced him from trying to impose an abstract intellectual system on a reality with which it had little or no connection. The Kaplan of the thirties and forties acted out an approach that had been formulated during the experience of the first half-century of his life. Kaplan was a major force in the Jewish community long before 1930, even though he often regarded himself as a failure. Most particularly, he berated himself for not yet having published a major volume on any of the issues that occupied his mind. In 1930, Kaplan was 49 years old, a late age for a person who aspired to produce a corpus of significant works. Mordecai Kaplan was born in a small town in Lithuania.1 His father, Rabbi Israel Kaplan, was a strictly Orthodox Jew, whom Kaplan loved and respected for his probity and willingness to expose his son to heterodox views. Despite the elder Kaplan’s adherence to traditional Jewish thought, he believed in openness to the world about 30

Theorist and Activist

him, trusting that Mordecai’s loyalty to Rabbinic Judaism would be strengthened, rather than weakened, by such exposure. The story of Mordecai Kaplan’s subsequent wrestling with tradition has been well documented and need not be repeated here. But it is pertinent to observe that Kaplan learned from his own experience that the path of freedom does not necessarily lead to the results desired by those who follow that path. Nonetheless, even if the future does not turn out as we might like it to be, we should continue to adhere to freedom rather than try to force our offspring into our own patterns of thought and behavior. Kaplan knew of no other way than that of intellectual persuasion to convince others of the correctness of his message. Almost always, he was sure that his views were sound, so that when they were rejected by his audiences or his readers, he would occasionally attribute his failure to a weakness in his formulation or delivery or style, rather than to the quality of the ideas themselves. Nonetheless, his Diaries demonstrate that Kaplan did not permit his vanity to interfere with his intellectual integrity and judgment. Those same Diaries abound in constant selfcriticism, re-thinking of his premises, analyses and recommendations. Frequently, the self-criticism takes the form of self-flagellation for his outbursts of temper or his lack of adequate scholarship. At one point, he says about himself, “Mine is the hell of being a mediocrity and knowing it.”2 From his mother, whom he depicted as something of a tyrant, Kaplan acquired stubbornness, single-mindedness and determination, but he tempered these traits with the capacity to correct mistakes and to see when his assumptions or objectives were misguided. He was able to achieve this level of character, because he learned the lesson of his mother’s life. She was an unhappy woman, and Kaplan attributed her unhappiness to her blind, unalterable piety. She was simply unable to adjust to a changing world or to conceive that her son had to be free to live his own life. Kaplan’ mother was so determined that he should become the Chief Rabbi of England that she looked upon his departure from traditional Judaism as her own personal tragedy. Kaplan retained his mother’s strength of will, but he directed it toward the attainment of truth rather than the domination of the will of others. 31

Chapter 1

These observations on Kaplan’s character can help us to understand how he was able emotionally to cope with the critical problems that faced the Jewish people during the two decades between 1930 and 1950. They do not, however, describe the unusual features of Kaplan’s way of thinking that enabled him both to grasp the essence of the Jewish experience of those days and to contribute notably to the molding of the decades ahead. That two-fold ability was a result of his broad reading and his insistence that experience is the key to wisdom. He made this point vividly when he wrote, “I am always fascinated by life rather than by books, even the finest. After all, I am by nature an activist, and theorizing is with me a means to an end and not an end in itself.”3 Kaplan read assiduously in history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, literature, comparative religion and the arts. He followed the advances in the physical sciences. He never lost sight of the limits of his knowledge in each of these fields, but he was confident in concluding from what he knew that reason and experience held the keys to wisdom and prevented the imagination from running wild. Tradition had to be adjusted to what had been discovered by the best minds among humankind. If tradition opposed the truths and values common to the world’s accepted authorities, it had to give way. But Kaplan’s predilection for modernity did not blind him to the need to give a fair hearing to the heritage of the past. He argued that life is far more than intellect alone, and he therefore never abandoned the exploration of the classic sources of Judaism for their untapped resources, even in the regions of mysticism in which he would tread with great trepidation. His love of Judaism and his dedication to effectuating the creative continuity of the Jewish people were founded both on his emotional ties to his forebears and on his belief in the ability of his fellow Jews to utilize the Jewish heritage for universally valid and worthwhile purposes. These affirmations drew Kaplan to the cause of the Jewish people and its civilization rather than to the application of his talents to an academic career in anthropology, sociology or education which was offered to him at various times. Kaplan was an intellectual who believed that the human mind must not be blocked in its journey through time 32

Theorist and Activist

by the restraints of group loyalty. He set out to prove that the intellect could be as effective a tool for universality when it is applied to the problems of a single society as it is held to be when it embraces the human condition as a whole. Let us remember that this assertion was far from evident in some leading intellectual circles, including Jewish ones. The assumption was widespread, for example, that the problem of anti-Semitism would be resolved when the plight of those who suffered from colonialism and economic oppression would be alleviated. According to this cosmopolitanism, Jews sustained their culture, because they had no other outlet. However, as soon as they would be free to choose their means to salvation, they would join the human mainstream. According to this view, the Jewish people would simply disappear. This was the conception of the Communists and their many fellow travelers and of some leading anthropologists. Kaplan perceived that the cosmopolitanism of the thirties was a spurious one. The universal salvation, preached by both fascists and communists, was actually a form of nationalistic imperialism. In retrospect, this phenomenon should have been apparent to every intelligent observer; but Kaplan himself flirted with Soviet communism for a few years, until he understood fully that its universalism was an illusion, intellectually and morally. Fascism presented no problem for Jewish intellectuals, inasmuch as its avowal of rule by brute force was sufficient to drive it outside the pale of respectability. Communism, however, was a different story. Marxism, after all, rested on a universal ethic of social responsibility — “from each according to his ability to each according to his need” — which could easily be accommodated to the ethical foundations of Judaism. It was this feature of Marxism which appealed to Kaplan for a while. That principle, however, was too circumscribed for his taste, and he turned his back on Marxist and communist doctrine. His opposition may be summed up in a remark he made during a discussion he had in 1936 with students of the School for Jewish Social Work. Kaplan maintained that, “...official Communism or Marxism, in demanding the acceptance of the Marxist outlook, precluded its being accepted by those of us who believe that the spiritual aspect of life, though determined (sic) in its form and content by the economic factor, can and does achieve an independence 33

Chapter 1

which enables it to determine the development and utilization of the economic factor.”4 Subsequently, Kaplan developed a much broader theory of the causes of social conflict and change, but it is apparent from his reasoning about communism and fascism that the nationalism of the Jewish people, in his view, would have to accord with a moral and spiritual system immune to any misuse of power. The interplay of cosmopolitanism and nationalism occupied Kaplan’s mind when he thought about the Jewish people. On the one hand, he believed that the Jews had always and would continue to be universalist in their national aspirations and could therefore be depended upon to treat their nationalism as a responsible and creative spiritual force. At the same time, the Jewish people was in a shambles. Kaplan was fully aware of the threats to Jewish survival that lurked in the free world. Deculturation, intermarriage and the lack of visibility of Jewish community and culture all led to assimilation. Furthermore, Jewish survivalists seemed to have no inkling as to what had to be done in order to plan for the future. By 1930, Kaplan had already completed the blueprint of his theory of Jewish civilization, which he called Reconstructionism. In defining Judaism as an evolving religious civilization, Kaplan based himself on several assumptions, from which he never deviated: Judaism is not an abstract entity; it is the product of the living Jewish people. Since the Jewish people inevitably has to change as it adjusts itself to the vicissitudes of life, so must its culture undergo evolution from one form of expression to another. A civilization contains every variety of spiritual, ethical, social, economic, political, linguistic and aesthetic creation that the genius of its adherents can conceive. The genius of the Jewish people has been most clearly evident in its understanding and creativity in the field of religion. Any plan for the future of Judaism has to take into account all the elements of the Jewish heritage, with special emphasis on religion. At the foundation of Jewish civilization, there must be a clear conception of Jewish nationhood or peoplehood. Basic to Kaplan’s position is the intuition that the Jewish people has to recast its selfidentity in radical ways. In the first place, it has to accept the fact that it 34

Theorist and Activist

is a natural group. The doctrine of divine election has to be abandoned in favor of the adoption of a national vocation responsive to the ethical challenges of the moment.5 This revolution in self-identity necessarily entails a new theology and philosophy of nationhood, to which Kaplan had already addressed himself early in his career. He concluded that the Jews must see themselves as a trans-territorial people whose center in Eretz Yisrael would be surrounded by a periphery of a viable Diaspora. That is to say, the Jewish people, in effect, will be composed of all those communities free to work out their own destinies and able to assist their still oppressed brethren to achieve free expression. Kaplan came to grips with the full impact of freedom on Jewish polity. If Eretz Yisrael is to occupy the central role in Jewish creative survival, it has to be so chosen by the Jews as indispensable to the creation and retention of a high national culture. Kaplan was alert to the fact that countless Jews would need Eretz Yisrael as a refuge and that the bulk of its potential settlers would come as refugees. But such a rationale could not suffice to satisfy the spiritual purposes for which a nation requires a land; nor could it serve as a basis for building the land as a living space for the Arabs and others who already dwelt on the soil. Kaplan wrestled with all these questions. While the return to Eretz Yisrael in traditional Judaism always laid a heavy burden of responsibility on the Jews to behave in such a way as to merit the restoration of the Land to them, it was God who would effectuate it. Under freedom and voluntarism, however, it was the people alone who would decide when and how to return. Therefore, reasoned Kaplan, it would be unrealistic to expect that the Ingathering of the Exiles could ever be actualized in its entirety. As long as Jews can find freedom in the Diaspora, a large percentage of them will remain there. Furthermore, no country in the world, and especially a small one, can be expected to provide for the needs of persons of all sorts of skills, temperaments, family responsibilities and aspirations. Mankind is in movement. State borders are increasingly being crossed. National exclusiveness, buttressed by laws to keep strangers out and natives in, is becoming an anachronism. The Jewish nation is destined to be in the vanguard of this process. It should define itself henceforth as a spiritual people, centered in Eretz 35

Chapter 1

Yisrael.6 Its diaspora communities, tied to the core in Eretz Yisrael by bonds of religion, culture and ethical aspiration, would each have to create a distinctive but nonetheless Jewish culture befitting the unique circumstances of its environment.7 Kaplan argued that American Jewry and Jewries in other open societies in the Diaspora should organize themselves into one form or another of voluntary organic communities. He posited that without such a structure, it would be impossible to cope with the centrifugal forces set in motion by freedom. The Jewish people in dispersion needed a new polity which could simultaneously guarantee freedom of expression for all who wished to identify themselves as Jews and provide a visible framework for that identity. Although Kaplan insisted that these organic communities would operate according to the rules of democratic polity, he was opposed by those organizations and movements that feared to lose some of their autonomy and power. Others, principally the American Jewish Committee, deplored any move that might cause Jews to be viewed as a separatist group within the larger body politic of the state. Although Kaplan’s view has never been adopted in its entirety, it remains as a challenge to this day. At least in the United States, whose future most engaged Kaplan’s interest, there is considerable communal organization — the Presidents Conference, the Federation of Jewish Welfare Funds (now the United Jewish Community), the National Community Relations Advisory Council, the United Jewish Appeal, the various unions of synagogues, to say nothing of the many local efforts at coordination. However, all these structures have avoided dealing with the purposes and methods of Jewish creative continuity. Until they do, there will be little or no ability on the part of American Jewry to combat the powerful forces of assimilation that are decimating its ranks. Kaplan is often portrayed as a naive optimist about Jewish survival in the United States, but this is most certainly a misreading of both the mood and content of his analysis of American Jewry and his hopes for its future.8 He feared that all that would remain of Judaism in America would be a sterile Orthodoxy. He respected the survival power of Orthodoxy but deemed it hardly worthwhile to survive on that level of vitality. It is now clear that Kaplan erred in his evaluation of the 36

Theorist and Activist

ability of at least some segments of Orthodoxy to adapt to a modern, pluralistic society, but he was correct to be concerned about the kind of Judaism that could emerge out of the tottering edifice of the Jewish community of this era. Kaplan’s vision of Jewish peoplehood was Zionist to the core. The rebuilding of Jewish life in Eretz Yisrael was a sine qua non for creative Jewish survival. Nonetheless, Kaplan’s conception of Zionism was always critical of crucial elements in the theory and practice of the Zionist movement and of the way in which it operated in Eretz Yisrael. As stated, he sought to devise a strategy for survival in the Diaspora, despite his fear that the venture might be in vain. Moreover, he looked upon Jewish life outside Eretz Yisrael as capable of bringing salvation to the individual Jew and of insuring the creative continuity of the Jewish people. He knew, of course, that Jews would now have to choose between two styles of life, that of a responsible, autonomous majority and that of a free minority. Since that choice would and should be made by each Jew in accordance with his temperament and life circumstances, Kaplan posited that the Jewish people would have to engage for the foreseeable future in a two-fold process of establishing a humane and culturally creative society in the Jewish homeland and a voluntary, minority existence wherever possible in the lands of dispersion. Therefore, he opposed those who negated the possibility or desirability of a diaspora Judaism and those who believed that there could be a Jewish future under freedom without a creative Jewry in Eretz Yisrael.9 Kaplan aligned himself with Ahad HaAm, A. D. Gordon and others who empathized with the national feelings of the Arabs. Periodically, he criticized the Zionist leaders for their shortsightedness in not involving the Arabs in the building of a shared economy and in ignoring their national feelings and needs. Unfortunately, Kaplan expressed his criticisms only sporadically and lightly in his published writings. Here is a typical passage: “The White Paper of 1939 is the penalty Jews are paying for having mishandled the problem of their relations with the Arabs — Jews should have realized that they have to live with the Arabs, and should not have attempted to build a Jewish economy by discouraging employment of Arabs. They should have tried to develop 37

Chapter 1

a single high-level economy in which exploitation of both Arab and Jewish labor would have been precluded.”10 For the most part, however, he concentrated in his public essays on supporting the historical claim of the Jewish people to its homeland. This, he felt, was what the hour demanded of Jewish leaders. Privately, in his Diaries, Kaplan was most outspoken. He notes that as a result of the failure of the Arabs to develop the land, Jews tended to disparage them.11 In 1929, he comments, “Instead of deploying some of the abler and more fiery spirits among the Arabs by giving them positions in some of the financial and industrial undertakings, the Zionist Administration fostered a spirit of Jewish chauvinism and a Western air of superiority which is bound to antagonize the natives.”12 In this same reflection that was stimulated by a conversation he had had with Joseph M. Levy, the noted correspondent of The New York Times, he went on to observe that the mentality which served the Zionists in their dealings with diaspora Jewry and foreign governments could not be serviceable in relating to the Arabs. Kaplan’s empathy for the Arabs was deep. He thought that the Zionist movement had made a serious mistake in not first negotiating with the Arabs before turning to the European nations to support the Zionist endeavor.13 In subsequent years, Kaplan added further reservations about Jewish behavior toward the Arabs, but he never developed a clear and practical plan of action for the integration of the two peoples in a setting of Jewish sovereignty. The disparity between Kaplan’s departures from popular Zionist rhetoric, as expressed throughout the Diaries, and his published declarations, can be partly explained by his reluctance to take a public position, except in general terms, on a matter in which he was only peripherally involved. Moreover, he hesitated to add to the difficulties of the Jewish people at a time when its very existence and the possibility of implementing the drive for autonomy were threatened. Nonetheless, the stand taken in the Diaries was fully consonant with Kaplan’s vision for reconstructing the Jewish people and its tradition. Concerning the latter, he was less reticent about voicing his ideology. He insisted that any Jewish society or state that would be established in Eretz Yisrael must act in accord with the ethical standards of enlightened democracy. During 38

Theorist and Activist

the two years that he taught at the Hebrew University (1937-1939), he saw the threat that halakhic extremists constituted for the Yishuv; and he was no less concerned by the extreme secular abandonment of all connection with the rich tradition of classical Judaism. He asserted strongly that a religion-less Judaism, whether in Eretz Yisrael or in the Diaspora, was a distortion of Judaism and would eventually deprive Jews of their morale and of their reason for perpetuating the Jewish people. Kaplan did not rest at this point. Indeed, from his earliest days in the rabbinate, he attempted to evolve a general philosophy of religion and a new orientation to Jewish religion that would meet the requirements — intellectual, spiritual and moral — of that philosophy. His basic premise was what he called his Copernican revolution — turning religion on its head and using as the point of departure — not revelation of God’s will for man but rather man’s search for salvation or self-fulfillment. In the course of this search, he affirmed, man will experience the reality of God by virtue of his (man’s) discovering resources in himself and beyond himself that will enable him to satisfy his needs, at least to a reasonable extent. A full exposition of Kaplan’s theology and religious ideology would have to take cognizance of the complex of issues with which he knew he had to come to grips and the solution of which he sought, but did not find. He envisioned a group of thinkers from various disciplines who would pool their intellectual skills toward the development of what he termed the science of soterics. The purpose of soterics would be to search for a unifying principle or principles regarding the dimensions of human salvation. He never abandoned this effort to gather an effective group, whether in the Rabbinical Assembly, the Reconstructionist movement or in Israel after his aliyah late in life. He even attempted, together with the liberal Protestant theologian, Henry N. Wieman, to establish an inter-religious association of thinkers who were prepared to respond to the challenges of secularization and the advance of scientific method. For some reason which I have not yet discovered, the plan did not materialize, but the idea is indicative of Kaplan’s conviction that Judaism could only benefit from close cooperation with other 39

Chapter 1

religions in the search for truth and for the furtherance of human salvation on earth.14 Having determined that religion should be located in those elements in the life of every people that derive from the drive to satisfy the human need for self-fulfillment, Kaplan concluded that a rational philosophy of religion ought to begin with an attempt to locate those basic requirements of the human person. Here would be the meeting point of science, philosophy and theology. Both philosophy and theology would have to remain attached to experience and the scientific method, if religion is to keep pace with the expanding horizons of the human intellect. This premise in no way put Kaplan into the camp of scientism and radical empiricism. He was careful to acknowledge the limitations of science, in the light both of its frequent mistakes and of the enormous domain of the unknown, as well as of its inability to handle the dimensions of value and aesthetics. Man’s imagination is capable of extending into the far reaches of the realm of transcendence. All Kaplan sought to do was to prevent the misuse of imagination by religionists who permitted it to ignore the authority of reason and — to use John Dewey’s language — warranted assertability. Kaplan never ceased studying the nature of man. More accurately, he persisted in learning about the physical and psychic make-up of the human being, because he was convinced that in order to approximate the cosmic role that humans ought to play, a theologian must first acquire a well-grounded knowledge of the human body and mind. Kaplan never fell prey to the fallacy of any type of reductionism that might have led to equating the “is” and the “ought” or deriving the spiritual from the physical, but he insisted that all ethical judgments must avoid distorting what is natural to the functioning of body and mind. Thus, for example, many of the roles that women have been forced to play in society have derived from misconceptions on the part of males as to the nature of the physiology and psychology of the female sex. Nonetheless, science should not be so construed as to eliminate the reality of a transcendent sphere without which man cannot aspire to fulfillment. Kaplan returns to this theme many times, but I cite here one of his late statements, that illustrates his sense of 40

Theorist and Activist

balance: “Although man transcends mechanistic and scientific law, some would reduce life and mental events to pure mechanism and scientific formulae. Transcendence does not imply overstepping the limits of natural law. It merely implies taking into account a dimension within human nature which some scientists ignore. That is the dimension of value which differentiates human nature from subhuman nature.”15 Theology, it is sometimes forgotten, deals not only with God but with the cosmos and man, as well. That is to say, any concept of God entails views about the physical universe and about human beings that befit, or should befit, the way in which a particular theologian perceives the Deity. Similarly, every concept of man or the universe requires a parallel idea of the other dimensions of reality that is consanguine with that vision. Inevitably, theology, like all other disciplines, has to undergo constant metamorphosis. Kaplan has yet to be accorded his due as a major theologian. The reasons for this lack of recognition are several, but detailing them would take us far beyond the confines of this brief account.16 It is pertinent, however, to declare that Kaplan realized how tenuous and conditional theological statements must be, how necessary it is to consider seriously both the rational and mystical approaches to reality and how aware one must be of the limits of and need for both systems of mind. Kaplan should be credited with being one of the few Jewish scholars of the twentieth century who tried to make sense in theological terms of the impact on Judaism of the discoveries of the physical sciences and the insights of the human sciences. Many theologians, it is true, recognized that a new world was aborning, but for the most part they argued either that Judaism had already anticipated it or that it need have no effect on the essentials of Jewish theory and practice. Kaplan under-estimated the holding power of supernatural habits of thinking, but his challenges to these habits remain unanswered: How shall religious Jews respond to the scientific study of the classical Jewish texts, especially of the Bible? Do not the findings of that study undermine the foundations of halakhic Judaism? And if so, what must religious-minded people do about prayer, many of the mitzvot, the authority of the rabbinate, the status of women, and many other issues that are connected with the assumptions of supernatural revelation? 41

Chapter 1

The unwarranted attacks on Kaplan and the equally unfortunate ignoring or underestimating of his theology have characterized, as well, those who regard the whole theological enterprise as outmoded. For much of the thirties, for instance, little credence was given by Jewish intellectuals to religious thinkers of any stripe. Both the Marxists and their opponents were at one in their derogation of religion. In the forties came neo-Orthodoxy and existentialism and their assault on the power of reason. Kaplan’s efforts to refine rational methods of solving spiritual problems were declared to be shallow and secular. The semantics of all normative disciplines constitute a never-ending problem. Value words, in particular, possess so many overtones that communication between the most educated persons often founders on mutual misunderstanding of the intent of identical terms. Kaplan was troubled by having to resort to language that had become associated in the popular mind with supernatural connotations. Therefore, he had either to invent a new vocabulary or to elicit from the old terminology meanings that inhere in it in the light of today’s universe of discourse. He chose the latter method, although he also had to have recourse to neologisms or the borrowing of terms from other disciplines in order to get his points across. I shall touch sketchily on just two terms — God and mysticism. I have repeatedly referred to Kaplan’s insistence on the importance of transcendence in his system. Nonetheless, his critics continue to assert that Kaplan’s theology lacks any sense of the mystery of existence and of any reality beyond the mere immanent. The passage I quoted above concerning man’s transcending nature illustrates Kaplan’s problem. For him, the transcendent and the supernatural are not necessarily related. Traditionalists speak of God as supernatural, that is, as completely separate from the natural order and as capable at any time of overthrowing it. On the other hand, Kaplan sees the transcendent as a facet of the natural, in the sense of “the whole is greater than its parts.” Transcendence is an essential category of the thinking process, Tomorrow transcends today, natural law transcends natural phenomena, the human person is always far more than he appears to be, to himself or to others, at any given moment. These and many other examples show how a word can be transposed from 42

Theorist and Activist

the key of the supernatural to that of the natural. It should not require too much imagination in order to apprehend why certain theologians should be dissatisfied with Kaplan’s transposition and be unwilling to credit him with a theologically respectable application of the term, “transcendence.” All the more is Kaplan criticized for his unorthodox usage of “God.” In this respect, he suffered the same fate as John Dewey, who was taken to task for applying the term to man’s ideal ends. A God, it was held, who resided only in human imagination is no God. Dewey, they argued, simply muddied the waters. Whatever be the validity of that criticism or of Dewey’s subsequent rejoinder, Kaplan’s terminological dispute with his critics is more significant. As could be expected, he is still called an atheist in certain circles, the argument being that a God who lacks absolute power and freedom cannot be the true God. But the critics from all sides have paid no attention to the crucial distinction that Kaplan made between “God” and God. As I have reiterated, of the latter man can know nothing with certainty. Indeed, all he can do is to attempt more or less educated guesses about God as an existent, based on what he can experience. And since human experience is always limited, so must man’s knowledge about God ever be severely circumscribed. As for experiencing God, that too is an aspect of man’s uncertain ability to identify truth, goodness and beauty. It is a matter of our attaching these designations to that in the universe which indicates that there is a force operating in it that helps us to become truly human. In other words, Kaplan has taken theology out of the realm of certainty and conferred upon it the dignity of all his other efforts to define his place in the cosmos. That dignity stems from humans’ determination to posit purposes for themselves and to achieve them in the face of an imperfect and an unfinished creation. For Kaplan, belief in God is the assertion that the search for salvation, within the realistic bounds set by man’s mortality, is supported by the thrust of the cosmos for improving the quality of existence. There can be no proof for such a faith, but it is supported every time a good deed is done, every time the cause of a disease is discovered and every time a work of art is created or appreciated. 43

Chapter 1

Nor did Kaplan dodge the problem of evil that arises in every theological system and that became especially poignant for sensitive men and women during the decades under discussion. Kaplan’s treatment of the existence of evil is summed up in his published works in a chapter on the subject, written in 1949.17 He distinguishes between natural and moral evil, with the former constituting the real theological difficulty. How can a good, omnipotent God create or permit floods, disease and other natural disasters that destroy innocent lives? Kaplan’s response is unequivocal. “The question why evil exists is one to which the human mind should never expect to find an answer. It seems to be a necessary condition of life which we expect as part of existence. For, as human beings, we can never know why anything exists. But if the existence of evil is part of the mystery of the world that baffles human understanding, the existence of the good is no less a part of that mystery.”18 Thus Kaplan saw the Holocaust as a problem of the moral condition of the human race. The reasons for the inhuman behavior of the Nazis and much of the German population, and the culpability of the nations that permitted it to take its toll were, in Kaplan’s eyes, available to examination by scientists and other students of men’s ways. On the other hand, the unprovoked suffering that most persons undergo at some point in their lives and the unfair distribution of pain, not caused by man’s inhumanity to man, found Kaplan as agonized and perplexed as any other theologian. In the privacy of his Diaries he went beyond the mere acceptance of evil as a fact of life. He did, in the last analysis, concern himself with the mystery to which he knew man could not supply an answer. But he was humble enough to keep these reflections to himself. For instance, inasmuch as the existence of evil cannot be denied, Kaplan inquired as to its status in relation to good. In one of his reflections during the thirties, he remarks that, “Good by no means presupposes evil, as evil does good. The absence of good is not necessarily evil, whereas the absence of evil is necessarily good, for existence is per se good.”19 Starting as he does with the normative Jewish view that the Creation is good, Kaplan is hard put, as is everyone else, to explain the presence of evil. All he can do is to accept the polar 44

Theorist and Activist

character of reality and search for ways to minimize what is harmful to man’s salvation. One of his major steps in this regard is to eschew granting to evil the power of an independent force. It exists, because there is a basic tension in all of reality which God and man alike seek to overcome. In the course of that endeavor, the universe proceeds slowly in the direction of improvement. This is not a theology for those who want certainty, but it offers an honest and plausible evaluation of what can be asserted, at this stage of civilization, about the problem of natural evil.20 When it comes to the term, “mysticism,” Kaplan is again misread. He had enormous respect for what the Jewish mystics had tried to do. He wrote that, “Jewish mysticism caught the true spirit of the kind of religion man needs. The keynote of its thinking is the truth that man shares with God the power to create.”21 No honest thinker can ignore the fact that while man has reached into the vast regions of space, he is still surrounded by an even more enormous unknown. Kaplan always sought to learn more about reality. He joined those free spirits who believed that much of the inexhaustible cosmic mystery can be appropriated for the achievement of human destiny. Nevertheless, he avowed that mere knowledge of nature and the pantheism that one is tempted to advance in its wake leave us cold. Man needs a feeling that there is a direction to existence that confers meaning on his striving for self-improvement. There is plenty of room in this image of reality for mystical assertions, depending, of course, on what is meant by “mystic.” As Kaplan remarked, “…it is not at all necessary to resort to the befuddling terminology of mysticism in the effort to give expression to experiences which do not fall within the ordinary concepts of reason. And it is dangerous to disparage the function of reason in checking the wild extravagances of uncontrolled imagination. All that is necessary is to enlarge the scope of reason to limits beyond the traditional categories.”22 Given such a position, it seems to me that an objective reading of Kaplan must conclude that he paid careful and favorable attention to the essential role of mystical thought in Judaism and in all well-rounded intellectual systems. Kaplan’s naturalistic theology was applied by him to all other aspects of Jewish life. It is hard to determine in the dynamics of his system, 45

Chapter 1

whether he derived his theology from his anthropology or vice versa. But while that is a subject that might be of some interest to ontologists, psychologists and others who are absorbed in the development of ideas, it is sufficient here to draw attention to Kaplan’s effort to relate phenomena to one another in some organic way. Thus, a God located in the transcendent regions of the natural order cannot be said to have “chosen” the Jewish people for a special cosmic assignment. Kaplan was virtually alone among Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century who deemed it necessary to eliminate the doctrine of divine election from the Jewish mind. The logic of his theology left no room for a supernatural chooser. Nor did his ethical vision permit arrogating to any people a monopoly on moral responsibility for the welfare of mankind. That obligation rests equally on all peoples, depending on the circumstances surrounding each of them at any one time. The Chosen People doctrine, Kaplan understood, is woven of many threads, each of which introduces into the fabric of Judaism a source of spiritual deficiency. All together, they cast the Jewish people into the comparative mood, whereby the worth of Judaism is determined by whether or not its uniqueness also bears the signs of superiority or noblesse oblige. The implications of this mood for Jewish education and for inter-group relations reach far beyond the Jewish people. Strains of the doctrine are to be found in almost every tradition and cause untold damage to the perceptions that each has of the other. In place of election, Kaplan urged the Jews to accept the burden of their historical situation and, by endeavoring to respond to its challenge with ethical rectitude, contribute their share to the humanization of mankind. In other words, once election is removed from the theological framework, its message of responsibility for each person and each nation can be unambiguously held up for examination. It is this moral purpose of national life that informed Kaplan’s philosophy of education. In this connection, too, Kaplan’s intertwining of theory and practice stands out. His entire professional career is dramatic evidence of this organic and pragmatic approach. Kaplan was associated in various capacities for over fifty years with the Jewish Theological Seminary. During this period, he helped establish and also lectured at the School for Jewish Social Work. He 46

Theorist and Activist

taught for several years at Teachers College of Columbia University, where he made important contributions to the scope of educational philosophy. He taught philosophy of education at the Hebrew University, where he was asked to head up the School of Education. He did not confine himself to the academy: he appeared before lay audiences throughout the United States. He initiated the idea of the University of Judaism in Los Angeles and played a key role in bringing it to fruition. Kaplan participated in countless seminars and served on innumerable public committees. Kaplan’s career is an intellectual saga of historic proportions. Kaplan had many faults as a pedagogue. Yet he had few peers in transmitting to his students an awareness of his dedication to intellectual honesty. No teacher, he insisted, may violate the freedom of mind of his students or lead them to believe that freedom justifies their holding any idea without being willing or able to expose it to the collective judgment of the best minds of their generation. Kaplan loved the Jewish heritage, but he also recognized its weaknesses. He appealed for profound study of classic texts, but that erudition must stimulate new and creative ideas and forms of expression, unknown to our ancestors. Education, formal and informal, is the main instrument for promoting the advance of all civilizations. Kaplan was particularly eager to strengthen education by tying it closely to the democratic way of life. Here again, we see his passion for organic thinking. Democracy’s whole success depends upon the ability of the masses to bring to their decisions a fund of knowledge, a power of analysis and a wisdom born of tolerance of difference. Kaplan always drew the educational implications of his ideas, and he was equally eager to understand why some of those ideas, in which he placed great stock, were not acceptable to his audiences or his students. Kaplan’s life might be described as one of unending educational tension. Since education is the key to salvation, progress in that direction is inevitably slow and uncertain. Human beings, Kaplan maintained in his tough-mindedness, must cultivate a morale based on a realistic acknowledgment of the mortal condition. In this respect, as we have seen, there is much similarity between his reading of reality and that of 47

Chapter 1

Bertrand Russell, who preached a gospel of human dignity and defiance in the face of a cosmos bent on destroying itself.23 Kaplan, instead, depicted a universe of inexhaustible creative power, striving to bring order out of chaos and capable of injecting into existence new and improved forms of matter and mind. In the morbid atmosphere of the thirties and forties, during the unspeakable period of Nazism and the Cold War between the East and the West that ensued at its conclusion, Kaplan’s voice spoke of man’s need to strive toward perfection, even though the best he could hope to achieve was a limited alleviation of his pain and sorrow. In contrast to the spreading existentialism of the period, Kaplan urged his fellow human beings to take advantage of the enormous freedom that is available to them and to create a more beautiful world. One of the repeated criticisms leveled against Kaplan is that he lacked a poetic sense and was devoid of the emotions that are associated with the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of life. Nothing could be further from the truth. His published works and his activities in fashioning a modern curriculum for the Jewish school are distinguished, among other ways, by their emphasis on the need to heighten the artistic and emotional elements in Jewish life. Kaplan was largely responsible for the introduction of musical and artistic self-expression as a major objective in the education of Jewish children. Moreover, in his efforts to restore the creative spirit to public worship, one of his main aims was to infuse beauty and emotional power into what has become a moribund repetition of a formula that is largely irrelevant to the concerns of the worshippers. A study of Mordecai Kaplan’s intellectual career should be revealing to anyone interested in the dynamics of cultural history. In the first place, what drove a man with such obviously catholic and universal interests to devote almost a whole century of intellectual endeavor to the central question of creative Jewish survival? The answers to this question — for clearly there is no single explanation — would entail an examination of such issues as particularism and universalism and their bearing on chauvinism, the role of parental and other environmental factors in the framing of mind and the impact of temperament on lifedecisions. 48

Theorist and Activist

Secondly, it will be noticed that in many instances, Kaplan often concerned himself with matters that exercised the Jewish public only a generation or more later. This is manifest in his urging Jewish women to struggle for the equalization of their status,24 in his efforts to democratize the institutions of the Jewish community and to bring them into organic coordination, in his constant call for a new covenant which would bind world Jewry into a single people around an agreed platform, in his appeal to the non-Orthodox religious denominations to join the World Zionist Organization and in his incessant efforts to induce rabbis, educators and laymen to study the Bible and other Jewish classics in the light of the new intellectual reality. Some of his recommendations were adopted in the course of time, frequently without mention of his role in their promulgation. But others still remain to be considered. What, then, determines when the time is ripe for the implementation of an idea? Cultural history is replete with accident. Kaplan’s critics declare that his philosophy and his program are passe’. But that judgment might very well tell us more about the lack of vision of this generation of thinkers than it does about what Kaplan actually said. Of one thing I am convinced. Mordecai Kaplan’s writings cannot be dismissed or ignored in the careless fashion that has become common since his death. Notes This chapter appeared originally in The Other New York Jewish Intellectuals, ed. Carole S. Kessner (New York: New York University Press, 1994). A few items in the essay are dated, but I believe that the central points that I have made are still valid.

1

Mel Scult has written a definitive but yet to be completed biography of Kaplan, entitled Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993). See also his essay “Mordecai M. Kaplan: His Life,” Dynamic Judaism, ed. Emanuel Goldsmith and Mel Scult (New York: Schocken/Reconstructionist Press, 1985), 3-13; Kaplan’s autobiographical reflections, “The Way I Have Come,” Mordecai M. Kaplan: An Evaluation, ed. Ira Eisenstein and Eugene Kohn (New York: Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation, 1952), 283-321; also Richard Libowitz, Mordecai M. Kaplan and the Development of Reconstructionism (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1983). In 2004, Adar-Nisan Books published a magnificent

49

Chapter 1

study by the late Meir Ben-Horin of Kaplan’s theology, entitled Transnature’s God. The manuscript was only recently discovered by his family, long after Ben-Horin’s death in 1987. On Kaplan’s life, read pp. 13-83. 2

3 4

5 6

7

8

Mordecai M. Kaplan, Diaries, March 22, 1936. Kaplan was an inveterate diarist. More accurately, he kept a journal that is packed with reflections about himself, his family and a panoply of the people he met from all walks of life. He recorded important events in the Jewish history of his era and worked out in his entries many of his sermons. He recorded his disparate ideas and those that were eventually published in ordered form. The journals contain hundreds of pages of his efforts to systematize the science of soterics mentioned later on in this essay. They contain many striking passages in Hebrew and other languages. The entries began in 1913 and ceased, I believe, in 1979, when Kaplan was no longer able to concentrate. Most of the excerpts that I quote in this chapter are taken from the two decades of special interest for Dr. Kessner’s book. Researchers should know that the original, handwritten Diaries are stored in the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. A photocopy can be found in the library of the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. Kaplan, Diaries (December 19, 1947). Ibid., February 13, 1936. For an excellent account of Kaplan’s encounter with Communism, see Rebecca T. Alpert, “The Quest for Economic Justice: Kaplan’s Response to the Challenge of Communism, 1929-1940,” The American Judaism of Mordecai Kaplan, ed. Emanuel S. Goldsmith, Mel Scult and Robert M. Seltzer (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 385-400. References to the Chosen People doctrine are scattered throughout Kaplan’s works and need not be detailed here. Mordecai M. Kaplan, Judaism As a Civilization (New York: Schocken, 1967), chapters 17-19. (The first edition of this magnum opus was published by Macmillan in 1934, while a new edition, with an introduction by Mel Scult, was issued in 2010 by the Jewish Publication Society and the Reconstructionist Press.) Kaplan readily acknowledged the influence that Ahad HaAm had upon his conception of Jewish polity. Nonetheless, he refined in a crucial way Ahad HaAm’s conception of Eretz Yisrael as the spiritual center of the Jewish people. Whereas the great essayist left the impression that Jewish creativity in Eretz Yisrael would provide cultural enrichment for the diaspora communities, Kaplan looked to the vitality of the Yishuv as a catalyst that would galvanize those Jewries to create their own authentic forms of Judaism. Kaplan stated clearly the problem that underlay all his endeavors: “To me...the burning question is, can Jews and Judaism survive in the Diaspora? All other questions seem to me to be of an academic nature...” (Diaries, May 26,1949). Nor did Kaplan have any illusions about the future of the Jews in Europe, were Hitler to have had his way. He wrote that “...the Jewish people is confronted with the

50

Theorist and Activist

9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24

menace of gradual extermination accompanied by mental and physical torture...” (Diaries, August 12, 1936). The danger to Jewish survival came from the exposure of body and soul to forces that would require unified resistance. Kaplan was not naive. Perhaps the most penetrating summation of Kaplan’s perennial hopes and doubts about the Jewish future in homeland and Diaspora is his quip, penned in Hebrew during his sojourn at the Hebrew University: “Regarding the contrast between Judaism in the Golah and here, it can be said that from chaos it is possible to create a world, but from nothing it is impossible to create chaos.” (Diaries, December 8, 1937). Mordecai M. Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 136. Diaries, July 18, 1935. Ibid., June 3, 1929. Ibid., September 27, 1929. Ibid., May 1, 1947. Mordecai M. Kaplan, The Religion of Ethical Nationhood (Toronto-New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1970), 89. I attribute this genre of criticism to the incapacity of many modernists to step into the post-modern era. They recognize the problems, but they hesitate to attempt solutions that would necessarily set aside hallowed traditions and habits of mind. Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew , 231-243. Ibid., 235. In a significant entry in his Diaries, Kaplan suggests that salvation should be conceived as escape from evil rather than the attainment of good. But he points out that the determination by man of what is evil is often misplaced (Diaries, July 12, 1940). I might add that Kaplan’s suggestion is similar to the idea that Judaism teaches us to eschew and combat idolatry more than to make positive claims about God. Diaries, December 24, 1939. Ibid., July 10, 1940. Mordecai M. Kaplan, The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion (New York: Reconstructionist Press, 1962), 78. (First published in 1937.) Diaries, July 24, 1940. Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” Why I Am Not a Christian (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), 104-116. Mordecai M. Kaplan, “The Status of the Jewish Woman,” The Reconstructionist (February 21, 1936).

Chapter 2

The Rational Mystic

This chapter should be taken as a preliminary assessment of Mordecai Kaplan’s views on mysticism. I base much of my thesis about what I call Kaplan’s rational mysticism on what I have found in his Diaries. Even in his published writings, however, Kaplan had important things to say about mysticism. Our task will be to observe both how Kaplan, as a student of its varied manifestations, perceived mysticism and how he incorporated mystical elements into his own thinking. Kaplan took mysticism very seriously without ever abandoning his commitment to the rational reconstruction of religion. Before turning to the Diaries, let us examine a few passages in Kaplan’s published works, where he expresses his opinions about mysticism. In his The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion, Kaplan has the following to say; “Jewish mysticism caught the spirit of the kind of religion man needs. The keynote of its teaching is the truth that man shares with God the power to create.”1 Kaplan attributes to the Zohar the idea that the attainment by man of ethical truth confers on him the power of creativity. Thus, a few years before the publication of Gershom Scholem’s revolutionary Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Kaplan had gone on record as endorsing mysticism as an ineluctable factor in Jewish religious thought. Moreover, in the passage I have cited, Kaplan perceived in some forms of mysticism a continuity and an extension of tradition. The idea of man’s being a partner with God in the work of creation, for example, is a major Rabbinic concept. Kaplan attributed to mysticism 52

The Rational Mystic

a vital role in spurring the messianism which eventually inspired the establishment of modern Zionism. In 1934, he wrote that, “Mystic lore formed a part of Jewish civilization, as it was part of all other ancient civilizations, because, in its essence, mystic lore develops from man’s need to adapt his environment to his desires, to render the physical and spiritual forces subservient to his wants. Impelled by the need of transforming their environment, the Jews resorted to mystic lore in the hope of discovering the theurgic formulas and practices that would help to bring about the forcing, as it were, of the hand of God to redeem his people, by sending the Messiah and restoring them to their land.”2 All through the years, Kaplan maintained this capacity for objectivity. Despite his opposition to the supernaturalistic, theurgic thread in Jewish mysticism, he clearly recognized the contribution of the mystics to the return of the Jewish people to Eretz Yisrael. In the same spirit of eliciting the positive, Kaplan found mystical insight to be one of the crucial factors in the make-up of Jewish leaders over the ages. Starting with his oft-repeated assumption that no single conception of God can satisfy the spiritual need of all Jews, he contended nonetheless that the differing views could be legitimized only if “...their emotional and conative expression in religious behavior make for what are now recognized as the highest ends of human aspiration.”3 The mystic, in Kaplan’s opinion, supplies the emotional fuel that is essential to galvanizing the people into action, when social or cultural crises require it to adjust to new standards. In his Greater Judaism in the Making, Kaplan reveals in his analysis of the evolution and variety of mystical ideas his awareness of the inescapable role of non-rational thinking and offers some of the reasons for his rejection of most of the mystical approaches. He posits that one of the major factors in the effectiveness of Jewish mysticism is the obliviousness of the mystics to “...any challenge to the authority of the Torah. They did not recognize any source of knowledge concerning God, man and the world, outside the tradition.”4 In this passage, Kaplan refers to medieval mysticism, but the point applies, as well, to all fundamentalisms, including those of our own day, with the possible difference that the authority of Torah is now proclaimed consciously and often sophisticatedly by mystics and rationalistic 53

Chapter 2

halakhists alike. However, whether or not Kaplan assessed accurately the scope of realistic awareness in the mystical outlook, he has touched on a significant psychological explanation for the success of mysticism in winning over masses of Jews. The will to find an anchor in a Torahtrue Judaism, in the face of bewildering, unstable and often immoral surroundings, is overwhelming for certain temperaments. The quest for certainty is neither new nor likely to be eliminated from the hearts and minds of many human beings. Mysticism, Kaplan recognized, satisfies such souls more readily than rationalism and its tentativeness. Thus, the study of Torah as essential to the apprehension of God’s revelation and the observance of the mitzvot as the way to communion with Him offer a solid foundation for the quest for salvation for those Jews who can blind themselves to disciplined, verified experience and thought. Kaplan argues further that mysticism attracts many a mind, because “...it seems to hold on to the promise of coping either theoretically or practically with the problem of evil.”5 Normative traditional Judaism, according to Kaplan, was and remains less successful than mysticism in handling the question of evil, because it places its emphasis on equipping the individual to store up credits for the world to come.6 This heritage of the Middle Ages cannot match the fascination of assigning to the Jewish people the vocation that is the suggestion of mysticism; namely, to combat evil in this world. Each Jew is given an absorbing and cosmic function. Thereby, the acquisition of the requisite ability to fulfill one’s function as a Jew becomes a challenge of the first order. Of course, Kaplan rejects the premise that the conquest of evil requires that man attain supernatural power through the study and discipline of Torah, as set forth by the Kabbalists and other savants of mysticism. But he concedes that rationalists have to find a way of evoking in themselves a single-minded determination to fight the battle against evil similar to that characteristic of the mystics. They must do so even though they know that their struggle will be without end. Kaplan conceded that evil, particularly natural evil, is an inherent fact of existence. I cannot enter here into a description of Kaplan’s many-faceted treatment of this central theological problem, but I call the reader’s 54

The Rational Mystic

attention to one of Kaplan’s observations which deserves intensive examination. I refer to an entry in the Diaries which illustrates Kaplan’s struggle to find a solution to the questions raised by the reality of evil. In a sense, given Kaplan’s naturalistic theology, he should have no problem; a God who is perceived as an aspect or quality of the cosmic process cannot be held responsible for evil. God can only be turned to as man’s partner in the fight against the disorders of existence. Nonetheless, even the naturalist-oriented or process theologian must take a stand regarding the cosmological significance of evil and relate it to a mature conception of God. Even those who conceive of God in terms of process have to respond to the challenge of evil. In the following entry, we observe Kaplan wrestling with the inherent difficulty of defining God as independent and transcendent and yet fully immanent in the cosmic reality. The passage reads as follows: “The problem of evil is insolvable if treated as an independent fact, when in actuality it is one pole of the reality which is nature, or existence. It seems to me that the Kabbalistic representation of Deity as embracing both good and evil is more the truth than the philosophical tendency to regard good and evil as mutually antithetic and existentially separate. Apparently, the ascription to God of the existence of evil (borei ra) is far more the case than the watered down liturgical version, Creator of everything (uvorei et hakol).”7 Kaplan refers here to the benediction in the traditional prayer book, in which a verse in Isaiah is bowdlerized by the Rabbis, in order to soften the prophet’s bold theology. In combating the dualism of the gods of good and evil, Isaiah defined God as the Maker of good and evil. In composing the prayer book, the Rabbis changed “evil” to “all,” thereby distracting the worshipper’s mind from Isaiah’s intent. In brief, Kaplan’s response to the question of the reality of evil is to consider it as unsolved — and probably unsolvable. He does not grant evil any metaphysical status, such as was true of the Gnostics. There is no independent evil Force or evil God. Evil or chaos has to be treated in the spirit of negative theology. All we can know about evil is that it is not good, just as God is neither evil nor cruel. Beyond that, we must learn to live with the fact that evil is a quality of the universe 55

Chapter 2

not yet brought under the control of the good. This is a tough-minded theology, lacking the certainty for which so many human beings long. But it is an honest confrontation of life as we know it and offers hope that the direction of the life-process is integrative and that man can rely on the order in nature, as well as on the goodness, justice and love of which humans are capable. It is this positive thrust in reality which Kaplan designates by the term “God.” Perhaps exaggeratedly, Kaplan finds mysticism to be more proficient than rational theology in utilizing tradition as an instrument of Jewish survival. The medieval mystics, and, by implication, their successors down to the present, regard mysticism “...as an inexhaustible mine of truths that might help the Jewish People recover its ancient glory, materially and spiritually, as well as the individual Jew to fulfill the purpose of his own life on earth.”8 As opposed to this capacity, theology, in having to reconcile tradition with non-Jewish influences, has “...failed to establish a connection between the tradition and salvation, whether national or personal.”9 Before turning fully to the Diaries, I bring two more indications from the published works of the mystical ingredient in Kaplan’s philosophy. He writes in one place: “Religion is the ability to discover creative possibilities in the most unpromising aspects of human life. The mystic doctrine that ‘the sparks of divinity’ inhere in all things is what all religion should seek to verify.”10 As we shall see, Kaplan believed that man could not and should not limit his reasoning to that which can be immediately experienced or which rejects automatically the products of imagination or intuition. He insisted only that at some point, these too had to be subject to the discipline of coherent and experiential examination. Inevitably, mysticism has to be part of the normal outlook of man. Kaplan states forthrightly that, “If mysticism is the recognition of the mystery of life, then surely any statement or idea that has to do with Jewish religion is part of Jewish mysticism.”11 He asserts that his “...purpose is to indicate in what way the manifestations of the human spirit and the ethical aspects of human relations point to the mystery which spells God.”12 Kaplan found much mystery in the sense of divinity which Jews throughout the ages have attached to the career of the Jewish people 56

The Rational Mystic

and the centrality of peoplehood in the distinctiveness of Jewish religion. Whereas religion, and especially monotheistic religion, lays stress on faith and theological views on the essence of God, Judaism, without eschewing these factors in the religious makeup, highlights the mystique of the Jewish collective. In his A New Zionism, Kaplan, the rationalist, credits the psychological, emotional and non-rational reality of Jewish peoplehood with being the source of inspiration for creative Jewish survival. Like all mysteries, it is not subject to analysis and is effective in inspiring Jews only insofar as it is clothed in a cultural garb that meets the highest standards of an ethical civilization. Kaplan’s Zionism is a realistic combination of political strategy, cultural creativity and mystical attachment. There are other references to mysticism in Kaplan’s books and essays, and one can make out a good case from them for my claim that Kaplan did not permit the irrationalism of certain versions of mysticism to blind him to those non-rational factors in human consciousness and to those mysteries of man’s cosmic environment which defy the explanations of reason alone. Kaplan was too honest to deny that this is a mysterious universe, but he was too respectful of the human mind to permit it to be traduced by plain nonsense, blind adherence to the authority of the past or the failure to distinguish between warranted assertability and the masquerading of truth claims in flights of unrestrained poetic imagination. For all the dryness of his prose, Kaplan nonetheless was fully aware of the mystical elements in humanity’s exposure to the wonders of reality. He writes, “…we characterize as mystical anything we regard as indispensable to our life as human persons, without being able to explain why that is so, on logical or rational grounds. We accept our parents and our community with all their ways as the indispensable foundation of our lives. Why that is so is a mystery. Secondly, whatever experience gives us a feeling of direct personal contact or rapport with what we consider to be ultimate Reality we refer to as mystical. If we have a perceptive eye for the beauties of nature, any landscape or seascape or starry night meets that requirement, and therefore puts us in a mystical frame of mind.”13 Kaplan’s mysticism is thus non-rational but not irrational. 57

Chapter 2

This same mood characterizes the spirit of Kaplan’s attitude toward Jewish peoplehood and Zionism. He writes: “Since the Jewish People is indispensable to the Jew as a human person, and since it has always given him the feeling of being in rapport with God, identification with the Jewish People provides Jewish religion with the indispensable dimension of the mystical. On the face of it, nothing should seem more obvious; yet it is the very obviousness that seems to have led many a Jewish thinker and theologian to develop a blind spot for the mystic character of this self-identification with the Jewish People. They seem to see in it only the socio-psychological significance which the non-Jewish social scientist, as an outsider, can see in it. But if they would stop to consider for one moment the entire regimen of Jewish religious practice and ritual and note the extra-ordinary fact that the individual Jew never takes part in them without associating himself with the whole House of Israel, they would begin to sense the extent to which this association with the Jewish People is not merely a sociopsychological but a definitely mystical, experience.”14 We turn now to some of Kaplan’s reflections on mysticism as recorded in the Diaries. Some of what he wrote there is to be found in what he published, but there is also a treasure of questions and insights that should add further proof, if such be needed, to my charge that Kaplan’s critics fail to do justice to him as a theologian. It has to be hammered home that Kaplan, for all the dryness of his prose, was a highly emotional person, who valued feeling as a natural and essential part of being human. However, emotion, like reason, has to be disciplined and refined; excessive feeling can be as destructive as reason unrestrained by moral standards. But whether emotion runs amok or functions constructively, it is an ineluctable aspect of consciousness. As Kaplan notes, “Who in his right senses ever claimed that he could afford to ignore the role of the emotions, the nonrational or the mystical aspects of reality? Who ever attempted to base disinterested love or loyalty on pure reason”?15 Clearly, Kaplan believed that rationalism and mysticism should be construed as supplementing, rather than contradicting, one another. Where they are in mutual opposition, one can be fairly certain that reason has been suppressed or distorted or that emotion and imagination have 58

The Rational Mystic

become unbridled substitutes for straight thinking. However, reason and feeling, rationalism and mysticism, experience and mystery are all part of the organic complex of human consciousness. Like the parts of any well-functioning machine, their respective roles have to be coordinated. When that happens, man achieves “...a rational method of indicating where to look for that inexpressible, indescribable and incomprehensible mystery we name God.”16 Kaplan realized how difficult it is to achieve this balance. Therefore, he was especially suspicious of the kinds of mysticism that seize the popular mind. He cautioned against that mysticism which is “...the articulation in ideas, feeling and action of the state of mind induced by the imagination when uncontrolled by the intellect or by reason and intelligence.”17 Although respectful of the human mind in general, Kaplan was often skeptical about the intelligence of the average person. Hence, he was not surprised that crass mysticism is frequently a mass phenomenon. Kaplan’s ceaseless effort to find a proper place in his system for mystery, imagination and emotion did not prevent him from casting his barbs at mysticism as it was and is still generally understood. He described it as “...a kind of fig-leaf mythology which is intended to hide the shame of ignorance.”18 This is the problem of anyone who tries to distinguish between the unknown and the unknowable. Kaplan conceded that there are dimensions of existence that are beyond human ken, such as why evil exists or why, indeed, there is existence, at all. But he would not accord to mystics the ability to capture the unknown or the unknowable by means of pure intellection or imagination, or by magic or hermeneutical manipulation of the Bible or other revealed texts. The human power to think is one of those givens whose workings, once having been acknowledged, cannot be further explicated in any category of Why? or, in certain respects, even How? Kaplan was not a logical positivist, but he agreed with Gilbert Ryle that the soul or mind is not a “ghost in a machine,” an instrument separate from the body. Thinking is what a certain ordering of matter, the human body, learns to do as it matures. But having said that, we have not advanced very far toward understanding the thought process. Kaplan suggests in one of 59

Chapter 2

his entries that perhaps we ought to say,”...it thinks in me,” rather than “I think.”19 We seem to be overwhelmed by the complexity of thought, and this is borne out in the way we try to express the act of cogitation. Who or what is the “I” in “I think”? And what is the “it” in “it dawned on me”? Of course, we can answer that the “I” can be found in the mind in its conscious and purposive state, while the “it” is the passive mind. But then, we have explained nothing. Kaplan’s rationalism led him to conclude that these questions are unanswerable and that it is unprofitable to waste time on idle speculation about them. Instead, he sought to understand as much as possible about the process of thinking and to harness that knowledge to purposes that are attainable and that seem to be in accord with the physical structure of the universe and the moral and esthetic needs of mankind. Implicit in this approach is the necessity to perceive consciousness as a phase of a universal process that transcends humankind, individually and collectively. Kaplan did not dodge the problem of transcendence. Kaplan refers to transcendence throughout the Diaries and in his published volumes. Each time he mentions the subject, it is evident that he is attempting to fathom how it is possible for the human being to use his or her imagination without losing touch with what he knows or can know from experience. For instance, in 1926, he wrote that, “God in his essence is transcendent. As such, he represents the mystery which we cannot help seeing behind the phenomena of the cosmos. Through his attributes, however, he is immanent. The ethical implications of religion are derived from God as immanent.”20 Kaplan never retreated from the idea of God’s being both immanent and transcendent. As he declared in a brief statement, “No true conception of God is possible without including in it both His immanence and transcendence.”21 Kaplan could not accept a simplistic, pantheistic identification of God and nature, but neither did he relinquish his conviction that God and nature are intertwined, much in the fashion of body, mind and soul. In other words, Kaplan refused to concede that transcendence is a category of cognition that is necessarily equivalent to supernaturalism. In traditional theology, transcendence implies a God who stands over 60

The Rational Mystic

and above nature and controls it absolutely. Nature has no autonomous status. All is subject to God’s will, and the orderly functioning of the universe, what the Sages called minhago shel olam, the regularities in cosmic activity, is all that man can posit. But, in this long-standing view, the cosmic process is ultimately dependent on God’s inscrutable will. In this vision, God’s transcendence is separate from the physical universe. In place of this cosmology, Kaplan conceived of transcendence as the orderly framework, within which nature operates and man devises and seeks to carry out his purposes. Kaplan’s universe is open, by virtue of the accidents of nature and both the creativity and misguided steps of man. Chance, like evil, appears to be a built-in feature of reality and is to be dealt with, not theoretically but practically. The mystical element in all this is the assumption, for which there can be neither proof nor disproof, that the struggle against life’s evils and uncertainties can be mitigated and in some cases eliminated. Evidently, humans can disclose some of the laws that govern the universe. Kaplan’s mysticism is thus composed of his natural piety, his belief in a cosmic order and its availability to man in the satisfaction of his needs and just purposes. Kaplan tempers his mysticism with the sobering conviction that man’s apprehension of the truth about reality must always be taken with a light touch. Man has to rely only on what he can infer from the ceaseless tension between his immanent experience and the elusive transcendent order of existence. I call this rational mysticism. Rationalism and mysticism share a common desire — really an obsession — to grasp the unity of the cosmos. In the face of the many discontinuities that manifest themselves and disturb our confidence and complacency, both of these philosophical temperaments are founded on the assumption of a unified cosmic whole. But whereas mystics think they can rise above nature and somehow get into communion with that whole, rationalists are satisfied to acquire that knowledge of it which will enable them to improve the quality of their experience. Kaplan makes this distinction in two entries, in 1928 and 1932. In the earlier reflection, he states: “Nowadays it is fashionable to designate magic as mysticism. There is no doubt a form of mysticism which is as legitimate as the plainest rationalism, the mysticism which is based 61

Chapter 2

upon the sense of totality. But that is as unlike magic as an oyster pearl is unlike a synthetic one.”22 A few years later, Kaplan writes: “The only possible meaning the human mind can ever hope to achieve is that which derives from a successful creative adjustment to environment. It is only misguided arrogance that impels man to want to get at the meaning of the universe as a whole.”23 I interpret Kaplan’s position on transcendence to involve at least three points: 1) Transcendence is necessary in order to provide man with the criteria, the laws and the frames of reference that are necessary for an understanding of the connections between immanent events; 2) In the face of the many unknowns and the countless mistakes to which man is prone, he needs a source of hope and promise, a larger perspective which will encourage him to keep trying to broaden his knowledge and his ability to overcome the obstacles in the way of his fulfillment; and 3) The belief in an ever-present and ever-expanding transcendence serves to check the hubris that characterizes many of man’s claims to truth. He can never be certain that his appraisal of truth is either correct or complete. The mysticism which Kaplan never tires of criticizing is the sort which he describes in the Introduction to his translation of Moses Hayyim Luzzatto’s Mesillat Yesharim. In contrast to the philosophic bent of mind, that of mysticism “...did not stop with mere contemplation of God as the highest goal of human life, but aspired to nothing less than the acquisition of such power as might enable its disciples to transcend their human limitations.”24 Interestingly, Kaplan admired this pragmatic streak in mysticism, particularly as regards Kabbalah. Several times in the Diaries, he alludes to the practical side of Kabbalah, taking care to differentiate between its purpose of controlling nature and its employment of magic. For example, he comments that, “...Kabbalists and other mystics were aiming at exactly the same goal as the scientists and inventors of today, the control of the forces of nature (except that the former based all their reasoning on the assumption that the world was governed by personal instead of impersonal forces).”25 Kaplan continues by insisting that he has hit upon an important point in the proper understanding of religion. “Kabbalah,” he says, 62

The Rational Mystic

“is the transition between ancient magic and modern science. It is all wrong to imagine that because Kabbalah engaged in elaborate theories about God (theosophy) it had the same purpose in mind as Aristotelian metaphysics — namely, the knowledge of truth with a view to the contemplation of and communion with Deity.” It was power over the forces of nature that Kabbalah sought. “Its theosophy was only a prolegomenon to its theurgy. This is why its theosophy was based upon the emanation theory of God, for only upon the basis of such a theory could God logically be brought down to the practical every day needs of man. So viewed, religion is nothing more than primitive science, and modern science is the child and heir of ancient religion. The scientist of today is the son of the mystagogue of yesterday and the grandson of the medicine man of the day before.” Rationalists and mystics alike search for unity, the former in the hope that they may find explanations for the relationship between phenomena, the latter in order to overcome the discontinuities which divide men from one another and from God. The point of departure of mysticism is a set of dualisms that are said to pervade all of reality — God and man, God and nature, man and the rest of nature, this world and the world-to-come, body and soul, matter and spirit, and so on. These dualisms, however, are considered in mystical cosmology to be the aftermath of God’s mysterious act of Creation and are meant to be reconstituted into a final unity, in which the Whole once again becomes identical with the Only One. Kaplan, of course, would reject notions of cosmic dualism. His intuition, such as underlies most forms of rationalism, is indicative of a mysticism that does no violence to rational experience. Kaplan states, as follows: “We can know God not by reason from effect to cause, but by contemplating mind itself. The significance of the marvels of nature attains its climax when we begin to appreciate the marvel of the mind which is experienced with the warmth of immediacy in the sense of personal unity. When in this experience of personal unity there is also borne in on us the unity of life and the world as a whole, we have come face to face with God.”26 In other words, unity already exists in diversity. The One and the Many are not contradictions, but their connections have to be grasped by 63

Chapter 2

recourse to over-riding, transcendent principles of interdependence and organicity that condition the possibilities and the limits of their interaction. Kaplan’s quest for unity is thus based on the ability of men and women to harness their purposes to an accurate reading of experience. They have to adjust their sights in the light of the facts of nature and to act intelligently in the implementation of their ideals and purposes. Kaplan argues that, “There is much more of the case for humanity and for that cosmic unity and creativity which gives meaning to life in the social idealists of the last three centuries than in the self-intoxicated mystics who, if they really got at the secret of godhood, were unable to communicate it in spite of their proliferate verbosity and their bizarre actions.”27 This pragmatic conclusion is typical of Kaplan’s well-known aversion to metaphysical abstractions not sired by experience. Nonetheless, he did not try to hide his own leap of faith which was the motive power behind his entire philosophy. One has only to read Bertrand Russell’s early, passionate essay, “A Free Man’s Worship,” and compare it with Kaplan’s outlook on life to sense the deep, pious root of Kaplan’s thinking. He asserts that, “Some kind of a world view is a prerequisite to any organized conduct of life. But then there are those thinkers who maintain that irrespective of the nature of reality, it should be possible to organize lives morally and rationally...They don’t realize that in denying any meaning to Reality, they are smuggling in such meaning through the door of human personality which they extol.”28 As a corollary to Kaplan’s efforts to coordinate the search for unity in nature and in the moral order, it is pertinent to note his view that religion should not be tied to the mystery of nature. He maintained that the reality of transcendence is best appreciated in the experience of responsibility.29 The concept of God is to be regarded as a construct applied to whatever in the totality of existence impels and assists man to become fully human, morally, as well as intellectually. There would be no problem in adding numerous other passages from the Diaries to illustrate the varied facets of Kaplan’s concern with mysticism, both in its role in the framing of Jewish spirituality over the centuries and in its place in his uninterrupted attempt to refine his 64

The Rational Mystic

own thought. Then, too, there is much work to be done to explore the general impact of the Zeitgeist on the direction of Kaplan’s philosophy and the specific influence of or similarity to the thinkers whose ideas he considered worthy of attention. Kaplan himself declared that he arrived at most of his ideas himself and only later turned to others for correction, support, illustration or enrichment. Whether or not this self-evaluation is acceptable is another area for scholars to examine. I acknowledge the incompleteness of this chapter, but mine is not the obligation to exhaust the subject. I conclude with an example of Kaplan’s spirituality, which to my mind is an indication of his poetic urge and the emotional, mystic foundation of his rationalistic conception of God, man and the universe. One Friday morning in December, 1938, he awoke with the following thought, which he immediately recorded: “Who am I?/ I am I/ What am I? Dust that breathes,/ Breath that sings,/ Song that dies,/ But in dying,/ Lives in You.”30 Notes This chapter is an edited and expanded version of a paper delivered at a conference on Kaplan’s thought sponsored by Queens College, November 14-15, 1993. 1

Kaplan, The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion, 78. (First printing: Macmillan, 1937.)

2

Mordecai M. Kaplan, Judaism As a Civilization (New York: Schocken, 1967), 270271. (First printing: 1934.)

3

Ibid., 397. Mordecai M. Kaplan, The Greater Judaism in the Making (New York: Reconstructionist Press, 1960), 124.

4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Ibid., 128. Ibid. Diaries, April 11, 1967. Kaplan, The Greater Judaism in the Making, 130. Ibid. Ibid., 468. Mordecai M. Kaplan, Questions Jews Ask (New York: Reconstructionist Press, 1956), 468.

65

Chapter 2

12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26

27 28 29 30

Ibid. Mordecai M. Kaplan, A New Zionism (New York: Theodor Herzl Foundation, 1955), 115. Ibid., 115-116. Diaries, April 17, 1955. Ibid., August 28, 1956. Ibid., January 6, 1957. Ibid., July 10, 1965. Ibid., October 2, 1938. Ibid., March 3, 1926. Ibid., January 7, 1957. Ibid., August 31, 1928. Ibid., September 23, 1932 Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, Mesillat Yesharim, tr. Mordechai M. Kaplan (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1948), xxviii. Diaries, March 7, 1929. See also March 10, 1935. Ibid., February 2, 1930. See also the thought recorded on August 26, 1933: “The God of religion is not an inference but an object of immediate experience, rightly or wrongly. If the Jews had not believed that their God had actually shown himself to their ancestors at Sinai, the Jewish people would long ago have disappeared.” Ibid., August 3, 1935. Ibid., August 3, 1934. Ibid., June 23, 1948. Ibid., December 16, 1938.

Chapter 3

Toward a Theology of Experience

One Shabbat afternoon, I went for a walk around my daughter's kibbutz. I met up with a seven-year old boy, who was kicking a soccer ball. He stopped me and asked if I would be interested in playing with him. I answered, “Yes, but I'm not very good.” He promised to give me some pointers. So we began to kick the ball back and forth. After a few moments of silent concentration on the intricacies of soccer, the youngster asked me, “Are you Adeena's father?” “Yes. I am,” I answered. Came the next question. “You're religious, aren't you?” “Yes.” “Do you believe in God?” Again, I replied, “Yes.” “So do I.” End of conversation. Several times since that charming exchange, I have reflected on what might have been going on in the mind of my little friend. What did he mean by “religious”? How did he picture God? Why did he feel it necessary to confess his belief to me? I had my thoughts about each of these questions, but I did not think it appropriate to intrude on the precious privacy of this youngster's imagination in order to test my wisdom. Nonetheless, the few words which passed between us suggest that reflection about God is part and parcel of human experience and not an invention of professional theologians. True, the jargon of theology is created by the professionals — often, whether inadvertently or not, as a cover-up for ignorance or a means of staking out and protecting a domain of presumed expertise. But the issues which theologians discuss are directly connected with or can be traced to the crises, the doubts, the perplexities, the wonders, the fears, the 67

Chapter 3

passions, the delights and the purposes which constitute the substance of human life, from the moment of the emergence of consciousness to its ebbing and final extinction in death. Since these life-experiences occur not only in the private consciousness of individuals but also in their relationships with each other and in their shared culture, theologians extend the range of their perceptions and their concerns to the intellectual and emotional transactions of their group and of mankind as a whole. Indeed, one cannot attend in depth to the problems of individual consciousness without ultimately relating them to the cosmic involvements of man as such. However, the existential source of theological reflection is no guarantee that the latter will remain rooted in the soil of experience. The questions which experience stirs up are often intractable. Some thinkers, instead of accepting proximate or tentative answers, prefer to build complex structures of abstraction which purport to stretch out to the far-reaches of eternity. In those distant regions, they hope to find satisfying solutions to life's problems and meaning. Unfortunately, such structures of systematic theology only conceal the effort of their formulators to escape from the disconcerting fact that there are some questions which are destined to remain open. I cite, as an example of one great thinker caught by the allure of abstraction, the much admired Franz Rosenzweig. He begins his magnum opus, The Star of Redemption, with the following declaration: “All cognition of the All originates in death, in the fear of death. Philosophy takes upon itself to throw off the fear of things earthly, to rob death of its poisonous sting, and Hades of its pestilential breath.”1 And he ends his book with his noted call, “Whither, then, do the wings of the gate open? Thou knowest it not? Into life.”2 Rosenzweig’s religious existentialism is thus designed to enable us to overcome what he regards to be the most decisive emotion of our being — the fear of death. In order to accomplish this purpose, we must abandon philosophical idealism, in which the individual is smothered in the embrace of insensitive totalities. Instead, by walking humbly with God, we can achieve the faith, hope and love that dispel all terror. But what is the path followed by Rosenzweig which leads from morbid obsession with death to the passion for life? 68

To w a r d a T h e o l o g y o f E x p e r i e n c e

On the occasion of the publication of the English translation of The Star of Redemption, Richard Rubenstein wrote an exceptional analysis of the relationship between Rosenzweig’s personality and his thought.3 Of interest to us here are a number of Rubenstein’s reflections on how Rosenzweig responded to his own mortality and to that of mankind, in general. According to Rubenstein, Rosenzweig finds his way out of the temporality of his being by attaching himself to the eternal Jewish people. Our people, Rosenzweig claims, has already achieved its goal, to which the rest of the nations still aspire.4 Rosenzweig then develops his well-known philosophy of Judaism, in which the powerlessness and rootlessness of the Jewish people are held to be essential qualities of its eternity. Other nations cannot exist without land and language, custom and law, but for the Jewish people, these elements of national existence “...have long left the circle of the living and have been raised to the level of holiness. But we are still living as a result of our bonding to eternity. Our life is no longer meshed with anything outside ourselves. We have struck root in ourselves. We do not root in earth and so we are wanderers, but deeply rooted in our body and blood. And it is this rooting in ourselves, and in nothing but ourselves, that vouchsafes eternity.”5 It needs no comment to demonstrate how problematic Rosenzweig’s position was and is. Only by avoiding all contact with the living reality of the Jewish people and that of the rest of mankind can a Jew sanctify homelessness, powerlessness and the self-contraction of a vital and creative civilization. Rosenzweig’s conception of the proper conduct of life for his people amounts to the embodiment of death in a truncated form of existence, not the triumph over death. Against this background of Rosenzweig, we can begin to appreciate the concerns, spirit and achievement of the theology of Mordecai M. Kaplan. Until the last five or so years of his life, during which Kaplan’s physical state steadily deteriorated and he could no longer engage in normal interaction with his environment, his mention of death was rare. One finds scattered reflections in his Diaries on the character of deceased persons and an occasional protest against the suffering that some of them had to undergo. 69

Chapter 3

Then, too, Kaplan’s works include passing references to the treatment of death in various trends in Jewish thought, particularly in regard to the question of this-worldly and other-worldly views of existence. Throughout his career, Kaplan affirmed life by dealing with its problems. He proclaimed repeatedly that death is a normal part of life, to be welcomed when vitality has run its course.6 As for immortality, it should be conceived only as the impact which individuals leave on the social groupings with which they identify themselves — their families, friends, nation, and other associations of importance to their fulfillment. Interestingly, Kaplan and Rosenzweig agree that immortality for the Jew is to be found in the continuity of the Jewish people. But what a difference there is in their conceptions of the nature of the Jewish people and of life itself! The two thinkers are worlds apart in the way each conceives the patterns of thought and behavior that a people ought to adopt in seeking to preserve itself. Rosenzweig offers us the existence of disembodied intellectualism, unrelated to the changing environment. He calls for a spirituality that lacks much of the passion of a mankind that must ever strive to maintain its health in the face of the threat of sickness, to guard its moral worth and its hope for a better future in the midst of suffering, and to adhere steadfastly to the pursuit of truth against the many temptations to espouse alluring falsehoods. Rosenzweig, of course, knew some of these experiences in the tragedy of his agonized body. But even before the advent of his illness, he had arrived at his own way of wrestling with the approach of death. He avoided having to confront the temptations of reality, power, autonomy and responsibility by removing them from the purview of his proper concern as a Jew. Thus, the life to which THE STAR would lead our people is, in effect, a submission to at least some of the passivity and inaction which denial of national vitality would force upon us. At best, it would be a life of pure intellect, energized, perhaps, by the practice of selected rituals. In contrast, Mordecai Kaplan grapples with the full essence of human beings, individually and collectively. He, too, begins his major work with the statement of a problem. In the Preface of the first edition of Judaism As a Civilization, his opening sentence reads: “Judaism is 70

To w a r d a T h e o l o g y o f E x p e r i e n c e

a problem to those who have to teach it, and what Jew is exempt from teaching it?”7 He concludes the volume with the plea that the Jew arm himself with the “…type of courage that is not deterred by uncharted regions. If this be the spirit in which Jews accept from the past the mandate to keep Judaism alive and from the present the guidance dictated by its profoundest needs, the contemporary crisis in Jewish life will prove to be the birth-throes of a new era in the civilization of the Jewish people.”8 Kaplan’s focus, like that of Rosenzweig, is the future. But the direction he takes is different from that of Rosenzweig, by virtue of his viewing the past as a form of life rather than as an expression of truth. Furthermore, Kaplan sees with greater comprehension and comprehensiveness the full scope of the challenge to a creative Jewish future. Kaplan speaks to the complex and varied interests of those Jews who look to the quality of Jewish life as the soil of their personal fulfillment. To appreciate Kaplan’s contribution to Judaism, one must seek in the breadth of his vision and in the honesty with which he delineates each aspect of the Jewish situation. Nevertheless, a great thinker cannot rest only in asking the right questions; he must also provide fruitful and suggestive answers. Kaplan’s theology, despite all the criticism that has been leveled against it over the years, deserves to be regarded as an important link between the long era of supernaturalism and the relatively new age of naturalistic views of God. Kaplan’s theology suffers from its strength. Because he sees human life as a process of interaction between man and his physical and social environments, between the individual person and the groups that condition his being, and between the groups themselves, his thought seems, on the surface, to be overly dependent on non-ideational factors. Kaplan’s attention to every-day problems requires him to deal with issues directly and not through the medium of far-reaching social blue-prints or, as we call them these days, models. This leads many a critic to dismiss Kaplan as shallow and lacking a theological system. Indeed, they argue, Kaplan is a sociologist but not a theologian, at all. For a theologian must reckon with eternal realities and verities or, as the jargon puts it, with ontology. The theologian must not be restricted by man’s changing experience. Because Kaplan insists that theological 71

Chapter 3

questions, like all other matters that concern man’s quest for meaning, must be tied to man’s existence as it evolves in real life, it is erroneously believed that he is devoid of all metaphysical concern and depth. Kaplan opens the door to such criticism by defining metaphysics as a flight of imagination devoid of the restraints of experience. This narrow conception of metaphysics is unjustified, and Kaplan thereby blinds himself to the metaphysical roots of his own outlook. Naturalism, too, is founded on metaphysical assumptions. When Kaplan lashes out at metaphysics in a manner similar to the way Rosenzweig attacked a certain type of philosophical idealism, he plays false to his own insistence that disciplined thought must begin with an accurate identification of the target of criticism. Kaplan is often guilty of treating metaphysics monolithically, as being identical with supernaturalism or with unfettered abstraction. Metaphysics, after all, is an attempt to perceive the cosmic whole which informs the parts that constitute human experience. Since no human being can ever do more than make an educated guess about the cosmic whole, even a naturalistic guess falls within the metaphysical scope. The question to be dealt with by all serious-minded persons is, therefore, which metaphysical position leaves them with the most comfortable set of unresolved issues? Let us explore briefly Kaplan’s theology. He starts by rejecting historical revelation, the belief that at some moment or moments in the past God set forth His will to the Jewish people in an act of self-disclosure and legislative decree. This form of revelation is quite different in its implications from the attempts of many modern theologians to explain how the human mind unravels the secrets of universal morality. In the latter case, the question is asked as to how man is to know when he has touched on a divine imperative; in the former, the imperative is given and unchallenged, not only in regard to ethical values but in relation to all other forms of human behavior, as well. If there is a problem for the believer in historical revelation, it is not whether he is in possession of God’s will, but whether he has correctly interpreted the meaning of the written command. For Kaplan, divine revelation and human discovery of truth are two sides of the same coin and not, as most theologians would have it, 72

To w a r d a T h e o l o g y o f E x p e r i e n c e

two entirely separate and unequal sources of knowledge. According to the prevailing convention, revelation is initiated by God, and man can only wait for the moment of God’s decision to disclose more of His will. Discovery, on the other hand, is the result of man’s effort. In truth, however, both revelation and discovery are terms we apply to our ignorance about the working of the human mind. Every language is caught up in the mystery of consciousness and its functioning. Our languages show clearly that we humans have not yet mastered the complex nature of consciousness and cogitation. One thing is certain. The mystery is not solved by positing the intrusion into the natural process of a divine Being whose thought is inaccessible to and incapable of being understood by humans. Such a premise degrades and frustrates the human mind, reducing it to an instrument of patent inefficiency, unreliability and self-delusion. Instead, says Kaplan, let us associate divinity with the unchanging laws of the universe, which we can apprehend and appropriate within the limits of our creaturely capacities. What we humans experience on earth gives warrant to our belief that God is trustworthy and that His ways can be understood. Harold Schulweis corrects a consistent misinterpretation of the verse in Isaiah (55, 8), common to virtually all those thinkers and preachers who have quoted it in order to prove that man cannot know God, at all. Schulweis draws attention to Isaiah’s comment that, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways Mine.” Schulweis argues, I believe correctly, that this declaration of the prophet does not mean that there is no common basis to the way God and men think and that men are not endowed with the ability to know anything about God. On the contrary, in the context in which the verse appears, it is clear that the intention of Isaiah is to implore men and women to seek God and learn His ways, so that they will feel impelled to overcome the vast gap between their behavior and that of God. Humans should know, that unlike them, God is trustworthy. He keeps His word; He acts consistently. He sends His servants, rain and snow, to water the earth, and they do not cease to function until they have performed their mission. Similarly, God is characterized by His trustworthiness. This is a fact that humans can and should learn and emulate. They must become as reliable as God. 73

Chapter 3

At this point, Kaplan’s honesty and humility come to the fore. He acknowledges that while we can know that God is faithful, in the sense of being trustworthy, consistent and orderly, we cannot grasp the reality behind these attributes or fully comprehend the ways in which they are embodied in the cosmos. Kaplan never grants to man the power of omniscience. Nevertheless, he maintains, we must ask, what phenomenon in the universe seems to be totally consistent and unchanging? Kaplan’s plausible answer is suggested by the stich in Malakhi 3:6, which reads, “I, Yahweh, do not change.” He concludes that only cosmic law, embracing both physical and moral reality, can meet this specification. This is the farthest point that man can hope to reach in the direction of the knowledge of God. When man steps beyond the quest for a rational grasp of nature and human behavior and makes claims about God’s essence or takes leaps of faith in contradiction to what experience clearly indicates, he is guilty of idolatry, ignorance or arrogance. Think, for instance, of how susceptible the human race has been to mental and social habit in studiously avoiding making the changes in its conduct for which the advance of knowledge would seem to call. A classic example of such a habit is the rationalization by traditionalists of the daily benediction to be recited by males, “Blessed are You, O Lord, Ruler of the universe, Who has not made me a woman.” HaRav Kook claims that the male Jew has much to be thankful for, since men, by nature, are the active force on earth. As Kook interprets the blessing, “The souls are divided in their existence into those that are active and those that are acted upon, and this is the essential difference between the soul of the male, which is active, impressive, conquering and subduing, and the soul of the female, which records impressions, is acted and etched upon, conquered and subdued by the authority of the male.”9 Clearly, tradition is a powerful instrument, not only in education for humaneness but also, all too frequently, for restraining or misdirecting inquiry and preventing self-correction and growth. Kaplan bids us keep abreast of the best available information about the human condition and not hesitate to draw the necessary conclusions from that knowledge, whether they imply unlearning or altering traditional habits 74

To w a r d a T h e o l o g y o f E x p e r i e n c e

of mind or practice or suggesting departures from some conventions of Jewish culture. When Kaplan associates the Name of God with cosmic law, he does not mean that such law is God. Law is that manifestation of God revealed or discovered in our experience. But our experience with cosmic orderliness forces us to confront one of the major theological problems of all times. In what sense is God both transcendent and immanent? In the short space of this essay, I cannot enter into the lively history of this issue or attempt to analyze the fine points of the debate. I wish only to argue that Mordecai Kaplan has stated a view on the interplay between these two attributes of God that merits consideration not yet accorded to it. If God’s immanence, in Kaplan’s system, is manifested in cosmic law, where do we find His transcendence? It should come as no surprise that God’s transcendence, as it relates to man and the world, also lies in law. It is within transcendent law that all disparate phenomena find their relationships. That law is the whole within which every individual thing is assigned its proper place. The immanent law is that portion of the transcendent whole which man claims to know, with greater or lesser certainty. In short, immanence is a station on the road between God and Creation. Since Kaplan always tries to deal with viable issues, his vocabulary often seems to lack the kind of spirituality that we associate with traditional piety. But anyone who has read Kaplan’s original prayers should be able to satisfy himself or herself that Kaplan appreciates the emotional, spiritual and poetic overtones of human existence. However, he refuses to hide problems in verbiage. Endowing a problem with a name does not solve it. Hence, it makes all the difference in the world how transcendence is construed. For Kaplan, it is an integral part of natural experience. Supernatural, on the other hand, which is often and erroneously treated as a synonym for transcendent, is a denial of the thrust of the scientific enterprise. And on the moral plane, it leaves us with a set of troubling paradoxes. How can a good God permit evil to enter Creation? How can God wipe out innocent beings in the natural disasters that disrupt the lives of innocent men, women and children, and animals, as well? How could He remain in eclipse during the Holocaust? 75

Chapter 3

Kaplan’s brand of transcendence fails to satisfy those critics who believe or want to believe in a Creator Being who will redeem His faulty Creation. But then they cause a dilemma by attributing to God as LawGiver a system of ordinances many of which are of doubtful ethical worth. How can a good God legislate immorality? These critics press further the search “for the basic nature and structure of reality.” Eugene Borowitz sums up the critique in scattered passages of his works: While Kaplan’s theology posits some reality beyond that of humanity, Borowitz argues that reality, according to Kaplan, is on the same level as man himself, namely, the product of the creative process of nature. Borowitz asserts that this view is inadequate as a ground for our values. It cannot help us to justify our choice of one set of values as opposed to another. There is no basis for a moral imperative. Kaplan’s notion of transcendence offers us only an extension of our human experience. It does not take us to another level of reality, such as is demanded today by most philosophers of religion.10 If I understand Borowitz aright, he denies that Kaplan’s interpretation of transcendence gives due consideration to God’s Otherness, to the qualitative differences between God and Creation and the location of rightful authority over the determination of moral values. Transcendence, Borowitz asserts, has to be more than a human inference. This is a serious criticism which deserves a more extended treatment than I can engage in here. But I want to offer a brief defense of Kaplan. To locate the quality of transcendence in physical and moral law is to proclaim that there is a reality other than, and quite different in essence from that disclosed through man’s sensate and mental experience with disparate reality. A physical or moral law is held to be such by the informed opinion of scientifically trained men and women, who base their conception on all the available factual support and on the absence of any counter-evidence. A physical law helps us to explain the relationships that exist between material things and enables us to control to some extent how such relationships can be put to human use. But we can only experience the impact of the law. We cannot see, feel, hear, smell or touch it. Cosmic law is other and of greater consequence to the operation of the universe than the functioning of mortals can ever 76

To w a r d a T h e o l o g y o f E x p e r i e n c e

be. Cosmic law transcends the genesis and evolution of all that exists and conditions the very being of man and the survival of the human race. Every move we humans make will be judged by the dictates of a divine law over which we can have no authority whatsoever. Thus, the so-called laws of nature transcend the physical world. The cosmos as pictured by Kaplan is not the one-level structure that Borowitz claims it to be. But what about the authority for our values? How does that emerge out of the Kaplan’s version of transcendence? The argument against Kaplan boils down to Borowitz’s insistence that we have to establish a distinctive, qualitatively “superior transcendent realm.” However, what does “superior” mean? If we mean that cosmic law exercises a greater power than that available to single phenomena or events or to all of them together, Kaplan agrees. But Borowitz and others of a similar bent of mind then make the mistake of thinking that by recourse to words like Being, God, Creator and Judge they have discovered a Source of truth and goodness beyond what disciplined experience entitles us to assert. For after having personified transcendence, they must still subject themselves and their conception of divine transcendence to the inevitable adjustments imposed by man’s further evolution. Kaplan, I maintain, without overstepping the limits of our human capacities, opens for the religious mind vast regions of wonder, in which humble adoration of God requires neither lack of respect for the human mind nor excessive confidence in the claims of religious tradition. Kaplan bids us tend to our job as mortal beings, namely, to make life more humane than it has been and more in keeping with the human potential. He has no illusions about the limitations of our given nature. Therefore, he urges us to cultivate a theology grounded in experience, one which looks reality in the face, which sees men and women as they are but also, with a warranted stretch of the imagination, as they might become. To see reality honestly means, of course, to realize the extent to which we humans are morally limited and prone to err and sin. But do we minimize our errors and sins by affirming that what our tradition claims is God’s command is indeed such at all times. Sometimes we try to weasel our way out of the consequences of such an assumption, by arguing that the tradition has built-in ways of keeping up with the times. 77

Chapter 3

The interpretations and reinterpretations of the great scholars are said always to have been implicit in both the Written and Oral Law. However, the ploy does not work. Exegesis is a legitimate method of trying to understand the past. But interpolation or the forcing of new ideas into the traditional mold is unfair to both the former and the latter. Are we not closer to a correct view of the divine economy when we interpret our experience and draw from it our spiritual and moral conclusions, all the time knowing full well that we do so on our own responsibility and at the risk of making many mistakes? By trusting in our human potential, we expose ourselves to the possibility of acting with hubris and of absorbing an overdose of unwarranted assumptions, but we are also more likely than staunch traditionalists to be alert to the tentativeness of our claims. Kaplan’s theological agenda was and remains a serious and profound attempt to grapple with the meaning and usage of “God,” “man” and “cosmos.” His worth as a theologian is belittled by those who are less humble than he in the way they write theology. Kaplan, at least, acknowledges that there is no one theology which can satisfy the varied temperaments, interests and intellectual vantage points of human beings. For theologies can neither be proved nor disproved. They can only be more or less convincing. And that outcome depends as much on the personality and temperament of the student as it does on the validity of the theologian’s teaching. Sometimes, a doctoral dissertation demonstrates great perception and expertise. In 1979, Charles Vernoff earned his doctorate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a study of Kaplan’s theology. Vernoff was critical of much in Kaplan’s approach, but he nonetheless concluded his dissertation with the following remarks: “If the original inner rationale of modern Jewish thought was to put to acid test the necessity of the primordial Judaic categories of Israel, Torah and God, Mordecai Kaplan on this ground, too, commands a signal position in the scheme of Jewish as well as Western intellectual history. Whatever his inadequacies, Kaplan’s achievement looms larger than his detractors could imagine and his partisans could dare suspect. Standing at a momentous crossroads in the history of thought, he glimpsed new paths that he himself could not recognize. The nature 78

To w a r d a T h e o l o g y o f E x p e r i e n c e

of the man and the scope of his vision may no longer brook denial. To accord him a rightful place in the Judaic and Western traditions simply pays an homage long past due.”11 In his perceptive essay to which I referred above, Richard Rubenstein comments that Rosenzweig was never more alive than during the years of his total physical disability. He was able to continue a meaningful life, because he was able to devote his full attention to the universe of ideas. Kaplan was no less enamored of thought, but he could not abide an existence which detached his body from his mind. The two, for him, had to work in harmony, if thought was to be effective. Thus, toward the end of his life, when he was confined to a wheel-chair and wracked with pain, he would ask me why death takes so long to come. A life without the opportunity to relate ideas to experience is defective. Only then, did Kaplan really express interest in death. And then, it was to welcome it. Kaplan and Rosenzweig. Two courageous thinkers, occupying two spaces in the saga of human existence. Is it necessary to choose between one or the other? Do we not need both types of mind? Notes 1

Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, tr. William W. Hallo, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 3.

2

Ibid., 424. Richard Rubenstein, Soundings (Society for Religion in Higher Education, Vanderbilt University, 1972).

3

4

Parenthetically, this version of election is one of the major strands of the doctrine as interpreted by Solomon Schechter. Schechter saw Israel’s election as one of precedence in time. Eventually, all the nations will attain the level of knowledge of God already vouchsafed to Israel.

5

Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 304. See, for example, Kaplan’s discussion of the approach to death in the Middle Ages in his The Greater Judaism in the Making, 144-147. See also his brief comment on immortality on p. 480.

6

7 8

Kaplan, Judaism As a Civilization, xi. Ibid., 522.

79

Chapter 3

9

HaRav Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook, Olat Harayah (Jerusalem: Mosad HaRav Kook, 1964/5723), 1:72-73.

10

For example, interested readers can browse profitably in Borowitz’s Exploring Jewish Ethics (Detroit: Wayne State Univeristy Press, 1990) and in his Renewing the Covenant: A Theology for the Postmodern Jew (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1993).

11

Charles Vernoff, Supernatural and Transnatural — An Encounter in Religious Perspective: The Theological Problematic in the Modern Judaic World View of Mordecai M. Kaplan (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1979), 407-408.

Chapter 4

Religious Education for Democracy

I dedicate this chapter to the memory of Dr. Avraham Elazar who devoted his professional career to the advancement of Jewish education in the spirit of democracy. He was an ardent pluralist, whose conception of education was animated by the realization that the varieties of Jewish experience and visions of the Jewish future could be constructive only if Jews wanted and accepted one another. Intense love of the Jewish people underlay all Elazar’s efforts to prepare the next generation to cope with the growing freedom and voluntarism characteristic of a democratic society. Against this background, we can understand Elazar’s interest in the philosophy of democracy and education of Mordecai M. Kaplan. In assessing Kaplan’s contribution, I also pay tribute to Avraham Elazar for the important role which he played in the communalization and democratization of Jewish education.

Authority and Democracy Mordecai Kaplan’s thought is distinguished by its breadth of scope, its coherence and its organicity. In limiting ourselves to the two foci of democracy and education, we shall be missing entirely or glossing over other aspects of his philosophy of and program for Jewish continuity that would be indispensable in a full treatment of the concerns of this essay. Unfortunately, in what follows, I can only hint here and there at such points of interest. 81

Chapter 4

In adopting democracy as a foundation stone of Jewish education, Kaplan was well aware of the revolution in Jewish self-awareness of which he was both a product and an agent. Jews are divided in their perceptions of Judaism and democracy. A vociferous minority of Fundamentalists look upon democracy as an enemy of Judaism or as irrelevant to it. Others believe that Judaism is inherently democratic. They point to the wide-ranging debates between the Sages of the Talmud and their halakhic disciples as indicative of the democratic spirit of Rabbinic Judaism. Kaplan, however, refused to follow either of these versions. Neither acknowledged the complex structure of Jewish culture and the revolutionary nature of Western democracy. Kaplan’s writings are replete with references to democracy, of which he offers a number of complementary definitions. In a penetrating essay on Kaplan’s philosophy of democracy, Joseph Blau depicts the larger cultural matrix in which Kaplan presents the case for democracy.1 Blau draws our attention to Kaplan’s perception that democracy is no less culture-bound than any other form of polity. Democracy, in Kaplan’s view, is as varied as the societies in which it is embodied. It follows that in order for the designation “democracy” to be communicable, it is necessary to state what is common to all the varied forms of democratic expression. What, after all, is common to Great Britain, which has an established church, and the United States, which is dedicated to the separation of state and religious establishment? What entitles Israel and France with their different electoral systems to bear the democratic label? Here are a few instances of Kaplan’s understanding of democracy. In regard to authority, democracy transfers its source “...from the past to the present, from the will of the ancients to the needs of the contemporaries. Just as political life, under democracy, gives rise to laws which need to be obeyed, so would moral and religious life under democracy. And just as the consent of those who are to live by the laws is required in political life, so it would be required under democracy, in religious life.”2 Democracy exists when the authority for making decisions about common interests resides in all the members of the group. All are to share in judging the validity and applicability of 82

Religious Education for Democracy

the achievements of their forebears. Furthermore, Kaplan avers, this conception of authority applies not only to the political sphere but to religious life, as well. While authority in democracy resides in the people, there are limits which must not be breached. Kaplan puts it simply when he states “...that a people must not deprive the individual of certain inalienable rights.”3 These rights are variously recorded and expounded in the sacred documents of democratic cultures — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness or liberty, equality and fraternity — to cite just two well-known formulations. Democracy, like all other forms of government, is subject to the weaknesses and limitations of the human psyche. Kaplan goes to great pains to alert everyone to the danger of mass tyranny which can result from bureaucratic rule and to the state despotism that can be the outcome of the dissipation among the masses of transcendent ethical values.4 Democracy, Religion and Human Fulfillment Kaplan conceived of democracy as a way of enabling man to act out his natural capacities to the maximum degree. In one of his random thoughts, he remarked that the essence of democracy “...is the belief that the people can and should govern themselves.”5 This is so, he continues, because “...every normal human being is entitled to exercise some measure of power or influence as a prerogative of his very humanity.” For Kaplan, democracy thus presupposes a profound faith in the ability of human beings to act intelligently and responsibly for the fulfillment of their destiny on earth. One of Kaplan’s great contributions to democratic theory is his insight into the nature of values and the religious component of the democratic system. This is a complex matter. Democracy, on the one hand, emerged in some countries as the antithesis of religious domination. That was the case, for example, in countries like England and France. In the United States, as Perry Miller has described, one of the main principles of American democracy, the separation of church and state, was a compromise. Competing religions abounded, but none succeeded in establishing its dominance. Consequently, says Miller, the 83

Chapter 4

various denominations were permitted to exist and the outcome was called “...freedom of the mind. Then we found to our vast delight, that by thus negatively surrendering we could congratulate ourselves on a positive and heroic victory. So we stuck the feather in our cap and called it Yankee Doodle.”6 Clearly, Kaplan had his work cut out for him in justifying his conviction that religion is germane to the very essence of democracy. If we accept American polity as one of the primary models of democracy, then the complexity to which I referred above becomes manifest. For while rejecting religious establishment, the founding fathers of the United States nonetheless highlighted the religious values on which the new state was to rest. In the Declaration of Independence, they not only gave expression to the “unalienable rights” of all men but went beyond their humanistic base and credited those rights to the endowment of the Creator. Although the Declaration has no legal force, it has remained a sacred text of the American democratic tradition and expresses for many Americans its religious spirit. Needless to add, American political culture is still sprinkled with acts of piety, such as the prayer which opens sessions of Congress, the oath uttered by the President at his inauguration and by witnesses in courts of law, containing the words, “so help me God,” and the countless references to the Deity in the speeches of political leaders on all levels. However formal and sometimes insincere these expressions might be, they point to the profound question as to how the ethical values of democratic society are to be derived. To understand Kaplan’s approach to this matter, we must first consider his philosophy of religion. Kaplan performed what he considered to be a Copernican revolution in the conception of religion. He did so by depicting religion as a response to man’s need to achieve the fulfillment which his essential nature and that of the physical universe make possible. Kaplan argued that the focus of religion should be on man as the measurer, not the measure, of human destiny. It is man who, through his experience, assesses the structure of the universe and formulates the purposes and values of his vocation in the cosmos. When theologians claim that God is at the center and that it is He who determines the content of human salvation, they are correct in the sense that the parameters of 84

Religious Education for Democracy

salvation are, indeed, imbedded in the structure of the universe. That structure, whether conceived in theistic, atheistic or agnostic terms, can be manipulated by man only to a limited, although significant, extent. To man the measurer is given the power and the responsibility to study the puzzle and to observe and obey the rules of the game. Thus, when he is confident that he has come upon one or more of the laws by which the universe is governed, he proclaims his discovery of truth or declares that he has hit upon a divine dictate. In the latter instance, he is inclined to ignore the limitations of his self-transcendence and to exaggerate the extent to which his achievement has really come to him as a communication from God. The supernaturalism of traditional religion, at least in the Western world, has been marked by subtle theologies that hide the reflexive power of thought. By way of illustration of that power, consider the enterprise of space exploration. In order to send space missions into orbit, scientists had to be able to assume an enormous number of factors in the behavior of particles beyond the gravitational hold of earth and to fashion a technology whose success depended on the accuracy of their suppositions. All this involved acts of supreme projection beyond any previous experience. The dangers were apparent and some failures were almost inevitable. Man’s ability to see himself and his world in perspective is limited by the instruments of measurement available to him. However much he refines his intellectual and technological tools, man always falls short of apprehending the whole perspective. Kaplan embraced both immanence and transcendence. Observing the universe only in its immanence is to miss its multi-dimensional quality. Kaplan repeatedly called for the adventurous employment of man’s imagination in trying to perceive reality from some transcendent point of reference. One aspect of that transcendent sphere is to be found in the values and ethical and spiritual purposes that condition and direct human behavior. Transcendence is also the concept we apply to the order that presumably establishes the interdependence of phenomena and the range of their possible, future relatedness. Man’s role in the cosmic enterprise is to become aware of the process in which he plays the observer and, to a limited extent, the orchestrator of life’s many motifs. Man’s independence is great but not absolute. 85

Chapter 4

His scope of knowing and creating is circumscribed by the objective circumstances of a reality which he did not create. To say that God is the measure makes sense, if by that assertion we mean that man’s knowledge of existence is, at best, proximate. To claim that one knows God or holds the key to His will is pure hubris. God is always an object of search, and if, from time to time, a person feels that he or she has made contact with Him, there is no reason to doubt the actuality of his psychological condition but every reason to be skeptical about the extent of his/her cognitive success. But man cannot help reflecting about the ultimate mysteries of existence, and Kaplan’s venture into what he called soterics is his effort to render that curiosity reasonable and realistic. The starting point for Kaplan is man, not God, but in terms of God’s bearing on human life, religious faith resides in the possibility that man’s needs can find satisfaction. Religion, then, becomes “...the effort to discover what makes life worthwhile and to bring living into conformity with those laws on which the achievement of a worthwhile life depends.”7 Faith in God becomes faith that man’s strivings are not in vain but are part of a cosmic process of organic growth, of rendering existence more amenable to human aspirations, when these, in turn, are in accord with the cosmic order. The Soterical Approach to Democracy and Religion In throwing his full weight behind democracy and democratic education, Kaplan develops a philosophy of human nature that befits the present state of knowledge. I can do no more here than offer a brief summary of the theory that Kaplan calls his soterical approach. He starts with the assumption that democracy is laden with religious significance and that “...democracy teaches a different conception of the ultimate authority which validates the ethical values of human life from that taught by institutional religion.”8 “According to democracy... the source of authority or validation is immanent in the very nature of man...”9 Hence, Kaplan has to offer an image of man that will accord with and buttress the foundations of democracy and justify his claim that democracy is a form of religion. Kaplan’s revolution can be described as an attempt to transpose religion from the key of 86

Religious Education for Democracy

supernaturalism into that of naturalism. And that step calls for an upto-date understanding of human needs. For Kaplan, religion is the affirmation of what constitutes man’s salvation and the ways in which societies go about securing as great a measure as they can of life abundant for their members and for all mankind. God, in turn, is defined as the Power, immanent and transcendent, on Whom man must rely in order to achieve that maximum fulfillment. God’s immanence is manifest in the cause and effect relationships which condition the behavior of physical phenomena and human interaction. His transcendence resides in the laws which attest to His unchanging nature and enable man to make sense of his experience. In one of his formulations — Kaplan never ceased searching for better ways to state his intention — he classifies the basic needs of man under the following rubrics: vital needs, wisdom and holiness. Vital needs, stemming from man’s will to live, involve such interests as health, security, work, companionship, mating and play. This list is by no means exhaustive. To meet these needs, man exercises power whereby he hopes to overcome resistances in himself and in his environment which stand in the way of need satisfaction. Power, however, in order to serve as a saving force, has to be guided by wisdom. The quest for power is a natural trait of every individual, but it can easily lead to violence. If that destructive eventuality is to be mitigated, then power has to be directed and checked by qualities of wisdom which we identify as expressions of truth — justice, lawfulness, inner consistency, love, mercy and other dispositions that enable humans to live together in peace. The element of the holy comes to the fore when men seek the purpose and unity of life and determine for themselves what that destination should be. Against this background, Kaplan describes the qualities of democracy that render it a religious phenomenon. Kaplan’s soterical approach to religion enlightens us as to one of the main objectives of democracy. That purpose is to help form the kind of unified and constructive personality in each individual that will qualify him or her to contribute to a world of peace and harmony. 87

Chapter 4

When Kaplan talks about democratic religion, he means the type of religion and of democracy in which “...the concept of personality, or soul, carries with it the principle of intrinsic worth or dignity that is inviolable, and of rights and duties that are inalienable. Among these rights and duties is the right to be different and the duty to be oneself or true to oneself, one’s real self, which, paradoxically enough, is one’s ideal self.”10 It is this concentration on the improvement of character, Kaplan claims, which should lead us to apprehend the religious quality of democracy. Character, let us remind ourselves, is a transcendent ideal, hewn imaginatively out of what we know about the human makeup and of our suppositions about what we are capable of becoming. For some, the ingredients of good character might be dictated by a supernatural God. For others, they might be built into the possibilities of an orderly but inscrutable universe. In both cases, the outcome is the same. Man is not self-sufficient. Although he has to exercise his creative initiative, he is also dependent for his salvation on forces beyond his control or subject to only limited manipulation by him. The key to the maximum understanding and cultivation of character is, of course, education. Kaplan’s problem — and ours — is: what kind of education suits a democracy conceived in religious terms? Kaplan posed this problem for both American democracy and for the Jewish people. Through education, Kaplan sought to firm up the spiritual foundations of American democracy and to democratize the religious base of Jewish peoplehood. Democracy differs from all forms of authoritarianism insofar as it guarantees a major role to the masses in the conduct of governance and in decision-making. Kaplan states: “It is impossible for human needs to be met without human society, and it is impossible for society to exist without the few to exercise authority and the many to submit to it. From a consistently authoritarian point of view, the many should have nothing to do with determining who is to possess authority, nor with what qualifies some for authority. Both of these matters should be determined by those who derive their authority from a source that transcends the rights of the many.”11 In contrast, in democracy, “...the determination of who should govern and what qualifies one for 88

Religious Education for Democracy

government is itself the prerogative of the many.”12 It is the many who have the authority to choose those who are to be empowered to make the decisions that all are expected to honor. Education is called upon to qualify the citizenry to recognize the capacity of the candidates for leadership. There is considerable truth in the trite saying that a people gets the leaders it deserves. The Soterical Approach to Education Kaplan’s soterical view opposes the kind of education in which the primary aim is to prepare young people for vocational success and which leaves the art of living to the family and religious institutions. For Kaplan, the job of the school from early childhood through the university is to assist the learner to appreciate and to implement the values of power, wisdom and holiness.13 Kaplan realized that human beings are not created with equal talents of mind, physical strength and dexterity. Most persons become aware of their limitations and learn to accept them. But they are all entitled to the opportunity “...to continue their mental, moral and spiritual growth in so far as their abilities can carry them.”14 Kaplan advocated programs that would insure for all equal access to free education. He insisted fervently that education on all levels has to reckon with the spiritual and moral dimensions of the human soul. To appreciate the significance of this presupposition, one need only look at the current state of college and university schooling. Students who reach higher education are trained to become expert in some specialized field but often remain ignorant of other branches of learning that are essential to their functioning as informed members of society. Nor are the students expected, in the course of their undergraduate or postgraduate studies, to wrestle with the implications of these subjects for the conduct of life. The argument that it is not the duty of a physicist to deal with the ethical issues that eventuate from nuclear advance has as little validity as the refusal of doctors, genetic researchers or medical technologists to examine the moral dilemmas stemming from medical advance. Kaplan, on the other hand, maintained that education should aim “...to enable the human being to live as full a life as possible... 89

Chapter 4

and so to train all human capacities in their mutual relationship as to produce not a fractional man but a whole man.”15 The Organic View of Values The whole man is one who can maintain a proper balance between the dimensions of truth, goodness and beauty. Kaplan accepted this trinity but was critical of the way in which the organic nature of its components is often mishandled. He reminds us that this “...HebreoHellenic heritage has not been transposed into the art of living nor into the policy of nations. In the meantime the undreamed of developments of technology with their thousand-fold augmentation of man’s power have tended to render man more oblivious than ever to the indispensability of wisdom. Only by reinterpreting democracy so as to have it apply...to every phase of living, and only by reinterpreting the great terms of the institutional religions so that they may fully articulate the redemptive qualities of democracy, will we know what has to be done educationally to replace the striving for power with the striving for salvation.”16 By wisdom, Kaplan means the capacity to balance the components of human wholeness. In one of his reflections on the subject, he writes: “The classification of values into the good, the true and the beautiful formulated by the Greeks has become traditional. Its inadequacy becomes apparent the moment we realize the term good is not coordinate with the other two. Plato identified the Idea of the Good as the supreme Idea, thereby making truth and beauty phases of it. I would therefore have ‘good’ coextensive with value or meaning in all its aspects conceived affirmatively, i.e. as conducive to the fullness of human life.”17 Kaplan’s sense of organicity and balance is not identical with the view that all values are equal in their valence. Nor, in their interplay, do they carry the same weight on all occasions. Nevertheless, Kaplan regards the striving for a humane, democratic society as the desirable focus of social concentration. In this, he expresses a traditional Jewish conception. The biblical tradition is more concerned with the problem of good and evil than with that of truth, and the Halakhah continued this emphasis. But whereas the halakhists deemed the beautiful to be 90

Religious Education for Democracy

a potentially dangerous category except in the context of enhancing the quality of a mitzvah, Kaplan saw it as an indispensable element in the program of human salvation. Although goodness should be the central value of life, it cannot be achieved at the expense of truth and beauty. I offer just one example of what I believe is Kaplan’s intent. A city of ugly slums is obviously suffering from a failure of its citizens to deal honestly and effectively with the problems of equality of opportunity for all. On the other hand, a beautiful city is no guarantee of social justice. The good has to be the focus for truth and beauty. Education in a Religio-Democratic Setting More than any other form of society, the success of democracy depends on the breadth and depth of its educational system. Kaplan’s most comprehensive statement on education for democracy appears in his talk before a meeting of the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, from which we have already cited several passages. Kaplan adopts wholeheartedly three propositions which underlie the report of a presidential Commission on Education for Democracy. The Commission called for realization of democracy in every phase of living, for education directed explicitly to international understanding and cooperation, and for education that would encourage the application of creative imagination and trained intelligence to the solution of social problems and the administration of public affairs. Several of Kaplan’s convictions are manifest in these propositions. Education has to be directed toward the fostering of democracy. Democracy has to be both the means and the end of education. While education is always rooted in a particular culture, its aim must be to have that culture contribute to the unity of mankind. Particularism must be a tool for the enhancement of universal values. And finally, education, however much it must attend to the collective wisdom of the past, must be future-directed. That objective calls for the cultivation in the young of free and creative minds. However, education along the lines of the Federal Commission must come to terms with the role of religion 91

Chapter 4

in society. Such recognition, argues Kaplan, is necessary in higher education. Kaplan’s position draws attention to a serious problem regarding the historical religions in pluralistic, democratic states. None of the traditional religions can serve as the religious base of a free, multireligious society. For instance, the Anglican establishment in England is merely a vestige of what was once a troublesome alliance of church and state and is now no more than a ceremonial symbol. But even this degree of recognition creates problems of education and status for other branches of Christianity and for the growing numbers of nonChristians in Great Britain. We need only repeat what was said above about the American brand of avoiding the danger to democracy entailed in the domination of any religious denomination. Israel has yet to face up to this issue, but if peace with the Arab states is achieved, the Jewish state will have to decide between implementing democratic principles of religious equality or traveling the rough road of continuing to impose a Jewish religious establishment. Even before the State of Israel was established, Kaplan warned against the undemocratic direction of the Yishuv in regard to religion in the public domain. Although consistent in his opposition to the close tie of any institutional religion to the state, Kaplan, as we have noted, calls for a common religious underpinning for democracy. The latter step does not imply that the historical religions have no role to play in the lives of their communicants or in the affairs of the general community. These religions are and should be free to influence the thinking and the style of life of their members, and through them to pass on their ethical and spiritual insights for consideration by all citizens of the state. But as for the conduct of the life that is common to all citizens, it is necessary to formulate a spiritual outlook that can unite them in brotherhood and to fashion a regimen of shared sacred occasions and forms of celebration that will sprout from the soil of the state’s historical experience. It also stands to reason that the various subreligions will undergo changes, as a result of their interaction with one another and their involvement in the evolution of the civil religion. It is this which many a traditionalist fears and which Kaplan accepts as a necessary consequence of opting for freedom. And it is this 92

Religious Education for Democracy

step in the unification of mankind to which education must respond courageously. Handing over authority to the people should apply not only to the democratic body politic, but to the historical religions, as well. Since religion, according to Kaplan, should be conceived as the outgrowth of man’s search for salvation. It is no less a feature of nature than the functioning of man in politics, economics or art. It thus becomes the responsibility of educators to equip the minds of the learners with the necessary knowledge and ability to think, that will enable them to choose freely the path of their fulfillment. In politics and economics, this conception of authority calls for its transfer from a single ruler or a powerful clique to the people as a whole. In religion, education now becomes the process whereby the authority of divine revelation as interpreted by a class of experts in sacred texts is replaced by the authority of the open minds of informed masses. This expansion of authority obviously has its dangers. No educational system has yet succeeded in raising more than a fraction of the population to the desired level. The price of failure of democratic education can be the tyranny of the masses; or it can be the inefficient, entrenched bureaucracy we so frequently experience in free societies. Nevertheless, no other system of sovereignty is more calculated to open the doors to truth and to the maximum development of the human personality. The rule of the masses has to be circumscribed by another consideration. Democracy is also the rule of law. Majority vote is no guarantee that the decision will be wise. Every democracy, therefore, requires a set of guiding principles and basic laws which the majority must respect. At times, when the circumstances of life change radically, tensions can arise between the transcendent guidelines and the correlative, expanding horizons of a new generation. The resolution of that tension, necessitating constitutional amendment, is a challenge to the wisdom, patience and sense of responsibility of a people. Democracy and democratic education receive their severest test at such a moment. However, it is in a democratic setting that the right to change fundamental assumptions of tradition is affirmed. As a result, the issues at stake can be examined in their own right, without the 93

Chapter 4

people’s having to debate whether or not it has the authority to alter the heritage of the past. Here again, Kaplan employs his soterics in order to indicate what democracy, religion and education have in common. He declares that, “Democracy without a philosophy of salvation is a headless torso.”18 Since human salvation or fulfillment is the point of departure of religion and since, in Kaplan’s system, democracy is that form of government aimed at guaranteeing the life, liberty and happiness of each individual, both religion and democracy must place due emphasis on their educational roles. We have already outlined briefly the type of salvation which Kaplan recommends for religion and democracy. However, although the fulfillment of the biological, psycho-social and spiritual needs of man are the joint objectives of both religion and democracy, the method for their achievement is not always agreed upon by educators. Kaplan leaves no doubt about what he believes to be the proper educational method for democracy and enlightened religion. He says that, “Democratic indoctrination is not the inculcation of fixed or inviolately sacred tenets. It is a process of teaching in which the learner is aware that he is given the choice between alternatives in ideas, beliefs, and values. It is possible for indoctrination to communicate affirmations without ruling out the experimental and hypothetical attitude. It can cultivate in the student that open-mindedness which enables him to discipline himself into living by truths, though he knows them to be subject to the limitations of the human mind, and by standards which he can freely choose, even though he should be prepared to exchange them when circumstances render them obsolete.”19 Kaplan has traveled far from those educational approaches that lack the sense of adventure he hopes to engender. The careful reader, however, will note that while Kaplan is tentative in his judgments, he is no relativist or advocate of laissez faire. What emerges from the education which he advocates is a dedication to truth at each stage of its apprehension. For man, Truth is an ideal to be approximated but never to be fully appropriated. But man’s inability to know what is known only to God is no reason to deny the cogency of what can be apprehended by the human mind. At the same time, neither must man 94

Religious Education for Democracy

forget that his knowledge is subject to correction and elaboration by contemporaries or members of future generations whose sights might extend beyond his own. This balancing act is not for those persons who want a motionless foundation on which to stand. Pluralism, Naturalism and Jewish Education In 1909, when Kaplan accepted the invitation of Solomon Schechter to organize and head the Teachers Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, he had already begun to picture in his own mind the environmental setting in which the training of teachers for the Jewish school must henceforth take place. It was the democratic, naturalistic universe of discourse we have been describing. Although, this environment might seem to be commonplace to many of us today, it was far from self-evident for most Jews at the outset of the twentieth century. Kaplan had his hands full over the years with his Teachers Institute faculty and, as is well known, with his colleagues in the Rabbinical School of the Seminary, where he also taught. The reason for this ceaseless tension was Kaplan’s consistency and resoluteness in not only seeing the world as it is, but in applying what he observed to the education of the younger generation. He was not a person who could think one way and act in another. Recognition of the impact of the Enlightenment and Emancipation on the social structure of the Jewish people and on the mentality of growing numbers of Jews was not original with Kaplan. The whole of the nineteenth century consisted of increased awakening on the part of many serious-minded Jews to the revolutionary environment into which they had been thrust. Kaplan’s uniqueness lay in the comprehensive way in which he studied the environment and in his readiness to deal radically with its full scope. He accepted as desirable both democracy and much of scientific and naturalistic thinking. That being so, he deemed it essential that Judaism adjust to the new conditions. If democracy is a desirable form of polity, it should be applied to the organization of the Jewish community and to Jewish education. Kaplan’s advocacy of community-sponsored Jewish education is too familiar to need repeating here, except to comment 95

Chapter 4

that Kaplan never supported the kind of communal control which would water down or overstress the secular and nationalistic aspects of contemporary Judaism or under-stress its religious content. He called for a pluralistic balancing of the available options. The reasons for the failure of the Jewish communities in Israel and the Diaspora to adopt this democratic formula deserve a separate study. But it seems to be obvious that the threat to vested interest and the fear of ideological challenge and of organizational upset are among the main factors in accounting for the reticence of Jews in all streams of Jewish life to expose their children to other outlooks. Even more than by the resistance to transposing Jewish community and education into the key of democracy, Kaplan was disturbed by the problem of how to bring the people into the scientific age. While Solomon Schechter was bewailing the Higher Anti-Semitism of Wellhausen, Kaplan was embracing the scientific study of the Bible as the authoritative way in which to arrive at the true understanding and appreciation of the text. Kaplan did not accept every assertion of biblical scholars as accurate, but he did affirm that the teachers of the next generation would have to be trained in the critical method. The result of such study would have to be the conclusion that the Bible in its totality is a man-made document. The scientific study of the Bible, Kaplan declared, “...has scrapped beliefs and assumptions that were considered sacrosanct, beliefs and assumptions concerning God, the origin of man, of the Torah, of Israel and of numerous other central values and beliefs in our life as Jews.”20 Every change in the social and intellectual environment affects the way in which the Bible is understood. We must expect that this will hold true for our age, too. If, as Kaplan maintains, interpreters of the Bible always read the text in the light of the moral and spiritual values of each age, we are advised to treat it critically today from the perspective of our scientific and democratic ethos. The study of Bible should serve as a paradigm for the manner in which Jewish education should prepare the next generation to continue the epic of Jewish peoplehood. If democracy be the latest form of polity adopted by the founders of the State of Israel, and if it is to be adopted by diaspora Jews in their efforts to survive creatively as 96

Religious Education for Democracy

Jews, then the Bible becomes an excellent lesson in the art of national accommodation to changing circumstance. The text is an incomparable story of the birth and evolution of a people and depicts its struggles with hostile neighbors and with its own soul. The importance of the Bible lies more in the questions it raises and addresses than in the answers it provides. It should inspire Jewish educators to arouse their students to seek their Jewish roots and to provide a democratically acceptable way of asserting their belongingness to the Jewish people. In so doing, they will have to clarify for themselves their relationship to Eretz Yisrael, either as olim or as Jews who will bind themselves in spirit to their brothers who have settled here. They will also find in the Bible a paradigm of the challenge to the survival of the Jewish people as a trans-territorial group. As such, they will refuse to accede to demands that they abdicate their right to maintain their national ties to their fellow Jews throughout the world. Freedom and Democracy Transcend State Borders The Bible also relates how ancient Jews conceived the universe, man’s role in it and the God on Whom both were dependent. The theological questions centered particularly on the moral concerns of man, individually and collectively. Jews would lose their birthright if they were to abandon this ancestral, biblical interest in the proper conduct of life and in the search for the meaning and purpose of human existence. This manner of studying and teaching the Bible is, as I have suggested, a paradigm for the whole of Jewish education. But much of its impact will be lost, unless all segments of the Jewish community recognize how much they need each other in order to expand their respective horizons, to correct one another’s mistakes or exaggerations and to enrich one another’s visions of Judaism. Mordecai M. Kaplan has had a fate somewhat similar to that of John Dewey, perhaps the greatest educator of American democracy. Dewey’s philosophy of education, which concentrated on the growth of the learners rather than on their absorption of subject matter, was thoroughly misinterpreted or trivialized by many of his disciples. Dewey was committed to teaching tradition in depth; he called for erudition. 97

Chapter 4

But he held that the appropriation of the past should not be an end in itself. The business of education is to make for human growth and fulfillment. Humanity is the end. Dewey never advocated permitting children to learn only what they want. They have to be helped to want what they need. Among human needs are a solid grounding in the history of thought and practice and acquisition of the ability to select and to apply from the past what is still relevant and useful for the maturation of humankind. Dewey should not be held responsible for not having succeeded in uprooting some of the deep-seated habits of educators, including those who presumably agreed with his theories. Kaplan’s recommendations for the reconstruction of Jewish education are so far-reaching as to preclude their wide-spread adoption. It is true that he did have profound influence over a generation of his students and others who heard him speak or who read his books and articles. That influence waned as subsequent generations of Jewish educators were trained without competent exposure to his ideas. Why Kaplan did not succeed in raising a sufficient cadre of disciples to implement his theories and supplement them in response to new conditions is a matter for cultural historians to explain. Notes This chapter first appeared in Jewish Education and Jewish Statesmanship, ed. Daniel Elazar (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 1996), 87-108. 1

Mordecai M. Kaplan, An Evaluation, ed. Ira Eisenstein and Eugene Kohn (New York: Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation, 1952), 244-245.

2

Kaplan, Questions Jews Ask, 413. Kaplan, The Greater Judaism in the Making, 481. See Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew, 501. Also, Kaplan’s remark, “Unfortunately, the human mind is so susceptible to self-delusion, and so capable of making the worst appear the better cause that it can smuggle in, under the concept of democracy, the worst kind of tyranny”. Kaplan, “The Need for Normative Unity in Higher Education,” Goals For American Education, ed. Lyman Bryson, Louis Finkelstein and R. M. MacIver (New York: Harper and Bros., 1950), 306.

3 4

98

Religious Education for Democracy

5

Mordecai M. Kaplan, Not So Random Thoughts (New York: Reconstructionist Press, 1966), 30.

6

Perry Miller, “The Location of American Religious Freedom,” Religion and Freedom of Thought (essays by Perry Miller, Robert C. Calhoun, Nathan M. Pusey and Reinhold Niebuhr) (New York: Doubleday, 1954), 16.

7

Kaplan, The Future of The American Jew, 45. Kaplan, “The Need for Normative Unity,” Goals for American Education, 326. Ibid. Ibid., 318. Ibid., 332-333. Ibid., 333. Historians and philosophers of education will undoubtedly detect the similarity of Kaplan’s views to those of John Dewey. Kaplan acknowledged his indebtedness to Dewey, but he insisted that Dewey’s conception of democracy and education were part of a universe of discourse that stemmed from many sources. Kaplan, too, matured in that atmosphere. For an appreciation of Dewey’s development, see Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Education (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Kaplan, “The Need for Normative Unity,” 332. Ibid., 329. Ibid., 329-330. Kaplan, Diaries, August 14, 1935. The Diaries, which cover the years between 1913 and 1979, contain numerous observations on education and democracy. Prof. Mel Scult is currently preparing a three volume edition of excerpts from the Diaries. The first volume was published by Wayne U. Press.

8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17

18 19 20

Kaplan, “The Need for Normative Unity,” 297. Ibid., 305-307. Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew, 449. See also “Horaat Hatanakh Bizmanenu,” Yesodot Hahinukh Hayehudi B’amerika (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1946).

Chapter 5

On the Theology of Election

The doctrine of the Chosen People is many-faceted. For instance, it has been advanced as an historical judgment about the spiritual-ethical priority of the Jewish people. The election of the Jews is a designation of their having been the first to achieve the level of Torah, of the understanding and behavior demanded of humans by God. Eventually, all the nations will reach this goal. Israel’s election is a temporary status. The Jews, in other words, are destined to be the religious teachers of the rest of humankind, who will some day match the spirituality of their mentor. Sometimes, this status is said to inhere in the very genes of the Jewish people, in a biological and mental make-up not bequeathed to any other nation. Sometimes, this spiritual genius is said to have been granted to Israel by God, despite its being the least of all peoples and, objectively speaking, unworthy of the mission assigned to it. In this case, Israel’s election is a mystery, a duty to be carried out even if it is not understood. There are many other strands in this complex doctrine. I shall list here only a few of them. Election is a burden, not a reward; it is a privilege that constricts rather than releases. The chosen ones are put into the strait-jacket of a regimen that often subjects natural drives to what seem to be arbitrary restrictions. A proselyte, for example, one who comes to Judaism from the outside, thereby imposes upon himself or herself a set of duties from which s/he would be exempt had s/he remained in his/her previous patrimony. 100

On the Theolog y of Election

Another popular interpretation of chosenness, of ancient vintage but particularly widespread today, is the notion that the chooser is Israel rather than God, or both simultaneously. “Who has chosen us from among the nations” means that Israel has found the true God and has dedicated itself to keeping His Torah. The tendency is to hedge this anthropocentrism and to put the choice into a covenant, in which God offers Israel His Torah. Israel, by accepting it, thereby selects God as its Ruler. In either case, Israel is unique among the nations in its recognition of the true God. Parallel to the role that Torah plays in the elective procedure, the tradition assigns major importance to Eretz Yisrael as the Promised Land. Chosenness is total. It embraces the entire set of circumstances that pertain to the national career of the Jewish people — its identity, its physical, intellectual, moral and esthetic traits, and the soil in which it must be planted. The land of Canaan was prepared before the arrival of Abraham, the father of Israel. That land was endowed with special qualities, not duplicated in the soils of other nations. It matters not that the borders of the Promised Land have never been defined with finality; what matters is the belief that Eretz Yisrael was chosen, no less than the people of Israel, to play a central role in the fate of humankind. Stripped of its land or deprived of autonomy in it, the Jews cannot fulfill their mission as the people of God. Not to be overlooked are less savory elements in the theory of Israel’s election. A strong thread, which has been cast aside by most Jews, accords to Israel inherent spiritual and moral superiority. God has “raised us above all tongues” has been taken literally by generations of Jews. The tendency of humans to compare themselves with and to contrast themselves from their fellows is virtually universal. It is the rare person who is prepared to see himself or herself honestly and to accept his or her individuality, especially if it might be one of mediocrity. Many people want to feel that they are not only important but more gifted than others. Jewish election, in the mood depicted in this paragraph, is, however, not the rising consciousness of historical achievement, but the assertion that the Jewish people is inherently more advanced in its ideals than all the families of the earth. 101

Chapter 5

Obviously, I have barely touched the surface of the role of election in Jewish thought and practice. What I have written thus far is only a prelude to a consideration of a serious, theological critique by David Novak of Mordecai Kaplan’s rejection of Israel’s election.1 In my response to Novak, I shall attempt to substantiate the validity of Kaplan’s rejection of chosenness and to demonstrate why Novak’s dismissal of Kaplan’s theology is unjustified. Novak is correct in seizing on the theological strand in election as the most crucial element in the doctrine. All of the threads that make up the fabric of election are colored by the assumption that the fate of mankind is subject to God’s will and that within this context, God has assigned a special role to each nation. The selection of Israel for its unique mission presumes that other peoples are similarly marked out for special roles in the evolution of mankind. The only interpretation which might be an exception to this generalization is the one which construes election as Israel’s choice of God. But on close examination, this anthropocentric inversion is found to be a questionable theological statement. We may speak, as Abraham Heschel does, of “man in search of God.” That is good, understandable theology. But when we reverse the subject and object and talk about “God in search of man,” we take it upon ourselves to identify and define God or His will. This is pretentious theology. But let us first outline Novak’s argument. First, I want to address briefly the tone of Novak’s critique. The bill of particulars is such as to prejudice any student who has not read Kaplan or who fails to note the weaknesses in the charges leveled against him. After all, why should anyone take seriously a thinker who distorts “...what Judaism is and ought to be”?2, whose “...views are not very philosophically original, but rather eclectically derivative from thinkers much more profound and original” than he3? Moreover, Kaplan’s recourse to these thinkers “was mostly rhetorical rather than analytic, which makes philosophical critique of him quite often frustrating.”4 Nonetheless, Novak does take the trouble to devote a serious essay to the demolition of Kaplan’s stand on election, and he does so because of what he calls Kaplan’s significant influence on Jews. So despite Kaplan’s mistakes and shallowness, he must not be ignored. Novak concludes that “Philosophical retrieval of the classical 102

On the Theolog y of Election

doctrine of the election of Israel can only be situated in the present, which Kaplan for good or bad did strongly influence.”5 One wonders why it is so frustrating to mount a philosophical attack on Kaplan. If he is unoriginal and mouths only what those who influenced him have to say, then it should be easy to get at Kaplan by demolishing his mentors. It seems to me, however, that Novak’s difficulty lies in the fact that Kaplan frequently adjusted the thinking of others in terms of his own vision and for his own purposes. Novak himself points to Kaplan’s reservations about the philosophy of Ahad HaAm, a man whom Kaplan himself acknowledges to have been one of his major influences. Similarly, Kaplan undoubtedly had great respect for Emile Durkheim’s insights regarding the role of the group in the evolution of religion. But he had arrived at his own intuition about the social function of religion before he read Durkheim. Kaplan was undoubtedly close to John Dewey and Felix Adler in their emphasis on ethical values as the core of humanistic religion. But he was not a carbon copy of Dewey, while his opposition to the disembodied ethicism of Adler governed much of his early treatment of Jewish peoplehood. I do not intend to defend Kaplan by scoring points against Novak. I shall deal with the substance of his critique. But I must mention the misleading nature of Novak’s reference to “the classic doctrine of the election of Israel.” At the outset of this chapter, I presented a truncated list of some of the ways in which election has been conceived by Jews during the 3500 or so years of Jewish history. Some expressions are of ancient vintage, some more recent. But all have their classic formulations. It is true that Kaplan never researched the entire panorama of the doctrine of chosenness, but he did recognize its many facets. When, after much soul-searching, he decided that election was no longer viable, at least in his system, he sought to meet its challenge on the highest possible level, the theological. Thus, I accept Novak’s perception of the importance of the theological argument for and against election but not the analysis which he has offered of Kaplan’s position. However, I want to add a few more words about the tone of Novak’s critique. Suppose we accept for the moment the judgment that 103

Chapter 5

Kaplan was unoriginal and merely eclectic. So what! A good eclectic can hardly be effective if he has not perceived connections between the views of disparate thinkers, and especially between them and the environment. That is one form of originality, and an important one, at that. If, then, Kaplan exercised great influence on his contemporaries, he must have had insights that were denied to other supposedly more original thinkers of his day. Or, as other critics have admitted, Kaplan’s intellectual honesty forced his students, colleagues and audiences to look at reality in a new way. So why dismiss Kaplan as unoriginal? Novak would undoubtedly counter with the opinion that he refers only to Kaplan as a philosopher or theologian and not as a teacher. More serious, however, is Novak’s charge that Kaplan paints a distorted picture of Jewish tradition and of what it ought to be. Even mediocrity can and has to be accurate. Novak starts his attack by telling us that Kaplan “...asserted that the classical biblical-rabbinic doctrine of election of Israel by God is not necessary for the continuity of Judaism.”6 He also maintains that Kaplan and his disciples regarded their rejection as original and as having had enormous influence on many contemporary Jews. Each point should be examined. What is the classical doctrine? Novak puts his finger on the fulcrum on which the entire doctrine rests. He writes: “Nevertheless, the point in common between the classical doctrine of election and even the liberal Jewish inversion of it is that the existence of the Jewish people is not that of a natural entity. In the classical doctrine, the election is as unnatural as the act of creation itself: it could just as easily not have taken place.”7 The classical doctrine — at least those strands of it in the Bible and/or the Rabbinic tradition — holds that God burst miraculously “...into the natural world just like (sic) creation is God’s miraculous founding of the world and its nature. Like all miracles, it can be taken as a reminder to those who would worship nature how contingent its seemingly necessary order really is.”8 It would take a monograph in itself to do justice to the assumptions, presumptions and pretentiousness of these few sentences. Here, I can do no more than touch upon a few of them. The biblical authors (would Novak challenge the plural and lower case term?), of course, and the 104

On the Theolog y of Election

talmudic Sages attributed both the regularities and irregularities in man’s environment to God’s action. No earthly or celestial phenomenon had autonomous status. Natural law, in fact, was neither a biblical nor Rabbinic concept. If, today, the majority of educated men and women do consider as proper and useful this designation for the order that has been discovered in the universe, this does not mean that they worship Nature or that they have eliminated its mysterious character. As I have shown in the chapter on Kaplan’s mysticism, he refers time and again to the mystery of existence. However, one does not solve the mystery with the classical but simplistic assertion that it is all God’s doing. Attributing Creation to the will of God raises more questions, and more troubling ones, than it answers. Not the least of these is the age-old perplexity as to why an omnipotent, all-good God should have created such a messy world. The classical doctrine of election, as outlined by Novak, is of this genre. In rejecting this classical theology, naturalists like Kaplan need not go to the other extreme and adopt atheism. For the latter simply elicits a different set of questions; atheism too provides no clear answers to the mystery of life. Kaplan prefers the more modest view that man cannot attain any absolute knowledge of God. He can experience only what appear to him to be manifestations of God’s action, and he must, therefore, define carefully what he means when he uses the term “God.” Creativity, says Kaplan, is experienced at all times; Creation, however, remains very much in the stage it was when Maimonides acknowledged the possibility that Aristotle might have been right when he described the universe as being of infinite duration. But inasmuch as this claim could not be proved, he (Maimonides) preferred to rely on the biblical account. (Moreover, the Rambam was more concerned with supporting the belief in the Torah as divinely revealed. This vision could hardly be sustained under a philosophy of eternity and eternal creativity.) Since then, the evidence has mounted that nature is, indeed, autonomous, although the eternity of that self-development remains an open question. Thus, a naturalist theology deserves at least as much respect as one based on supernaturalist assumptions. Novak admits that Israel’s election is a chapter in supernatural theology. Such, as a matter of fact, it is in many of its ancient and 105

Chapter 5

modern strands, but some apologists endeavor to rest the case for election on what they deem to be objective observations. On close inspection, however, we note that some of their assertions suffer from ignorance or overriding pride. Israel is not biologically superior to other peoples; its morality has commendable but also some reprehensible features. Its striving for excellence is matched by that of other peoples. Thus, trying to substantiate election as a designation of the objective superiority of Israel, biologically or spiritually, cannot be taken seriously as a description of the human reality. All peoples undergo change, sometimes for the better and sometimes in the direction of ethical retrogression. The claim of supernatural election seems to me to be the height of pretension. This dogmatic position brooks no criticism. It is based on a certainty for which there is no warrant other than those documents purportedly recording the historical act of God’s election of Israel. Is Novak prepared to defend the literal truth of that incursion of God into the affairs of humankind? And if not the literal truth, then what? Novak is troubled by any view that would reduce Israel’s election to a natural act. He is critical of the “liberal” inversion of chosenness as referring to the election of God by the Jews, instead of the reverse. (Incidentally, the inversion, as I have said above, is one of the traditional threads of the election thesis.) Novak bases his criticism on the assumption that it is unreasonable to expect that an entire community would, merely by its own will, be able to approximate “the absolute ideal.”9 I cannot fathom why Novak thinks that God’s election by the Jews is not a natural act. But then, Novak seems to believe that the Jews, in the elective mood, passive or active, are a notch above the natural. I leave it to the reader to judge whether this convoluted argument makes more or less sense — and Jewish sense, at that — than Kaplan’s effort to establish Israel’s relationship to God on the very limited capacity of humans to draw warranted ideological conclusions from their experience. Kaplan understood, no less than Novak, that election is based on the primacy of the Creator God who transcends His Creation and whose Creation never transcends Him. In rejecting election, Kaplan regards God’s creativity and transcendence differently from Novak. 106

On the Theolog y of Election

It is here that the theological encounter is most acute. Let us continue to follow Novak’s critique. He makes a blanket statement that Kaplan denies that the Jewish people was founded either by the will of God or by that of the people. Then he quotes part of a statement by Kaplan to the effect that, “A civilization is not a deliberate creation. It is as spontaneous a growth as any living organism...its existence must be determined by the imperative of a national tradition and the will to live of a nation.”10 Novak is unhappy with the logic and what he calls the terminological impreciseness of this and other remarks in Kaplan’s corpus. Novak argues that terms like “deliberate,” “spontaneous,” “will,” and “imperative” do not hang together. Instead, the normal sequence is deliberating about what to create, willing to do it and then feeling the compulsion to act. Novak interprets Kaplan as saying that the Jewish people’s spontaneous growth is really a result of an instinct or drive. Therefore, Kaplan’s attribution to the Jewish people of the will-to-live is inappropriate. “What Kaplan seems to mean, however, is that Jewish identity and survival are conscious matters needing no justification by any end external to themselves.”11 Admittedly, the words quoted by Novak from Kaplan’s description of the genesis and growth of the Jewish people require clarification. That is the case with many normative terms in common usage, including “instinct” and “drive,” as suggested by Novak. Nonetheless, Kaplan’s meaning is not at all imprecise, especially when one relates to sentences which Novak omits from Kaplan’s broader statement. No organism creates itself. In that sense, its genesis is spontaneous, even though, as in the case of humans, birth might be the outcome of deliberate copulation for the purpose of procreation. Group cultures are born similarly, as the result of a deliberate act of a pioneer or as the gradual emergence “...out of centuries of inevitable living, working and striving together.”12 Obviously, even when a cultural group is founded by a social virtuoso, its evolution takes turns in directions unanticipated by the founder and by each generation of his successors. Of course, as Kaplan writes, “Once it exists it can be guided and directed, but its existence must be determined by the imperative of a national tradition and the will-to-live as a nation.”13 Spontaneity is thus the social reality 107

Chapter 5

that emerges unpredictably from the most intense volition and the most careful planning. Non-human organisms are sustained by their instinctive reactions to their environments, but human societies are conditioned by the determination of their members to keep the groups alive. Without that will-to-live, peoples disintegrate; with it, peoples survive, but often in ways not conceived by the planners. A people’s right to live is no less inherent than that of an individual. But existence has its limits. In the struggle for life, the human person must accept the responsibility to respect the equal right to life of others. The same applies to groups. This is why Kaplan placed so much emphasis on the transmission of tradition by suggestion, imitation and education within the network of family, school, religious organization and communal self-government. He was an educator, who knew the importance of conscious efforts to pass on tradition while, at the same time, giving due consideration to equipping the next generation to continue the process of creative adaptation to the changing world. But Kaplan was also a realist about human limitations and the operation of chance and accident. The future, therefore, is open and unpredictable. Why, then, should humans strive to improve their lot? To answer this question, we must, together with Novak, probe Kaplan’s theology. Novak perceives Kaplan as more or less a carbon copy of John Dewey and other naturalists. He claims that Kaplan believes that, “Nature is all there is. There is nothing beyond it or prior to it; it includes everything.”14 Note that Novak’s statement is based on Dewey. Kaplan’s theology, however, was something else. In a 1939 entry in his Diaries Kaplan notes: “God should not be equated with Reality, any more than consciousness with man. God is the positive pole of Reality.”15 In other words, Kaplan defines “God,” the word, as a force within, but not identical with Reality. He reasons as follows: “Reality is polar. It is both body and mind and couldn’t be one without the other. It is both good and evil...He (God) therefore is ever at war with himself. He prays to himself...Since we exist in Reality or are part of it, we too consist of good and evil and (are) ever at strife with ourselves. God prays with us as we pray to him. God prays to God.”16 This degree of mysticism was certainly not derived from Dewey. (It was undoubtedly derived from Kaplan’s reading of the passage in Berakhot 7a, where 108

On the Theolog y of Election

God is described as praying to Himself that His attribute of mercy triumph over His attribute of judgment.) I have brought this thought here as one instance of Kaplan’s independent treatment of the divine mystery and to indicate that his approach to the God of nature was not what Novak describes. Whether it is legitimate theology to limit God’s being or power is a matter which we shall consider below. It is advisable, however, to draw the attention of the reader to Kaplan’s declaration that Reality is both good and evil. In accepting evil, particularly natural evil, as a fact of existence, Kaplan is careful to avoid the conclusion at which Novak arrives. Unlike Novak, Kaplan does not have to agonize over the suspicion that perhaps God is cruel. In Kaplan’s theology, the evil in the cosmos is not purposeful. Except insofar as it is moral evil engendered by human beings. “God” can thus be associated with the natural processes that work to eliminate or alleviate the discontinuities in the physical universe and those moral disorders caused by men. Elsewhere, Kaplan wrote: “There is only one universe in which man and God exist. The so-called laws of nature represent the manner of God’s immanent functioning. The element of creativity, which is not accounted for by the so-called laws of nature, and which points to the organic character of the universe or its life as a whole, gives us a clue to God’s transcendent functioning. God is not an identifiable being who stands outside the universe. God is the life of the universe, insofar as each part acts upon the other, and transcendent insofar as the whole acts upon each part.”17 (Italics, MMK) The theological dispute thus focuses upon the meaning of transcendence. Transcendence has generally been interpreted as synonymous with the supernatural. That is, God is “wholly Other,” apart from and totally in control of the universe. The latter has no autonomous status, and nature is a tool subject to God’s will. Its so-called laws are no less arbitrary than miracles and can thus be set aside whenever God chooses to do so. Millions of people, perhaps most of the human race, think in this fashion. Were theology a popularity contest, Novak’s view might better suit the current mood than that of Kaplan. However, we are not asking for votes, only for attention to the evidence of experience and for logic, coherence, probability and anticipation of the consequences of one’s outlook. On these counts, it seems to me that 109

Chapter 5

Kaplan’s theology is more profound, consistent and daring than Novak and other critics are prepared to acknowledge. Most of them confine their positive appraisal of Kaplan to his honesty, which, if one wants to be nasty, raises the question as to why it is at all necessary to refer to this virtue. Should it not be taken for granted as part of the mental structure of every thinker? Is Kaplan a rarity in this regard? The question, then, is not Kaplan’s honesty, but whether or not his view of transcendence is cogent. I maintain that it is. In the first place, Kaplan does not dodge the fact that theological preferences are human constructs. Supernaturalists would have us believe that the idea of a supernatural God is either self-evident or a product of God’s revelation to man. Surely, it is not self-evident, any more than the Aristotelian idea of the infinite duration of the universe. The strenuous, indecisive efforts that have been made over the centuries to prove the existence of a Creator God are evidence of the complexity of the problem. Nor is the appeal to revelation any more satisfactory. Theological claims about a supernatural God, including appeal to revelation, are largely conjectural and raise as many questions, if not more, than they answer. Again, how do we explain why or how a good and omnipotent God created so imperfect a world and permitted so much evil in it? If we maintain that our conception of what is good or evil is essentially inadequate and defective, by what right do we make any normative judgments? And to questions like these the cumulative, overwhelming evidence of the scientific study of ancient religious texts indicates that their authors were humans. The tower of revelation is at least leaning, if it has not already crumbled completely. This is not to say that Kaplan overlooks the mystery of consciousness. He is well aware, as we have indicated before, that both ordinary cogitation, and even more so, creative endeavors, have about them both active and passive modes. These modes indicate how much there is still to learn about the functioning of the human mind. Human consciousness cannot be reduced to the mechanical operation of the brain. In another reflection on the mind, Kaplan indicates how far his rationalism is from blind self-assertion. “We can know God not by reasoning from effect to cause, but by contemplating mind itself. The significance of the marvels of nature attains its climax when we begin 110

On the Theolog y of Election

to appreciate the marvel of the mind which is experienced with the warmth of immediacy in the sense of personal unity. When in this experience of personal unity there is also borne in on us the unity of life and the world as a whole, we have come face to face with God.”18 Two important aspects of Kaplan’s theology disclose themselves in this reflection. One is the fact that thinking is at least partially but importantly the receptivity of the mind to an ordered reality. That order or unity is not the product of inference, although such inference often follows as a support for the immediate, intuitive grasp of the unity of self and the cosmos. Secondly, the experience of God or cosmic unity precedes any attempt to conceive of God intellectually or to seek the connection between physical phenomena. Novak criticizes Kaplan’s occasional proneness to speak of “godhood” rather than “God.” He feels that this is a circumlocution which Kaplan uses in order to show his opposition to the traditional view of God as a Person. Novak overlooks the widespread recourse by many traditional theologians to the abstract “Elohut” (godhood) instead of “Elohim” (God). One notable exemplar of this usage is HaRav Kook, for whom the former term was practically second nature. Kaplan, indeed, explicitly rejected the view that God is a Person. But this is not simply an alignment with “a major trend in Western ontology,” as Novak would have us believe. It is that, too, but more importantly, denial of God’s being a Person is also Kaplan’s way of avoiding the indecisiveness of traditional theology on the subject of the nature of God. When Maimonides writes that “God is His attributes,” he articulates the position of the popular theology of his day and probably of ours, too. But why did he add “and His attributes are He,” so that it can be said of Him that He is [the act of] knowing, He is the Knower, and He is that which is known”?19 It is one thing to declare that justice, love, faithfulness and the like are expressions of God’s nature; it is something else to declare that these qualities are the process in terms of which we identify God. This ambivalence is reflected both in Jewish philosophical thought and in the nomenclature of our classic texts. Elohut, Makom (Space), Shekhinah (Presence), Ayin (Nothingness), Matzui Rishon (First Existent) and other impersonal 111

Chapter 5

terms are commonly accepted designations for God. It is even possible that the plural form, Elohim, might have been an antecedent of Elohut as the abstract term for godhood. Novak disputes Kaplan’s right to use the designation “God.” For Novak, God has to be defined as Absolute, than which, as Anselm phrased it, “nothing greater can be conceived.” Anselm’s dictum, however, tells us nothing about the reality of God, only about the limits of human conceptualization of Him. And here, perhaps surprising to his critics, Kaplan would agree that nothing can be said about God, only about “God,” that is to say, what there is in human experience to which the word “God” can be legitimately attached. Thus, Kaplan’s theology is far more modest than that of the supernaturalists who claim to know more than what they can glean from human experience. Kaplan’s theology is “...a radical departure from both western ontology and biblical revelation,” as Novak correctly states.20 So if Kaplan is not original, he is at least saying something which requires accurate understanding. Since he would lead us away from certain traditional truisms and philosophical conventions, we owe it to ourselves to ask where this new approach will lead us. I maintain that what Kaplan asks us to do is to remember that all human endeavor is simultaneously limited by our creatureliness and capable of unforeseen achievement. Our creatureliness, renders it impossible for us to know the whole of reality. We can project our horizons beyond the here and now, but we must be very modest when it comes to truth claims as to what lies out of the reach of our possible experience. Novak, however, throws caution aside when he declares, “Unlike Kaplan’s theology, in biblical revelation and rabbinic teaching, God evaluates his creatures by his own standards; to evaluate God by our standards is what God reminded Job is absurd. A God who can be evaluated by his creatures is no God at all.”21 There is an asymmetry here. Who would deny that man cannot and should not evaluate God? That is why Kaplan makes his differentiation between God and “God,” the latter being a totally human invention. But what can man know about the standards by which God evaluates or judges His creatures, other than what he himself deems to be the divine criteria? The author of the Book of Job dismisses Job’s questioning of His justice as hubris. Man is 112

On the Theolog y of Election

incapable of comprehending God. Job does not ask God to reveal His essence, as Moses had done. He questions God’s justice from the only perspective available to him — his personal experience and his sense of values. God supports Job’s protests against the conventional piety of his friends. Job did not step beyond the bounds of propriety when he defended his innocence. But God ends the dispute by informing Job that, in the last analysis, he will have to continue to act responsibly according to his human standards, without hope that he will ever learn the secret of the moral imbalance between his values and the vagaries of God’s Providence. Novak tries to undermine Kaplan’s theology by depicting it as a shallow humanism and anthropocentrism. He does so by means of the following quotation from Judaism As a Civilization: “...the logic of supernatural revelation is challenged by our sense of values...human welfare [is] the sole criterion of what is good.”22 Now let us examine the paragraph from which Novak extracts the foregoing comment. “If the fact of supernatural revelation is challenged by what we accept as historical evidence, the logic of supernatural revelation is challenged by our sense of values. That logic clashes with the second essential of the modern ideology, that human welfare be the sole criterion and determinant of what is good. To accept revelation of God’s will through supernatural experience as a fact means that whatever is thus commanded must be obeyed implicitly, and that we have no right to determine, on the basis of a criterion such as social utility, what is more important or what is less important. It is only when a conflict of duties arises that we are forced to choose; but judged seriatim one law is as obligatory and may entail as serious consequences as any other. This logic is carried out with unwavering consistency in rabbinic Judaism.”23 Clearly, Kaplan does not claim that man evaluates God, since he can never know God. But man is obliged to acknowledge that all his affirmations and judgments are functions of his own mind at work and that those mental products, at best, are only gropings after or approximations of the truth that transcends current or potential experience. On the other hand, while man is not the measure of all things, he is the only measurer whom he has the right to follow. To say that he possesses God’s will through revelation or through some other 113

Chapter 5

form of inspiration is the height of arrogance. Given their conflicting claims and messages, the Torah, the New Testament, the Koran and other purported revelations cannot all be true. And given their inner contradictions and messages that often strain the intellectual, moral and spiritual credulity of honest men and women, is not the claim of revelation tantamount to the acceptance of an unbridgeable abyss between God and man? Yet Novak presumes to accord divine status to texts whose divinity is neither self- evident nor demonstrable embodiments of the will of a good and just God. The communicants of historical religions do evaluate God and find themselves having to commit a reverse form of hubris. It is men who posit a God who plays tricks with the minds that He presumably created. Believers in revelation are so certain they know God that they impose upon their fellows doctrines and practices for which their minds can find no warrant. All this in the name of a conception of transcendence that is synonymous with supernaturalism. Kaplan never ceased wrestling with the God-man relationship. Being unable to deny the power of reason, but also recognizing the responsibility entailed in its employment, he sought to extrapolate from human experience as much as could be reliably deduced. In this pursuit, he realized that he had to find a new way of handling the question of God’s immanence and transcendence. The key to Kaplan’s proposed solution is his assertion that the transcendent is not the opposite of the immanent. Instead, both are to be regarded as correlative aspects of the same reality when seen from different perspectives. The transcendent is the whole which confers meaning and gives direction to disparate, immanent phenomena. Transcendence has both its objective and subjective elements. On the one hand, it is the autonomous process of existence whose workings man ever seeks to comprehend. On the other hand, it contains the purposes, values and laws of behavior, all of them human assumptions, which, men hope, accord with the cosmic, transcendent process. Obviously, such a naturalist conception of transcendence necessitates a change in conventional religious thinking. A God who is not “Wholly Other” cannot be a partner of the kind mentioned in the worship to which religious Jews are accustomed. Novak, however, 114

On the Theolog y of Election

seems to think that the term “God” can legitimately be applied only to a Deity to whom one can pray in conventional fashion. Kaplan’s God, he says, cannot demand worship. Why not, especially if we accept the fact that there are options in worship other than those that have become habitual? Novak maintains that, “Both the Bible and western ontology have so determined our ‘God-talk’ that we can only designate as ‘God’ what is absolute. That is why virtually all contemporary atheism is based on a denial that there is an Absolute at all.”24 Granted that our common God-talk is what Novak says it is, it is also possible that we might have to revise it. Then, too, designating God as absolute is like saying God is God. Furthermore, what kind of address is demanded by an absolute? Are not affirmation and denial of the Absolute two sides of the same coin? When I affirm the Absolute, I deny the ultimacy of any man-made construct. When I deny the Absolute, I affirm that I am so constricted by my creatureliness as to be incapable of making any claims beyond what my experience warrants. The problem is clear. Man must never worship himself or what he himself fashions. At the same time, he is called upon to recognize that he is only a partial master of his fate. There is a reality which transcends him, which he must learn to love and before which he must stand in awe. Novak overlooks the response of the Sage in Yehudah Halevi’s KOZARI to the discourse of the philosopher. The latter depicts God along Aristotelian lines. The Sage (read Halevi) comments that the theory of the philosopher is correct but that his God does not induce the kind of life-style that he wants. The God of the philosopher does not evoke prayer, since He is unchanging. But cannot meditation be deemed a form of worship? Is not study a recognized part of synagogue liturgy? Kaplan chose to explore the possibility of viewing God naturalistically and of devising changes in formal Jewish worship that might be more attuned to the new conception of God’s transcendence than is true of much traditional prayer. Admittedly, Kaplan had only limited success in attracting Jews to his innovations. But then, the current low percentage of Jews who engage in traditional worship does not speak well for its adequacy. In the last analysis, it is not votes that determine the worth of ideas and practices, but their truth. And that truth is often beyond 115

Chapter 5

the capacity of many persons immediately to apprehend. Traditional Jewish prayer did not replace the sacrificial system overnight. The Siddur is the product of centuries of debate, creativity and selection. To sum up, Novak charges Kaplan with conceiving God as subhuman, subject to human evaluation and finite, inasmuch as He “...does only what we can accept as good within the confines of Nature.”25 Kaplan, however, is more subtle than this. Although he claims that within the experience available to mortals, the term “God” should be applied to the good, life-enhancing forces that operate in the universe, he maintains that these forces are manifestly not exhausted and are, indeed, inexhaustible expressions of God’s immanence. Such a God, says Novak again, cannot be the God of Israel’s covenantal piety, in which anger at God’s seeming cruelty seems to be an integral factor. This attitude of Novak’s would itself have angered Kaplan. If God is cruel, does He merit our worshipping Him? But God is not cruel, as we have stated above, because such an attribute belongs only to a monster. Yet the universe is composed of both good and evil. Therefore, the question is, how shall we locate God’s role in this reality? Kaplan tackles this question time and again, but I cite here just one of his insights: “It seems to me that one of the main reasons religion has been ambivalent in its functioning, instead of being a force for good, is just the very tendency to make God coextensive with all of reality, including evil. This has led to the defense of evil instead of to an unequivocal effort to eliminate it from human life.”26 In other words, the God of rational religion, not the God of abstract, metaphysical proofs, and not the absolute God of traditional theology about whose ways human reason must be silent, is that aspect of the unified but mixed cosmic reality that makes for the rule of the good. As we have seen, Novak interprets this theology as presenting a totally immanent God whose actions are judged by human standards and are within the confines of Nature.27 Kaplan, however, by asserting God’s transcendence, cautions us against equating God and nature. Or, to put it differently, the process of nature is and always will be beyond the complete ken of man. He cannot know the full extent of nature’s reach; nor can he ever be certain that his comprehension of nature’s order is accurate. Humans can only search for the true, the 116

On the Theolog y of Election

good and the beautiful; they must never claim that their discoveries and inventions are tantamount to knowing God. Kaplan, no less than traditional theologians, flees from the idolatrous habit of claiming that God is an instrument to be used in order to fulfill one’s wants. However, Kaplan conceives of “God” — again, not God — as referring to the constructive and integrative force in the cosmic process on which man must rely for the fulfillment of his needs. Of course, in this theologizing, it is unavoidable for man to identify “God” with what he is impelled by his reason to regard as good and true. Even if he mistrusts his reason and relies on another source of knowledge about God and God’s will, his reliance on that source is no less an act of his mind than what Kaplan recommends. Moreover, Kaplan’s naturalist theology has a built-in corrective. The distinction between needs and wants or greeds means that every person must check his purposes in order to bring them as close as possible to truth and goodness. But the knowledge of truth and goodness is itself the subject of eternal search and refinement. Novak asks oratorically whether the kind of God whom Kaplan proposes can be the subject of petition. Novak seems to say that God, indeed, can be petitioned. Really? Classic Jewish tradition had much trouble with this question. One type of petition it held to be altogether illegitimate — the request that God change an outcome that had already been determined naturally. One cannot properly ask God to change the sex of an embryo that had already been encased in a womb; nor should one who sees a conflagration from a distance appeal to God that his home not be the one affected. Another type of petition which does play a role in Jewish worship is the pleas for rain, help, wisdom, courage, etc. But even such appeals to God’s attribute of kindness are basically statements of human needs, rather than anticipations of supernatural response to our requests. I know, of course, that there are sincere and pious persons who recite Psalms in the hope that they will merit a positive answer from God, but Kaplan addressed those who no longer live in that universe of discourse. I do not know in which realm of thought Novak is to be found, but he should not dismiss cavalierly the piety of men and women who are convinced that prayer has more pertinent dimensions than petition. 117

Chapter 5

Unlike the traditionalists, Kaplan does not accept the conclusion that prayer is necessarily a dialogue similar to that between humans. If, as Kaplan believes, God is not a Person, then prayer must somehow be the implementation of the reflexive quality of the Hebrew word for praying — hitpallel. Prayer, even petition, can be an exercise in which man tries to connect with his better self and to achieve a clearer awareness and appreciation of the transcendent Power on which he and all his fellows must rely for their fulfillment. This is hardly an anemic God-idea. It seems to me to be far more demanding than that which absorbs conventional religionists. One more point is crucial to Novak’s critique. He credits Kaplan with acknowledging that the cosmic process is a creative one that transcends its past and is not the operation of blind, mechanical forces. But that transcendence pushes from within and “...is not pulled from without by what is always beyond it.”28 Thus, for Novak, transcendence means supernaturalism. If God is outside the cosmic process, then there is no reason to deny the possibility of His choosing Israel for whatever role He wills for it. Novak would have to answer all the charges that rationalists level against supernaturalism, but that is not for this essay. I want only to counter Novak’s reading of Kaplan as proclaiming that, “...any difference between the Jewish people and other peoples is at best one of degree.”29 On factual grounds, Kaplan repeatedly called attention to the achievements of the Jewish people at various stages of its development. One does not argue with facts. At the same time, Kaplan never hesitated decrying Jewish failures and failings. In the history of nations, differences are, indeed, matters of degree. Kaplan, however, rejected the doctrine of chosenness precisely on theological grounds. Whatever be the merits or deficiencies of nations, the attribution to God of these differences is to raise the specter of a Deity who plays favorites with or victimizes His creatures. In contrast, Kaplan’s theology is a call to responsibility and a challenge to human reason. It is an appeal to faith in a creative process that underlies the mystery of existence. It offers hope, not certainty, that by cooperating with the cosmic process, humans may yet fashion for themselves a sane and humane career on earth. 118

On the Theolog y of Election

Notes 1

David Novak, “Mordecai Kaplan’s Rejection of Election,” Modern Judaism 15:10 (January, 1995).

2

Ibid., 14. Ibid., 15. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 3. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 4. Kaplan, Judaism As a Civilization, 181. Ibid. Novak, 10. Diaries, November 14, 1939. Ibid., November 13, 1939. Kaplan, Judaism As a Civilization, 316. Diaries, February 2, 1930. Moses Maimonides, Shemonah Perakim, tr. Joseph Gorfinkle, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1912), 20. Novak, 11.

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Novak, 11. Ibid. Ibid., p.12. Kaplan, Judaism As a Civilization, 40. Novak, 12. Ibid., 13. Diaries, February 28, 1940. Novak, 13. Ibid., 14. Ibid.

Chapter 6

Other Critics

The history of ideas is hardly a model of linear progression. Anyone who has ever studied great texts from bygone ages knows that many seminal ideas have had to wait centuries for their redemption, while anachronisms, falsities and shallow opinions have managed to survive in popular and even scholarly discourse. Nor are thoughts that seem so obviously basic to human progress always developed or implemented at the time and at the speed they merit. Why, for example, has the idea of the sanctity of the individual not been universally accepted to this day and applied equally to both men and women? However much we should like to believe that a truth, once apprehended by a perceptive mind, must find widespread acceptance, the pace of such approval is often painfully slow. Between the disclosure of a previously unknown fact about physical or spiritual reality and its recognition and adoption by the masses or even by many so-called intellectuals, the resistance of many an emotional or mental habit must be overcome. The reasons for this phenomenon deserve more attention than has been accorded them up to now. But I doubt whether even the wisest among us will ever get fully to the bottom of this facet of cultural lag. I maintain, however, that a goodly measure of accident is involved in whether sound ideas gain ready acceptance or are ignored or rejected out of hand, only to be resurrected at a later, more propitious time. A striking example in Jewish cultural history of the devious path of ideas is the response to Spinoza. Excommunicated in the seventeenth century, he has become a thinker to be reckoned with, not always 120

Other Critics

entirely welcome but generally highly respected in Jewish universities and intellectual circles. Some of his spiritual heirs even occupy chairs in Jewish schools of higher learning. The foregoing opens a brief inquiry into the fate of Mordecai M. Kaplan at the hands of his critics. Being a disciple of Kaplan, I shall have to reckon with the charge of being too emotionally involved and therefore incapable of treating Kaplan with the requisite disinterest. So be it. My case will have to rest on its merits. Nonetheless, my close association with Kaplan over long years can also be seen as an advantage denied to most of his detractors who did not have the privilege of firsthand exposure to his intellect. Moreover, I have benefited from having read his Diaries, only now in the process of partial publication, without which the full depth of Kaplan’s mind cannot be appreciated. The Diaries cover a span of over sixty-five years. When they are published, in whole or in part, they will, I am certain, reveal Kaplan in an entirely new light.1 Here in Israel, Kaplan’s name is known only in a narrow circle of intellectuals, although as I write these lines, that circle appears to be widening. Accident plays its role in this matter. For had Kaplan responded favorably to the invitation of the Hebrew University to become a member of its faculty, or had Dr. Cyrus Adler, then President of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, agreed to release him from his teaching responsibilities there for one semester every two years, the picture today might be quite different.2 In the United States, where Kaplan’s influence is still felt, his critics often denigrate him as a thinker who was too closely tied to the intellectual fashions and the social conditions of his time. If Kaplan is still a name worth remembering, they comment, it is not because he really has any message worth listening to today but because the questions he asked are pertinent and lucidly formulated by him. Perhaps I underestimate Kaplan’s current status. I know that he is being taught in universities in Israel and the Diaspora and is written about quite extensively. I myself have been approached by numerous students, Israeli and American, who have written or are writing essays or dissertations on various phases of Kaplan’s thought. Moreover, a comprehensive collection of studies of his wide-ranging contributions 121

Chapter 6

to Jewish thought, practice and social structure, appeared in 1990.3 In 1993, Queens College in New York sponsored a two-day conference devoted completely to Kaplan’s philosophy. Stanford is another university which saw fit to sponsor a major treatment of his philosophy. And his name appears prominently on lists of great Jewish thinkers of the past millennium. Yet the pickings are sparse, given the richness of Kaplan’s interests and the suggestiveness of many of his proposals. Something is missing from the perspectives of Jewish intellectual leaders when they fail to examine far more thoroughly than they do what Kaplan had to say about the identity of the Jewish people, the future of Israel and the Jewish Diaspora, the philosophy, function and structure of the Zionist movement, the search for a concept of God suitable to the scientific era, the role of religion in human life, the moral and religious meaning of Jewish nationalism, the interpretation of classical Jewish tradition, the way we think and ought to think, the philosophical foundations of Jewish education, education for democracy, Jewish-Arab relations, the role of Hebrew in Judaism, basic values in Jewish religion, problems of freedom and pluralism in the open society, meaningful prayer and worship, the dimension of esthetics and the arts in Jewish life, and a long list of other questions to which Kaplan addressed himself. His agenda alone should have stirred Jewish scholars in this generation to study him with care. Of course, it can be argued that Kaplan’s catholicity of interest is no indication of his profundity. Indeed, asserts Bernard Martin, Kaplan had a “tendency to oversimplify complex theological issues.” This failing, says Martin, perturbs him more than anything else in Kaplan’s works.4 Martin’s charge is highly subjective, but since he does not detail the grounds of his accusation, I shall merely mention it without refutation and assert my own opinion that Kaplan’s functional approach to theology is at least as profound as the more popular versions of the neo-mystics, existentialists, revelationists and glorifiers of the ineffable — and, I add, more intelligible. Furthermore, Kaplan’s approach to problems has its roots in the philosophical heritage. From William of Occam to Henri Poincare, there has developed a strong philosophic and scientific tradition of searching for the least complicated solution to the most complicated problems. The best solutions are 122

Other Critics

often the simplest ones. Moreover, Kaplan never underestimated the complexities of reality. Nor did he dodge the responsibility of dealing with them. He was the first to admit when he failed, although many of his failures were really those of his audiences — students, fellow thinkers, educators and laymen — who could not keep pace with his far-sightedness. As I review this chapter, I wish to pay tribute to the late Meir BenHorin, whose posthumous book, Transnature’s God, appeared in the fall of 2004. Meir died in 1987, having just completed this volume, which I consider to be the most profound treatment of Kaplan’s theology that I have read. The manuscript was uncovered by his family just a few years ago, and they arranged for its publication. Ben-Horin presents a searching analysis of Kaplan’s thought, both appreciative and critical. I regret that the task of doing justice to Ben-Horin’s work is too formidable for me to undertake at this juncture. But in the few years that remain to me, it will occupy many hours of my time.

As the human mind progresses, each person becomes less and less capable of encompassing more than a limited area of knowledge. Wisdom becomes increasingly a team effort, or at least an attempt at fraternal interaction; it demands honest confrontation and a desire to learn from all available sources. There is also a growing need today to encourage the cultivation of disciplined imagination in all attempts to put together the cosmic jig-saw puzzle from the endless numbers of its cut-up pieces. Experts in the details will have to correct the mistakes of those who try to paint the whole picture, but who miss some of the changing landscape. Kaplan understood this danger and constantly sought for experts who could help him to avoid mistakes of commission or omission. He wanted to contribute not only to the kind of Jewish survival that would be a blessing to all mankind. He was particularly eager to find Jewish scientists, thinkers and artists who were as passionate as he was about creative Jewish continuity. The pursuit of the larger picture is made more difficult by scholars who guard the limited areas of their professional domains. Woe to any outsider who dares to express opinions on the subject matter of their 123

Chapter 6

research or to evaluate it from a vantage point beyond the borders of their respective disciplines! Undoubtedly, there is a large measure of justification for such reserve, but there is also need for opening the lines of interdisciplinary communication. And that is usually the function of thinkers with imagination, courage and sufficient humility to realize the limits of such speculation and the need for constant criticism by outside observers. Kaplan was such a thinker. Throughout the years, he turned to his peers for their wisdom and kept his eyes and ears open to his students for their reaction to his ideas. He read voluminously and often corrected or discarded his opinions and expanded or deepened his formulations as a result of what he had come across in his reading or experience. I address myself to the peculiar phenomenon of how Kaplan’s thought was belittled, distorted and misrepresented both during his life and after his death. I do not object to legitimate differences of opinion regarding Kaplan’s theology, his interpretation of Jewish peoplehood, his departure from orthodox Zionism, his hopes for Jewish survival in the Diaspora, his treatment of the mitzvot as religious folkways and a whole assortment of his controversial analyses and recommendations. Rather do I wish to cross lances with those critics who seem to employ language, when referring to his ideas, that seems calculated to induce the reader either to ignore him or to approach him negatively from the outset. Thus, there are thinkers — Milton Steinberg, Hayyim Greenberg, Jacob Petuchowski and Eliezer Berkowits, all of blessed memory, Eugene Borowitz, Eliezer Schweid and others — who have criticized various items in Kaplan’s system in terms that do justice to what Kaplan wrote. In this chapter, however, I bring just two instances of the kind of criticism, that has given Kaplan’s name an undeservedly bad reputation. I refer to the silent treatment of Commentary magazine and the “when did you stop beating your wife?” critique of David Hartman’s former approach. A favorite form of criticism is silence or paying scant attention to the person one wishes to downgrade. Consider the case of Kaplan in the eyes of Commentary. It is well known that, with the exception of its first two issues in November and December, 1945, Commentary has never paid attention to Kaplan. True, it did publish a review of Kaplan’s 124

Other Critics

Questions Jews Ask and his A New Zionism. But therein hangs a tale. First, to be fair, after the critical piece by Mordecai Grossman in November 1945, the magazine’s next issue contained a rejoinder by Kaplan. I shall not enter into an analysis of the contents of those two articles, except to urge the reader to examine them and, in the light of Kaplan’s treatment of Jewish civilization as a force for both the integrity of Jewish culture and for the advancement of the unity of mankind, to judge the level of Grossman’s reading of Reconstructionism. The dispassionate person should then consider the subsequent episode of Dr. David Baumgardt and the review of the two books mentioned above. It seems that Baumgardt’s review was part of a longer article that he had submitted, in which he had some laudatory things to say about Reconstructionism and one of Kaplan’s major works, The Future of the American Jew, which had appeared in 1948 and which Commentary had failed to review. Here is what Kaplan recorded in his Diaries: Baumgardt told Kaplan “...that the editor of Commentary had been unfair to him (Baumgardt) and to me...He had written a full size article about me and the Reconstructionist movement, basing most of what he had to say on the above named books. That he did after he had for over a year been trying to have them accept his offer to review The Future of the American Jew. Instead they kept putting him off with all kinds of excuses...When the Commentary editors received Baumgardt’s article, they deliberately threw out some of the most laudatory remarks about Reconstructionism, and whatever was left they changed into a book review. When he objected to this transformation of his article, they defended their vandalism on the ground that as a book review it would be more likely to be read.”5 [Kaplan’s entry needs editing for style and grammar, but I have no reason to question its veracity.] The experience of Baumgardt lent added credence to the charge of Milton Steinberg almost a decade before, that “Reconstructionism has had short shrift at Commentary’s hands.”6 Steinberg saw the affront as part of a general attitude of certain intellectuals on the fringes of Jewish life who were nonetheless drawn to some aspects of Judaism but shied away from too close a contact with those elements which challenged their style of thinking and behaving. I suggest that of all Jewish thinkers during most of the twentieth century, Mordecai Kaplan 125

Chapter 6

was most threatening to the type of mind represented by some of Commentary’s early editorial staff. Commentary, to its credit, has accorded considerable attention to such scholars and thinkers as Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, Leo Baeck, and others, publishing their articles and excerpting extensive passages from their writings. The question remains, however, why has Kaplan been subjected to the silent treatment that has been so evident for over half a century? There are two plausible answers. One is that Kaplan does not merit serious attention. The other has to do with the opinions of Commentary’s editors. The first explanation is, of course, a matter of opinion, but it seems to me that this easy dismissal of Kaplan is hardly defensible. Any journal purporting to advance the cause of a reasonable and morally dedicated Judaism cannot legitimately ignore the challenges that Kaplan thrust before the entire Jewish people in virtually every area of importance for its creative survival. As for the second explanation, Milton Steinberg’s analysis probably no longer holds true. Whatever one may think about the views of Commentary on Judaism, it cannot be denied that the journal is today heavily involved in some, if not all, of the major concerns of positive Judaism. We must ask, therefore, is Kaplan’s message outmoded or lacking in cogency and relevance, so as to justify its being overlooked? Or is its content still abhorrent to the mentality of certain types of intellectuals? I suggest that the latter is the case. Cultural history cannot be understood without acknowledging the role of disparagement, of which disregard is one of the most potent instruments. In his introduction to a volume of selected writings of Hegel, who for a long time had been set aside by the cognoscenti, Prof. J. Loewenberg comments that “...to ignore a claim is not to dispute it.”7 The argument from silence, used against Kaplan, is, I maintain, a deliberate avoidance of his theses. Disregard often occurs out of ignorance, and that, indeed, has been one of the main reasons why Kaplan’s thought, even at the height of his career, did not reach the potential of its influence. Kaplan is in good company, as he is among those thinkers whose ideas are distasteful to powerful opinion molders. The latter make it their business either to 126

Other Critics

ignore their intellectual rivals or to use their ideas without mentioning their source. I know, for instance, out of personal experience, that many rabbis have preached Kaplan’s ideas, without a word as to their source. Another form of criticism, widely practiced, even though it is unworthy of those who have recourse to it, is the well-known ad hominem attack. Kaplan was the butt of snide remarks by some of his colleagues throughout the almost six decades of his teaching career at the Jewish Theological Seminary. They derided his scholarship and belittled the importance of his courses. I was a witness to moments when Kaplan would be charged with doing irreparable damage to Judaism, without any attempt on the part of the critic to confront Kaplan’s theses or reasoning. On one occasion, a distinguished professor attempted to dismiss Kaplan with the comment, “After all, he’s an old man.” The sentiment in the faculty was that, in order to qualify for the right to make any judgment concerning Judaism, one has to have complete mastery of Rabbinic texts — an argument, incidentally, to which the Seminary faculty often resorted when they opposed some action on the part of their own students in the Rabbinical Assembly that did not meet their halakhic interpretations or standards. Kaplan, who received semikhah (traditional rabbinic ordination) from the distinguished Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines, never claimed to be a Rabbinic scholar, but his ability to interpret text was prodigious. Had he been so inclined, he could have become the scientific researcher so dear to the hearts of some scholars in the enlightened seminaries and the departments of Jewish studies at many universities. Kaplan, however, worried about the future of the Jewish people, and for that he needed the kind of broad interest, perception, knowledge, controlled imagination and ability to reason that were deemed to be of secondary importance by the erudite specialists in specific areas of Jewish learning. Whereas Kaplan always acknowledged his reliance on the fruits of scientific research into the meaning and interpretation of the traditional texts, he dared to assert that such study was insufficient. Someone had to draw conclusions of the bearing of all these studies on the conduct of Jewish life. For that “hubris,” he was pilloried. 127

Chapter 6

All the above is ancient history, although each of these forms of criticism is still in force today. However, let us turn to a more formidable effort to do away with the Kaplanian menace — misreading what he has said. Such misreading might or might not be intentional, but I shall not attribute motives. Let us deal with facts. The Critique of David Hartman I preface the following comments with a deep apology to David Hartman. My critique refers to a treatment of Kaplan which Hartman penned before he adopted a more balanced and appreciative approach to Kaplan. In the light of Hartman’s latter-day admiration of much in Kaplan’s theology, ethics and concern about Jewish peoplehood, my critical remarks about Hartman’s earlier approach might seem to be ungracious. I bring them, however, because there are many Jewish thinkers who continue to echo much in the earlier thought of Hartman. If I use Hartman, it is only because his critique was well-stated. First, however, I want to quote from Hartman’s splendid article, “Redemption and the Rational Mind,” which appeared in the Pesah Supplement of the Jerusalem Post, on March 29, 2010. Hartman wrote, “In search of a little religious sobriety, I recently began revisiting the work of Mordecai Kaplan the great 20th century Jewish thinker…The crucial question for Kaplan is how do the commandments percolate into the life-stream of the Jewish people? How do the rituals shape us ethically? How do the mitzvot propel us to become full human beings and reach our powers of ethical personality? In other words, how does Judaism impact us in the quest for human self-realization? “Kaplan’s philosophy grew our of his quest to understand how the Jewish people created patterns of living with the potential to redeem us from selfishness, narcissism and cruelty and open us to a world of holiness?” Clearly, Hartman is no longer the object of attack that follows. Nonetheless, I use his earlier critique just to provide an example of the type of criticism to which Kaplan has been subject over the years. Hartman is to be praised for his later, more insightful consideration of Kaplan’s thought. What follows, then, is the use of a text, whose 128

Other Critics

author is to be credited with the rare honesty and courage to be able to engage in the re-examination of his opinions. I turn to a chapter in the book by David Hartman, Conflicting Visions.8 What follows has more to do with other writers than it does to today’s Hartman. Nonetheless, I include the following critique, because what Hartman has to say in Conflicting Visions is paralleled in the attacks of other contemporaries. Thus, my critique applies only to Hartman’s original statement and not to his current position. In the chapter under consideration, Hartman undertakes to demolish Kaplan’s theology and some of its consequences. Hartman raises the following issues in his discourse on Kaplan: Kaplan views God as totally immanent. For Kaplan, “God may be identified with the manifold forms of human expression and productivity.”9 “The concept of God becomes a convenient way of referring to human aspirations and creativity.”10 “Though Kaplan does refer to some reality other than man (cosmic process) his world view remains thoroughly humanist. Kaplan makes God so immanent that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that his theology is little more than an elaborate metaphor celebrating human powers.”11 As part of his critique, Hartman claims that Kaplan is blind to the ineffable and the sublime reality of God and lacks a sense of awe before the ultimate mystery. Kaplan’s vision of the Jewish people is at least potentially “a rationalization for an undiscriminating devotion to the people of Israel, a devotion that weakens the critical force of Judaism.”12 Hartman claims that Kaplan’s approach allows “for the possibility of the Jewish people’s becoming the object of a modern form of idolatry.”13 Hartman finds Kaplan to be excessively optimistic about human intelligence, overly captivated by the spirit of early twentieth century America and “unburdened by tragedy or by manifestations of radical evil.”14 Inevitably, Hartman finds Kaplan’s treatment of Halakhah to be superficial. According to Hartman, Kaplan located a justification for traditional Judaism only in supernaturalism. When the credibility of historical revelation diminished, the Halakhah, as far as Kaplan was concerned, lost its force.15 Thus, Kaplan’s “presentation of the dynamics of religious life lacks kedushah.”16 129

Chapter 6

Kaplan’s hermeneutics breaks the chain of Jewish tradition. Hartman charges that, “Kaplan’s reconstruction of the past upsets the delicate balance between change and continuity and thus lacks the bridging quality of traditional commentary.”17 The chapter bristles with other charges and extensions of the foregoing criticisms, but the above provides a sufficient sampling of the demolition material used by Hartman in the late 80’s and early 90’s of the last century to give his readers a sense of his feelings then about Kaplan’s philosophy. I do not doubt that Hartman had a healthy respect for Kaplan, the man, and for his courage and intellectual honesty. But that is of no concern here, any more than is my own appreciation of Hartman’s charisma, ability and sincerity. It is too bad that Hartman did not have access to Kaplan’s Diaries before he wrote his chapter, but a more careful reading of Kaplan’s already published works should have led him to eschew the kind of attack which he launched. I shall base the following defense of Kaplan on what is equally available to Hartman and myself and to anyone who cares to study Kaplan’s published writings. I shall refer to the Diaries only to reinforce points that appear in his books and his many essays scattered through anthologies, periodicals and other publications. I shall examine each of Hartman’s assertions. Here is Kaplan on the immanence and transcendence of God, the ineffable and the sense of mystery: “The presence of the multitude in worship creates for all a sense of mystery, an awareness of the insufficiency of the self and its awareness of a transcendent Power that we call God.”18 Kaplan’s Diaries are full of declarations outlining his affirmation of the necessity of reckoning with God’s transcendence. I repeat one of those reflections. “God in his essence is transcendent. As such he represents the mystery which we cannot help sensing behind the phenomena of the cosmos. Through his attributes, however, he is immanent. The ethical implications of religion are derived from God as immanent.”19 In another of his published works, Kaplan states that his “...purpose is not to equate God merely with the manifestations of the human spirit or with the ethical aspects of human relations; the purpose is to 130

Other Critics

indicate in what way the manifestations of the human spirit and the ethical aspects of human relations point to the mystery which spells God.” He goes on to say, “Legitimate mysticism is that which arouses the sense of the sublime and whatever ecstatic emotions constitute the functioning of the human spirit at its best, in relation to some concrete experience in human life.”20 Obviously, Kaplan’s interpretation of transcendence and immanence and the meaning he gives to such terms as power, sublimity, mystery and other concepts of theological import need further explication. I should not object to a reasonable criticism of Kaplan’s departure from popular norms of definition of theological terminology, but I do take exception to the cavalier fashion in which Hartman and others have reacted to Kaplan’s efforts to sharpen theological thought and semantics. Hartman simply ignored Kaplan’s careful attention to the problems underlying the distinction between God as reality and “God” as semantic convention, between knowledge of nature and faith in its potential, between theism and humanism, between legitimate and illegitimate mysticism. In short, Hartman’s Kaplan is a caricature of the profound theologian who was in no way one-dimensional. Kaplan’s view of the Jewish people and Jewish nationalism is the opposite of what Hartman claimed it to be. A few statements from Kaplan’s writings will suffice. In describing the role of the group in molding the character of the individual, Kaplan writes that, “...unless the nation, the people, or any other community to which the person belongs, is more than an organization of power, that person must find it difficult, if not impossible, to act justly and to walk humbly with his God.”21 Or, “In the context of human survival the normal traits which should pertain to individuals apply also to nations. Ethical nationhood requires a responsible citizenry whose choice of leaders reflects the high standards of both leaders and constituency.”22 In his Judaism As a Civilization, Kaplan developed a conception of ethical nationhood that was intended to counteract chauvinism in all its forms. He never departed from that conception. Moreover, he did not rest with an abstract formulation. Instead, both in his activities in the Zionist movement and his ceaseless reflections on nationalism, he 131

Chapter 6

never permitted his devotion to the Jewish people to blind him to its failings and occasional departure from its collective moral responsibility. For example, together with the noted correspondent of The New York Times, Joseph M. Levy, Kaplan stated that, “Instead of employing some of the abler and more fiery spirits among the Arabs by giving them positions in some of the financial and industrial undertakings, the Zionist Administration fostered a spirit of Jewish chauvinism and a Western air of superiority which were bound to antagonize the natives.”23 That was more than eighty years ago. Kaplan’s love for and loyalty to the Jewish people, far from encouraging idolatry of any kind, impelled him to oppose any manifestations of moral deficiency on its part. He exercised his influence in the arena of practical politics to restrain the misuse of power. In the intellectual sphere, he sought to correct elements in the tradition which he felt were detrimental to the moral rectitude of the people. He understood more than most thinkers of his time that inherited ideas can be dangerous to the spiritual health of the group. This is one of the reasons for his rejection of both the Chosen People doctrine and the belief in the absolute truth of the Torah. It is Hartman’s privilege to maintain that the traditional process of interpretation is adequate to the challenge of adjusting the Jewish heritage to the demands of probity. Kaplan, in turn, often relied on interpretation, but he insisted on being scrupulous in distinguishing between interpretation, reinterpretation and the deliberate distortion of the plain intent of the classic texts. In the chapter under consideration here, Hartman hardly touched on the spirit of Kaplan’s effort to preserve what is valuable in tradition. Nor did he appreciate Kaplan’s confrontation of the problems posed for tradition by democratic values and concepts of authority and change and by the spirit of scientific investigation into the possibilities of human fulfillment. Hartman’s blanket strictures against Kaplan’s purported mistreatment of tradition covered a lot of ground, but they also concealed the truths of Kaplan’s method. The canard of Kaplan’s alleged over-optimism about human intelligence and his purported blind confidence in American democracy and the ability of American Jewry to survive creatively in its warm 132

Other Critics

embrace should have been laid to rest decades ago. I bring a few illustrations of Kaplan’s views on human nature and social progress. Kaplan writes that, “...the religious attitude is one which needs, and having found, clings tenaciously to that in human life which holds promise of redeeming it from chaos. It discovers in man with all his cruelty and viciousness the element of goodness which in the end will replace hatred and strife with reason and good will. To attain this faith in man, in the latent possibilities of his nature, is to accept the kingship of God.”24 Note that Kaplan starts from the premise that humankind is in a state of imperfection and that its improvement is not guaranteed but is dependent on man’s ability to achieve a constructive faith. That faith, in turn, can eventuate, Kaplan asserts time and again, only if man recognizes and assumes his share of the responsibility for bringing about the kingdom of God. Man’s unbridled self-assertiveness can engender only his own destruction. As Kaplan comments, “In our day we have been made to realize that the bestial heredity (of man) may be resorted to in organizing entire nations for a world order, in which all moral law and reason are blacked out. A large sector of the human race is still ready to answer the call of the wild instead of the call of God.”25 Kaplan was a realist whose faith in God impelled him to seek out and to activate the divine potential in man. Such an approach, it seems to me, is entirely appropriate for any person who faces life’s challenges constructively. As for Kaplan’s being captivated by the spirit of early twentieth century America, the charge itself is one of those breath-taking accusations which can refer to anything from Alfred Thayer Mahan’s belief in the mission of America to be a light to the nations to the vision of the “robber barons” and their influence on the growth of capitalism, from the social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch and the socialist teachings of Eugene V. Debs to the racism that blanketed the American South and much of the rest of the country. Kaplan was obviously not all of these; nor was he in any way at one with countless other beliefs about what America was all about at any given point from the turn of the century until his death. He was as much a creature of the latter years as he was of the first decades of the 20th century. That, however, is no weakness. It merely shows that Kaplan was alive to the 133

Chapter 6

changes around him which demanded the attention of serious social critics. Regarding America’s potential as the locale for a great flowering of Jewish culture, Kaplan constantly drew attention to the limitations and the faults of American society — its economic and social inequalities26, its proneness to overemphasize the need for loyalty and its rugged individualism27 -- to cite just two instances. Furthermore, Kaplan, despite his affirmation of the possibilities for a creative Jewish life in the United States and in other parts of the free Diaspora, always held this position with reservation. In his Diaries, he expressed repeatedly his fear that in the end, Jewish life in America would prove to be barren. For the purpose of this paper, I cite only one passage — interestingly enough, written in Hebrew: “I still wrestle with the question as to whether or not I delude myself in thinking that there is hope for Judaism in this land. I should have been convinced that as far as this country is concerned, it is a desert and wasteland that swallows up and destroys every vestige of our heritage. Indeed, I think that in the end, the circumstances of time themselves will force me to conclude that if I want to find satisfaction in my life, I shall have to devote the rest of my powers to our people in Eretz Yisrael. Only there is there hope for our future. After all, it is better to cast in my lot with those who are likely to live rather than with those destined for destruction. If I were younger, I would undoubtedly make my home in Eretz Yisrael. But now, it’s almost too late.”28 Kaplan did eventually settle in Israel, where he expected to complete his days. But by then it was, alas, too late. In his published writings, however, Kaplan, as an educator, wanted to encourage positive action that might contribute to Jewish survival. He exerted every effort to set forth a program whose implementation he hoped would enable American Jewry to answer successfully the challenge of living under freedom. From the very beginning of his public career, he warned against the danger of assimilation. Hartman’s Kaplan of 1990 presents the image of someone who is oblivious to the double-edged sword that America represents for Jewish survival. That was not Kaplan. 134

Other Critics

Kaplan did consider the weakening of the supernatural rationale for the Halakhah to be a major reason for casting doubt on its serviceability. However, he was no reductionist when it came to explaining why the Halakhah exercised so powerful a control over the Jewish people for so many centuries. Anyone who holds Jewish tradition in high esteem, as Kaplan did, will want to adapt its central feature, the Halakhah, to the demands and the needs of the present. Kaplan phrased his position as follows: “The sanction for the validity of Jewish laws is not to be their supernatural origin but their capacity to make for the worthwhileness and holiness of life.”29 Even as he criticized the Halakhah, Kaplan wrote: “If people knew what rich treasures lie hidden in Judaism, they would tear their hair for their failure to exploit them.”30 Kaplan studied the Halakhah for its relevancies; he sought to strengthen whatever in its foundations and structure could be saved; but he did not hesitate to cast aside what he considered to be useless scaffolding or to recommend divesting Judaism of outworn furnishings. That is what Kaplan and his colleagues did in their programmatic “Toward a Guide for Jewish Ritual Usage.”31 Kaplan clearly understood the symbolic and educational significance of the sancta that make up so large a portion of the Halakhah, and he argued for the necessity of fashioning a civil law for Jewish communal life. But he was convinced that Jewish law and observance had to be transposed into the key of democratic decision-making. That revolution, in turn, involves the acceptance of a degree of voluntarism and pluralism never contemplated in the Halakhah. Admittedly, Kaplan departed radically from the halakhic method, but his position was not taken lightly and has to be examined and judged by its viability as a force for the strengthening of the spiritual and ethical behavior of the Jewish people. Kaplan’s respect for the halakhic achievement is borne out in his insistence that the study of Rabbinic texts by every Jew and Jewess is obligatory. “Holiness,” he declared, “as a state of mind or spiritual attitude is awareness of being related or dedicated to that which renders life significant and saves it from frustration. Whatever, therefore, is related or dedicated to God is holy, in that it calls forth that awareness. That is the purpose given in the Torah for the entire system of ritual 135

Chapter 6

observances, including the Sabbath, the festivals, the sacrificial cult, the sanctuary and the dietary laws, as well as the entire gamut of moral laws.”32 In the same paragraph, Kaplan goes on to highlight the fact that the Jewish people dedicated its national life to God “... as the Power that enables it to be and to do its best.” Thus, Kaplan clearly had a sense of the need to pursue holiness by means of a Jewish way of life. Hartman is dead wrong to attack Kaplan’s system as lacking any sense of kedushah. Kaplan’s system obviously fails to work for Hartman, but it does speak to many of us who also seek the holiness that is imbedded in existence. Finally, Hartman considers Kaplan’s interpretation of Judaism as running roughshod over traditional commentary and as impoverishing the understanding of the richness of Rabbinic Judaism. I cannot help regretting that Hartman did not have the privilege of studying under Kaplan and benefiting from his tremendous insight into text. Kaplan sought every way he could to heighten the respect of his students for the classical texts, and his exploration of the Midrash frequently disclosed meaning and relevance that were unavailable to all but students like himself. Even without this experience, however, Hartman should have realized that Kaplan’s known commitment to continuity in change would have required him to accord proper respect to classic commentary. As a matter of fact, Kaplan made a determined effort to reclaim the peshat (plain meaning) of the text. But unlike many other commentators, he not only used scientific instruments to study ancient works but drew the conclusions about their relevance for today that seemed to him were in keeping with intellectual honesty. Nonetheless, this reliance on the latest tools of textual study did not lead him to overlook the different levels of meaning in the biblical and Rabbinic texts that transcend any single method of investigation and that reveal themselves only to respect and love. When Kaplan came across ideas that were not to be found in tradition or which contradicted it, he said so. By the same token, he was outraged when anyone would distort the clear meaning of a text, especially when this was done for apologetic purposes. Yet he was not averse to formulating his own midrash when it seemed to flow from the 136

Other Critics

intent of the verse or the practice whose vitality he thought fit to revive or preserve. An example is to be found in his treatment of the Havdalah ceremony, which he interpreted to “...symbolize the prophetic mood. It calls attention to Jewish life as a thing of the five senses consecrated to the task of redeeming life from the commonplace and secular and discovering in it the beauty of holiness.”33 Hartman portrayed Kaplan’s vision as devoid of the passion that makes for vital religion. He believed that Kaplan failed to capture the tragic sense of life. It may be that Kaplan’s insistence on straight-thinking and his prosaic style becloud the genuine passion that underlies every line he wrote. Again, when the Diaries appear, the aura of Kaplan’s supposed coldness will evaporate. Then, perhaps, Hartman and other critics will reread the published works with greater understanding. The man who wrote the following does not resemble what these critics say about him: “It appears to me that God feels with infinitely greater keenness whatever of evil there is in the world, for the more life or mind the more pain. Why should the fact that God suffers in any way prevent me from trusting in him? Would the infant when sick be justified in not looking to its mother for help if it were to know that its mother suffers more keenly than it does?”34 There was considerable poetry in Kaplan. A Latter-Day Critique Nicham Ross, who teaches at the Hebrew University and Ben-Gurion University, and who identifies himself as a secularist, offers an interesting criticism of what he describes as Kaplan’s over-rationalistic approach to Jewish religious tradition and its reconstruction for modern Jews.35 Ross contrasts Kaplan’s effort to reconstruct the intellectual basis of Jewish religion with what he describes as the emotional-intuitive approach of many modern-minded Jews who have turned their backs on supernatural religion but who nonetheless find their way to the synagogue and ritual practice. He cites the fact that such Jews find satisfaction in participating in worship services, even though they pay scant attention to the meaning of the liturgy. They are not disturbed by the content of the prayers, because they are motivated by their Yiddishkeit, their deep-seated attachment to the Jewish tradition. They 137

Chapter 6

come to the synagogue or relate to aspects of traditional Jewish life not to find God, but to experience the thrill of their identity with their people and its lengthy history. As an example of this mood, Ross cites the description by Aharon Appelfeld of the visits made by the writer, H. L. Rochman, and himself to Meah Shearim and its batei midrash (study halls). What is striking about the description is the sense of oneness with Jewish tradition and with those who accept its outworn tenets felt today by men and women who have abandoned the traditional beliefs. For Ross, experiences of this sort, which are characteristic of many secularists in Israel, are suitable alternatives for what he deems to be Kaplan’s excessive determination to find rational justification for Jewish beliefs and practices. Ross comments, “We have before us a Jew, who has abandoned the old religious life-style but nonetheless feels tied to the ancient religious tradition by bonds of love and feeling, in contrast to the religious model presented by Kaplan. Leib Rochman…does not attempt to justify this loyalty by resort to the old or new tools of thought of religious philosophy. It can be stated that whereas Kaplan tries to put forth a reconstructed model of a religious Jew, Leib Rochman exemplifies a non-religious but definitely traditional Jew.”36 Briefly put, Ross argues that Kaplan’s rationalistic, theological emphasis has not succeeded in attracting Jews to a religious-oriented Judaism. Nor, in his opinion is it likely to do so. It is unnecessary in and for Israel, where Jews relate — or can be educated to relate naturally — to Jewish tradition, whereas in the free Diaspora, it lacks the emotional power that is essential to counteract the force of interaction with other attractive cultures. I believe, however, that Ross, like other critics, overlook the depth and breadth of Kaplan’s message. It is true that Ross makes an honest effort to read Kaplan fairly. For example, he refers to Kaplan’s analysis of Shemini Atzeret, where the latter states clearly that God must be felt. He is not simply an idea. Kaplan writes, “Religious souls have never been satisfied with an awareness of God merely as an intellectual concept. They have always craved a religious experience in which the reality of God would be brought home to them with an immediacy akin to our awareness of 138

Other Critics

objects through the senses, and with an overpowering emotion that stirred every fiber of their being.”37 Unfortunately, Ross takes this thought to be an exception to Kaplan’s rationalistic bent, thereby distorting the organic perception that pervades Kaplan’s system. Love, passion, wonder, mystery are all necessary elements in the human make-up, and they must all find their place in the framework of Jewish religion. Kaplan was consistent in his rejection of irrationalism, but he was equally insistent on incorporating into his religious vision the nonrational elements of emotion, respect and love for the tradition and its proponents, and an unqualified sense of belongingness to the Jewish people. Kaplan was too thorough an observer of the role of religion in human life to have overlooked the importance of emotion in religious experience. But his organic bent led him to insist on depicting its relationship to the cognitive and social factors that affect emotional response. For example, Kaplan wrote that, “The emotional phase of religious behavior is compounded of…awe and trust which are the principle ingredients of the sense of holiness. There is, however, a marked difference between the cognitive and the emotional aspects of religious behavior in the degree to which they are affected by cultural development. The cognitive element…may vary from the crudest percept with a minimum of concept, to the most abstract concept with a complete negation of percept; the emotional phase, however, is the same in the most diverse forms of religious behavior.”38 We see that Kaplan fully appreciates the fact that many persons can be and are drawn to participation in prayer and other religious practices without endeavoring to harmonize their emotional attraction with a suitable cognitive understanding of their behavior. It is this phenomenon against which Kaplan fought. But he was wise enough to realize that intellectual and emotional consistency is difficult to achieve. The Limitations of Criticism The history of culture is rife with landmarks of creative thought and the checkered careers of creative visions and systems of ideas. However, not a single great mind has escaped the battering ram of one or another 139

Chapter 6

critic. The latter, in turn, are no less prone to influence the public mind for a limited time and to a limited extent. My teacher is no less prone to criticism than the critics themselves. Only in some presently unknown future will Kaplan’s place in the metamorphosis of Jewish civilization be decided. In the meantime, I find satisfaction n defending most of his insights against the arrows of most of his critics. Notes 1

Communings of the Spirit, Mel Scult’s first volume of selections from Kaplan’s Diaries, has been published by Wayne University Press (2001). Scult is presently working on the second of a three volume series.

2

Kaplan taught philosophy of education at the Hebrew University between 1937 and 1939. He was asked to remain as a permanent member of the faculty and head of the School of Education, an invitation which he was tempted to accept, but which he declined because of his wife’s desire to live in close proximity to their four daughters. When he finally decided to return to his post at the Jewish Theological Seminary, an alternate proposal was made to him that he lecture for one semester bi-annually. Kaplan wrote to Cyrus Adler, then President of the Seminary, requesting his approval of the arrangement, but Adler refused.

3

The American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan, ed. Emanuel S. Goldsmith, Mel Scult and Robert M. Seltzer (New York: University Press, 1990).

4

Bernard Martin, “Mordecai M. Kaplan and Reform Judaism,” Judaism (Winter 1981).

5

Diaries, Jan. 17, 1951. Milton Steinberg, “Commentary Magazine,” The Believing Jew, ed. Bernard Mandelbaum (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1951), 149.

6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Hegel Selections, ed. J. Loewenberg (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929), ix. David Hartman, Conflicting Visions (New York: Schocken, 1990). Ibid., 184. Ibid. Ibid., 191. Ibid., 200. Ibid., 210. Ibid., 189-190. Ibid., 195ff.

140

Other Critics

16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38

Ibid., 204. Ibid., 199. Kaplan, The Meaning of God In Modern Jewish Religion, 258. Diaries, March 3, 1936. Kaplan, Questions Jews Ask, 468. Mordecai M. Kaplan, The Purpose and Meaning of Jewish Existence (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1964), 96. Kaplan, The Religion of Ethical Nationhood, 68. Diaries, June 3, 1929. Kaplan, The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion, 135. Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew, 250. Ibid., 321. Kaplan, The Religion of Ethical Nationhood, 160-161. Diaries, August 22, 1936. Ibid., February 11, 1939. Ibid., April 20, 1929. Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew, 413-438. Ibid., 460. Diaries, January 1, 1929. Ibid., February 18, 1926. Nicham Ross, “Yiddishkeit as a Civilization: A Traditionalist Alternative to Mordecai Kaplan’s Religious Approach,” Moreshet Israel: A Journal of Judaism, Zionism and Eretz-Israel, 4 (October 2007): 162-184. Ibid., 170. Kaplan, The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion, 244. Kaplan, Judaism As a Civilization, 394.

Chapter 7

Naturalism and Supernaturalism

One of the most profound and thorough critiques of Kaplan’s theology was written by Eliezer Berkovits. In a forty-six page essay in Tradition,1 Berkovits offers a fair, although occasionally snide presentation of Kaplan’s naturalist theology. He engages in a serious point by point demolition of Kaplan’s entire thesis. I shall try to be equally as fair, as I follow the thread of Berkovits’s argument. Co m m e n t

Berkovits entitles his article “Reconstructionist Theology.” However, his target is Kaplan, for it is only his writings to which he refers. Kaplan often stated that Reconstructionism can and does entertain a variety of theological opinions, even so different a view as that of Milton Steinberg, who conceived of God as Cosmic Mind. Nonetheless, it is Kaplan’s naturalism, with which Reconstructionism is popularly identified. It would have been of great interest had Berkovits been able to react to Transnature’s God, the study of Kaplan’s theology by Meir Ben-Horin. In the final chapter of that book, Ben-Horin, a Reconstructionist, offers new dimensions to transnatural theology that could, I believe, have opened some new avenues of thought for Berkovits. Unfortunately, he died before the publication of Ben-Horin’s opus. I want to remind the reader, as I recorded above, that the latter’s manuscript had been completed in 1987, the year of Ben-Horin’s death, but it 142

Naturalism and Supernaturalism

had not been discovered until thirteen years later, when his children found it and arranged for its publication. This is a fascinating example of the role of accident in cultural history. Kaplan’s theological concerns stemmed from his overriding desire to contribute to the creative survival of the Jewish people. Both survival and creativity entail many more theoretical concerns than are covered in theological reasoning. Therefore, Kaplan ranged over demographic, educational, economic, moral, political, social and other issues, each of which had to be treated in its own right in addition to its bearing on theology. To take just one example, the decimation of the Jewish people that had begun to occur as a result of assimilation in the free world and the cataclysmic annihilation of the Six Million necessitate the increase of the Jewish birth rate. But is the rationale for that increase to be the biblical commandment to replenish the population of the earth or is it to be based on considerations of the ideal family, the economic sources that are available for the care and education of children and the health of women who must bear the brunt of the physical burden of child-bearing? The point in this observation is that Kaplan always attended to the practical implications of theological theorizing. All this is for the reader to keep at the back of his mind as we roam through Berkovits’s criticisms which have to do mainly with the abstract elements in Kaplan’s theologizing. I do not propose to deal in this chapter with the practical implications of the naturalistic and supernaturalistic approaches of Kaplan and Berkovits, even though, in the final analysis, those implications should also enter into any full evaluation of their theological positions. But one must not bite off too much to chew at one sitting, and that subject will have to be left for another occasion. 143

Chapter 7

Berkovits’s Presentation of Kaplan’s Theology In order to enable the reader to follow Berkovits’s critique, which accompanies his presentation of Kaplan’s theology but is also the subject of a separate part of his essay, I shall follow his path step by step, offering my own comments as required. Berkovits describes the basis of Reconstructionist (read Kaplan’s) theology as lying in the assumption, that “…the idea of God as a transcendental, omnipotent, all-kind and all-wise Supreme Being that confronts the world and man as their Creator has no meaning. Modern man, so he maintains, is able to conceive the godhead only as immanent in the world; modern man is incapable of entering into relationship with the supernatural. His concern is with life on this earth exclusively; there is no other.”2 Co m m e n t

Berkovits is correct in attributing to Kaplan the rejection of a supernatural God. But, as I have demonstrated previously, Kaplan distinguished between supernatural and transcendent. The former is applied to a God who is separate from the physical universe, of which He is declared to be the Creator. A supernatural God can will and execute miracles. A transcendent God is one who stands in a relationship to the immanent cosmos of experience in a fashion similar to the manner in which the soul relates to the body, the whole to the parts or natural laws to physical phenomena. It should be instructive to quote at length from an early entry in Kaplan’s Diaries, where he states the position on God’s immanence and transcendence that he retained throughout his theological musings. He writes that, “…while Judaism’s … contribution to religion consisted in the doctrine of divine immanence, it did not abandon…the transcendence of God…The moment God is merely identified with the world and conceived as being immanent but not transcendent, His 144

Naturalism and Supernaturalism

divinity is denied and He is dissolved into the world. This is the atheism and pantheism which religion so vigorously contends against. It will only verify the analysis we have suggested of the true character of the moral values and of the ‘ought’ as being derivative from a source of sanctions beyond the social group to which those values are applied, to learn that in a system of logical pantheism such as Spinoza’s there is no room for any ‘ought’…Religion, while not always clearly recognizing this danger in pantheism, instinctively felt it and has insisted upon the transcendent phase of God being brought into prominence.”3 More on this later. Moreover, Kaplan’s skepticism about life in the hereafter parallels the Bible’s relative silence on this subject. Our biblical ancestors seem to have been concerned with their this-worldly salvation, which was closely related to the welfare of the people of Israel. Kaplan’s rhetoric is justifiably criticized by Berkovits. Kaplan often generalizes in speaking about modern man’s being incapable of believing this or that. The fact is that an Orthodox modernist like Berkovits can and does make out a case for supernaturalism which takes into account the latest scientific view of reality. One may disagree with supernaturalism, but it is too simplistic to argue, as Kaplan often did, that it is impossible for a modern-minded person to hold an idea of God as Wholly Other. Berkovits describes Kaplan as stating that man’s “… goal is selffulfillment… salvation… this-worldly self-transcendence through the realization of man’s inherent potentialities.”4 “The God idea may be seen as the sum total of the process which in man and in nature contribute to human salvation.”5 Berkovits states that Kaplan regards the foregoing idea of God as a reinterpretation of the traditional view. For, as Kaplan argues, belief in God has always functioned as an affirmation of life’s value. At this point, Berkovits asks, ”…since the 145

Chapter 7

supernatural is rejected, what need is there for religion at all? In view of the fact that man’s purpose in life is this-worldly self-fulfillment, could he not strive for it without having to identify as divine those forces which assist him in his endeavor? Why should he not be satisfied with a purely secular form of self-realization?”6 Co m m e n t

Must religion be identified with supernaturalism? All men must realize that they are creatures of some cosmic power upon which they must rely for the attainment of their salvation — whatever salvation or fulfillment might mean. Since fulfillment is seen by Kaplan as the satisfaction of needs, not greeds, he is justified in identifying as divine the cosmic force or forces that dictate needs and aid man in gratifying them. Man’s obligation is to discover the difference between his needs and his selfish ends.

Quoting heavily from Kaplan’s Judaism Without Supernaturalism, Berkovits concludes that Kaplan has given a new interpretation of the adage that vox populi is vox dei, the voice of the people is the voice of God. He rests this opinion on Kaplan’s view that only in the totality of forces that impel men to think in terms of ideals and to establish laws and institutions can they discover the will of God. Furthermore, the will of God cannot be found in one tradition alone; it can be revealed only in the spiritual life of man as a whole.7 Co m m e n t

Berkovits overlooks the fact that Kaplan always attends to the limitations of humans. The term “God” points to the force or energy that drives men to try to approximate as closely as possible what they can be. But they can never be certain that they have achieved an accurate understanding of God’s will. The voice of mankind may express the human urge to become god-like, but thus far it has not spoken convincingly. Yet Kaplan insists that humans are driven by the divine energy to continue the search. 146

Naturalism and Supernaturalism

Citing a statement by Kaplan, Berkovits declares that for Reconstructionism (Kaplan) “God” “…is a symbol that expresses ‘the highest ideals for which men strive and, at the same time, points to the objective fact that the world is so constituted as to make for the realization of those ideals.”8 Co m m e n t

Although the passage quoted by Berkovits is not to be found on the page indicated in his notes, it is an accurate statement of Kaplan’s view. However, in order to capture Kaplan’s meaning, we must once again point to his distinction between “God” as a symbol that humans apply to the divine process and the reality of God which is the object of man’s striving. Thus, while humans tend to identify their highest ideals as divine, they are often mistaken in that identification, in the method by which true ideals have to be implemented and in their assessment of stumbling blocks in the way of implementation. What is often not what ought to be; and what ought to be may not be in the power of man or God to cause to be at a given time. Kaplan’s “divine process’’ heads in the direction of salvation, but the process is not willful. Nor is God perfect or omnipotent. This theological revisionism is shocking to most believers. But, given the imperfection of nature, is it reasonable to conceive of God as all-good and allpowerful? Cannot a conception of God as a Promise rather than as a perfect Creator be spiritually uplifting? I should think so.

Berkovits next expounds the faith of Reconstructionist theology in the harmony or connectedness of human purposes and the Power in the universe which guarantees or at least makes possible the achievement of those purposes. This harmony, according to Kaplan and correctly presented by Berkovits, cannot be proved. Such a belief is intuitive and a deeply felt emotion, and is, according to Kaplan, a belief in God. 147

Chapter 7

Co m m e n t

At this stage of his presentation, Berkovits is content to postpone his criticism. I want to stress, however, that Kaplan does not justify all human purposes or conceptions as to what are actual needs. If the physical cosmos is conducive to human salvation, it is up to man to assess correctly how he must behave in order to merit such fulfillment. Kaplan’s God does not willfully punish or reward. These results of human behavior are built into the divine process, in which humans must live up to their responsibility for obeying the rules of Creation and enhancing it as the source of human fulfillment.

The next question raised by Berkovits is: “What is the status and meaning of evil in the Reconstructionist world view? Since the emergence of values and purposes in man and society are attributed to the interrelated complex of helping cosmic powers which we identify as divine, shall we be justified in identifying evil in the world as the self-revelation of some diabolical cosmic forces that ‘unmake’ man’s striving for salvation and unity?”9 Berkovits carefully notes that Kaplan draws no such Manichean conclusion. But, of course, he is displeased with the new idea of God that is implicit in Kaplan’s handling of evil as the chaos that has not yet been penetrated by the divine energy that transforms chaos or evil into unity or good. Berkovits repeats Kaplan’s acknowledgment that this whole conception of reality is based on an unprovable act of faith. Co m m e n t

Berkovits does not present several important clarifications that have to be made whenever one discusses the status of evil in the cosmos. A distinction must be made between natural evils, which are the consequences of the chaotic forces in the cosmosin-the-making of physical existence — tornadoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, disease, genetic handicaps, and the like — and moral evils that are committed by humans and are their responsibility. Kaplan prefers to conceive of God as lacking omnipotence rather than to 148

Naturalism and Supernaturalism

see Him as the cause of natural catastrophes. Again, if God is all-powerful and all-good, then the evil effects of natural catastrophes must logically be willful acts on His part. In that case, what is the meaning of God’s goodness? All theologies are rife with suppositions and acts of faith. The preference for a supernatural position or a naturalistic one is thus a matter of choice as to which unanswerable questions one is more comfortable with. It is true that Kaplan cannot explain the reality of an unfinished universe and the frequent presence of evil. Nor can he guarantee the attainment of salvation. But then, he does not have to account for a good God who causes good people to suffer and evil persons to prosper. Berkovits finds fault with Kaplan for the latter’s stress on the enthusiasm for living or the will to live the maximum life as the source of “…the conviction…of the harmony between individual strivings and cosmic urges, and finally, the origin of the intuition of the unity of all reality.”10 Such a declaration calls for a tremendous leap of faith more bold than that of Karl Barth and his disciples. Co m m e n t

In the final analysis, faiths should be assessed by the degree of their reasonableness. While all faiths are emotionally based, they cannot be validated by the strength of a feeling. Believers in naturalism or supernaturalism all make leaps of faith, but the arguments for or against both views must inevitably be matters of the mind and experience.

Nearing the close of his summary of Kaplan’s theology, Berkovits declares that “…its characteristic feature is a mood of optimism, of ‘trust in life and in man’. The optimism is intuitively derived from ‘the quality of universal being,’ which is called divine and is identified with godhood’.”11 In the course of his statement of Kaplan’s view on evil, 149

Chapter 7

Berkovits compares it to that of the English philosopher, Shaftesbury, in his writings published in 1711. Berkovits maintains that the two thinkers must logically deny the reality of evil. For if evil exists actively in the universe, what would become of the enthusiasm for living so pronounced in the thought of Shaftesbury and Kaplan? Co m m e n t

The question of the will to live or the enthusiasm for living is one of those items I referred to at the beginning of this chapter which require extended analysis beyond what is possible in this short treatment. Briefly, however, Kaplan took evil to be as much a part of reality as good. In the physical world, evil is not willfully caused by God to the detriment of human felicity. It is a state of incompleteness and discontinuity. Man must strive to transcend or overcome the actual and potential evils by resort to the positive forces in nature, which are identified by Kaplan as the divine elements in reality. In such a universe, experience has demonstrated man’s capacity for overcoming many natural evils. Without suppressing his uncertainty and his doubts, man is thus able to cope with the unfinished state of reality, to avoid despair and find support for continued hope. This is realism, not blind optimism. Kaplan does not seek pie in the sky. Salvation for him is to be found not only in the partial fulfillment that is occasionally secured but also in the hope that helps him find meaning and satisfaction in his never-ending search. However, Kaplan was not an optimist; he was a realist who found reason for hope and for encouraging efforts to find the natural resources leading to human fulfillment. Kaplan’s “will to live” is certainly not identical with Anthony Shaftesbury’s enthusiasm and optimism about the world. His philosophy is a weak reed on which to peg a critique of Kaplan’s realistic faith. 150

Naturalism and Supernaturalism

Berkovits insists that Kaplan’s theology is a form of pantheism. “In untold…passages we are assured that God is a cosmic vitality, the creative urge in the universe; that man is in God and God is in man. Godhead is immanent in nature and humanity; its sovereignty is exercised through man and society.”12 Co m m e n t

Berkovits illustrates once more the common opinion that regards immanence and transcendence as separate domains. We have already commented above that, in Kaplan’s view, they are two aspects of a common dimension, such as the difference between the whole and the parts, with the whole transcending the immanent parts without being separate from them. This position is articulated by Kaplan many times. I refer the reader once again to the excerpt from Kaplan’s Diaries which I quoted above and which he repeated whenever he dealt with God’s immanence and transcendence. It is unfortunate that Berkovits did not have access to that passage. I do not find fault with Berkovits on this account. But he could have reacted to a statement like the following: ”The presence of the multitude in worship creates for all a sense of mystery, an awareness of the insufficiency of the self and its dependence on a transcendent Power that we call God. But how that mystery is understood depends on the worshipper’s individual cultural development.”13 Berkovits would reject Kaplan’s regarding values as a sufficient basis for a conception of transcendence or of the aboveness of God, but the quotation from Kaplan should at least set aside the charge that he ignored or underplayed the importance of transcendence in any acceptable concept of God.

Chapter 7

Berkovits’s Criticism Berkovits organizes his critique around three major issues — the problem of evil, the problem of freedom and the problem of unity. There can be no denying Kaplan’s dismissal of supernaturalism, of his belief that nature cannot be altered by an outside Power distinct from the reality of nature itself. Berkovits quickly jumps on the implication of this naturalist view and declares that Kaplan has to substitute a new distinction for the one between nature and supernature. The new point of departure for Kaplan has to be the difference between chaos and cosmos. “Chaos is mere resistance, absence of meaning…[It] can be overcome and conquered, but not so nature.”14 Co m m e n t

Berkovits starts off on the wrong foot. For Kaplan regards chaos as a feature of nature itself, just as evil is as real as good. Of course, there is a big difference between the course of nature, that runs between chaos and a beneficent state of existence that is favorable to humans, and the efforts of human beings to overcome their lower or beastly attributes. Physical nature is selfoperative. As such, it is often resistant to man’s efforts to bend it to human advantage. But moral chaos, except insofar as it is caused by genetic deficiencies, is willful.

Berkovits then asks why Kaplan ignores the possibility that chaos might be overcome by a more powerful supernature. Quite properly, he answers that Kaplan denies that supernature exists. He asks further whether anyone, on the other hand, has ever encountered “Tohu and Bohu” or that aspect of the universe that Kaplan cites as resisting the incursion of the good? All that we humans experience is a measure of chaos or evil that far exceeds the eagerly sought good. In thus positing a reality of sub-nature (chaos) and nature, with nature supposedly conquering the former, Kaplan is offering a form of Neo-Platonism, a metaphysics which he (Kaplan) says he eschews. Moreover, given the Reconstructionist insistence on the primacy of experience, how can 152

Naturalism and Supernaturalism

Kaplan hold on to his faith in the worthwhileness of life? Only by affirming his shaky metaphysical assumption of an immanent cosmic force for good. Co m m e n t

I agree with Berkovits that Kaplan erred in his occasional attacks on metaphysics. However, I cannot engage here in a dispute as to whether Kaplan was a Neo-Platonist in disguise. I think not, but to prove my claim would require a lengthy excursion into Neo-Platonism itself. Suffice it to say here again that natural evil for Kaplan was quite real, not as a counter force to good, but as a condition of reality not yet at a stage conducive to human fulfillment. As for his opposition to metaphysics, Kaplan was put off by the fact that so much of this branch of philosophical speculation has overstretched the credulity of the rational mind. He was not averse, however, to metaphysical claims that give credence to experience and reasonable assertion. I bring two examples. “No metaphysical speculation beyond this fundamental assumption that reality assures both the emergence and the realization of human ideals is necessary for the religious life.”15 The source of ideals and the notion that they can be realized are, indeed, matters of faith or, if one prefers, of metaphysical reasoning. Even if we humans are only able to crawl toward moral maturity, there is enough evidence in our experience to warrant our confidence that ethical goals can be attained and that it is worthwhile to make the effort to reach them. A second illustration is this: “If there is any metaphysical significance to the doctrine of the unity of God, it is that the ethical and spiritual strivings should be considered as belonging to the same cosmos as the one in which there is so much that is evil and destructive of the good.”16 Whereas Berkovits cannot 153

Chapter 7

conceive of a built-in cosmic force or energy for good, Kaplan cannot go along with the idea that a good, allpowerful God would create the faulted and incomplete world in which humans have to live.] Berkovits endeavors to destroy what he considers to be Kaplan’s metaphysical weakness. He writes that, “Only the power of metaphysical thought has ever dared to deny the reality of evil in defiance of overwhelming human experience…Such defiance, however, makes little sense if one starts with naturalism, as Reconstructionism does, and acknowledges experience, within the framework of nature, as the only arbiter of truth.17 Co m m e n t

Kaplan does speak of evil metaphorically as the absence of good or a state of reality not yet brought under the sway of good; he also refers to the image of darkness as the absence of light. But these are not metaphysical propositions. For Kaplan, evil is real and tangible, as is the good. But natural phenomena like earthquakes and hurricanes become evil only insofar as they harm humans. Presumably, such violent behavior antedated by billions of years the appearance of humans on earth, but there were no theologians around then to declare them evil. Truth, with a lower case “t,” is a human invention and has no relevance other than in the context of human experience. The search for Truth (upper case) is based on a metaphysical assumption that there is a perfect reality, but the claim that it is within human grasp is pure nonsense. Kaplan’s conception of salvation does not envisage that happiness is contingent upon the perfection or eternity of life or the total knowledge of the cosmos; it is the search itself and the partial successes which suffice to make life worthwhile for the realistic, honest, sober and courageous idealists. 154

Naturalism and Supernaturalism

It may seem strange to traditionalists, but it seems to me that Kaplan is closer than Berkovits to Jewish tradition in regard to the question of evil. For Kaplan stresses the ancient idea that creation is a partnership between God and man. The divine in nature has to be appropriated by humans in order to prevent the natural processes from becoming sources of evil. The next item of the critique concerns freedom. Berkovits asks, “How can the lawful orderliness of nature be made to obey a purposeful will without interfering with the ‘uniformities’ of natural law? It makes no difference whether the purpose emanates from an immanent cosmic urge or a transcendental divine will; its origin in each case is seen in something that is external to the dominion of ‘the immutable laws of cause and effect. In each case we are confronted with the conflict between the order of nature…and the order of the spirit guided by the chosen goals of an intelligent will. The order of nature is the realm of necessity; that of the spirit the realm of freedom.”18 Co m m e n t

Berkovits’s question illustrates his mishandling of the distinction between naturalism and supernaturalism. The naturalist argues that a scientist cannot undo the uniformities of nature; he can only try to employ them for whatever purpose he has in mind. But if that purpose be out of keeping with what is possible, no amount of manipulation on his part can bend nature to his will. The supernaturalist, however, regards nature as bespeaking only a customary way (minhago shel olam, in traditional language) in which the cosmos functions. But that way, supposedly, can be completely altered — and has been in past miracles — by the will of God. Thus, there is, indeed, a sharp distinction that has to be made between what a finite, limited and often erring human mind can do with nature and what a supernatural God can cause. 155

Chapter 7

Co m m e n t

The human mind is free to think what it chooses to think; it cannot think into existence or read out of existence that which violates the natural order. Thus, the following point by Berkowitz is not pertinent to the problem of freedom: “The question… is, how is freedom possible in the context of a reality that is dominated by the determinism of irrepressible laws?”19 The answer should be obvious. Freedom is not license. Men and women are free to do many things in and with nature, just as they are free to commit acts of justice or cruelty. There is a consequence in all cases, but the freedom of the human mind seems to be one of those ‘irrepressible’ laws of nature.

Berkovits presses on. He asserts that, ”…he who, because of ‘the uniformities of natural law,’ rejects the belief that God may perform miracles, cannot logically assert the creative principle of freedom merely by affirming its existence very firmly… Reconstructionism overlooks the point that in relationship to the uniformities of nature every ethical deed is a deed of freedom, indeed a miracle, and perhaps an even greater ‘miracle’ than the suspension of a natural law by the intervention of the will of a Supreme Being.”20 Co m m e n t

Suppose that freedom of the mind is generic to the human make-up, a mysterious phenomenon, but not any more mysterious than any other human trait or than human existence itself. Kaplan does not deny the mystery of freedom or consciousness, but at least he experiences them. Berkovits has no evidence for miracles. All he has the right to claim is that there are unexplained events. Kaplan would agree, but he would prove nothing by asserting that they are God’s doing. Nor does he wish to pay the price of having to justify supposed acts of a willful God that are manifestly unfair and even cruel. 156

Naturalism and Supernaturalism

In emphasizing what he considers to be the necessarily willful nature of deity, Berkovits declares: “…the cosmic intellect must be transcendental and prior to both chaos and cosmos. It is supernatural; and as a mind, associated with a will and purpose, it must be imagined in some terms of personal existence.”21 Co m m e n t

This criticism of Kaplan’s designation of God as process reminds me of the venerable debate on the creation of the world from nothing or from eternal matter. Both views, of course, are based on faith, with one’s preference dependent on its consequences as seen by the chooser. Maimonides, we recall, chose creatio ex nihilo, because the Aristotelian view could not be proved and Jewish tradition depended on the former belief. Obviously, if God is what the supernaturalists say He is, then He must possess the attributes of a supernatural being. But why should God create chaos and, let us not forget, be responsible for natural evil. Moreover, by creating imperfect man, he is at least indirectly to blame for moral evil. Admittedly, Kaplan’s concept of God as process provides no answer to the mystery of Creation, but it is no less logical a position than that which is suggested in Berkowits’s criticism. Moreover, it preserves God’s goodness. Parenthetically, it appears to me that the latter-day Big Bang theory sheds little light on this controversy. It is vastly important to know when and how our universe came to be, but the explosion of that minute something (particle? energy?) leaves the Creator hypothesis where it has always been.

Berkovits tries to uncover what he thinks is a hidden supernaturalism in Kaplan’s theology. He writes that if, as Kaplan claims, freedom and responsibility are demonstrations of a cosmic principle, then it must be the principle of cosmic selfhood cooperating with other selves.22 For freedom and responsibility can have no meaning except as a relationship between selves. So the cosmic principle is really a finite 157

Chapter 7

demiurge separate from the cosmos it creates. (Berkovits speaks of a Platonic demiurge, which seems to me to be a mistaken combination, but that is an issue for philosophical debate of no concern to us here.) Co m m e n t

Kaplan bases his reference to a cosmic principle on the notion of polarity. All phenomena are separate entities that also stand in relationship to other existents. As separate, they are free; as related, they either cooperate or oppose. If they are conscious entities, they can choose the character of their relationship; if they lack consciousness, their individuality and interaction with other phenomena are conditioned by their structures, locations and other physical factors. I fail to see any supernaturalism in this configuration.

Another front in the attack by Berkovits is in the area of evolutionary theory. Modern evolutionists, he argues, consider the idea that the emergence of latent possibilities is inherently present in the universe to be “…merely metaphysical speculation with suspiciously theological implications…The evolutionary principle is able to explain the rise of ethics by means of adaptive functions which work automatically within the context of causation.”23 Co m m e n t

Berkovits quotes T.H. Huxley and Julian Huxley who describe the evolution of purpose from countless years of blind and automatic operation of the universe. Is this a criticism of Kaplan or an unconscious acceptance of his view that one need not turn to a supernatural God to “explain” evolutionary developments? I cannot blame Berkovits for calling as witnesses scientists with whose work he was acquainted. That is what any thinker will do. Had he lived a little longer, he would undoubtedly have learned of the important work of ornithologists and other researchers on evolutionary developments among the finches on the islands of Barbados. Their efforts have thrown light on the actual mechanisms of 158

Naturalism and Supernaturalism

the changes that have taken place in these birds in the course of a generation. When Kaplan speaks of a cosmic urge or energy, he is not hiding a metaphysical predilection, as Berkovits supposes; rather does he limit his speculation to what science regards as the way in which physical phenomena operate. Nonetheless, Kaplan articulates clearly a faith which, if one is so minded, can be presumed to have metaphysical overtones. He repeats throughout the years that God must be believed in before He can be defined. His faith that the cosmic mechanism holds out hope for and even supports the fulfillment of human purposes is based on an unprovable metaphysical assumption. But the faith is in the ultimate or potential goodness (or god-ness) of the cosmic process. Turning to ethics, Berkovits proclaims that Kaplan sees the entire ethical life of man in terms of drives, impulses, etc. which on the level of consciousness reflect cosmic activities. “No Reconstructionist,” he writes, “ever encountered cosmic powers which make for life’s worthwhileness.”24 Co m m e n t

Berkovits errs on all counts. Kaplan is no reductionist. Nor does an inference from experience require that it be perceived by the senses. No one ever saw gravity; its laws had to be deduced from the mutual attraction of physical objects. Ethical thought is one of the branches of valuation. Kaplan states: “A value is any attitude or belief which is stressed as of high worth, because of its importance for the impetus which it supplies to the striving for salvation. The alternative to authoritative dogma is… the acceptance of values which, without offending reason, are capable of satisfying our most distinctive human needs. These are the needs that belong to the realm of the spirit.”25 159

Chapter 7

In other words, ethical values are evoked in man because of the very nature of his being. He needs his fellows for his own well-being; their association must be based on a set of values that take account of what is desirable and possible in the life order. Drives, impulses, forces and the like are all elements of that order. Human needs would be disastrous if there were no urges to satisfy them and nothing in nature to lend them support. Yet Berkovits persists. “The ethical deed is the fruit of freedom. Actions that are prompted by irrepressible impulses…which cannot be denied are not performed in free commitment to an ideal.”26 Co m m e n t

Why not? The impulses and drives impel humans to formulate the values that are to guide their behavior. But those values and their implementation are the product of the free choice of us human beings. We are not free, however, to be other than what we are. We apparently cannot be Martians or other creatures of outer space. Nor can we be elephants. Does the fact that we can be none of these beings mean that we lack freedom? Is freedom not one of the gifts that have been conferred upon us by the creative power of the universe? But does freedom confer upon us the power always to make the right decision? Berkovits misinterprets the meaning of “cosmic forces, drives, impulses,” as conceived by Kaplan. They do not provide the values or the moral laws which are necessary for the spiritual salvation of man. Those, we repeat, are derived by the free thought and decision of human beings. It is true that there are men and women who are morally inept, just as there are persons who are mentally deficient. We are back again to the problem of natural evil. We can only hope that this evil will lessen or be reduced by human effort. But meanwhile, those 160

Naturalism and Supernaturalism

humans who are competent have no choice but to act as morally as they can. Berkovits criticizes Kaplan’s conception of sin, which the latter defines as a betrayal of God or the failure of a person to live up to the best that is in him or her. Why blame the poor person who apparently has not been endowed by the creative power in the universe with the ability to know what is right or the desire or capacity to abide by the right? Co m m e n t

This is a question which Berkovits should direct to himself and not to Kaplan. Indeed, a good, supernatural God should not play such a bad trick on any of his creatures. Kaplan, on the other hand, conceives of a God who is not responsible for the evils of nature. We have to learn how to live with a limited divine energy that accounts for the orderliness and good which we experience in life. Admittedly, this is a tough theology but one that justifies human striving to understand reality and to continue to search for the meaning of life. Just as we persist in trying to improve our common human inheritance despite our limitations, so can we believe and trust in a non-omnipotent God. In arguing his case for the above criticism, Berkovits again charges Kaplan with pantheism. He uses virtually the same language as Kaplan in drawing the consequences of Spinoza’s philosophy, which is generally held to be the classic pantheist doctrine. I need only call the reader’s attention to the quotation which I cited above on Kaplan’s disdain for pantheism.

A difficult problem is clearly stated by Berkovits, as follows: “From all our experience we know that the laws of nature are indifferent to the considerations of right and wrong, that the causal nexus is the deadly enemy of freedom and teleological guidance…How then, is it possible 161

Chapter 7

to conceive of the natural and moral order as being in harmony with each other?”27 Co m m e n t

Berkovits inadvertently steps on the problem when he speaks of the natural and moral “order” and not “orders.” Are nature and morality part of a single system, or do they exist in separate realms, indifferent to one another? Kaplan argues for the polarity of natural and moral law. On the one hand, natural law operates in keeping with eternal mechanical laws, while moral values are conceived and implemented in a separate realm of the spirit. At the same time, the spirit and its products would not exist, were they not an outgrowth of the physical universe in its higher development. Therefore, when Kaplan refers to the harmony of nature and spirit, he is calling attention to the fact that values cannot be valid or helpful to the search for salvation if they fly in the face of what is physically true. For instance, much of the inferior position of women throughout the ages has been caused by a misreading of the actual physical and psychological make-up of the female sex — and, to be fair, of the male sex, as well. Berkovits calls in some philosophical heavyweights –Hermann Cohen, Fichte and Kant — to buttress his position, but none of them, as far as I can see, dealt with Kaplan’s question. He wrestled with the reality of the immanent structures of nature and man. They share the same cosmic order. But man is conscious and free and therefore has, or should have, the responsibility of contributing to the creative and constructive elements in his/her cosmic home and in himself/herself. Kaplan’s problem is functional, not metaphysical. He does not inquire as to how the physical and moral realms can be reconciled. He simply wants to learn how to bring moral values as close as possible to what human beings 162

Naturalism and Supernaturalism

can and ought to be. In that endeavor, nature can be helpful as a guide to possibilities and as a signpost in avoiding wrong directions. Metaphysics enters when we ask why things are as they are and what they might become. When Kaplan states that ethical and spiritual striving belong to the same cosmos as the one that contains evil, Berkovits says that he is not entitled to prove the unity of the universe by recourse to the unity of God. Only the supernaturalist has this right, because for him God is the transcendent Supreme Being who is the world’s Creator and Sovereign. “With such a faith, the supernaturalist may confront all the disharmony in the cosmos. But the Reconstructionist rejects the concept of the One God, the Creator of the universe. For him, God is an immanent aspect of reality; it is identical with the cosmic processes themselves.”28 Co m m e n t

One wonders what Berkovits means by “unity.” The cosmos, by his own admission, is disharmonious. And if God is the Creator, He has caused this disunity. Does God’s unity, therefore, mean that He is only one and the only One? All monotheists, including Kaplan, agree that there is only one God. But what is meant by the One God? If Berkovits regards God as only transcendent, then in what category must we place the cosmos? Does not its very existence call God’s unity into question, especially when man and nature seem to be so disordered? If God is also immanent, on what basis does Berkovits deny Kaplan the right to offer his own interpretation of God’s unity? We have seen that Kaplan’s emphasis on polarity enables him to describe God’s unity as the harmony that prevails between Him as the unchanging, transcendent order of nature and that aspect of the changing, immanent process of nature which works toward overcoming its discontinuities and imperfections. We 163

Chapter 7

have also noted that Kaplan is willing to pay the price for this conception of God’s unity. He has to relinquish belief in God’s omnipotence in order to strengthen his faith in His goodness. Berkovits would certainly disagree, but judging from his analysis, he has no convincing argument that would dispel the contradiction between his perfect God and the evils that men must suffer. “The very idea of a cosmos is a metaphysical concept. It is either the fruit of a monistic and deterministic pantheism or of a supernatural ethical monotheism…’Process of godhood’ and ‘divine aspect of reality’, in the singular, have no logical justification in the Reconstructionist context.”29 So declares Berkovits. Co m m e n t

There have been many ideas of a cosmos, from primitive myths to kabbalistic sefirot to various images drawn by scientists. Berkovits’s either/or declaration is unwarranted. Nor is he fair in this instance to Kaplan’s inference, based on the findings of the several sciences, that there is a force or energy in nature upon which man can rely as he seeks a worthwhile life. Without such a faith, the work of scientists would be baseless. But the faith itself implies no particular metaphysical orientation. I maintain that Kaplan’s naturalism is both more modest and better supported by scientific investigation than the traditional supernaturalist creationism of Berkovits.

Berkovits turns again to the defense of traditional Jewish monotheism, which admittedly posits a supernatural God, against Kaplan’s brand of cosmic unity. He brings Hermann Cohen to support the view that, “The concept of the One God, the originator of the one universe as well as the source of the moral law, alone makes known to us the multitude of people as the brotherhood of men.”30 164

Naturalism and Supernaturalism

Co m m e n t

Cohen is not a good advocate to justify the supernaturalism advanced by Jewish tradition. His God of unity is logically derived and is not the God to whom Berkovits addressed his prayer. No doubt, Berkovits preferred Cohen’s logic to that of Kaplan, but his recourse to the eminent neo-Kantian does not engage Kaplan at his point of departure. Berkovits repeats several times his argument that Kaplan’s naturalism cannot legitimately derive God’s or man’s unity from the world of natural disorder and from the multitude of tribes, races and other forms of social existence. But this multi-colored reality with its accompanying areas of chaos is what leads Kaplan to project immanent unity into the future, whereas it is God’s transcendent unity, manifest in laws and orderliness that alone can make such an outcome possible. As opposed to this tentativeness, Berkovits cannot offer a reasonable explanation as to how a supernatural One God would want to destroy His primeval unity in favor of a cosmic disorder.

Berkovits concludes his criticism as follows: “The attempt of Reconstructionism to reinterpret Judaism by dissociating the universal significance of Jewish ideals from their source in the One God, the Creator, must be considered a complete failure. Having rejected Jewish monotheism, Reconstructionism has not provided a convincing foundation for Jewish universalism. It does not understand the age-old truth…that before one may speak of the brotherhood of man one must acknowledge the fatherhood of God. Without it all ethics is mere utilitarianism and politics.”31 Co m m e n t

Like all serious thinkers who aim to preserve the Jewish people as a creative group, Kaplan too uses interpretation and reinterpretation. However, he also does not hesitate to recommend revolutionary ideas, methods and actions. Furthermore, he tries to 165

Chapter 7

avoid the traps that are often set by semantics. Thus “Jewish monotheism” and “Jewish universalism” cover a broad conceptual field. Was Maimonides’ version of monotheism a rejection of Jewish monotheism because he went beyond historical revelation and made some startling remarks about the essence of God? I repeat what the Rambam declared in his Shemonah Perakim. When he wrote “The Holy One, blessed be He is His attributes,” he was in line with the traditional concept. God is omnipotent, good, omniscient, etc. But when he added, “His attributes are He,” he introduced a whole new train of thought. Power, goodness, knowledge, justice and the like are God.32 Who decides what these attributes denote? Evidently, Maimonides was groping for a way to infer God from human experience and cogitation, just as he felt the need to prove God’s existence logically rather than rely on revelation alone. Kaplan did not reject monotheism, but he regarded its supernaturalist version as misleading and even harmful. As to the final statement of Berkovits, Kaplan saw the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man as correlatives. There is no father without a child or children, and the latter, by definition, is the offspring of a father/mother. (Come to think of it, it might be more accurate, in these days of genetic alternatives, to speak of the motherhood of God. For mothers can now become pregnant without the physical presence of a father.) In any case, there can be no worthy God/man relationship unless it is founded on universal principles of morality. Berkowitz locates those principles in a revealed tradition, but he does not attend to the moral errors that abound in that tradition. Kaplan accepts those universally recognized moral values that have been inherited by us from the past, but given the 166

Naturalism and Supernaturalism

history of moral myopia, he is sure that the tradition was man-made, often mistaken and therefore in need of revision. Berkovits’s Evaluation of Reconstructionism Berkovits writes: “From the striving of man for self-transcendence, trans-naturalism concludes not only the existence of certain cosmic powers but also the nature of cosmic reality, which is seen to be such as to guarantee the ultimate fulfillment of man’s aspirations.”33 Co m m e n t

How about adding the word “justified” between “man’s” and “aspirations”? That would be a more accurate representation of Kaplan’s intent. Kaplan often employs “trans-naturalism” rather than “naturalism,” in order to stress the presence of spirit and transcendence in the cosmic order. These factors, expressed in values and laws, place limits on human purposes. Only those purposes that accord with both the laws of physical and moral nature can reach fulfillment.

Berkovits claims that Kaplan has not proved that there is a correlate to personal and social salvation “…in the nature of reality which has positive significance in terms of that reality.”34 Co m m e n t

Again, semantic oversight, deliberate or not, raises its ugly head. I am uncertain as to what Berkovits refers when he writes “in terms of that reality.” For there is plenty of evidence in the nature of reality and the reality of nature to lend credence to Kaplan’s faith that there is a cosmic order that is and can be relied on in man’s search for salvation. I say “faith” because nature is, indeed, faulted, and no one can prove that its chaotic features will necessarily be overcome. We are thus left with the choice between reliance on God as the lifegiving energy in the cosmos or faith in a supernatural 167

Chapter 7

God for whom nature is some kind of toy to be played with according to His mood. The next step is to deride Kaplan’s reliance on science which, in the opinion of Berkovits, has a dire message for mankind — entropy. This subject is touched on in the next chapter, but I shall add a few words here. The ultimate annihilation of human life such as predicted in the theory of entropy can be taken as a scientific fact, possibility or probability. Berkovits cites the theory as if it were an incontrovertible outcome of the cosmic venture. On the basis of this fact, he berates Kaplan for finding cosmic support for the salvation of man. He quotes Psalms 8:4-6, in which man is described as being a nothing but nonetheless raised by God almost to the level of the angels. Berkovits argues that on the basis of Kaplan’s premise that the universe is favorable to man, all that he has the right to say is that we humans should eat, drink and be merry; for since entropy will have its way, our entire species will die. Yet Berkowitz fails to apply the same judgment to his supernaturalism. Has God created the world only to destroy it? Co m m e n t

Kaplan does not need entropy to realize the smallness of man. Our individual mortality is enough. Salvation has to be found during the span of a mortal life. If entropy does eventually take its toll, it will do no more than death does to interrupt the flow of consciousness. Still, Kaplan finds enough in the cosmic processes to support his faith in the worthwhileness of living and to provide the courage to enable humans to accept their mortality with serenity.

Another instance of Berkovits’s overlooking a salient point is to be found in the following sentences: “The Reconstructionist method of drawing conclusions from the higher aspirations of man to the structure of universal reality is tantamount to fashioning the cosmos in the image of human aspirations and values. The cosmic ‘correlates’ are nothing else but the projection of man’s wishes and desires into the cosmos.”35 168

Naturalism and Supernaturalism

Co m m e n t

Missing from these sentences is the fact that the correlates are not just anything to which man aspires or which he claims to be characteristic of the cosmos. All these aspirations and assertions about the structure of the universe have to be substantiated objectively. That is what science has been attempting to do. But Kaplan is careful to admit that mistakes are readily made. Faith for Kaplan is a psychological prod to inquiry, not a method of proof.

Carrying his argument further, Berkovits attacks Kaplan for his view that there is something in the nature of life which evokes ideals and sends man in quest of salvation and the cosmic force which they identify as God “…only because man approves of his own ideals and of the quest. This is the deification of human values.”36 Co m m e n t

Berkovits fails again to attend to Kaplan’s distinction between God and “God.” Identifying as God that in reality which impels man to search for fulfillment and to deem certain values to be divine is indicative of the way in which the term is used and not a validation of the values themselves. God is not known by man. He must ever be sought. The traditional belief that man is made in the image of God assumes that man knows what that image is. The statement loses its hubris only when the human being is modest enough to acknowledge that it is always he who makes the declaration. He is talking about “God,” not God. Who deifies human values, Berkovits or Kaplan?

The coup de grace of Berkovits is his derision of Kaplan’s understanding — or misunderstanding — of modern science. Clearly, Kaplan was no scientist. Nor did he claim to be one. To this extent, Berkovits was perfectly correct. But he accused Kaplan of not having kept pace with the latest in scientific theory and therefore of resting his theology and his criticism of supernaturalism on ignorance. 169

Chapter 7

Berkovits builds an impressive case, quoting principally from or mentioning Whitehead, Jeans, Eddington and J. W. N. Sullivan and listing some of the new developments in physics and the philosophy of science. Quantum physics, for instance, along with wave mechanics, the indeterminacy of atomic behavior and the statistical laws of microphysics have put an end to or at least made more complicated the assumptions of the universality of natural laws and the immutability of cause and effect. Berkovits is careful not to conclude that there is no such thing as causality; but he insists that the principle is now a matter of metaphysics, not of science. Berkovits asserts that, “The truth is that modern science excludes as little the Will of God…as a possible substratum to the world of observable phenomena, as it confirms the principle of causation as such a determining metaphysical background…science is no more indifferent toward (the Will of God) as it is toward Dr. Kaplan’s immutable laws of cause and effect.”37 Berkovits enthuses over Whitehead’s declaration that Hume’s criticism of causation and the universality of natural law has never been refuted by experimental science. Kaplan’s attempt to wed religion to science is a miserable bit of shadhanut. Admirably, Berkovits calls for an accommodation between a mature naturalism and a mature supernaturalism. His critique of Kaplan clarifies what for him is an immature naturalism, but it was not his purpose in his essay to paint a picture of a mature supernaturalism. Nonetheless, I want to pay tribute to him as one of the critics of Kaplan’s theology who has done his job in great depth. Although his intention was not to close the gap between himself and Kaplan, Berkovits ended his analysis with a comment to which I am certain Kaplan would have said, Amen. “Only from the fullness of the spirit will the cold skeleton of physical experience be clothed with life and saving dignity.”38 Co m m e n t

The criticism of Kaplan’s references to science and some of the metaphysical implications to be drawn mainly from the latest developments in physics is the strongest section in Berkovits’s monograph. However, while he is correct in pointing out how much deeper the mystery of the cosmos has become as the result 170

Naturalism and Supernaturalism

of scientific investigation and experimentation, he has not indicated convincingly that the physical world is supernaturally controlled. If natural laws do not prevail, what is gained by positing a supernatural Power who presumably has created the disorder that we experience — and the seemingly undisciplined behavior of parts of the cosmos, like those ornery sub-atomic particles? Mature naturalists and supernaturalists should be honest enough to call a mystery a mystery. Moreover, while the behavior of subatomic particles (or energy) seems to operate in ways not yet approaching complete scientific understanding, the world of experience has lost none of its dependence on natural laws. However, Berkovits has ignored the real basis of Kaplan’s attack on supernaturalism. The foundation of Kaplan’s rejection of the belief in God as a supernatural Being is in the human sciences and their implications for the understanding of human development. It is these, more than the physical sciences, that have undermined belief for many Jews in historical revelation. It is these that have cut at the roots of the Halakhah as God’s will for the Jewish people. It is true that nothing can be “proved” either way. But the evidence is heavily weighted in the direction of the belief that Jewish tradition and the traditions of all peoples were fashioned and continue to be developed by men and women of all manner of mental ability, temperament and moral stature. Hopefully, the advance of civilized culture is aided by a constructive energy or force that we call “God.” Kaplan preferred to believe that God, in some way, is to be located in the natural process. Berkovits could not make peace with that idea. But we cannot have it both ways. We have to choose between two deeply felt outlooks on life.

Chapter 7

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Eliezer Berkovits, “Reconstructionist Theology,” Tradition, 2:1 (Fall 1959). Ibid., 21-22. Diaries, March 30, 1913. Ibid., 22. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 30-31. Ibid., 31 Ibid., 32-33. Kaplan, The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion, 258. Berkovits, 34. Kaplan, The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion, 29. Ibid., 75. Berkovits, 35. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 40-41. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 43. Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew, 246. Berkovits, 43. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 52. Maimonides, Shemonah Perakim, 20. Berkovits, 53. Ibid., 54.

172

Naturalism and Supernaturalism

35 36 37 38

Ibid., 57. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 66.

Chapter 8

Ethical Values in the Thought of Bertrand Russell and Mordecai M. Kaplan The tendency to classify a thinker under the rubric of some school of thought often leads to a superficial understanding of his or her system. To state that a person is a pragmatist, idealist, existentialist, or what have you, arouses certain intellectual expectations, but until we have explored the details of his or her writing, we shall not know whether the categorization is warranted. In this chapter, I shall examine two men, Bertrand Russell and Mordecai M. Kaplan, who are generally designated as naturalists of one kind or another. Russell, the noted British mathematician, won a Nobel prize for literature. He acquired the reputation of being an iconoclast for his views on many subjects, including philosophy, war and peace, sex mores and religion. Kaplan, who chose a career in Jewish thought over the chance to become an academic scholar in anthropology or sociology, created many a furor in the Jewish community for his radical views on virtually every area of Jewish concern. Kaplan identifies himself as a religionist, while Russell leans to atheism. Nevertheless, they share much in common, despite their different points of departure and some of their conclusions. In what sense are they both naturalists? What are the bases of their different views on religion? I shall confine myself here as much as possible to their treatment of moral values. Both Russell and Kaplan assume that, as a result of the advances in science and disciplined thought of the last few centuries, men and women must divest themselves of some fundamental intellectual and ethical notions that have dominated the human mind for a long time. 174

E t hica l Va l u e s in t h e Th o u ght of B .R u sse l l an d M . M .K apl an

This revolution has to reach virtually every aspect of life — nationalism, politics, religion, art, economics, to name just a few. Kaplan and Russell call for wide-ranging social changes, including the outlawing of war, the unification of humankind under a universal law and government, and the kind of education for all that would guarantee freedom of thought, research and expression and would heighten respect for the natural cultural pluralism that prevails among peoples. Similarly, the two thinkers call for a re-examination of the entire range of ethical values — their content, their implementation and their authority. The values held by Russell and Kaplan are nearly identical and are common to every enlightened democratic society — equality, freedom, love, social justice, peace, and the like. The general agreement between them also includes the dos and don’ts that are required in order to implement the values in social intercourse. If the agreement between the two men is so wide-ranging, wherein do they differ? I begin with their views on religion. The starting point of their divergence on religion is related to the fundamental difference between Christianity and Judaism. Although Russell rebelled against his Christian origins, he saw religion as such through its embodiment in Christianity. According to this version, religion is a theologico-ethical outlook which its communicants urge upon all mankind. Inasmuch as Russell was convinced that this Weltanschauung contains many ideas and elements of faith that cannot stand before the bar of reason, he regarded it as a method of thinking unworthy of enlightened men and women. Moreover, the very attempt to unite humanity on a theological presumption is reprehensible. It is true that Russell is aware of the social aspect of religion, but he deals inaccurately with the connection between it and the values advanced in any particular religious polity. For example, every time he refers to biblical religion, he makes a sharp distinction between the legal system of the Pentateuch and prophetic morals. The former he regards as political and the latter as personal and religious. Ethical values on a political basis are to be found in the Torah, whereas the message for personal ethical understanding is the work of the Prophets. It does not seem to have occurred to Russell to regard the Pentateuch as teaching values, many of which inspired the Prophets. Of course, the Prophets 175

Chapter 8

took exception to some views of past generations and emphasized certain ideas as more important than others, but most of their value structure was based on toraitic ethics. Russell ignored the organic connection in the Bible between theory and practice and preferred to treat them as two entirely separate processes, with religion to be identified with an outdated morality.1 Kaplan, on the other hand, regards religion as emerging from the efforts of humans to fulfill themselves within social groupings. He derives this understanding from the fact that the Jewish people, in which he found his fulfillment, generated a spiritual culture whose universal message is inextricably bound up with the historical development of that people. It follows that religion is bound to change along with the other physical, spiritual and cultural transformations that occur in every society. Furthermore, whereas Russell confines religion to a supernaturalist outlook, Kaplan declares that religion must inevitably advance in keeping with the progress of science and the broadest general thought. Therefore, he holds the view that religion should now be transposed into the key of naturalism. That is the conclusion, he affirms, that must be drawn from the direction of thought in the last few centuries. It is this shared naturalism which enables Russell and Kaplan to approximate one another in their views on ethical values. Kaplan defines an ethical value as the position that persons take as they try to guarantee decent relationships with those close to themselves and between humans in general. That is to say, an ethical value is an intellectual construct and not a dogma which has to be obeyed whether it accords with intelligence or not. We should not conclude from this approach that since it is man who determines which values are desirable, anarchy must follow. On the contrary, it is incumbent upon man to distinguish between his needs and his wants. As long as an individual controls his greeds, his values lead him to a life of social discipline and spiritual balance. The question arises as to the sense in which Kaplan’s position can properly be designated as religious. How does it differ from secular humanism? This question is very relevant to the religioussecular debate in Israel. The centrality of man is a major point in the thinking of both Russell and Kaplan. The latter pictures humans as endeavoring to discover 176

E t hica l Va l u e s in t h e Th o u ght of B .R u sse l l an d M . M .K apl an

their needs, so that they can devise values that will justify the purposes that they set for their lives. In Jewish tradition and in those of many other religions, man is called upon to obey commandments that are set forth in revealed texts, for “they are our lives and the length of our days.” Kaplan reverses the order. Those values and the means of their realization in practice which seem to us to be of divine quality should be considered Torah, that is, worthy of our emulation. This point of view, illustrated in the statement of Maimonides in his Shemonah Perakim, to which I have referred, raises serious questions. Who determines what is just and good? If it is God, then the second clause in the Rambam’s declaration, which implies that goodness, justice, mercy, power and other so-called divine attributes are God is tautological and unnecessary. But Maimonides was not given to tautologies, and so there is a suspicion that he might have been toying with the possibility that human beings play an ineluctable role in the determination of the values to be associated with divinity. Be that as it may, we must remind ourselves that however much men and women in fact determined the values by which they live, they are not the measure. Humans cannot guarantee the worthiness and correctness of their values. In both systems, traditional revelationism and naturalistic humanism, proof of their accordance with reality is beyond the capability of their proponents. However, naturalism at least acknowledges that the discovery of absolute Truth and Good, if there be such, is a matter of future demonstration and not a given from the past. Russell, too, locates the source of all values in human determination. Like Kaplan, he admits that he cannot prove the correctness of his vision of the good life. But he places full responsibility on man for the choice of his values and purposes. Russell writes: “The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”2 This implies that the complete man is a being who has the ability to fashion his life out of love for his fellows and by application of the most exact and upto-date knowledge concerning nature and his place in it. Russell adds an important caveat. Individual fulfillment has to be part of general salvation. The good life for the individual alone is an unworthy objective. The aspiration for a good life has to be based on the recognition that 177

Chapter 8

the universe is one and organic. A person is mistaken if he thinks that he can live alone and for himself alone. To summarize the points of agreement between Kaplan and Russell: Salvation, fulfillment, wholeness, the good life — all these terms that are scattered throughout the writings of the two men — represent the purposes of life that are determined by men and women in accordance with their humanity and the level of their education and maturity. Although the correctness of values cannot be proved, they need not be arbitrary. They can and should be the fruits of disciplined research and thought and of the understanding that the individual is a link in a universal human collective with whose standards he or she must reckon. Ethical values are thus human inventions, with all that this assertion implies. Up to this point, Russell and Kaplan pave a naturalistic road on which they can both travel. They part company over the question as to whether there is a cosmic structure that supports man’s efforts to achieve fulfillment and warrants his adherence to ethical values of his own discovery or invention. Russell argues that there is no evidence whatsoever that gives credence to any moral value. All we have is scientific knowledge, and that knowledge bears witness only to the ruling presence in the cosmos of a tremendous power that is generally a force for evil. When we recognize the fact that man, with his awareness of good and evil, stands helpless before a reality which lacks this awareness, we can then face the choice that is ours: Shall we worship and serve power or goodness? Shall God be for us an evil existent, or shall we recognize God as a creation of our conscience? The human conscience creates values, and they must be examined in terms of their consequences. They are good insofar as they lead to the achievement of our ends. Russell adds: “I say ends that we desire, not ends that we ought to desire. What we ‘ought’ to desire is merely what someone else wishes us to desire.”3 Delving completely into the wellsprings of ethical values would take us far afield, but we cannot avoid reference to Russell’s belief that all of man’s search for ethical perfection will eventuate in nothingness. Relentless entropy will bring to an end the accomplishment of the human species. There is no basis for the belief that the universe can 178

E t hica l Va l u e s in t h e Th o u ght of B .R u sse l l an d M . M .K apl an

fulfill the desire for salvation. Once, Russell declared, religion drew its strength from the conviction that there is a unity between man and the cosmos. Today, he says, we have to seek another type of unity which asks for nothing from reality. Man is lost, and all that he can do is to try and preserve his self-respect. Kaplan takes exception to this dark picture, despite his own limited expectation from the outset concerning the nature of human salvation. The mortality of all creatures, natural evil and the gap between the phenomena of immanent existence and the secrets of the transcendent realm make it impossible for men like Kaplan to believe in eternal life for the individual. However, in contrast to Russell, Kaplan believes that human aspiration is not an idle hope and guess. He claims that the greatest human tragedy is not death or suffering but the absence of hope.4 Russell locates the genesis of values in the efforts of humans to achieve their goals in life and sees the justification of those values in the results of their implementation. Kaplan, on the other hand, maintains that the validation of values is dependent on their accord with laws of conduct that are no less objective than those governing physical nature. Therefore, says Kaplan, if humans wish to bring certain values to realization, they will succeed only if those values bespeak cosmic demands. Humans will not always succeed in their attempts to comprehend the cosmic order and what it requires of them, either physically or spiritually. However, in both instances, there has to be a direct and inherent connection between what humans wish and the means employed for bringing them to fruition. Cosmic law does not insure the satisfaction of all human desires, but it identifies the ethical parameters within which men and women must carry out its dictates. Kaplan writes that, ”…man alone, of all creatures, hears not only nature calling him but also God. As such he is exempt from the law of natural selection, and becomes subject to the law of spiritual selection.”5 Russell emphasizes the destructive forces in nature. Kaplan, no less realistic and alert to these elements of the physical universe, seeks the orderly and constructive vectors of the natural process that can aid man in improving his behavior and his condition. 179

Chapter 8

Neither Russell nor Kaplan has an answer to the genesis of cosmic evil. But whereas Russell despairs of the cosmic future, Kaplan proclaims the existence of a system of perpetual order on which humanity can rely. He often quotes the words of the Prophet Malachi 3:6, who puts into God’s mouth the declaration, “I, Yahweh, do not change.” Only one aspect of reality does not undergo metamorphosis, and that is natural law, in which Kaplan finds the tracks of divinity. True, humans invent moral values, just as they discover or deduce some of the laws of nature. But the validation of both sets of laws and the observation of their operation in life are essential if they are to contribute to the humanization of the human race. Anyone who seeks the key to olam haba (the world-to-come, interpreted here as life beyond the grave) will not find it in the pocket of either Russell or Kaplan. Both of these men will attract to their philosophies only tough-minded individuals, who are prepared to come to terms with their mortality and are not deterred from continuing their search for the good life despite the stumbling blocks that inevitably stand in their way. However, those who long for a morally-devoted humankind will find a challenge in the conceptions of Russell and Kaplan. The little I have presented of these conceptions should suffice to indicate how far most religionists and secularists are from finding a firm theoretical basis for their values, including ethical ones. But we need not despair. Once we ask ourselves what are the values that the intellectual rivals actually hold, we find that what divides them is not the values themselves. Decent men are to be found among the proponents of vastly different rationales and philosophies, and they agree on most of the ethical values that govern or should govern human behavior. Some of them are driven by their desire to advance human dignity, while others are motivated by their belief in the theophany at Sinai or some other historical revelation. The theological debate will continue until the return of Elijah who will solve all the cosmic riddles. Meanwhile, we can all continue to live constructively with the values we share.

E t hica l Va l u e s in t h e Th o u ght of B .R u sse l l an d M . M .K apl an

Notes This chapter is a translation, with a few revisions, of a paper presented in Hebrew at a conference in honor of Prof. Rivkah Horwitz, held at Ben Gurion University, on March 16, 1999. The conference dealt with ethics in Jewish thought.

1

Bertrand Russell, “Authority and the Individual (1949),” The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, ed. Robert E. Egner and Lester E. Denonn (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961).

2

Bertrand Russell, “What I Believe (1957),” Ibid. Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship (1903),” Ibid. Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew, 266. Ibid., 247.

3 4 5

Chapter 9

Reconstructionism Revisited

We must distinguish between the philosophy of Reconstructionism and its embodiment in the Reconstructionist movement. Founders of schools of thought, if they are still alive, are frequently surprised and often disappointed at the manner in which their ideas are interpreted and implemented by their disciples. Some of the greatest thinkers of mankind would have been astounded, had they been resurrected long after their deaths and discovered the ways in which their ideas were interpreted and adapted. Aristotle was not responsible for the different uses to which his thought was put by Jewish, Islamic and Christian theologians. Plato, too, has been variously interpreted, reinterpreted and misinterpreted by disparate philosophers and theologians. John Dewey did not intend that his educational theories be concretized in some of the extreme forms of progressive education. During his life, Mordecai M. Kaplan was frequently saddened by the manner in which so-called Reconstructionists interpreted his message. For example, he wanted Reconstructionism to be known as Zionist Judaism, but the Reconstructionist movement did not live up to this charge. In this essay, I shall confine myself to trying to recapture the basic structure of Kaplan’s thought and locate where it might have been ignored or misconstrued by the present generation of his followers. Mordecai Kaplan saw Judaism organically, in all its facets. He searched for and tried to keep pace with the changing relationships between the basic elements of Jewish civilization, as well as between them and the whole configuration of Jewish life. 184

Reconstructionism Revisited

Most Jews do not perceive the need to revise long-standing habits of thought and practice that are called for by the revolutionary impact of freedom, democracy, voluntarism, scientific advance (particularly in the social and human sciences), and new moral and esthetic standards. Kaplan was confident in the power of human rationality, but he occasionally underestimated the time factor in social change. He was always disappointed at the slow pace of Jewish response to the challenges of the day. He was usually a few decades ahead of the masses and of his colleagues. And he related to the larger perspective, while other thinkers were locked into their particular fields of interest. I cite a few examples. Kaplan posited that each Jewish community in the world had to make a distinctive adjustment to its social environment. He was aware of the need to develop strategies of survival for different types of diaspora communities. He was anxious about the physical survival of Jews in places where virulent anti-Semitism was rampant; but he was also frequently pessimistic about the chances of long-term continuity in the free world. Nonetheless, while supporting early aliyah from areas of oppression, he devoted many pages of his writing to efforts to strengthen the chances for survival in the free Diaspora. One of Kaplan’s celebrated notions was the idea of organic communities. He proposed that diaspora Jews establish democratically elected and authoritative bodies, wherever possible. These bodies would be supported by a system of taxation and provide educational, religious, recreational and welfare services for the entire local Jewish society. Belonging to the community would be a voluntary act, and only those who chose to join would be eligible to receive its services. I had many discussions with Kaplan on the subject, in which I expressed my opinion that the plan, while theoretically sound, was unworkable. Vested interests were so deeply rooted that it was naive to expect Jewish organizations to relinquish authority to a Jewish selfgovernment in such vital areas as schooling, religious facilities and staffing. Furthermore, there is little likelihood that disparate Jewish groups will consent to subject their ideologies voluntarily to communal criticism. Nonetheless, it is encouraging to note that Jewish leaders are endeavoring to restructure Jewish communities. They would do well 185

Chapter 9

to study Kaplan’s proposals as to how to achieve a greater measure of cooperation in Jewish communal life. Meanwhile, the Reconstructionist movement has concentrated on strengthening its own institutions and given scant thought to the pursuit of Jewish communal unity. No one can object to the efforts of organizations and institutions to survive and prosper. But where in Reconstructionist thought today are traces of Kaplan’s concern for the communal unity of American Jewry and the cultural and ethnic identity of international Jewry? Granted that Kaplan’s concept of organic community and his quest for a new definition of Jewish peoplehood require much rethinking and new means of implementation, the fact is that the Reconstructionist movement has lost Kaplan’s passion for communal unity in diversity. It maintains its adherence to freedom and diversity in its own ranks, but it no longer gives serious thought to bringing about cooperation toward a new concept of Jewish identity in a fast-changing world. I regret that Kaplan did not accept the invitation of the Hebrew University to become a permanent member of its faculty and to head its School of Education. For family reasons and out of loyalty to the Jewish Theological Seminary, as I have explained in my introduction to this book, he rejected the offer made to him when he taught at the University, between 1937 and 1939. Had he decided then to come on aliyah, his impact on Zionist thought might have been crucial. As it is, not only did his conception of the Diaspora fall on deaf ears in Israel; his message of the centrality of Eretz Yisrael drew scant attention from his disciples and followers. Reconstructionism today is a pale shadow of Kaplan’s Zionist theory. In the six decades that have elapsed since the establishment of Israel, there has been only one official visit here by several members of the Board of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and only now are lay missions and congregational visits occurring regularly. Sad to state, in all these years, neither the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association nor the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation has ever held a convention in Israel. Until 2003, despite repeated requests on my part for the republication of works by Kaplan that had been translated into Hebrew, nothing was done to bring such material to the attention of Israelis. It was 186

Reconstructionism Revisited

in that year that the Reconstructionist-oriented Kehillat Mevakshei Derekh, in Jerusalem, created the Mordecai M. Kaplan Center and began a program of publishing in Hebrew the writings of Kaplan and his disciples. These are only a few examples if the failure of the Reconstructionist movement to fulfill its Zionist commitment. A few years ago, the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation set up a Task Force to look into its Zionist program. It remains to be seen how effective this new endeavor will be, after over a half-century of neglect. Had Kaplan spent a few decades of vigorous teaching, writing and lecturing in Eretz Yisrael, he would have had here a wider and more influential Zionist audience. I surmise, too, that his Zionist thought would have had a greater impact on his disciples in the Diaspora. But he procrastinated; it was not until the twilight of his life that he finally settled in Jerusalem. Kaplan was also guilty of not persistently articulating his fears about the future of American Jewry. Being ambivalent about his own aliyah, he was nonetheless riddled with doubts as to the effectiveness of any of the current strategies for Jewish survival, except for Zionism. But in his essays and books, he tried to be the educator, stressing the potential and positive side of minority existence in the enlightened countries of the Diaspora. His followers, however, were uninterested in investigating how Zionism could be translated into life-giving energy for both the minority and majority styles of life. Today, Jews face the danger of a growing split between Israel and the communities of the Diaspora. It is not only assimilationists who are alienated from the Jewish homeland; a greater threat lies in the loyal and devoted diaspora Jews who find little or no reason to tighten their connection with the emerging culture of Israel. Kaplan was one of the few Zionist thinkers to anticipate this phenomenon. His constant call to formulate a revised covenant for the Jewish people was intended to stipulate the respective roles of Diaspora and Israel in shaping a modern conception of Jewish peoplehood. Unfortunately, Kaplan underestimated the severity of the splintering forces. Holding together the hub and the periphery of the Jewish people would be easier, were it not for the shattering religious differences that grow more powerful each day. There seems to be an unbridgeable gap between haredim 187

Chapter 9

and the rest of Jewry, while doctrinal disagreements and organizational loyalties have prevented genuine dialogue and cooperation between the other branches of Jewry. Under present conditions, Kaplan’s vision of a new covenant is a pipe dream. This is an example of how even a valid idea must await its time. However, it is not a foregone conclusion that the Jewish people will survive as a single collective body. Kaplan foresaw the decimation through assimilation of Jewish ranks in the Diaspora, but even he did not anticipate the loss of historic Jewish national roots among large numbers of Israelis and the retreat to irrationality of many of those who are steeped in the tradition. The Uniqueness of Reconstructionist Theology Can Kaplan’s theology serve as the basis for the spiritual renewal of a significant number of Jews? He himself repeatedly argued that no single theology could satisfy the natural differences of temperament and understanding that characterize the human species. On the other hand, it would be folly to regard all theologies as possessing equal worth. For the most part, I continue to believe that Kaplan set forth a philosophy and theology that meet the standards of rationality and emotional soundness, but it will be acceptable only to tough-minded men and women. Every theology leaves its proponents with unanswered questions. The choice of a theology depends on one’s temperament and intellectual bent. Thus, there are many persons who long for the certainty and comfort that come from belief in a good and omnipotent God — Creator, Ruler and Judge of the Universe — who guarantees fulfillment to all who obey His commandments. Such a God can also make it possible to believe in the special ‘chosen’ status of the Jewish people. However, such a theology has no answer to the problem of natural evil and to the charge of favoritism that inhere in the comparative mood of Israel’s election. On the other hand, it takes a different mind-set to be satisfied with a God who is to be found in the flux of reality. Kaplan was one of the early proponents of the idea that God is to be sought in the 188

Reconstructionism Revisited

transcendent dimension of demonstrable existence (cosmic laws, for example) and in the polar quality of man’s experience in the cosmos (body and mind, body and soul, man and woman, transcendence and immanence, independence and interdependence, and the like). Polarity helps explain how it is possible to believe in a God who lacks omnipotence but whose reliability enables humans to have confidence that their striving to transcend and refine themselves finds support in the positive, constructive powers of the universe. Such an approach is founded on accepting the cosmos as it is, but it has nothing to say about Creation. It provides no certainty, but it holds out hope for humans whose realism and courage enable them to find life’s meaning in trying to improve themselves and their societies. Kaplan offers no pie-in-the-sky assurances, and he makes no pretense at answering questions that are inherently unanswerable. God cannot be defined, and Kaplan attempts only to explicate his use of the term “God” and its synonyms. Thus “God” refers to the positive pole of reality that also includes evil. Kaplan is not a dualist; there is no evil God to oppose a good God. There is only a universe, in which man has a limited opportunity to transcend himself and attain a more ethical and spiritual existence, aided and abetted by the consistent laws that constitute the positive cosmic good. Kaplan’s position requires no less a leap of faith than that of supernaturalism. How can one substantiate the claim that life is worthwhile? That is the conclusion at which theists arrive, despite the frequent destructiveness of nature and the tragedies that befall humankind. But it seems to me that reliance on experience, employing methods of scientific investigation and rational thought, facing facts and acting courageously on tentative but well-supported conclusions are all more likely to redound to the advancement of Jewish life than theologies based on a claimed historical revelation or of a spurious “spirituality.” It is charged that such a process theology is cold and uncomforting. But this is true only for those who need a supernatural God to enable them to believe in a divine dimension beyond the natural one. Upon the death of a loved one, they find solace in the belief they will be reunited in Heaven. No one, of course, can disprove such piety, but 189

Chapter 9

it seems more plausible, noble and courageous for humans to seek their salvation in the art of living, rather than in a doubtful life after death. Admittedly, Kaplan’s this-worldliness is interpreted by some conventional religionists as a rejection of belief in God. However, that charge overlooks the fact that in the Bible, the idea of life beyond the grave is almost totally absent. Immortality is to be found only in the successful continuity of the Jewish people. In keeping with that view, Kaplan strove to foster a Judaism in which human needs would be distinguished from greeds and false assumptions about human nature. Such a venture in itself should suffice to make life worthwhile. I find the game to be worth the candle, and I feel sorry for those who must seek satisfaction beyond this limited but profoundly significant earthly adventure. Obviously, Kaplan’s vision of Judaism necessitates radical revisions in Jewish worship and ritual. He was the first to admit that the changes he and his colleagues introduced into the prayer book would be rejected by traditional worshippers. He was, however, too optimistic in hoping that his innovations would bring masses of Jews into the synagogue. Nevertheless, there are only two alternatives available to Jews who regard the synagogue as indispensable. One is to leave things as they are and try to argue people back to worship and the practice of traditional ritual. The other is to experiment with revisions in traditional worship and ritual practices and, in addition, to strike out in new directions. Progress along the second path is bound to be slow, but is it any less likely to succeed than retracing our steps into a problematic tradition? Is one Siddur more likely to draw Jews to public worship than several serious attempts at fashioning a prayer book for our times? Or perhaps we need a novel form of worship other than a repetitive recital of formal liturgy? Despite the failure of Kaplan’s experiments to inspire more than a small group of Jews, I still believe that he was on the right track. Preserve tradition wherever and whenever possible, but do not distort its relevant meanings! Have the courage to reach out to new ways of searching for God! What do we find in Reconstructionist theology and liturgy today? To a great extent, much of Kaplan’s vision remains intact. His rational approach, however, while still adhered to in the main, has fallen prey to 190

Reconstructionism Revisited

what seems to me to be a failure of nerve and a shallow understanding of Kaplan’s approach to rationality. Every age has its perceived or imagined dangers, disappointments, excesses, misunderstandings, reversions to pre-modern habits of mind and practice and other indications of dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs. These are natural responses to life’s complexity, and each has to be judged in its own terms. There is nothing wrong in the efforts of present-day Reconstructionists to keep the movement’s philosophy and practice up-to-date. However, such efforts, too, have to stand before critical examination. One of the widespread criticisms of Kaplan emerges from the charge that he failed to assess adequately the role of emotion and feeling, particularly in relation to prayer. On a theoretical level, the charge is completely unfounded. For Kaplan argued time and again that prayer which lacked emotional power could not perform its task of converting the articulation of ideas into the energy needed for moral and spiritual action. Kaplan himself acknowledged that his vision had not energized masses of Jews, as he had hoped. He did succeed in satisfying the emotional needs of a select group of devoted and knowledgeable Jews during his own lifetime, but he did so by enabling them to find new inspiration in the heritage that was already part of their being. The present generation of seekers, it is said, wants to find emotional fulfillment before its members can endeavor to convert their emotional fervor into a rational Jewish style of life. This new demographic and sociological situation has resulted in what I perceive to be some serious mistakes. The first has to do with the causes and meaning of emotions. It should be obvious, but evidently is not, that the same causes can arouse a variety of feelings in different persons and sometimes in the same person. A critical word directed to us when we are tired can arouse our anger, whereas we can easily overlook it when we feel refreshed. Kaplan was often reduced to tears when he prayed, but like all of us, he also experienced moments of sheer boredom. He wanted prayer to evoke in all worshippers the feelings of exaltation, sanctity, thankfulness and joy that are among the hoped-for outcomes of worship. But he hoped to achieve these ends by a combination of rational thoughts bound together in non-rational, 191

Chapter 9

esthetic public prayer ritual. He insisted, however, in eliminating from Jewish worship irrational elements. It is at this point that we find a loss of nerve and a retreat from rationality in some of today’s Reconstructionist ranks. The reintroduction of Israel’s chosenness is justified by what seems to me to be specious argumentation. Kaplan, it is claimed, rested his case on grounds that have nothing to do with the truth or the value of the doctrine for Jewish continuity. Thus, we hear now that belief in chosenness and its relatedness to holiness and covenant has strengthened the Jewish will to live. By abandoning that belief, it is charged, Kaplan weakened the sense of special destiny which has spurred our people’s urge to survive. Kaplan, of course, affirmed the contribution of the belief in election to the Jewish will to live. But now that intellectual honesty has become an ineluctable characteristic of a morally upright person or group, we must seek another, more truthful ground for our continuity. The new Reconstructionists have failed to address the fact that chosenness is impossible without a willful chooser. How can they, at one and the same time, hold that God is not willful and yet proclaim that He, She or It has conferred a special destiny upon us? It might help us to understand this development if we latch on to the fact that many words have become instruments for stirring emotion rather than for stimulating thought or communicating truth. People come to houses of worship today for solace, “spiritual” recharging, social contacts and connecting with fellow communicants. Jews also seek instruction but do not regard prayer as one of the media for such learning. Hence, it matters little to them what is actually recited in the course of group worship. It is the sense of comradeship and fellowship, evoked by singing melodies pleasing to the modern ear, that draws many a Jew to the synagogue. Words of prayer are important to the extent that they can be sung; their meaning is largely irrelevant to the prayer experience. This seems to be behind the non-intellectualism or even anti-intellectualism that animates many a latter-day Reconstructionist. In a similar vein, the present generation seems less bothered than Kaplan and his disciples were a generation ago about references to revelation in the liturgy. Whereas the Kaplan generation, in the name 192

Reconstructionism Revisited

of truth, felt it necessary to counteract the effect of ideas such as Torah min Hashamayim (Torah from heaven) or Torah from Sinai, this generation regards these designations mytho-poetically, as manifesting the high regard that Jews have for the Torah and its study. Apparently, these modernists think that the treatment of the Bible as a manmade document is no longer in question. Therefore, we can afford to abandon our rationalistic literalism and relax into a poetic frame of mind. Unfortunately, one need only observe the use to which the Bible is put by many Zionists to justify the claim that God gave ownership of all of Eretz Yisrael to the Jewish people in order to realize that many Jews still regard the biblical text as divinely revealed. The foregoing is a bare introduction to latter-day revisions of Reconstructionist theology and liturgy. There is much at stake in Kaplan’s determination to establish an ethos of honesty in the use of language. Mistakes of the Master Where did Kaplan go wrong? Mainly in his naiveté. He was naive in thinking that reason is powerful enough to overcome, in a brief span of time, people’s resistance to new ideas and ideals. Social progress is rarely unilinear; change is not a value in itself. Although he was aware of the resistance to his program, Kaplan miscalculated the strength of the opposition. He was mistaken in his assessment of the holding power of traditionalism, and he did not grasp the degree to which modern intellectuals crave emotional sustenance. Many of them are prepared to enter the synagogue with their hearts alone, leaving their minds hanging in the cloak room, under their coats and hats. Similarly, although Kaplan was one of the main proponents of a heightened use of the arts in Jewish life, in general, and in worship, in particular. he did not realize the extent to which emotionally-stirring melodies, mainly hassidic in origin or inspiration, would block out the need for meaningful words of prayer. Thus, he was wrong in some of his predictions and too optimistic in some of his hopes. I believe, however, that Kaplan will yet be proven right in his efforts to link religion to a rational outlook. 193

Chapter 9

Kaplan did not succeed in finding an adequate authority on which to base the observance of the mitzvot, although he thought that the Guide to Jewish Ritual Usage, formulated by him and a group of colleagues, sufficed for that purpose. Once one abandons belief in historic revelation, the Torah loses its peremptory character. The rationale for practicing traditional rituals becomes a matter of individual choice and folk habit. Unfortunately, only a small number of Jews are ready for such a challenge. Those who want a colorful Jewish life — and it is hard today to determine their numbers — would rather follow a ready-made routine than take the trouble to select and revise old usages and create new practices. Jews who do accept the challenge often lack the knowledge and skills so essential to an innovative approach. Their efforts, all too frequently, are shallow. Kaplan was his own principal critic; he felt that he did not possess the requisite artistic and esthetic qualifications. But because the need for action was so desperate, he stimulated his colleagues to produce liturgical materials. Today, it is apparent that some of these ventures into liturgy were time-bound. Kaplan knew that ritual renewal is endless, but he failed to anticipate the conservative mood of the Jewish people. Many Jews want more tradition, and Kaplan’s critical approach drives them away. It is unfortunate that he did not base his innovative thrust more persistently on traditional sources as part of his program for ritual revision. On the other hand, because he worked mostly with Jews who grew up in the rich soil of the mitzvot, he did not try to engineer radical departures that might have attracted to his side some of the serious-minded secularist seekers. For example, Kaplan regarded as worship the kind of group study that would delve into the spiritual and moral questions that concern or should concern every human being. The inclusion in the Siddur of selections from the Bible, Mishnah and Gemara and the regular reading from the Torah are clear evidence of the importance our Sages attached to study as a form of worship. But the original intent of this practice has been lost. In place of study, rote has replaced reflection. Kaplan never went beyond talking about his far-reaching thoughts on this subject. As a disciple of Mordecai Kaplan, I nevertheless remain open to cogent criticism of his philosophy of Judaism. However, I find much of 194

Reconstructionism Revisited

the criticism leveled against him to be specious. I am not convinced that his view of Jewish nationalism might lead one to sociolatry (worship of one’s group), that his trans-naturalist theology spells either atheism or pantheism, that his approach to prayer lacks poetic imagination or true piety, that his ethical theory is too abstract and bourgeois or that his estheticism is too hesitant. In all of these areas, Kaplan has been charged with tendentiousness and lack of originality. Like many other intellectuals, he was touched by the spirit of the times and by significant advances in science and intellect. How could it be otherwise? But Kaplan was no faddist; he sought to keep pace with intellectual progress and to locate those findings which would contribute most to the creative continuity of our people. What Would Kaplan Say of the Reconstructionist Movement Today? Were Kaplan alive today, would he be happy with the Reconstructionist movement? Probably with some of the new ventures of Reconstructionist thought and conduct. The ecological concern of many Reconstructionists is a logical application of his feeling about man’s responsibility for the moral appropriation of nature. He would also be pleased with the increasing attention being paid in Reconstructionist congregations to the education of children, youths, and adults. He would be pleased with the lively liturgical activity in the movement, but he would undoubtedly look askance at some of the innovations and revisions in recent versions of the daily, Sabbath and holiday prayer books. Kaplan would be deeply uncomfortable with several developments among his followers. He would berate their failure to respond properly to the centrality of Eretz Yisrael. Despite his doubts about the ability of diaspora Jewry to withstand the ravages of assimilation, Kaplan always hoped that the revitalization of Judaism in the Jewish homeland would inspire American Jewry to create a vital Judaism of its own. However, he maintained that the success of this enterprise would be contingent on close ties with Israel. The Reconstructionist movement has failed 195

Chapter 9

miserably in implementing Kaplan’s charge, as it has in making known to Israelis the insights of Reconstructionism. Kaplan would feel awkward in regard to some of the misplaced emphases that characterize the movement today. While he would favor the sympathetic treatment of homosexuals, he would reject some of the extreme reactions by homosexuals to the deprivations they suffered over the centuries. He would want gays and lesbians to function within mainstream synagogues and not perpetuate their separate status. What would Jewish religion look like if the differences between heterosexual and homosexual families were to be obliterated and to become merely matters of sexual and social preference? Homosexuals and feminists are justified in addressing their special problems, but their programs should be part of the normal functioning of congregations. Kaplan would be opposed to having rabbis conduct homosexual ‘marriages. As a liberal, he could not deny gays and lesbians the right to contract to live together, but he would not regard their relationship as a suitable norm for the perpetuation of Jewish life. But he would acknowledge their right to a contractual relationship. The homosexual family should be legitimized but not idealized. Feminine theology is another example of misplaced emphasis. Kaplan would be the last to deny the need for liturgical reform, including taking feminist views into account, but for him, the appeal to feminine attributes of God is to exacerbate the mistakes of anthropomorphism. The real problem is how to find a prayer vocabulary that would inspire the worship of God as Process no less than does traditional liturgy arouse the believer in God as Being. In brief, the heritage of Mordecai M. Kaplan has persisted since his death, but it remains to be seen whether its scope and basic premises will continue for long to distinguish the thought, aspirations and activities of the Reconstructionist movement. The movement seems likely to grow. Will it resemble the school of thought that Kaplan conceived?

Chapter 10

A State with a Jewish Majority

After two thousand years of statelessness, the Jewish people has witnessed the restoration of its national life on the soil of Eretz Yisrael. From the first centuries of the Common Era, when the long Exile began, until the advent of the Zionist movement in the last decades of the 19th century, the Land had never been without a Jewish presence. However, during those centuries, there had never been a viable community here until Zionist settlers began to trickle into the country, work the land and lay the groundwork for an autonomous Jewish society. The State of Israel was established as a Jewish state in 1948, pursuant to a decision of the United Nations. It was designed to provide a national homeland for the Jewish people, but it is often forgotten that the architects of the UN plan also intended that as a result of the partition of Eretz Yisrael-Palastine, another, Arab state, would come into being. It was to be created by those Palestinian Arabs already settled in the assigned area and others, then residing in the territory of the Jewish state or in various Arab states, who would prefer not to be a minority under Jewish or non-Palestinian rule. Instead, immediately following the passage of the Partition Plan, the Arabs launched an assault on the Jews that was to become a full-scale war when the State of Israel was formally announced on May 14, 1948. The Arabs, including those whose consciousness as Palestinians later became all-consuming, totally rejected the UN compromise. It is idle to speculate today as to whether or not an accommodation between Jews and Arabs could have been reached had the Arabs not 197

Chapter 10

determined to obliterate the UN decision. Both peoples, impelled by their respective political, religious and cultural histories, have shown little inclination to try and really understand the hurt and the needs of the other. With the exception of Lebanon, where the sharing of power by the country’s religions has never been a stable arrangement, all the Arab states over the entire expanse of North Africa and a good part of South Asia are dominated by an overwhelming Moslem majority. By virtue of this population advantage and in keeping with its conception of the relationship between religion and state, Islam either dictates or exerts enormous influence on the law and the style of life in all Moslem lands. Social and legal variations in the Moslem world reflect the level of liberalism of some states or the degree of reaction in which most of them are still mired. A non-Moslem and, in Arab Moslem states, a non-Arab, must expect the status of a disadvantaged citizen. This is the fate of minorities in most states with established religions. To the extent that Islam is deemed to be an essential and organic feature of Arabism, there can be no equality under a Moslem Arab regime for members of other religions or peoples. Undoubtedly, the Jews were relatively comfortable during certain periods of their sojourn in Arab countries, when there were wide opportunities for cultural and religious self-expression. Even during those moments, however, Jews always knew that they were guests in a foreign world, just as they felt in a Christian environment until the advent of democracy. This condition of alienation was bearable as long as the Arab majority behaved humanely. Paternalistic decency is the most that minorities can expect in most societies. However, paternalism is degrading to those who are supposed to benefit from it. If, nonetheless, the Jewish people managed to maintain its national dreams and persist in its ceaseless efforts at spiritual creativity, we can only attribute this determination to an inordinate Jewish will to live, accompanied by a great talent for cultural renewal under the most trying circumstances. Furthermore, Jewish success during liberal eras was not an outgrowth of Arab acknowledgment of the Jewish right to exist. On the contrary, the fact that some Jews were given the opportunity to cultivate their own vineyard stems from 198

A State with a Jewish Majority

the services which “court” Jews were able to render to the rulers or from the graciousness of several monarchs. No one advanced beyond paternalism. In dreaming of the return to Zion, the Jewish people sought to unburden itself from the yoke of decisions made by others concerning its fate. During their exile, the Jews had no chance to exercise their responsibility as a nation. Their ambition to regain autonomy was particularly intense when anti-Semitism was rampant. In a rare moment of truth, the international community finally supported Jewish demands for autonomy and enabled the State of Israel to absorb several million Jews from Arab lands, Russia, Ethiopia and other places where they felt insecure. In addition, many have come from the free world to share the experience of Jewish national creativity in a state in which every individual is presumably guaranteed all human rights. Herein lies a problem. What are those human rights? An eighteenth century formulation had it that as far as the rights of Jews were concerned, each of them deserved everything, but as a nation they were owed nothing. This was the view expressed in the French parliament in 1789, during the debate on the emancipation of the Jews. According to the delegate, Clermont-Tonnere, it was necessary to distinguish between the rights of the individual citizen and those of a nation. The state cannot afford to grant national rights to the minorities within its borders. Only the majority can determine the state’s identity and character. The minorities must renounce certain national pretensions they might harbor. They can enjoy only those rights which belong to each citizen as an individual. These rights do not include the privilege of preserving a political attachment to a hostile or even a friendly foreign state. Political loyalty, in other words, must be absolute. In 1806, the Jews of France agreed officially to this interpretation of their rights, and considerable numbers of Jews in other West European countries adopted the same position. The price of emancipation thus appeared to be renunciation of Jewish national identity. Despite this apparent surrender to the overriding power of the modern state, Jewish nationalism was not thereby removed from the stage of history. For what actually is nationalism? It is, above all, the collective consciousness of a group which possesses a continuous 199

Chapter 10

history that has its origins in a specific land to which, even if it no longer lives there, it retains at least a sentimental attachment. In the course of its evolution, this group creates a unique culture and becomes fired by the determination to survive as an identifiable people or nation. In the case of the Jews, religious culture and language were the cement that bound the people together during its long exile and kept aglow the hope for the national return to Eretz Yisrael. Even a non-Zionist Jew, to the extent that he identifies with Jewish history and Jewish religion, cannot easily divest himself of the influence of the Land that suffuses the whole of Jewish religion and folk-culture. A Jew who studies Hebrew and dips into the Bible and other classical texts cannot escape their nationalist flavor. It is no accident that the former Soviet government, in its attempt to undermine the Jewish nationalism of its Jewish citizens, suppressed the study of the Hebrew language and the Jewish tradition. For these, more than any political sentiments about a Jewish state, are the marks of Jewish nationalism. A living people will not voluntarily surrender its nationhood, even if this is what is demanded of it for securing rights of citizenship in lands where that people is a minority. Hence the question must be posed: Is it desirable for the majority nationality or religion in any state to be established by law in such a way as to forestall the possibility of a minority’s ever coming to power by the natural and orderly process of free and democratic elections? The question does not have a self-evident answer. The nationalism of most states puts minorities at a disadvantage. At times, unintentional discrimination occurs as the natural result of the majority’s life-style. For instance, when a national day of rest is legislated, it is inevitably in keeping with the dominant religious culture of the country. Jews in the United States long suffered the disability of being unable to keep their businesses open on Sunday and had to struggle hard in order to observe their Sabbath without excessive loss of income. The Christian majority chose Sunday as the national day of rest simply as an expression of its way of life and not with any intention of making things difficult for the Jews or Seventh Day Adventists. Even were there not a single Jew in America, American Christians would maintain their customary calendar of observance — whether religiously motivated or led by the 200

A State with a Jewish Majority

inertia of folk custom. “Discrimination” does not always apply to the majority-minority syndrome. A minority status exposes a group to the arbitrary will of the majority. The latter can easily victimize the former. Moreover, in every majorityminority situation, the minority cannot avoid the cultural pressure of the majority. Nonetheless, if the state is democratic and the minority culture is strong, the confrontation need not end to the disadvantage of the minority. A weak culture, on the other hand, will hardly be able to cope with the dual challenge of freedom and the power of an attractive majority culture. If the majority is aggressive and missionary in spirit, a self-respecting minority has no choice but to fight against restrictions on its freedom of movement and self-expression and to resist the attempt to annihilate it. Jews in the Diaspora are thus called upon to sustain their pride, while Jews in Israel have to learn the art of being a majority that respects the desire and the right of the country’s minorities to retain their cultural integrity. Many states were established while their populations were more or less homogeneous and demographically well-defined. It stands to reason that any group possessing sufficient power will assume governmental authority and tend to its needs and ambitions. Should an opposition arise, the first rulers will resist handing over power, in part or in whole, to this new force. Forced surrender of power is always traumatic. Experience has shown that the sharing of power by nations, political parties, religions or races is rarely, if ever, accomplished smoothly and willingly. The Flemish and the Walloons in Belgium, the Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, Bedouin and Palestinians in Jordan, Hindus and Moslems in India and Kashmir, Whites and Blacks in South Africa — the examples are numerous. Conflicts over sovereignty occur everywhere, frequently with violence. If one group manages to gain control, it will not cede any of its authority merely to satisfy the need of a minority to feel effective. How does this analysis apply to Israel? Have Israel’s successive governments followed the usual pattern? In what ways, if any, have they showed a willingness to cater to the needs of the country’s various minorities? In what direction should Israel’s leaders head in the future? These types of questions are not those of Israel alone, for it is evident 201

Chapter 10

that the statesmen who conceived the partition settlement in 1947 did not understand that a state which is meant to solve the problem of one nation cannot rest with implementing this purpose alone. It must also assume the burden of satisfying the need for status, security and cultural autonomy of other peoples within its borders — to the extent possible and permissible for free minorities.1 Unfortunately, the UN and the Zionist leadership exhibited no foresight in anticipating some of the complex issues that were bound to eventuate with the creation of the “Jewish” state. The Arabs at the time were not attuned to any solution which was not complete surrender to their self-interest. Our concern, however, is with the Jewish role. While our people dreamed of the return to Zion and the restoration of ancient days, it was scarcely aware of the change in its mentality that had occurred during the two millennia of exile. In Israel’s Declaration of Independence, the Jewish people turned its back on the idea of an halakhic state. It refused to create for itself a political structure to be erected and ruled by Jews alone, for Jews alone and subject to laws which Jews alone would be authorized to legislate and execute. Instead, the founding fathers expressed the will of the majority of Jews dwelling in Israel in 1948 and opted for a democratic regime. Non-Jews were accorded equal rights of citizenship. Almost all Jews everywhere thought then that the “Jewish problem” had at long last been solved. By virtue of our status as a sovereign majority in the homeland, we had both assured the Jewish character of our state and created conditions which would enable the Arab citizens to feel at home, too. Unfortunately, we were short-sighted. With one hand, we granted the Arabs very much, indeed. They would have the right to vote and to elect their own candidates for the Knesset. They would be able to educate their children in their ancestral history and culture. Arabic would be recognized as one of the country’s official languages. Freedom of religion would be complete. Presumably, the Arabs were to enjoy equality with their Jewish fellow citizens. However, with the other hand, we implanted in the Arabs a sense of estrangement, deprivation and inferiority. In other parts of the world, Jews demanded their right to unconditional existence (kiyyum l’lo t’nai — to use a phrase coined by Simon Ravidowitz), but we forgot that minorities in our state would 202

A State with a Jewish Majority

necessarily insist on the same right. Freedom and equality cannot easily be qualified. We made it impossible for the Arabs to sing the state anthem; Hatikvah is a Jewish hymn. We implemented only sporadically the use of Arabic in official matters. Government offices generally have not offered high posts to Arabs, even when their qualifications entitle them to such recognition. The government has expressed itself in favor of greater involvement of Arab citizens, but the number of Arabs appointed to diplomatic posts can be counted on the fingers of one hand.2 And, as was to be expected, social discrimination has added to the hurt caused by political limitations. Arab education, despite improvements that have been introduced since 1948, is not yet on a par with the Jewish system. Restrictions on Arab housing are pronounced. Permission to expand the borders of overcrowded Arab villages is rare. The government has done little to encourage industry in the Arab sector. The argument that the State of Israel was created by the UN in order to provide the conditions for the reconstruction of the Jewish people and that Israel’s Arabs will have to wait until peace with all neighboring Arab states is achieved is specious. Similarly, the idea that Arabs must wait for full equality until the country is more prosperous is mendacious and self-defeating. So too is the security argument, which declares that Arabs cannot be fully trusted. Many Jews in Israel believe that Arabs cannot be expected to renounce their emotional attachment to the rest of the Arab people, even though they accept their Israel citizenship as a commitment. That commitment would suffice in normal times, but the perpetual armed conflict with the Arab states places Israel’s Arab population in an untenable psychological predicament. Hence, the argument proceeds, Arabs cannot be employed in sensitive governmental posts or in security-risk industry. Although the security argument is based on a real need for vigilance, its salience suffers from its being applied too facilely to situations in which the concern should play no role. As a matter of fact, the discrimination which has accompanied over-zealousness itself contributes to Israel’s insecurity. Embittered Arabs are more prone to become extremists than those who find fulfillment in their vocations and who can be 203

Chapter 10

convinced that they are wanted. By failing to make a concerted effort to integrate Arab citizens into the general economy, we have erected a barrier to their coming to terms with their minority status. Every day, we remind the Arabs that they live in a Jewish state.3 Instead, we ought to heighten their sense of responsibility for the welfare of our common state. The Arabs do not have to be reminded of the Jewish impact on Israel’s institutions and its society; they know that this disadvantage is an unavoidable consequence of their choice to live as a minority in Israel. But the constant articulation of the obvious by Jews fosters resentment. Understandably, a Jew whose memory of his people’s long history of suffering is strong and who is dedicated to Jewish spiritual and cultural vitality will not abandon the Jewish right to national independence. That right has been implemented in the State of Israel. The State insures a haven for Jews who suffer disabilities elsewhere; equally important, it enables Jewish civilization to be cultivated naturally on its native soil. Until the Arab people in its various branches can appreciate these deep-rooted concerns of survivalist Jews, they will be unable to relate constructively to the Jewish reality. From their end, Jews must realize that expression by Israel’s Arabs of their drive for national fulfillment need not be an indication of hatred or of determination to destroy the State of Israel. Nonetheless, the conflict between Jewish and Palestinian nationalism must not be underestimated, and any resolution of it will have to be based on mutual recognition of the integrity of feeling on the part of the other. It then becomes necessary for both peoples to search for those premises in each other’s claims upon which it might be possible to build a bridge. This procedure has to be two-directional. Each side has to help the other to self-criticism and to the ability to listen to one another with a fair degree of empathy. What should be the policy of Jews who want to guard Jewish independence and at the same time wish to convey to the Arab citizens of Israel the conviction that they too are at home? It would be naive to offer any proposal without recognizing that Israel’s Palestinian population is at one with their fellow Palestinians within and beyond any conceivable borders of Eretz Yisrael. They too are seeking 204

A State with a Jewish Majority

a solution for their political uncertainty. In full awareness of that fact, I suggest the following.

1

The first step, most obvious but inordinately difficult, is for everyone to accept the need for patience. Even when good will prevails on all sides in a political dispute, immediate solutions are rarely at hand. With the best will in the world, for instance, progress toward integrating disparate populations or raising the economic and social status of underprivileged classes sometimes requires generations of devoted effort. Humans cannot accomplish their purposes by mere will. The speed of social change is a function of multiple factors that cannot always be manipulated according to plan. Sometimes, the call for patience is an escape for those who fear to act or a way of covering up their aim of keeping the underprivileged in their present place. This, of course, is not the patience of which I write here. I look upon patience as that quality which can help strengthen the hands of those who strive to improve human behavior; it is a prerequisite for the re-examination of values in which every society must engage in times of crisis and radical unrest. Patience of this kind lessens the danger that stems from irrational emotions. Surrender to such emotions prevents careful weighing of the likely consequences of proposed action. Patience is not opposed to action as such, but only to that type which is apt to cause more harm than good.

2

The national identity problems of the Jews and the Arabs have to be seen in the context of a painfully slow historical process. Failure to recognize this fact lengthens the distance that will have to be traversed before relations between the two peoples can be divested of their stridency. From the perspective of general human welfare, both peoples must enjoy the opportunity to promote their respective nationalisms. However, neither Palestinian Arabs nor Jews can isolate their self-development from the power struggles that periodically tear apart every region of the world. Yet without some measure of detachment from the pressures exerted by powers outside the Middle East and from the geo-political maelstrom of the Middle East itself, 205

Chapter 10

conciliation between Palestinians and Jews will be pushed further into the future. Both Jews and Palestinians in Israel are branches of peoples whose members are also dispersed in other lands. However, their demographies and structures differ. Israel’s Palestinians are surrounded by a tight belt of their Palestinian fellows, as well as by a ring of Arab states whose inhabitants bear essentially the same culture as their own. In contrast, the Jews of the Diaspora are scattered to the ends of the earth, lacking sovereignty in any other state. Nor can one ignore the tremendous numerical superiority of the Arabs surrounding Israel. Therefore, the psychology of Jews and Arabs in Israel differs from that of average majorities and minorities. Israel’s Jewish majority cannot fully enjoy its numerical advantage in its homeland as long as the surrounding states endanger Israel’s very existence. Even under peace, the majority status of Israel Jewry is an optical illusion. Insofar as trade, industry, language, culture and religion are concerned, the Jews will remain a small minority in the Middle East. Meanwhile, the presence of hostile Arab states on Israel’s borders deters Israel’s Arab citizens from fully accepting their minority status as a viable condition. Both the suddenness of the revolutionary change which, in 1948, converted them into a minority, and the possibility that history might be reversed render Israel’s Arabs a unique and restless minority. Other, natural minorities — those that have never known any other status or whose prospects of becoming a majority are inconceivable — adapt to their condition as an inescapable fact of life. Until 1967, the Arab citizens of Israel had strode in the direction of this accommodation, and for the most part still seem to adhere to this psychology. But events in the Middle East have encouraged extremists to act, on the supposition that Israel can be destroyed. On their part, Israel’s leaders seem to think that Arab integration as citizens can be conducted at a lapidarian pace without arousing resentment.

3

Accommodation between Israel’s Jews and Palestinian Arabs demands compromise. Initiative, however, must come from Israel’s Jewish leaders. Jews have shown a greater capacity for selfcriticism than the Arabs. I base this impression on the statements of 206

A State with a Jewish Majority

many Arab intellectuals denying any responsibility of their people for the sad conflict and the assertions of Arab leaders denying the historicity of the ancient Temple and other sites holy to the Jewish people. I rely, too, on my experience in many Arab-Jewish dialogues in which, after a short inter-group exchange, the discussion becomes almost completely an intra-Jewish debate as to wherein we have gone wrong or sinned. Nonetheless, a Jewish-dominated state exists, and it is thus more imperative for Jews than for Arabs to respond to moral demands. The Palestinians are under incessant calls by their brothers to resist any compromise and to follow the path of blind nationalism. However, Arabs must also pay the price for their mistakes and intransigence. Despite their measure of suffering, they are called upon, no less than the Jews, to submit to compromise. Israel’s strategy must be directed to encouraging this new stance. Wise and decent persons do not fall prey to self-delusion. If they are loyal to their people and proud of its tradition, they strive for the maximum freedom essential for their group’s creative continuity. This freedom is also necessary to enable them to participate in the determination of their people’s destiny. An Israel Arab will thus resent the stress which most Jews place upon the claims that the land of Israel belongs exclusively to the Jewish people, that Israel is a Jewish state and that all that is expected of an Israel Arab is that he be a law-abiding citizen. Many of Israel’s Jews do not respect the Arab’s historical relationship to and love of the land. Nor do they appreciate the difficulty the Arab has in working out his cultural identity as a citizen in a state dominated by Jews. Moreover, both the Israel Palestinian and his fellows in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and elsewhere are offended by the imperviousness of Israel’s policy makers to their desire for a Palestinian state. The Israel Palestinian looks upon himself as akin to the diaspora Jew for whom the State of Israel is the realization of his national aspirations but who does not intend to reside here. State nationalism, however essential it is for Jewish existence and seems to be in the perception of Palestinians, has to be recast. States must henceforth be conceived as pluralistic structures, open to the 207

Chapter 10

spiritual and cultural differences of their varied populations. There need be no exclusive claims to any soil, in order for its sovereign majority to enjoy the full, legitimate advantage of its status. At the same time, the minority nationalities must cultivate their own nationalisms in such forms as are compatible with the requirements of a liberal society. They, too, have to obey the rules of democracy and must not try to deprive the majority of its sovereign rights. This obligation is predicated on the adherence of the state to the standards of liberal democracy. To sum up. It is dangerous for Israel’s security to have its Arab citizens feel that they are fated to be an inferior group in the state of their birth and citizenship. From the standpoint of both Arab and Jewish nationalism, Israel must house both of them, albeit with different scopes of extensiveness. Equality under the law cannot erase the gap between the atmosphere created by a majority and the one which the minority would fashion if its numbers enabled it to set the cultural tone of the state.

4

The slogan “Jewish state,” as I shall analyze in the next chapter, should be used in discourse only in its proper context. Instead of slogans, we need a style of statehood that will enable each of the nations in Israel to attain the maximum degree of national satisfaction permissible in a democratic polity. Morally speaking, nationalism is a sentiment proclaiming a people’s right to self-determination. However, every nation must live alongside, and sometimes together with, other nations. All of them must live symbiotically with one another. In a majority-minority setting, the majority must not use the law as a whip in its hands. Legitimate activity of the minority must not be limited by irrational and coercive means. Certainly a majority ought not deny a minority its elementary right to participate unconditionally in government. A minority in a newly born state most likely will have to struggle before its members can gain sufficient trust in the eyes of the majority that will enable them to achieve high office. Every minority will always have to put forth great effort in order to survive as a distinct ethnic and cultural entity. The temptation to assimilate is always strong, especially in a congenial 208

A State with a Jewish Majority

environment, and there seems to be no way of avoiding the pain caused to loyalists by such defections. The behavior and psychology of a minority are functions of the way in which it is treated by the majority. If the latter honors the minority and views it as a partner in the building of the common state and if, further, it relates with empathy to the national and cultural aspirations of the minority, the chances are good that loyalty to the state will deepen as time goes on. As in the case of the Jews in the United States, patriotism can take root even if the minority does not succeed in winning some of the highest elected political offices. Where there is confidence in the good will and fairness of the majority, the minority will not become embittered. Neither will it lose its determination to break the monopoly of power. The election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States is dramatic evidence of the need to have faith in the foregoing process. Turning specifically to Israel, its Jews should make the distinction between the “is” and the “ought,” between the need of the moment and that which it should be willing to deny itself once peace has been achieved. This means that the State of Israel is a state with a Jewish majority which, even in the midst of an unresolved conflict with the Arab world, will have to encourage greater involvement of Arab citizens in government, the general economy and other aspects of life that should be shared. Progress has already been made in such areas as sport, literature, art and education, but Israel’s Jews have yet to address the Arabs in Israel as follows: “All that we want in this land is that with the advent of world peace and the elimination of anti-Semitism, we shall have the same right as your brothers do in the vast stretches that are available to them — to live in peace and security and to preserve our freedom. When we can be assured of these blessings, there will be no justification for the restrictions and discomfort you experience as the result of the Law of Return and some of the other inequities that currently mar our own democratic convictions. You know that your situation has improved since the founding of the State, and while we acknowledge that we have often been mistaken in our treatment of you, the direction we want to follow is to equalize your freedom and status with those of ourselves.” 209

Chapter 10

Israel’s Palestinians, in turn, will have to learn how to say to the Jews, with equal candor: “It will take us generations to recover from the nakba (the catastrophe) and the trauma of 1948. Our fathers expected to rule in all of Palestine, and it is hard for us to accept our role as a minority. We should like to see our brothers achieve statehood. But we intend to remain citizens of Israel, identifying with it as a political entity and hoping that one day we may even learn to love it and become true partners in the fashioning of its history. We need time, and we need your help and understanding. We have already proved our peaceful intentions over the six decades of Israel’s existence. But we are not satisfied merely with having to justify our behavior; we want to feel that we and you are partners in our common state.” If we Jews are determined to implement in Israel the democratic habits of the enlightened world, we must, at the same time, try to integrate ourselves into the region in which we dwell. Integration involves both giving and receiving. We should like the Arabs to be influenced by some of our standards of truth, justice and beauty, but the Arabs must be equally convinced of our honest desire to understand them and their culture and spirituality. We have to learn their language and study their culture. By doing so, we shall add a link to the chain of brotherhood that must be forged. We should find encouragement in the growing awareness of Israel’s political parties that they must increase the number of Arab candidates on their lists, but we cannot as yet say that our few efforts at equalizing opportunity have communicated to the Arabs the sense that they are wanted. For the Arabs to acquire a feeling of self-respect, they need more than to be asked to be loyal and to accommodate themselves to a status of permanent inequality. Thus the responsibility falls heavily on Jewish shoulders to clear the way for Arab citizens to look upon Israel as their state in every sense of the term.

5

The Jewish character of Israel actually antedated the establishment of the State. From the last decades of the nineteenth century, when the halutzim (pioneers) began to arrive in Eretz Yisrael, they planted the seeds of a new Jewish society. Their efforts gathered momentum under the relative freedom of the British 210

A State with a Jewish Majority

mandatory regime. During the seven decades preceding 1948, the Jews succeeded not only in inaugurating a viable economy and laying the foundations of an effective government; they revived the Hebrew language, built an educational network, experimented in new forms of cooperative living (the kibbutz and the moshav, to say nothing of the Histadrut), enhanced the celebration of the Shabbat and the traditional holidays, revived long abandoned practices that are tied to life on the soil of Eretz Yisrael, organized (for better or for worse) a rabbinical establishment, raised an army invested with as humane an ethic as a military force can have, and more. In brief, the pre-State settlers had already achieved many of the purposes for which the State of Israel was intended and which are popularly considered to be the embodiment of a full Jewish life. Only sovereignty, which was needed to insure unrestricted Jewish immigration, was missing. For the foreseeable future, the Jewish people cannot afford to relinquish one iota of its sovereign independence in Israel. But even national sovereignty and independence, which now, in the light of international enmity, appear to be so vital for the existence of Israel and the security and freedom of the Jewish people, might be treated more flexibly when world conditions become more humane. All this has to be understood by our people and patiently discussed with our Arab citizens. More than we need a Jewish state, we need a state in Eretz Yisrael in which we can live at peace and in decency with all who are in our midst and with those who are yet to join us.

Chapter 10

Notes This chapter is a translation and revision of the article “Medinat Harov Hayehudi,”

1

which appeared in Petachim 4:18 (Elul 5731/1971), 8-13. By the time this book is published, history might have taken some dramatic steps. Hopefully, those events will be conducive to peace. I have chosen to make a few minor changes in the original text in order to ensure its relevance for today. I believe that my analysis and proposals hold up whether or not progress toward conciliation has been made. This point is well delineated in an article by the Israeli historian, Yigal Elam. The essay, “A State, Jewish Style,” appeared in the weekend supplement of HaAretz (January 3, 1990): 21.

2

Interestingly, the appointment of Muhammad Masarweh, an attorney from Kafr Kari’, as Israel Consul in Atlanta, Ga., was objected to by a number of American Jews on the ground that an Arab could not serve as a bridge to the Jewish community in the United States.

3

See next chapter.

Chapter 11

The Concept of a Jewish State

History is often hypostasized. Phrases like “history tells us” or “history repeats itself ” are common parlance. However, history is not simply a recording of the sequence of events. What we call history is carved out of the interpretations put by scholars on the achievements and failures of their forebears and the reasons why things happen as quickly or as slowly as they do. Historians sometimes help us to understand what the actors themselves have overlooked. Those who provide the raw material for the historians are entangled in a web from which they cannot entirely escape. I refer to the fact that even the wisest and most prescient social engineers can neither dictate the direction nor accelerate the speed of social change beyond the rate with which the collective consciousness can cope. Unless we bear this characteristic of historical development in mind, we shall be unable to fathom the confusions and inconsistencies in the remaking of the Jewish people in Israel and the rest of the world, This is particularly true in regard to the idea of the “Jewish state,” which I propose to analyze briefly now. There are two premises on which my argument is based:

1

The Jewish people is entitled to a state of its own, no less and no more than any other nation. As long as autonomous states are deemed necessary in order to enable nations to survive and to nurture their cultures, the Jews are as deserving as any other group of enjoying sovereignty in their own land. If and when other forms of polity are found conducive to international peace and amity and to the strengthening of spiritual nationhood, Jews should cooperate 213

C h a p t e r 11

in efforts to engender those forms. Ethical nationhood is predicated on the willingness of all peoples to surrender part of their autonomy for the sake of universal peace. The political restructuring of mankind is surely necessary, but the Jews are in no position to pioneer alone in this venture. It hardly needs mentioning that this next stage in human development is at present only a dream.

2

The Jewish people is entitled to have its autonomous state in Eretz Yisrael. No land can be said to belong absolutely to any nation, since all territorial possession is an accident of history. Some peoples have succeeded in seizing and taking root in a spot of earth that henceforth became their recognized possession. Some nations are luckier than others, having occupied their lands without serious challenge from any other people. No one seems to question the right of the Norwegians to Norway or of the Swedes to Sweden; nor are their borders or their right to autonomy challenged. The Finns, however, just a few decades ago, had to fight the Soviet Union for their territorial integrity and their independence. The Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians only recently regained their independence on their ancestral soils, as have other peoples in the now disintegrated Soviet Union. In all of these instances, however, even where nations have lost their sovereignty, the naturalness of the relationship between the particular people and its land has rarely been called into question. It has been the fate of the Jewish people throughout its long career that its right to Eretz Yisrael has never gone unchallenged. For a variety of reasons — geo-political, economic, mystical, and religious — the ownership of the Land and the right to settle in it have been disputed between Jews and a succession of other claimants from ancient days to the present. Nonetheless, I argue that the Jewish people is acting morally in pressing its claim to sovereignty in Eretz Yisrael. I do not discuss here the problem of borders, inasmuch as the Arab-Israel conflict has to do mainly with the question of the respective legal right of the two peoples to the whole of the territory, whatever that whole might be. I assert Israel’s claim, knowing full well that the Arabs enter a counterclaim. Abba Eban often asserted eloquently that the right of Israel to exist on the soil of Eretz Yisrael is not debatable, but while this is 214

The Concept of a Jewish Statey

a comforting thought for Jews, the reality is different. Whether we like it or not, the Jewish people must be prepared to defend its sovereign role in Eretz Yisrael militarily, morally, politically, and religiously. Why, then, should I have qualms about applying the designation “Jewish state” to the State of Israel? Why did Mordecai Kaplan declare in his description of the new Zionism that a democratic Israel cannot be designated as a Jewish state? In a lecture delivered in 1954, Kaplan had this to say: Zionists cannot be excused today “…from the duty of facing the inescapable consequences of the idea of the democratic state, based on intrinsic and inalienable rights of each citizen. In the light of those realities, the State of Israel cannot be a Jewish State, nor can world Jewry be a nation in the modern sense. The State of Israel will have to be an Israeli State, and world Jewry will have to be metamorphosed into a Jewish People which is rooted in Eretz Yisrael and which has its branches wherever it is allowed to live.”1 In one sense, it would be silly to deny the appropriateness of the term Jewish State as a designation for Israel. Any majority impresses its stamp on the culture and institutions of its domain. Quebec, to all intents and purposes, is largely French in culture. The United States is a Christian country, even though it allows no religious establishment. Most Latin American countries are Catholic. Israel is Jewish. Furthermore, the UN decision to divide Palestine into Jewish and Arab states lends legitimacy under international law to the idea of the Jewish state which might seem to render pedantic the burden of this chapter. Yet I persist. The issue is not one of description. Anyone who travels around Israel will be impressed by its Jewish flavor. The predominance of Hebrew, the universities, the government offices, the army, the theater, the restaurants, the mores — all leave no doubt as to which group and which culture prevail. Indeed, the Arab enclaves seem to be overwhelmed by the Jewish atmosphere. The semantic problem that perturbs me is the excessive use of “Jewish state” in situations where the designation is either inappropriate, unnecessary or offensive. The prevailing interpretation of “Jewish state” falsifies the actual democratic and liberal ethos of the State of Israel; it distorts the dual aim of classical Zionism of establishing 215

C h a p t e r 11

a Jewish homeland while at the same time guaranteeing fully the human and civil rights of the non-Jewish population. The truth is that the historic step taken by Israel’s founders in opting for a democratic polity bore consequences to which few persons gave heed in 1948. The euphoria of the time made the future seem straightforward and simple. A Jewish state was declared in which Arabs would be accepted as equal citizens. The real revolution, it was thought, was within the Jewish framework. Israel’s minorities could only be its beneficiaries. The decision for democracy was taken in conscious opposition to two alternatives that could have far more radically than democracy dramatized the rise of a “Jewish state.” As one possibility, the founders, had they been so minded, could have elected to create an halakhic, theocratic state. This possibility was, indeed, raised seriously by the Orthodox who to this day advocate the extension of halakhic standards in the public domain. In the months prior to the establishment of the State, the Orthodox newspaper, Hatzofeh, ran a series of articles that explored how the Halakhah might be applied as the basic system of legislation, jurisprudence and administration in the state that was to be. Whatever the merit of those studies, their intent was clear. Even under democratic rule, the Orthodox intended to exert as much pressure as they could to insure their (halakhic) control over crucial areas of Jewish concern — principally, education and personal status (marriage, divorce, inheritance). Actually, the halakhists were totally unprepared then, as they continue to be today, to retool the Halakhah for the conduct of a modern society. The Halakhah had evolved as a remarkably effective strategy for minority existence in exile, but it was rejected out of hand by the liberal, realistic Jewish majority of 1948. Another option, also totally rejected, was the establishment of a democratic Jewish state, in which non-Jews could reside and be treated with complete tolerance and humaneness, but without the privilege of citizenship. This restoration of the biblical status of the ger toshav or resident alien was also unthinkable to men and women of liberal, democratic mentality. What does this democratization of the Jewish mind signify? The state in which Jews are a majority was conceived as one in which 216

The Concept of a Jewish Statey

Jews and non-Jews would govern. All citizens would be entitled by law to the franchise and to the right of participation in all branches of government. Halakhic traditions would take their place, alongside desirable precedents from other legal systems, in the formation and the inspiration of the institutions of government. Final authority, however, would reside in the popularly elected Knesset. Israel legislators are free to enact laws whose inspiration and content stem from any appropriate source whatsoever, even in contradiction to the spirit or letter of the Halakhah. The legal system of the Jewish state, in other words, is what the Jewish majority wants it to be. However, theoretically at least, the nonJewish minorities can exercise their moral power of persuasion to influence the majority to change its mind. Under the democratic ethos, the majority must protect the minority’s right of protest, whenever the latter feels that the former has overstepped the bounds of propriety. This appeal to the conscience and intelligence of the electorate is both one of the hallmarks of democratic polity and the major test of its workability. By choosing democracy as the basis of their new state, the Jews have said, in essence, that its legal apparatus belongs to the citizenry as a whole and is mainly to be safeguarded by the probity and wisdom of the Jewish community. “Jewish,” to the liberals who were largely responsible for the creation of Israel, meant that the state was to be a model of enlightened rule. And what kind of a model could it become if Arabs and others would be excluded from the privileges and duties of full citizenship? Israel is truly a democratic state, but the term “Jewish state” has become a weapon in the hands of men and women who are prone to forget — or who perhaps have never learned — the obligations which democratic sovereignty thrusts upon a majority population. To be a responsible majority, it is necessary to acquire a profound empathy for the minority. The ancient Israelites were repeatedly told that they must know the hearts of the gerim, the foreigners who were their neighbors. But that sensitivity is not yet on the level required under democracy. For now it is the heart of one’s fellow citizen that has to be plumbed. The very notion of the ger, in the sense that all non-Jews should be viewed as resident aliens, is anathema to democratic idealists. Foreigners 217

C h a p t e r 11

who, for whatever reason, opt out of citizenship in any country but who nonetheless wish to reside there, should be free to do so and be granted temporary or permanent residential status. No one would assume that the state, in such a case, would or should confer upon such persons the rights of citizenship. However, preventing the foreigner from ever having the possibility of undergoing full naturalization is an anachronism in a democratic setting. If the status of ger is no longer legitimate, to what, then, should a non-Jewish citizen of Israel be entitled? He should be subject to the same rules that apply to all citizens. He should be able to live anywhere he chooses, subject to the availability of land. Housing and other amenities should be at his disposal on a an equal basis with that of the Jewish majority. He should be free to establish a business wherever any other citizen may do so. He should share equally in the services provided by all branches of government. He should be able to join any political party and feel himself to be a potential candidate for public office. He should be protected against discrimination in employment. Unfortunately, because many Jews have never thought through the implications of a commitment to democracy, they are unable to conceive that a “Jewish state” that espouses democracy must adhere consistently to democratic standards of equality. To them, Jewish interests must come first in all circumstances. In their view, there can sometimes be a contradiction between “Jewish” and “democratic,” in which case democracy has to give way. As a result of this type of thinking, the pace of securing equal rights for Israel’s non-Jewish citizens has been uneven, almost always lagging behind those experienced by underprivileged Jews. Arabs suffer handicaps in housing, both as a result of the kind of social discrimination one finds in many societies and of governmental proneness to concentrate on Jewish needs. Upper Nazareth is a classic example of the former, and the limitations that abound on building rights for Arab villages typify the latter. The Jerusalem Municipality is notorious for its policy of limiting the housing possibilities of its Arab residents. Many of the latter cannot secure building licenses as the city plans to prevent the growth of Arab neighborhoods. Arab villages lag behind Jewish settlements in the speed with which they are supplied public services, like water, electricity and roads. Nor are new settlements 218

The Concept of a Jewish Statey

established to relieve some Arab villages of their overcrowded conditions. Arabs suffer job discrimination, even in government offices, despite the fact that in many instances they are eminently qualified for appointment. They are prevented from establishing businesses in a town like Carmiel which, ironically, was erected on lands expropriated under eminent domain from Arab owners. When these disabilities reach unbearable proportions, Arabs will react bitterly, particularly Arab youth who see for themselves only a bleak future. This was the background of the protests of October, 2001. The violent reaction of Israel’s police illustrated the ease with which the blindness of a majority to the needs of a minority can lead to tragedy. The picture, admittedly, has its bright spots. Arabs are now included in the lists of candidates of several leading political parties. This step indicates that some Zionist leaders recognize that Arabs must share with them the responsibilities of government. The entry of Arabs into political partnership with Jews is evidence that many of them have accepted the reality of their minority status and have learned that they can nonetheless take advantage of their civil rights to press for greater equality. That some Arabs opt for membership in “Zionist” parties is indicative of the direction in which Israel will head once its leaders become fully cognizant of the fact that the Jewish character of the state can only be enhanced by the strengthening of its democracy. Further support for this optimistic forecast is the very vigor and openness of Arab criticism of Israel authorities for their foot-dragging in meeting Arab needs. As long as Arabs feel free to criticize and this freedom is impeccably protected by the law and its executors, hope for further progress is warranted. Jews are neither saints nor fools. Therefore, they will need more time than they have already had to deepen their empathy for the Arabs, most especially for the Palestinians. Quite likely, from all appearances, the Arabs will continue for some time to be psychologically unprepared to adjust themselves fully to the Jewish presence and to the scope of Jewish need. Jews react, in turn, with their own limited vision. They behave naturally, and it is natural to take care of one’s own before serving others. Nonetheless, when a natural self-interest, weakness or 219

C h a p t e r 11

prejudice becomes a resolute policy or an unconscious bent of mind, it is time to be critical. A “Jewish state” cannot afford to duplicate the very violation of human rights and psychological discouragement of fellow citizens, from which Jews themselves have perennially suffered in many countries. Arab citizens must not be told in subtle and not so subtle ways that Israel does not belong to them, too. As things stand at this writing, Israel’s Arabs do not yet enjoy the full benefit of their citizenship. Israel has yet to become the fully liberal state many of its founders deluded themselves into thinking it would be. When we take account of the special circumstances of Israel’s struggle for survival, we can understand some of its disregard for Arab needs and rights, even if we cannot condone such behavior. The Jews, it can be reasonably claimed, have done more to create a modus vivendi for mutuality with Israel’s Arabs than most other peoples might have done under similar circumstances. The Zionist pioneers tried to carry out God’s charge that the descendants of Abraham are “to keep the way of the Lord, to do righteousness and justice” (Gen. 18:19). Because I believe this commitment still guides most of Israel’s Jews, I am worried about the inability of so many of them to perceive the effects of the excessive recourse to the rhetoric of the “Jewish state.” To the extent it is descriptive, the designation “Jewish state” is unnecessary. Insofar as it bespeaks a retreat from the egalitarian implications of the Zionist dream, it is unfortunate and even insulting. Anwar Sadat, in making his courageous decision for peace with Israel, expressed his view that the Arab-Israel conflict is to a great extent psychological. His point was true, but psychological change cannot be effectuated by moralizing. It can take place only if time and circumstances are ripe. Sadat would not have been able to make his move before the Yom Kippur (or October) War of 1973. It is too often forgotten that Israeli leaders had long preceded Sadat in calling for negotiations. Their pleas were uniformly rejected. None of the Arab states were psychologically ready. Now, in approaching the psychological distance between the Jews and Arabs of Israel, we have to ask ourselves: How can we help to prepare both communities to readjust their opinions of one another and proceed together toward a new accommodation? 220

The Concept of a Jewish Statey

I have already mentioned the trauma caused to the Arabs when they suddenly became a minority in a state governed by Jews. Equally contributory to their mental distraughtness has been their realization that their Arab identity has been complicated by their new political status. In some Arab states — Kuwait and Lebanon are dramatic examples — the Palestinian refugees have been hampered in their efforts to integrate into the local society. They do not feel wanted by their Arab brothers and sisters and, in the case of Kuwait, are sometimes considered enemies of the state. Even in Jordan, where Palestinians have risen to high positions in government, they remain ethnically distinct from the Hashemite population. Since the Six-Day War, Israel Arabs have arrived at a consensus that they are Palestinians, but Palestinianism remains largely a political concept, devoid of historical depth and cultural content. When Jews observe this political emphasis in the identity of Israel’s Palestinians, they are reluctant to lower the barriers that keep the latter from the mainstream of power. The Jews do not find plausible the Arab claim that their relationship to a Palestinian state would be identical with the feeling of diaspora Jews toward Israel. Clearly, the psychological block between the two peoples can be torn down completely only after a political solution is achieved between Israel and the Arab states. Meanwhile, Israel’s Palestinians will have to make a strong effort to clarify their identity. And that step will necessitate their coming to terms with their minority status. Note 1

Italics, MMK. A New Zionism, Theodor Herzl Foundation, New York, 1955, p. 93

Chapter 12

What Is a Zionist State?

The Israel public has been inundated over the years with emotion-laden references to the meaning and future of the Jewish, Zionist state. This phenomenon, of course, is not new. Since the advent of the modern Zionist movement, there has never been clarity as to how to reconcile the polarities of a Jewish state and a democratic state, a Jewish state or a state for Jews, a Jewish state in which non-Jews would have equal rights, a Zionist state in which non-Jews would have equal access to the instruments of government and society. Recently, however, as the peace process is interrupted periodically by political maneuvering and excessive, frightening violence, the issues involved in the meaning of all the social and political visions just mentioned beg for the kind of long range thinking that has been lacking until now. For it is certain that concerning each of the above concepts — Jewish state, Zionist state, democratic state — there is neither consensus nor universal understanding among Jews or Arabs. The same applies to the associated concepts of Palestinian peoplehood, secular state, and the like. The Ownership of Land Before examining the ways in which Jews and Arabs view their respective human and civil rights in Israel, it is necessary to clarify the parameters of the extremely knotty question of national ownership of land. In some parts of the world, of course, there is no apparent problem. No one raises the question as to which nation today “owns” the soil occupied 222

What Is a Zionist State?

by Sweden, Canada, Mexico, Malta, Spain and numerous other statenations or nation-states. At some point in the history of these countries, there was conflict over these territories, both externally, as regards the claims of several colonial nations, and internally, with regard to which of several folks was to be the recognized owner of the land. What has been called the “territorial imperative” has operated throughout history. Few nation-states have ever come into being without some dispute or armed conflict over the question of ownership. In most instances, the matter has been decided militarily, with occasional politically arranged adjustments following the cessation of the armed conflicts. However, with the slowly growing recognition that war is becoming too dangerous for all humankind and with the slow evolution of international law and government, we can no longer afford to ignore the moral underpinning and political implications of national and state ownership of land. The political implications follow from the moral assumptions. What are the moral options best calculated to enable humankind to avoid self-destruction and assure peaceful co-existence? I see no other ethical basis for the distribution of land among the peoples of the world than to assume that no group has an absolute right to any of the earth’s soil. This truth was proclaimed long ago by the Psalmist: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof ” (Ps. 24:1). Clearly, this declaration has never been accepted by any nation. Whether a people has come to self-consciousness on native soil or whether this self-recognition has emerged in the course of wanderings and other historical circumstances, it seems to be a deeply-ingrained fact of human nature that groups of people become so attached to and enamored of a corner of the earth as to deem it their own. In a practical sense, this premise of national ideology is morally sound. Every people has a right to a parcel of soil on which it can live undisturbed, free from the threat of armed invasion from without or insecurity or restrictions on its freedom from within. Nevertheless, a people’s geographical setting is an accident of nature and history. That setting is open to radical change. A century or so ago, it was possible for Rudyard Kipling to proclaim with some justification, “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” and 223

Chapter 12

have his opinion accepted as self-evident. However, that assumption fails to take account of the vast movements of men and women to and from one country and from one continent to another. The earth is becoming smaller; cultural exclusiveness is giving way to intercultural exchange, and people are more than ever open to racial, cultural and religious intermarriage and demographic mixing. However, the countervailing forces of patriotism, group loyalty and inertia guarantee that the configuration of state borders will remain more or less intact for a long time to come, unless there is a resolution of some or all of the remaining historical territorial controversies. Whether those disputes will be resolved by agreement or violence will depend on whether the peoples involved are able to achieve a common moral perception or at least a willingness to compromise. But the starting point has to be the moral and spiritual recognition that all mortals are temporary tenants on earth, whose places of occupancy must be acquired within the framework of international law and in accordance with human needs, considerations of history and capacity for living as good neighbors. The relative nature of territorial ownership is easily perceived in the history of every nation. The Bible clearly outlines the questionable nature of the borders of Eretz Yisrael. The extent of the Promised Land, depending on which account one chooses to rely, could include every spot on which the Israelites had trod — the immense area between the Euphrates River and the “stream of Egypt,” the lesser territory between Dan and Be’er Sheva or any one of several other references to the country’s borders. In Europe, geography has had to be revised in every generation as a result of the reshuffling of borders, usually as a consequence of war. The “Manifest Destiny” of the United States was the outcome of the hunger of its growing population for new outlets for its burgeoning economy and its social needs, rather than of any divine plan. The native Americans were the victims of the moral immaturity and irrepressible appetites of the colonists. When we turn to the specific problem of the Arab-Jewish conflict, we meet up with this universal and continuous moral ambiguity. Both sides point to historical justification of their claim to Eretz Yisrael/ 224

What Is a Zionist State?

Palestine. The Jewish claim is presented in several ways: Theologically, God is said to have bequeathed the land to the Hebrews and their posterity, the Jewish people. But while the argument is sufficient for many Jews who believe in the authenticity of biblical revelation, it is a weak reed upon which to rely for other Jews who no longer believe in this type of theological orientation. Nor can we expect that Arabs will give credence to this Jewish understanding of God’s will. Even Orthodox Moslems, who respect the authenticity of the biblical revelation, will counter that the Jewish claim has been superseded by the supremacy of Muhammad. While Fundamentalist Christians support the Jewish ownership claim on theological grounds, other Christians, including Arab believers and their backers, remain adamant in their insistence that Judaism has been superseded by Christianity, thereby negating any Jewish rights based on the biblical text. As for Far Eastern theological traditions, the idea of basing the national ownership of land on a divine revelation is altogether strange. Historically, most Zionists point to the ancient settlement of Eretz Yisrael as the homeland of the Jewish people. They rely, too, on the uninterrupted, two millennial dream of the Return. They point to the unparalleled nature of this relationship as in and of itself a legal and moral argument in support of Jewish right to the land. But again, the argument is difficult to sustain in the light of the history of nations. Throughout time, invaders have destroyed native populations, subjecting them to foreign rule or sending them into permanent exile. Despite the cruelty of such a fate, most of the unfortunate victims never regained their lands. Moreover, after a period of time, the innocent heirs of the conquerors looked upon these territories as their own, a status that gained recognition in the eyes of the international community. In the case of Eretz Yisrael, it is military and political power, rather than recourse to history, which is currently relied upon to determine which parts of the area are to be in Jewish or Palestinian possession. In both instances, however, continued possession by either people will most likely depend on this same combination of military might and diplomatic power. History, therefore, cannot be reversed by fiat. It can only be appropriated as a motivating factor in the psychological and political orientation of nations. 225

Chapter 12

Morally, many Zionists have argued that it is the Jewish people that is entitled to the soil of Eretz Yisrael, because it is we who have protected the land and made it flourish. Moreover, our current care of the land is evidence of the love for it that we have exhibited throughout the centuries of exile. This argument is undoubtedly appealing, because it is surely a moral obligation for all nations to maintain the ecological health of the soil on which they dwell. This obligation, however, has nothing to do with ownership. A tenant is no less duty-bound to keep his or her rented apartment in good repair than is the owner. Since all humans are temporary residents on earth, their protection of natural resources is an obligation they owe to future generations, but it is no guarantor of their ownership of these resources. Legal possession and the right to use territories according to international law, Yes! Ownership, No! Another argument for ownership is need. Fair-minded people know that the record of the international community regarding the human rights of the Jews has been deplorable. Affirmative action was called for long before the 20th century, but the events of the last hundred and more years made such a step imperative. The Jews had to have their opportunity for independence and undisturbed development in a land of their own. Still, this is not -equivalent to exclusive ownership of that land, any more than is the case with peoples everywhere. Humans have to learn how to be custodians of property given to them on loan. The earth, as far as we humans can detect, is on permanent loan to all living creatures. Those of us who have the ability to think must learn how to share all natural resources as equitably as we can. This means that the distribution of land among the nations should be contingent upon the welfare of humanity as a whole and must not be left to the wielding of power. Arab-Jewish Conciliation Thus, embarking on the road to conciliation between Jews and Arabs cannot await the outcome of efforts to decide which of the two peoples has ownership rights to Eretz Yisrael/Palestine. There can be no decisive answer to this question. Both peoples have grounds for 226

What Is a Zionist State?

their claims of possession, but there seems to be no human court that can substantiate their arguments for ownership. The problem, then, has to be seen as one which concerns the ability of both peoples to engage in morally acceptable social engineering and compromise. Sections of both peoples are destined to live in close proximity to each other. They will have to learn how to turn that fact into a mutually rewarding experience. Given the history of the sprouting of the two nationalisms, how is this possible? Let us not lose sight of the progress that has already been made during the past few decades. Influential Jews and Palestinian Arabs, as well as many of their political representatives, have exhibited their readiness to compromise on the question of ownership. Significant numbers of both peoples have agreed that neither one can claim title to the whole of what each side considers to be theirs by virtue of any or all of the claims mentioned above. The process of deciding who gets what is now in the stage of alternating negotiation and impatient recourse to violence. If negotiation succeeds, it will set the stage for the long process of conciliation. If it fails, then one people or the other will attempt to gain possession of the whole area. But the lesson of history will not have been learned, and possession will continue only until the next round of conflict. Meanwhile, Palestinians remain divided as to their narratives concerning which people owns the Land and has the right to possess it. Some, like the members of Hamas, argue that Israel has no right to exist and that many Jewish immigrants live here illegally. Other Palestinians have retreated — or so it seems — from their determination to drive out of the land those Jews who settled in Israel after 1948. Meanwhile, the lines have been drawn between two visions of Zionism that antedated the rise of the State of Israel. One vision is the “it’s all mine” syndrome. For most of the era of modern political Zionism, the idea of the Jewish homeland has been based more or less on the assumption that the extent of Eretz Yisrael is a fact of history. This, it must be said, is an illusion. For the borders of the land have been a bone of contention among all the parties that have ever been involved in the dispute over the land’s boundaries — the peoples of the ancient Near East, as well as modern Jews, Arabs and all 227

Chapter 12

the states that have had anything to say about the controversy. Among Jews, we can point, among other issues, to the pre-State question of whether or not to press our claim to the territory east of the Jordan River that was described in the Bible as having been occupied for a time by the tribes of Gad, Reuven and half of Menasheh. Most Zionists in pre-State days were fully prepared to forfeit that part of the Promised Land, even though they had thought otherwise before a British White Paper had wrenched Trans-Jordan from the so-called Jewish homeland conceived, or so many Zionists believed, in the Balfour Declaration. It is also important to recall that before the Six Day War in 1967, none of the leaders of the Yishuv were demanding action to occupy Judah and Samaria. In this instance, too, David Ben-Gurion expressed the prevailing Zionist view that the establishment of an independent state was preferable to a struggle for the annexation of the West Bank. In other words, the Zionist movement has followed a course of flexibility and pragmatism as regards the amount of Eretz Yisrael essential to the viability of a Jewish society in the Jewish homeland. For their part, the Palestinians achieved national self-consciousness after the Arab world had more or less determined the location of its respective states. One of the few areas still contested was the West Bank, occupied by Jordan after the War of Independence, a move that was not ratified by the world community or the other Arab states. Once the Palestinian Arabs developed their conscious nationalism, they had to battle the Jordanian government for their right to self-determination, even before they came to grips with Israel. Nor has it been clear to the Palestinians or to the rest of the world just what territory should be assigned to the Palestinian people. Many voices have been heard calling for the Palestinians to replace the Hashemite rulers of Jordan as the “rightful owners” of Trans-Jordan and the proper political authority. Even some Israeli Jews have argued that a Palestinian state already exists. That state, in their eyes, is Jordan. Thus, the territorial dispute is both between the Jews and the Palestinians and within each group, between the holders of different nationalist ideologies. Therefore, the conciliation of Jews and 228

What Is a Zionist State?

Palestinians and Israelis and the rest of the Arab world is equally a search on the part of all the parties for their own identity and national soul. My purpose in this chapter is to clarify the questions that we Jews have to answer if we are to face our Arab brothers with a coherent and morally commendable proposal of our self-understanding and the way in which we should like to live in peace and brotherhood with them. I know that some readers will respond that I should be demanding the same of the Palestinians and their fellow Arabs. I agree. I go further. I think that the Arabs have an identity problem at least as complicated as our own. There is no telling how long it will take them to solve it to their own satisfaction. It might well be that their proposed solution will be unacceptable to us and only heighten our disagreements. But just as I must behave wisely and decently, even if I think my neighbor is despicable, so must I be able to come to my neighbor as a person whom I should wish him or her to be. I have to be a good neighbor before I have the right to demand that my neighbor be equally so. A Jewish State Until modern times, Jews dreamt of the Return to Eretz Yisrael as a divine reward for the obedience of our people to the will of God as revealed in our sacred texts. But while that dream depicted the reconstitution of a Jewish state under the rule of a descendant of the Davidic dynasty, it never showed a blueprint of undisputed borders of the monarchy nor any description of the details of governmental organization, other than to affirm the authority of the Halakhah. It is true that attention was paid to some of the problems that would arise concerning the revival of mitzvot that can be observed only in Eretz Yisrael. For example, with the advent of the Zionist movement and the beginning of Jewish settlement on the land, questions arose as to the observance of the rules of shemittah during the sabbatical year, maaser (tithing) and the rebuilding of the Temple, with its attendant regulations concerning the duties of the kohanim (priests). However, it was only shortly before the establishment of the State of Israel that the 229

Chapter 12

halakhists began to wrestle with the problems of Jewish sovereignty under freedom as a matter of immediate urgency. Traditionalists among the founders of Israel were confronted by the question, “How can the Halakhah be applied to the unprecedented conditions that were created by the resettlement of the Jewish people in Eretz Yisrael?” Jews had come from the four corners of the earth, many of them ignorant of the Rabbinic tradition. The mentality that each group of olim brought with them was molded in the unique cultures of the lands in which their families had lived for centuries. Clearly, the new state required a different polity than that envisaged by halakhic loyalists. Indeed, the founding fathers of Israel established the state as a modern democracy, rather than as an halakhic nomocracy. But in the wake of coalition politics and in their desire to emphasize the Jewish character of the state, they placed under halakhic control matters of marriage and divorce, conversion, inheritance and other items of personal status. Ever since, and increasingly so with the proliferation of immigration that includes a large number of Jews ignorant of or critical of the Halakhah, the halakhic community in Israel has sought to extend its authority over wider areas of public life. At the same time, democratic-minded Jews have sought to limit or eliminate entirely elements of the halakhic establishment. Expanding on the subject of the previous chapter, I ask, what is a Jewish state — or what should it be like? To answer this question, we must address ourselves to the following possibility: Inasmuch as many states throughout the world are identified with dominant religions or ethnic groups, should not Israel adopt the same policy? Everyone agrees that the human rights of non-Jews in Israel must be protected, but to what extent does and should their right to citizenship grant them equal access to determining and executing policy in all areas of political, economic and social life? What is meant by Jewish? And what is the relationship between Jewish and Israeli? I tackle each of the foregoing questions. A good starting point for our discussion is an excerpt of an interview conducted by the journalist, Ari Shavit, with Aharon Barak, the former Chief Justice of Israel’s Supreme Court. (HaAretz, April 10, 2008) 230

What Is a Zionist State?

Barak tells Shavit, “I am a Zionist in every fiber of my being, but not in the style of Ahad HaAm. I am a Herzlian Zionist who believes in a Jewish national state designed to solve the Jewish problem, a Zionist who thinks that a bi-national state would be a catastrophe, a Zionist who believes that the Law of Return is not prejudicial but is a just response to the agonizing cry of Jewish history.” Barak continues, “However, what is Zionism? For me, the lesson of the Holocaust is that while Israel has to be the state of the Jewish people, it must also be a state of all its citizens. There is no contradiction between the two. Israel must relate with equality to all its citizens.” Although Barak makes clear his dedication to democratic methods of government and to democratic ideals, he ignores one factor of enormous psychological importance. I refer to the symbols of statehood. It is here that Barak fails to note the contradiction between Israel as a Jewish state and as a state of all its citizens. As a Jewish state, Hatikvah and the Jewish flag are clear indications of its Jewish character. As a democratic state, however, these symbols proclaim that all non-Jews are second-class citizens. They cannot sing the national anthem honestly; nor can they salute the flag in full dedication to the state as their own. This contradiction is not unique to Israel, but the symbolic issue in Israel is particularly acute under current historical circumstances. Many states are dominated by and identified with the religion of its majority population. A few examples will suffice. Saudi Arabia is totally Islamic. Islamic Sudan has a long history of restrictions on and oppression of its Christian minority. Pakistan, Sudan, Libya and other Asian and African states are dominated by Moslem law or practice, and their national ethos is openly Islamic. In most cases, the Christian world has adopted democratic rule, and the theocratic influence is confined mostly to the area of ceremonial practice. Nonetheless, while other religions are either tolerated or granted equal rights, the public image of these states is that they are Christian countries. In varying degrees of tolerance, the same status of the majority religion characterizes the Buddhism of Thailand, Nepal and Sri Lanka. The democratic world is characterized by the impact of its religious majorities. In Great Britain, for example, there is even an established 231

Chapter 12

church, with the Archbishop of Canterbury serving as a symbol of the dominant Christian religion. As far as I know, the religious and secular minorities in England find no difficulty in living with the symbolic disparity between their beliefs and their status as citizens. In Italy, the dominance of the Catholic Church is obvious, with symbols of the crucifixion to be seen in hospitals and schools. Here, too, Jews and other religious minorities take advantage of their equal citizenship without questioning the overwhelming presence of Catholic symbolism. In regard to Israel, we face a complicated situation. To begin with, the demographic pluralism of the state is both religious and ethnic. Both Jews and Arabs are in the throes of inner identity crises. The Arab citizens of Israel have had to adjust to the minority status that was thrust upon them in the wake of the War of Independence. Unlike their brothers throughout the Middle East, they have to cope with the difficulty of creating a life-style that will bring them fulfillment despite their lack of national sovereignty. In addition, they, like their Palestinian fellows, have yet to define their Palestinianism. What role does or should religion play in Palestinian consciousness? In most Arab states, although Christianity has made some inroads, the Moslem influence is overwhelming. Shall Palestinians remove religion as a dominant factor in their national identity? What shall be the links binding Palestinians in Israel with the Palestinian state in the making and with the widespread Palestinian Diaspora? Meanwhile, the long-standing problem of Jewish identity under freedom took on a new configuration with the establishment of the State of Israel. What binds Jews in Israel and those in the Dispersion? Is it a combination of fate and faith? Is it the force of a tradition which is observed mostly in the breach? Is it the attraction of building a national home in which many Jews are unlikely to settle and from which, to judge by present experience, significant numbers of Israeli Jews are apt to emigrate in the future? Having lacked the experience of building and governing a modern, pluralistic state, how are Israeli Jews to reconcile themselves to the reality that the new state must to a significant extent be a state of all its citizens? These and other questions are difficult for Jews in Israel and the rest of the world and for the 232

What Is a Zionist State?

non-Jewish citizens of Israel. The solution of the latter’s identity problem will undoubtedly be affected by the way in which Jews treat theirs. The identification of any state is a function of the way in which its citizens define the legitimate parameters of sovereignty. For example, the societies of both England and the United States are predominantly Christian. Christian symbols, practices and churches color the cultural image of these states. Nonetheless, while these countries are predominantly Christian in their cultural atmosphere, their legal systems are devoid of interference from the Church. With the exception of vestiges of Christian ceremonials, both of these democracies guarantee equal rights to all their citizens. The legal systems are secular. This is true, in varying degrees, of all democratic states. However, state identities are not confined to the role of religion. For instance, the Scandinavian countries are also demographically Christian, but their identity in the eyes of the world and in their own eyes is that of their status as nations or peoples. Thus, the name applied to all the citizens of Sweden, regardless of their religion or their ethnic origin, is Swedish. And so for Norway and Finland. The citizens of the Scandinavian countries, with all their religious and ethnic identities, have common national identifications. None of their respective religions or ethnic groups can claim their state as their exclusive possession. In contrast, while Pakistan is represented in the United Nations by virtue of its statehood, its Islamic identity is unquestionable and unquestioned. In the light of the foregoing examples, in what sense should Zionists regard Israel as a Jewish state? Like all normative questions, this one, too, is a matter of opinion. But there are a number of factors that have to be taken into account, if we are to make a wise decision. The first is the fact that whereas no one disputes the right of the Scandinavian states to possess the territories they currently occupy and no one is making a fuss about the Islamic character of Pakistan, the whole world seems to be involved in the dispute about Israel’s legal borders, the right of Jews and Arabs to Jerusalem as their capital and the legal status of Israel’s Arab citizens. Accordingly, even if the current off-again, on-again peace negotiations eventuate in an agreement between Israel 233

Chapter 12

and the Palestinians, the issue of Israel’s Jewishness might still be on the agendas of the United Nations, certain Christian denominations and Moslem Fundamentalists. Zionists must acknowledge that there is a significant difference between the Land of Israel and the State of Israel. The longing for Eretz Yisrael during the 2000 years of exile never assumed political proportions until the 19th century. With the exception of the flow of masses of Jews toward Eretz Yisrael, inspired by Shabbetai Zvi, the Jews remained rooted wherever they were tolerated. The longing for Eretz Yisrael was a dream which would be brought to realization by an act of God, who would define the area to be allotted to the Jewish people. Even after the Zionist movement took shape, the issue of borders remained a vague consideration for a long time. The Return was a matter of the Jewish soul, rather than Jewish action. When the period of aliyah set in and Zionist thoughts began to reckon with political reality, the idea of a Jewish state developed slowly. Even then, not only was there disagreement among Zionist leaders as to the realistic territorial goals of the state in the making; there was also a considerable, if short-term support, for the possibility of a bi-national state. Nor did many Zionists rule out the possibility of internationalizing Jerusalem. One more fact must be mentioned. The cultural quality of any state is conditioned by the spiritual power of its inhabitants. In a state which has a large ethnic or religious majority, the cultural ambience will undoubtedly be conditioned by the way in which that majority conducts itself. In a pluralistic state, the cultural atmosphere is likely to be formed by the influence of the most forceful demographic entities. Thus, it is important to recall, as I have mentioned before and emphasize anew, that before the establishment of the State of Israel, while Jews were still a minority ruled, as were the majority Arabs, by the British mandatory authority, they (the Jews) were able to cultivate a rich and vibrant Jewish culture. The early Zionist pioneers were able to develop remarkable social experiments in the kibbutz and moshav movements and in labor organization; Jewish education advanced beyond anything known in the Diaspora; new forms of holiday celebration were initiated; the arts — music, painting, architecture, dance, etc. — were adapted to the 234

What Is a Zionist State?

landscape, the light and the sounds of Eretz Yisrael; self-governing institutions were elected; and self-defense forces were organized. Despite their minority status, the Jews of pre-State Israel were clearly remaking the cultural map of the country. All this without the benefit of sovereignty. What I have just written is in no way meant to deny the legitimacy or the necessity of the State of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people. The still precarious position of the Jewish people in the world, its long exile and its persistent will to live entitle it to a territory for its security and creative passion. Moreover, while there are few territories in the world that have not yet been preempted by one people or another — mostly resulting from the exercise of armed forces — it behooves the human community to contemplate some redistribution of land to accommodate the needs of underprivileged peoples. That redistribution should take into consideration historical, geo-political and cultural factors. In this light, it is obvious that neither Jews nor Arabs, in their struggle over the right to Eretz Yisrael/Falastin, can ignore the narrative or the claim of their opponents. This is not the place to review the arguments advanced over the years by the two parties. Fair-minded observers would have to admit that we are faced with a dilemma that cannot be resolved by counting up points in a debate. Only a mutual desire to live and help live can generate the psychological state of mind that would enable the two peoples to compromise and to share the territory they both love and want. In the current peace process, there seems to be some hope that this realization is dawning, but only the naive can believe that ignorance, enmity or blind self-interest can be overcome quickly. We can now return to our question: In what sense is it appropriate, as Barak claims, to designate Israel as a Jewish state? De jure and de facto, of course, it is such, by virtue of the decision of the United Nations to place certain areas of Eretz Yisrael at the disposal of the Jewish people. In view of the fact that its political structure is controlled by a Jewish majority, the Jewish coloration of Israel becomes manifest. However, the question is: What are the rights, privileges and responsibilities that go along with this designation of Israel as a Jewish state? 235

Chapter 12

To answer these questions, it is necessary to distinguish between a state and a homeland. A state, at least a democratic state, must belong equally to all its citizens. A homeland, on the other hand, is a place in which individuals and groups want to live, because it elicits from them their finest qualities and rewards them with a sense of belongingness. A homeland is dependent more on a state of mind than it is on the status of the people who regard it as such. Eretz Yisrael, for example, was for centuries regarded as the homeland of the Jewish people, most of whom could not immigrate there or who had no intention of doing so. Today, many Palestinians regard as their homeland the whole of what they call Falastin, even though they do not exercise sovereignty over the area. It comes down, then, to whether or not other citizens of the State of Israel besides the Jews can have equality, both politically and culturally? Is Israel to be monolithic or pluralistic? As a democratic state, Israel is duty-bound to be pluralistic — the state of all its inhabitants who are entitled to be its citizens. As a homeland, its identity in the eyes of both Jews and Arabs antedated the establishment of the State of Israel and, in essence, is not dependent upon which people is the dominant force in the state. Minorities by their very nature will be able to wield only such political power as they can generate by their skills and ability to influence the thinking and behavior of the majority. But as long as they are free to develop their own culture, even if lacking political sovereignty, minorities can feel at home. This is true, however, only in a democratic polity which is designed to insure the rights, dignity and equal opportunities of all minorities. Israel, then, is de facto a Jewish state, by virtue of the power of decision which all majorities possess in a free society. But inasmuch as the majority in a democracy is subject to the laws of the state, it cannot legitimately deprive the minorities of their equal status under those same laws. The problem for Israel is profoundly political and psychological. Israel is asked by the Palestinians and all the Arab states to surrender a status with which it was empowered by the United Nations, namely, that the State of Israel was to be recognized as the only state of the Jewish people. No one is challenging the Arab identity of any of the territories under Arab sovereignty or requiring the Arab states to grant 236

What Is a Zionist State?

equal national rights to their minority populations. The democratic sections of the world might condemn the inequality of non-Arabs or non-Moslems in Arab states, but they are not pressuring these countries to equalize the latter’s group status. No one conceives of binational or multi-religious reorganization of Arab polities. Therefore, many Zionists argue that it is unfair and unrealistic to ask of the lone Jewish state that it live up to the full measure of democratic principles and share national sovereignty in Israel with the Palestinians. This opinion gains credence whenever there is a move by an Arab leader that indicates Arab estrangement from the spirit of Israeli citizenship. For example, when an Arab member of the Knesset is quoted as urging the expulsion from the Arab community of young Arabs who volunteer for national service, he automatically lends support to Jews who want to place limits on expression of nationalism among Israeli Palestinians. Psychologically, it cannot be expected that the Jews, who have suffered unparalleled deprivation of freedom and the right to rule themselves, should surrender a good measure of their sovereignty in a region which still regards them as illegitimate interlopers. Furthermore, a look at the rest of the world, particularly at its democratic sectors, bears witness to the fact that minorities accommodate themselves, without protest, to the cultural domination of the majority populations. Jews in the United States raise no objection to the fact that Sunday and Christmas are nationally recognized. No minority in Switzerland raises a fuss about the Cross in the national flag. And then, of course, Muslim state symbols feature Islamic references. It seems that only in Israel is there vigorous objection to majority symbolism. One might expect a bit of empathy from Israel’s Palestinians and their non-Israeli fellows for the way in which the Jewish people has signalized its return to sovereignty after centuries of homelessness. Particularly is this the case when one considers the high degree of equality which Israel’s Arabs enjoy. Yet, when all is said and done, if the democratic ideal is to become the norm for all sovereign states, the risk must be taken, even in the face of some nationalist extremists among Israel’s Palestinians. Sooner or later, the Arabs of Israel must be welcomed as full partners in the 237

Chapter 12

building of Israeli democracy. It goes without saying that they, no less than the Jews, must play according to the rules of the democratic game. But that can only be determined on the basis of experience. The human passion for freedom and equality is unstoppable. It behooves a majority to be gracious and to recognize the just demands of a minority rather than to engage in a fruitless struggle to induce the latter patiently to accept a second-class status. On the other hand, Israel’s Arabs have to be patient about the Jewish symbols that dominate the Israel scene. Israel is surrounded by Arab states that are marked by Islamic symbols, and it is to be expected that when a Palestinian state is established, it will also give symbolic expression to its majority religious culture. Israel’s Arabs are ill-advised to expect that, at this stage of history, Israel should be the only people in the world that is asked to abandon expression of its dominant culture in the symbols of its state. I hope, however, that the time will come when all majorities will at least see fit to introduce a second set of anthems and other symbols that will give due expression to the pluralistic nature of their citizenry. Peoplehood, Nationhood and Statehood. I turn to the second set of questions that I have posed above. Granted that Israeli Palestinians deserve equal rights of citizenship, to what extent should their Palestinian nationalism be accorded recognition in Israel at this stage of history? For example, should Arabs be accorded the same privileges as Jews under the Law of Return? Should they be permitted to pledge allegiance to the flag of a Palestinian entity or state? Should they be permitted to fly the Palestinian flag in their schools and have their pupils open the school day by singing the Palestinian national anthem? Is it not customary for Jews in the Diaspora to exhibit the Israel flag and sing Hatikvah at public Jewish gatherings? Why, then, should Israel’s Arabs not be granted the right to display the symbols of Palestinian nationalism? These are complicated questions, not addressed by Barak in his interview, that have to be seen against the background of the changing political conceptions that are perplexing all humankind. 238

What Is a Zionist State?

We often speak of the Jewish people, the Arab people or peoples, the Palestinian people, and sometimes we use the term, nation. Whereas Zionist Jews do not hesitate to speak of a Jewish state for the entire Jewish people or nation, many of them are nervous when Israeli Palestinians claim their right to support the establishment of a Palestinian state as something which would be theirs in the same sense that Israel is deemed to belong in some way to the Jews of the world. It is necessary to clarify the meaning of these three concepts — peoplehood, nationhood, and statehood. A people is an historically evolving, self-conscious group of persons who are united by a common past, by the culture that their forebears have bequeathed to them and their determination to survive creatively as a distinctive social entity. A people may exist in many forms of polity that transcend territory or any particular political structure. Thus the Jewish people, that was long ago concentrated in Eretz Yisrael, has survived as a people for two millennia, even though it has been scattered throughout the world. The Arabs, the bulk of whom are united by bonds of religion and language, were never attached to a single land and, like the Jews, are a scattered people. Unlike the Jews, however, they are divided into states that are often in conflict with one another. A nation has many of the characteristics of a people, particularly in its sense of unity and desire to maintain its distinctiveness. Unlike a people, however, it tends to identify itself with a particular land and most frequently with a state. Furthermore, it tends to be more pluralistic than a people. It is often composed of more than one religion, language and culture. Yet, in common discourse, the two concepts, “people” and “nation,” are frequently used interchangeably. Nonetheless, it is more accurate to speak of the American nation than to refer to Americans as a people. Undoubtedly, most Americans are conscious of their unity as a nation. Their attachment to the land and to the democratic institutions and symbols of the American state and society are the chief ingredients of their nationhood. On the other hand, the very pluralism of their ethnic origins and histories, their religious varieties, their varying folk customs and even, to some extent, their languages, prevent Americans from stepping over the threshold and becoming 239

Chapter 12

a well-defined people. Even after over two hundred years as a state, the United States is still too young for its inhabitants to weld themselves into a well-defined people. For a long time to come (perhaps forever), it will be a nation of many peoples. That is an important element in its greatness. In contrast, the Jewish people, until now, has maintained its identity in the face of its dispersion among many states and nations. In some of those states and nations, Jews have taken on a double identity, as Jews and as conscious and dedicated members of the host societies. Most American Jews are clearly loyal and accepted members of the American state and nation. But they see no contradiction in identifying themselves also as members of the Jewish people. This is so, because the American ethos recognizes the legitimacy of cultural loyalty to groups that are transnational but that do not create problems of dual political loyalty. Italian, Irish, Polish and other ethnic Americans may have many cultural and sentimental ties to the lands of their or their parents’ origin, without in any way compromising their Americanism. States are political entities, varying in their structure, from democracies to the crudest forms of authoritarianism and dictatorship. Democracies tend to be the home of more than one people, ethnic group, and religion, whereas other forms of state polity are apt to be more monolithic, with authority resting in the hands of a dominant majority. Saudi Arabia is monolithic, both in terms of its Arab ethnicism and its Islamic Fundamentalism. Lebanon is the scene of a struggle between Christians, Muslims and Druze, whose common Arabism is sometimes insufficient to serve as a unifying force. As of this writing, the efforts of some Lebanese to secure democratic rule are being blocked by the severe opposition of the current Muslim majority. The State of Israel is still an infant entity, after only sixty-one years of independence. Its democracy is unquestionable, but it has not overcome some of the contradictions that have inhered in its practice since its inception. We have already alluded to the mistake of identifying a state as democratic but associating it with only one of its peoples. In Israel, within the dominant Jewish people, the democratic ethos has been fought by a significant minority of ultra-traditional Jews who wish 240

What Is a Zionist State?

to institute a theocratic nomocracy. We are thus faced with three sets of issues that interlock and will take many years to disengage. There are, first, the two problems of Arab and Jewish peoplehood. Although signs of Palestinian peoplehood were apparent before the establishment of Israel, it was not until the State came into existence that the Palestinians undertook serious action to give substance to their identity. And then, it took the form of struggle for the possession of the territory that they call Falastin and for the creation of the political tools to effectuate control over the land. No cultural distinctiveness has yet been created which could mark the Palestinians off significantly from other sections of the Arab nations and provide a rationale for their existence as a people. Meanwhile, we Jews have to deal with our own problems of identity. The Jewish people existed before Israel, but the new state confronted it with the question concerning the relationship that should henceforth prevail between Jewish communities abroad and the Yishuv in Israel. Legally, the problem, in certain instances, is not difficult to resolve. A number of states permit their citizens to have dual citizenship. There are many Jews, citizens of Israel, who also cast ballots in national elections in the United States, England and other countries. Similarly, many Jews in Israel hold passports as citizens of other states. This duality is possible as a result of the friendly relations between the several countries. Unfortunately, the practice is not universal, especially so in regard to states with which Israel has no diplomatic relations and is often in conflict. Clearly, the Jews in such countries cannot legally regard Israel as a second political home, but they see themselves as no less Jewish than those who dwell in Israel. Furthermore, beyond the legal consideration, the Jews have to reconsider the cultural bond between them. In pre-modern days, they were virtually unanimous in considering themselves united in their covenant with God. In today’s world of diversity, no such consensus prevails. Consequently, Jews in Israel, and certainly in their relations with the Jews of the Diaspora, are deeply divided as to the nature of their peoplehood. Inasmuch as Jews and Arabs are equally perplexed about their identities under freedom, it is difficult for them to come to terms 241

Chapter 12

about their respective rights and duties in a democratic Israel. On the one hand, as we have observed above, Israel was established as a Jewish state. It was designed by the UN to solve the problem of Jewish homelessness, alongside an Arab state that was supposed to enable the Arabs of Palestine to satisfy their need for autonomy. That solution did not occur in the wake of the UN Partition Resolution of November 29, 1947. Instead, the Arabs chose to undo the plan by force. The rest is history. As of this writing, despite the ongoing violence, there is a glimmer of hope that Israel and the Palestinian Arabs will reach a peace agreement, under which the Palestinians will have another chance to create their state, albeit with less territory than was contemplated according to the original UN proposal. Nevertheless, peace alone will not resolve the problem of the status of minorities in either state. Given the premise that the two states are meant to afford Jews and Palestinians the opportunity to fashion their respective identities freely, there still remains the question regarding the legitimacy of a democracy in which one group of citizens has preferential treatment under the law of the land. The issue is clearly delineated in Israel in the debate over the continuation of the Law of Return, under which any Jew may immigrate into the country and receive automatic citizenship. This privilege is denied to non-Jews, whose entry into Israel and acquisition of citizenship are subject to many preliminary steps, limitations, or outright rejection. It remains to be seen what immigration policy will be adopted by the Palestinian state, if and when it is established. However, as far as the Law of Return is concerned, it is clearly restrictive in principle. Yet the Law can be justified or at least understood. As long as anti-Semitism persists in many countries to the degree that we witness today, the Jewish people is justified in keeping the door of Israel wide-open to Jews who need a sanctuary. Furthermore, as long as the immigration laws of many states, democracies included, contain quotas that discriminate against prospective immigrants from certain areas, the Law of Return is not exceptional. Although exclusive, it is simply another form of the means by which many states protect themselves from inundation. 242

What Is a Zionist State?

Of course, under ideal conditions, some way must be found internationally to protect freedom of movement for all humans. Such a utopian scheme is conceivable only in the distant future, but in the meantime, humane societies are called upon to open their doors to the maximum degree to those in need and to those who desire to take on a new national identity. In the case of Israel, it is reasonable to expect that it should enable non-Jewish families to be reunited and that it should welcome a fair number of non-Jews within its borders and hold out to them the privilege of Israeli citizenship. To some extent, this is already taking place. But there is much room for improvement. The Rights of Non-Jews in Israel As long as Jews are the majority in Israel, their status as the dominant force in government is assured. However, under Israel’s democracy, all citizens are entitled to equal rights under the law. But a problem arises when Israeli Palestinians want equal national status. What can such a status mean? One possibility is a bi-national state, in which the two peoples share power. That course was recommended in pre-State days by Hashomer Hatzair and was even supported at one point by David Ben-Gurion. But the idea is, as Aharon Barak asserts, unworkable and even dangerous under prevailing conditions in Israel and the Middle East as a whole. Another option might be for Israeli Arabs to have complete control over limited areas of national life, such as education, town planning and building, religion, and national symbols (flag, hymn). But this approximation of bi-nationalism would also meet up with the complications of inter-group interests and the needs of the common society. The only sensible way to handle the civil and human rights of ethnic groups in a democratic state is to guarantee the maximum possible equality for all citizens. Thus, in education, the state has the right and the duty to set standards for all schools and the obligation to provide proper facilities and a curriculum that will include fair presentation of the various cultures, including their languages, histories and folkways. 243

Chapter 12

There must also be room for special interest education, to be funded by those who wish for such education but having in its curriculum subjects compulsory for all pupils. If religious institutions are supported by the state, all denominations should receive assistance in keeping with their numbers. Subsidies for local governments should be made without discrimination. Fair employment and housing laws should be passed to prevent discrimination against any minority group. A difficult problem for Israel is the question of land and the population growth of villages and towns. Up to now, Arab communities have been hampered by the failure of the government to release new acreage for Arab villages and to permit and assist them to build new housing for their younger generations. It is hard to justify this policy while no comparable limitations are imposed on the Jewish sector. This is a severe blight on the spirit of Israeli democracy. An even more difficult question concerns land purchased and owned by the Jewish National Fund. Before the establishment of the State of Israel, it was perfectly commendable for the Jewish people to acquire land in Palestine on which it could settle both oppressed Jews for whom Eretz Yisrael was their only refuge from persecution and idealistic Jews who dreamed of reconstituting their people in its ancient homeland. However, once the State became a reality and the use of JNF land became an integral part of the government’s settlement program, the question arose as to whether it is morally legitimate and politically prudent to deny access to such property to non-Jewish citizens of the country. If a Jewish or Zionist state means that such favoritism is necessary, then doubt is cast on its democratic quality and on that of its Jewish society. The practice resembles the treatment once accorded to Jews even in democratic countries, in which restrictive covenants prevented them from purchasing homes in certain locations or gaining employment in certain industries or vocations. Theoretically, the argument can be advanced that the above analogy is unwarranted, for Palestinians, under Israeli law, could acquire land and create their own national fund. But this would be compounding the problem. Restrictive covenants based on racial, religious or social grounds are morally questionable. Again, it would seem that the only proper way to deal with the issue is for the Israel government to 244

What Is a Zionist State?

recognize the needs of all its citizens and to allocate land equitably and insure a free and just employment market for all. Nonetheless, the historical situation cannot be ignored. A long time will elapse before the condition of the Jewish people in the Middle East and in the world at large can be normalized. Until that time, it cannot be expected psychologically to deal on a par with all the disabilities of those Arabs who have been victimized during the Jewish struggle for freedom and autonomy. I mention this as a fact, not as an excuse for the faults in Israel’s democracy. Sooner or later — preferably sooner — those faults will have to be corrected. Ultimately, there can be no compromise with equality for all in any state that declares itself to be a democracy. Since the paragraphs concerning the JNF were written, Israel’s Supreme Court has judged in favor of an Arab family that had been denied the right to build a home on JNF land that had been made available to Jewish families for the same purpose. The Court’s decision is a revolutionary step which will undoubtedly challenge Israel’s authorities to rethink their understanding of the relationship between Jewish nationalism and the obligations of democratic statehood.

What Makes Israel a Jewish and Zionist State? Our excursion has led us to the crucial question as to the parameters of a Jewish and Zionist state. Like all normative terms, “Jewish” and “Zionist” are variously defined. Under the rubric “Jewish,” we come across many versions of belief and practice, of definitions of Jewish identity ranging from a religion to a nation, from a variety of religious conceptions to an abundance of secular philosophies, from a race to a culture, and so on. “Zionism” is defined in no less a plethora of ways. Zionism is living in Eretz Yisrael or intending to do so; it is believing that the land within one or another of the sets of borders mentioned in the Bible belongs eternally to the Jewish people; it is the belief that Eretz Yisrael is the spiritual homeland of all Jews, whether they choose to live here or not; it is the conviction that Israel is the only place where Judaism 245

Chapter 12

can be lived fully; it is a movement to help Jews who wish or need to do so to migrate to Eretz Yisrael; it is a movement whose aim is to guarantee Jewish sovereignty over all of Eretz Yisrael. Some would identify Zionism as a movement to enable the Jewish people to become a light to the nations by creating a model society in its homeland. In view of this kaleidoscope of interpretations, I see no reason to deny myself the privilege of offering one of my own. Before outlining my own vision of Zionism and a Zionist state, I draw attention to the current debate on what is called post-Zionism. The term is used to point to various changes that have occurred in Israel since its founding in 1948. I suppose that my own vision of Zionism will be considered by some right-wing Zionists as belonging to the category of post-Zionism. So be it. But frankly, I find the debate to be unfruitful. All I ask of my readers is to accept or reject the conception I offer of how a Jewish majority should behave spiritually, ethically and politically in its declared homeland. Zionism, however defined, has always been directed towards two main objectives. The first is the restoration of the Jewish people to a natural and indigenous national life in Eretz Yisrael, within viable borders and with sufficient autonomy to enable the people to control its own destiny. That objective has been accomplished, although in our unsettled world, all political settlements seem to have an aura of tentativeness and uncertainty about them. Thus, while Zionists are justified in their efforts to protect the autonomy of the State of Israel and the sovereignty of its Jewish majority, they should not turn a blind eye to possible rearrangements in the Middle East of the future. I refer, of course, to peaceful accommodations that are not likely to occur for generations to come. Nonetheless, the spirit of a new international polity can be suggested by reference to the second objective of Zionism. That purpose is to revive the creative energies of the Jewish people, so that Judaism will be not only the celebration of a glorious past, but a vital and inventive civilization. As I indicated above, most Jews forget that the conditions for such creativity were generated in Eretz Yisrael before the establishment of the State. The latter was necessary in order to empower the Jewish settlers to keep the doors of the land open to unlimited Jewish immigration and to restore the Jewish people 246

What Is a Zionist State?

to its proper status among the nations of the world. However, even without these capacities of statehood, the pre-State Jews in Israel succeeded in laying the groundwork for the vital civilization of the Zionist dream. As I have emphasized, the halutzim and the other olim who came in successive waves during the period between the 1880s and 1948 produced a rich culture of religious thought and practice, experiments in cooperative and collective living, magnificent works of literature and art, the substructure for self-government and many other manifestations of a new life. The conclusion to be drawn from this historic development is that a free people, driven by the mystique of a beloved homeland, can function naturally and creatively even without absolute autonomy. It follows that Zionists must not make the mistake of thinking that the Jewishness of the State of Israel is dependent on its identification with the Jewish people alone. Unless Israel’s minorities can be made to feel that the State belongs to them as well — just as Jewish minorities feel about their roles in other free states — the Jewish character of Israel becomes deficient in an important moral dimension. The fact is that the Jewishness of Israel depends not only on the ability of Jews to remain a majority but also on their ability to live up to their creative spiritual potential. As long as Israel remains a free democracy, it will also continue to be a Zionist state, where Jews will enrich humanity by their talent for creating a unique spiritual civilization. Finally, the Zionist state will be Jewish to the extent that it serves as a magnet, drawing Jews throughout the world to a recognition of their peoplehood and, at the same time, inspires its Jewish citizens to recognize their kinship with the rest of the Jewish people who live in the vast Dispersion. A Zionist state, in other words, is the center of a unique type of international association, best designated as a People. Anyone who would want a more detailed description of this new form of social organization can do no better than to read Mordecai M. Kaplan’s descriptions that are scattered throughout his writings. His book, A New Zionism, is a classic example of this genre.

Chapter 13

The Western Wall

The Western Wall is a subject for a fascinating study in historical memory, symbolism, holiness and politics. It deserves an in-depth, book length treatment. Here, however, I wish only to introduce the subject with a short account of what has happened to the Wall from 1967 to the present. The so-called Western (Wailing) Wall is mainly the remains of a section of the wall that surrounded the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. Until 1967, the site was fronted by a crowded area of Arab-owned houses. Before the War of Independence, whenever it was possible, Jews would come there individually or assemble there in small numbers for meditation or prayer. But for the most part, it was regarded as a symbol of past glory, a reminder of the relatively few centuries of Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem and of a messianic future. In the aftermath of the Six Day War, a new reality confronted the Jewish people. The Wall was once again in the possession of Jewish authorities. It was now a challenge to the whole Jewish conception of history and spirituality. What role should the Wall henceforth play in Jewish culture and identity? It was clear from the outset that the challenge was and is still a complicated one. In the first place, the Wall is not an isolated entity. Its peak lies parallel to the mount on which the Temple had once stood and that has been occupied by two mosques sacred to the entire Muslim world. Secondly, the Wall itself has become in Jewish consciousness a symbol of Jewish national aspiration and, for many traditional Jews, of the ultimate restoration of the Temple, in whatever form. What was 248

The Wester n Wall

to be done from 1967 on about the Jewish connection to the Temple mount? These questions, with all their dangerous implications, remain as of this writing a part of the political agendas of Jews and Moslems. These and associated problems should enter into the exhaustive study that I suggested above, but for now, I want only to express my opinion as to what the symbolic significance of the Wall ought to be. My thoughts go back to two periods in my own life. In August, 1947, my wife, Rhoda, and I came to Jerusalem for a year of study at the Hebrew U. Readers will recall that in the wake of Arab attacks, Mt. Scopus was abandoned immediately after the passing of the UN partition resolution. The University was closed; only a few courses were conducted in scattered locations in the center of the city. Previously, Rhoda and I had visited the Wall, together with fellow-students. It was a sad site and sight. The Wall was fronted by a dense Arab neighborhood that stood only a few feet from the holy area. Only sparse space was available for small groups of Jews to stand before the Wall to pray or reflect. I do not recall seeing any group worship, although I understand that there were occasional Orthodox minyanim (worship with ten or more male participants). However, no permanent mehitzot (forms of separation) had been erected. Only occasionally, when political conditions permitted, were temporary mehitzot set up. For the most part, Orthodox men who wished to pray would simply move a few feet away from any women who might have been present or ask the latter to do so. Recently, Prof. David Golinkin, the distinguished scholar and head of the Schechter Institute for Jewish Studies, in Jerusalem, published a responsum detailing the manner in which Jews expressed their feelings at the Wall. For centuries, it was not the locale of a synagogue or the kind of worship that it became after the Six Day War. Even from an halakhic perspective, it is only the lower plaza fronting the Wall which has played the role of a synagogue for brief periods of time. I leave it to the reader to consult Golinkin’s authoritative research essay for a clear summary of the checkered career of the Wall as a place of worship and a spiritual center for Jewish men and women.1 Immediately after the Six Day War, the Wall became the chief magnet drawing crowds to the Old City. No one who experienced it can forget 249

Chapter 13

that stirring day in June, 1967, a short time after the Israeli army had conquered the Old City of Jerusalem, when masses of Jews flocked to the Wall. Rhoda and I were among that outpouring of celebrants. We had been in one of the last buses to leave Mt. Scopus, in December, 1947. We had last been in the Old City in November, and we never expected that we would ever be able to return to these sites during our life-time. But here we were, standing before the Wall together with tens of thousands of our people. The Arab neighborhood was already in the process of demolition. Immediately in front of us stood a young woman, dressed in a short skirt and sleeveless blouse. At her right was an aged Jew, wearing the full regalia of a pious traditionalist. They both faced the Wall, paying no attention to one another. Each one was wrapped in her and his thoughts. After a while, they turned around simultaneously and started to walk toward the climb back to West Jerusalem. I was amazed when the old Jew initiated a lively conversation with the young woman. I watched them talking animatedly until they disappeared from sight. I have no idea what they meditated about at the Wall; nor could I catch any of their conversation. Of one thing I was certain. I had caught a glimpse of what the Wall should mean today for the Jewish people and for those non-Jews who would wish to understand its soul. My hopes were dashed a short time later when the Ministry of Religions was empowered to formulate policy for the Wall and to administer it. One of the weaknesses in Israel’s democracy is its religious establishment. In matters of personal status — marriage, divorce, inheritance, Jewish identity — the Orthodox rabbinate has had almost complete authority from the moment the State was established. This arrangement was the result of a political compromise that was forced on Israel’s coalition government. That political power of Orthodoxy has been sustained until today, with only a few, limited improvements resulting from court actions instigated by the Reform and Conservative movements. As soon as the Ministry of Religions took over, the Wall was converted into an outdoor Orthodox synagogue. Separate sections were marked off for men and women; non-Orthodox worship was forbidden. (I omit here discussion of the demolition of the entire Arab neighborhood, 250

The Wester n Wall

mentioned above, that had made access to the Wall difficult and severely restricted the number of persons who could meditate or pray there at one time. This measure was carried out immediately after the cessation of the war but, to the best of my knowledge, was done by the secular government for nationalistic purposes. In any case, by the time that the Ministry of Religions introduced its measures, it had at its disposal the large compound that we see today. It is idle now to question the wisdom of this move or to speculate on whether another policy might have been better suited to orchestrate the archeological, esthetic and political interests that have come to the fore during these more than forty years since the 1967 War. The questions I wish to raise have to do with the purpose or purposes that the Wall might serve. Should the Wall be a synagogue or a collection of improvised religious services, as it is today? Certainly it should not be an Orthodox house of worship, to the exclusion of other forms of Jewish worship. It should not be a venue where a Conservative woman is subject to arrest for wrapping herself in a Tallit, as is customary today among many female worshippers in that denomination. Whatever else the Wall might be, it is a landmark of Jewish history and a holy place for the entire Jewish people. The Orthodox authorities argue that all activities at the Wall should be in accord with Jewish tradition, which they equate with halakhic Judaism as interpreted by the Orthodox establishment. They argue further that any attempt to introduce non-Orthodox worship is a blow to the unity of the Jewish people and must therefore be forbidden. By any standard of religious freedom, this position is outrageous, but in Israel today, it is unfortunately politically correct. The fact that the Wall fell into Orthodox hands is by no means an indication of what Jewish tradition is or should be. For Judaism, the collective culture of the Jewish people, has always been in a condition of evolution. Moreover, in the past few hundred years, with the rapid changes that have taken place under freedom in all cultures, Judaism has become more pluralistic than ever. The Orthodox denominations have every right to try and convince the majority of their fellows, who practice Judaism in different ways, that the Orthodox version of halakhic tradition is the 251

Chapter 13

ideal way for Jews to think and behave. But under democratic freedom, it is absurd to make a landmark like the Wall a fortress for a minority or even for a majority view of religious belief and practice. Moreover, it is not only the Orthodox who have missed a golden opportunity to enable the Wall to strengthen Judaism as a force for a modern and universal spirituality. It was natural for liberal-minded Jews to object to the monopoly of the Orthodox over the Wall. Protests by the Reform and Conservative movements and by women’s groups have reached the Supreme Court. Their calls for religious freedom and equality at this sacred site have been handled gingerly by the courts. In a decision handed down by the Supreme Court on March 30, 2003, the justices ordered the government to prepare within a year a proper facility for group worship by the non-Orthodox denominations and by women at Robinson’s Arch, arguably a section of the Temple wall. The Reform and Conservative movements have yet to acquire the right to conduct services at the Wall in accordance with their rites, although they are permitted, with certain restrictions, to do so in the vicinity of Robinson’s Arch. At the moment, this area is used mainly by the Conservative Masorti movement. But even this concession is subject to Orthodox interference. In August, 2008, the Masorti leadership was informed by a government official that worshippers at the Arch may not bring musical instruments into the compound. Instrumental accompaniment at prayer services there is thus banned. The inevitable result of the current rules for the religious management of the Wall is to make it a subject of political controversy. No great imagination is needed in order to see the complex arrangements that would have to be made were the courts to decide that full equality of worship should prevail at the Wall. Can one expect Fundamentalist or Orthodox Jewish males to pray alongside other Jews who are worshipping in equal gender groups? Given the present psychological state of the former, the inevitable result would be violence. The pace of cultural history is often slowed by the proneness of leaders to make hasty and ill-conceived decisions. Once the Orthodox establishment was authorized to draw up the blueprint for the conduct of affairs at the Wall, it was to be expected that any attempt to alter 252

The Wester n Wall

that plan would inevitably be met with emotion-laden, often irrational and harsh opposition. That in itself should have given the government pause before it knuckled under to Orthodox pressure. Unfortunately, cultural history is also subject to the exigencies of accident. At the time that the State of Israel was founded, the majority of religious Jews came from traditionalist communities in Eastern Europe. Although they were and remain a minority of Israel’s population, they have exercised power beyond their number in successive coalition governments. Along with their political power, the Orthodox have benefited from the anti-religious sentiments of the secular majority, whose understanding of religion has been framed by their experience with Orthodox and Fundamentalist intransigence. Hence religious practices which do not interest them elicit from them only indifference. They do not understand the mind of religious liberals and the latter’s spirituality or their approaches to group worship. When these secularists come to the Wall, it is of no great concern to them that growing numbers of Jews are deprived of the opportunity accorded to the Orthodox to worship in their own spirit. A secularist might resent their having to be separated from his or her spouse for a few minutes, but that is considered to be a small price to pay in order to keep the Orthodox happy. A whole new psychology and grasp of religion will have to be developed before the situation at the Wall can be improved. In regard to the secularists, it might be of interest to ponder what might happen if the small groups of spiritual-minded secularists, who are currently expressing interest in worship, should look to the Wall as a locale for their spiritual self-expression. I raise the question, but I am incompetent to answer it. Is there a need for change at the Wall? Certainly! Without such change, Israel’s claim to be a true democracy will be subject to serious challenge. Religious freedom and equality do not exist at the Wall. Can those ideals be implemented if the Wall continues to be a place for organized worship? Not for the foreseeable future. I have suggested above that it is virtually impossible to satisfy the different and often contradictory opinions as to what is legitimate Jewish worship. The very sight of women praying alongside men or raising their voices in song is anathema to extremist traditionalists and is a sure call to intemperate 253

Chapter 13

action on the part of Fundamentalist extremists. That in itself need not prevent the government from altering its policy. Throughout the world, many revolutionary steps have had to be taken in the struggle for social progress, and many of these measures have had to be secured against efforts to overturn them by force. One need only mention the abolition of slavery, the desegregation of schools and the other steps that had to be taken in order to secure freedom and equality for American Blacks. Almost all such developments were accomplished against deadly opposition. Should the struggle for freedom of denominational worship at the Wall be the cause into which the liberal religious movements, the feminists and other libertarians ought to put their energies? I think not. For several reasons, the Wall should never have become a place of organized worship. If the Wall is a major historical landmark of the Jewish people, it should be a site where every Jew can come to reflect on his or her renewed encounter with the history and cultural development of this unique people. Any sensitive Jew who stands before the Wall has much to think about. Should or can there be a central place of worship for the Jewish people? Was the destruction of the Temple with its sacrificial form of worship a catastrophe or perhaps a blessing in disguise? Had not the time come to replace the Temple cult with a more spiritual form of worship? Can there be a single form of worship for all Jews? What is to be learned from the unparalleled Jewish struggle for survival? What is the spiritual purpose of the revival of Jewish national life in Eretz Yisrael? These and countless other questions should fill the minds of Jews who come to the Wall to enter into dialogue with their history. I think again of the old Jew and the young Jewess, miles apart in their Jewish values and commitments but united by their common love for the Jewish people and their desire for its continuity. The Wall, moreover, no less than Yad Vashem, should speak to the nations of the world. Non-Jews who visit Israel and who have the slightest knowledge of Jewish history, can be moved by this visible symbol of a tiny people’s spiritual contribution to civilization. They might think of the centuries-long suffering that Jews had to undergo under foreign rule, both Christian and Moslem. In order for these 254

The Wester n Wall

purposes to be achieved, the ambience of the Wall would have to be transformed. It would have to be given the aura of a place which is at one and the same time a shrine of Jewish history and peoplehood and a center for reflection for individuals of all races and creeds. In this way, the Wall could contribute to the moral and spiritual growth of mankind. There are other considerations, which should induce the liberal religionists and feminists to back away from their attempts to legitimize various forms of group worship at the Wall. From earliest times, attention has been paid to the esthetic aspects of Jewish worship, as well as to the intellectual and emotional elements that make for kavvanah — sincerity, concentration, awareness and depth of devotion. While it is always possible for some men and women to shut out the world that surrounds them, worship at the Wall is not conducive to elevating, sincere and dignified group prayer. The voice of a prayer leader cannot be heard beyond a few feet because of the constant, noisy traffic of people coming and going. Moreover, any attempt to overcome this handicap by introducing loud-speakers on Shabbatot or holidays would arouse uncontrollable opposition from Orthodox worshippers. In addition, worshippers often face uncertain weather, while elderly men and women sometimes suffer from the paucity of seating. And the conversations of those who have completed their service or have not yet begun to pray create precisely the kind of atmosphere which the modern liturgical movements have sought to eliminate. Clearly, from an esthetic point of view alone, the Wall is an inappropriate locale for Jewish public worship, especially were an attempt made to equalize the space and time to be made available to all the denominations. The Wall became a sacred symbol for Jews from the moment that the Temple was destroyed. It can still function as such, but it has to be dedicated to ideals that bind Jews together and which can meet the test of universally accepted morality. For instance, the upper plaza of the Wall has been used as the site for initiating soldiers into Israel’s armed services. This is a legitimate use of this space, as long as the young men and women who take their oath of loyalty, Jews and non-Jews, are instructed to serve in the spirit of tohar haneshek, the purity of arms. That ethic unites Jewish and non-Jewish soldiers in defense of principles 255

Chapter 13

that are worthy of all peoples. Such a ceremony vitalizes the symbolism of the Wall and tightens the bonds between all its participants. Jewish soldiers can also appreciate their connection with their ancestors who fought against overwhelming odds and bequeathed to them a noble heritage; and non-Jewish Israelis can be thankful for being able to serve in the army of a state which recognizes and cherishes their humanity. This vision might seem to be naive and overly idealistic, but symbols are meant to propel individuals and societies into a better future. The Wall should be that kind of symbol. The controversy over the Western Wall is indicative of the shallow thinking of even democratic-minded and liberal Jews. It should not require much imagination for any intelligent person to understand that the Wall cannot be a suitable location for denominational Jewish worship. Even if the Haredi, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and the new groups of secularist worshippers could miraculously agree to compromise, the logistical problems of assigning time and place for each would defy solution. Furthermore, in addition to the considerations that I have touched on above, should not the Wall be a prime symbol of Jewish peoplehood and unity? Unfortunately, the sad fact is that the Six Day War has revealed how unprepared Jews are for confronting freedom and its consequences. One of those consequences relates to religion and the need to compromise between conflicting theologies and styles of worship. Moreover, we seem to be insensitive to the fact that religion has other forms of expression besides disparate group worship. Religion should also unite. The Wall as a symbol of Jewish spirituality should be such an example. I am under no illusion; my conception of the Wall’s significance hasn’t the slightest chance of being accepted by this generation of our people. Note 1

David Golinkin, Responsa in a Moment 4:4 (February 2010).

Chapter 14

A Theology of Ethics

The cogency of theological claims is dependent on the experience on which they rest. Experience itself requires interpretation. Each encounter with reality can convey a variety of meanings. It follows, then, that theology is an art. Its contribution to human self-understanding is in its suggestiveness, its ability to expand the vistas of hope, courage, decency and striving. We should not expect from theology the knowledge of truth; but we should demand of a theologian that he base his assertions on reliable information about humans and their natural environment. A theology that ignores the latest insights into the workings of the psyche is hardly qualified to offer us a viable interpretation of the soul. A theology that lends more than poetic credence to the God who “spreadest forth the earth above the water”1 cannot be relied upon to equip the worshipper to face reality as it is. A modern theology should thus be founded on as close an approximation as we can achieve to what makes authentic humans. Here, however, we run into trouble. For authentic humans are not only what they are by virtue of their birth and their creatureliness. Their authenticity lies also in their ability to become what they ought to be. It is this leap from the “is” to the “ought,” which defines the realm of ethics and, ultimately, of theology. And it is this problem which we shall explore at this juncture. Consider the theological implications of a seemingly simple ethical command, “Thou shalt not murder.” (Ex. 20:13) We shall arrive at three conclusions. The first is that the prohibition of murder cannot be logically derived from an analysis and understanding of the meaning 257

C h a p t e r 14

of “Thou.” The second is that the meaning of “Thou” can be inferred from the sense we attach to “shalt not murder.” And finally, “God” cannot be properly understood until the meaning of both “Thou” and “shalt not murder” has been clarified. By way of preliminary observation, I assert that the traditional classification of bein adam lamakom (between a human being and God), while only partially an ethical category in form, has significant bearing on ethical behavior. Formally, the mitzvot bein adam lamakom cover principally ritual obligations and only tangentially — as in the case of moral culpability for not fulfilling vows made to oneself but that affect one’s fellows — are they ethical in content and in intent. The mitzvot that are subsumed under the category of bein adam l’havero (between two or more persons), on the other hand, are clearly ethical in purpose. Nonetheless, despite their division into two classes, the mitzvot seem to have a common purpose. As Moses Mendelssohn suggested and as seems to be implicit in the morally-directed tradition embodied in the Prophets and the halakhic ethicists, the mitzvot are to serve as mnemonic and pedagogical devices for moral education. Two passages from Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem should establish this point: “There is no subdivision in the system of human duties that could be entitled ‘Duties toward God’. All of man’s duties are obligations to God. Some of them concern us, others our fellow-men. Love of God demands that we ought to love ourselves in every reasonable way; and we must love His creatures, our fellow-men, in the same way in which we are obligated to love ourselves.”2 “The ultimate purpose of the written and the unwritten laws prescribing actions as well as rules of life is the (attainment of public and private salvation. But to a certain degree, they must also be regarded as a kind of script and have significance and meaning as ceremonial laws. They guide the seeking mind to divine truths — mostly eternal, partly historical — on which the religion of this people was based. The ceremonial law was to be the link between thought and action, between theory and practice.”3

Thus, the bifurcation of the divine commandments in traditional Judaism is bridged by attributing to the mitzvot maasiyot (the practices 258

A Theology of Ethics

that make up most of the corpus of ritual Halakhah) the function of providing the method and the language for the moral and the spiritual education of the Jews. Other peoples have different means of accomplishing this purpose, but Mendelssohn regarded the ceremonial laws of Judaism as divinely revealed and as binding on all Jews. Although it is not always apparent how ritual observances actually produce the results that are claimed for them, the values toward which they point are independent of this educative process. Ethics in Jewish tradition occupies that zone of experience most subject to human imagination and reason. Variously termed,4 ethical laws have been consistently conceived in Jewish thought as discoverable by man. Revelation of ethical laws has been deemed necessary (for example, by Saadiah Gaon) only in order to hasten the process of discovery, to prevent error by unintelligent persons, or to enhance the reward for good behavior. Yet we should misinterpret the tradition were we to assume that it contemplates a naturalistic ethics. In all revealed traditions, reason plays an inferior role to faith; and faith almost always resides in the content of historical revelation. Reason receives the approval of the traditionalists when it substantiates revealed doctrine, whether moral or ritual. But when reason contradicts revelation, or when it is powerless to find supporting grounds for the tradition, it is dismissed as a human and therefore a fallible instrument. The argument here holds that ethics is a rational enterprise which should be seen not as a revelation of God to humankind but as one facet of the ceaseless search for God. Ethical search provides some insight into that aspect of reality which humans call “God.” This is the sense in which ethical values and laws or conventions bespeak a relationship between man and God. It is a dangerous relationship for the human psyche, because while man must rely on God for the ethical meaning and content of life, he can never be certain that he has correctly assessed the demands upon his conscience. Are they divine or demonic? Let us see what the man-God polarity can mean in relation to ethics. Theological uncertainty outlasts faith and emotional assuredness. The most profound conviction about the divine source or support of one’s ethical commitment cannot obliterate the fact that even values 259

C h a p t e r 14

are subject to the erosion caused by social change. We cannot help but be disturbed when firmly-held values become shaky. We are assailed by doubts about our own perceptiveness and about our conception of God. Like Job, we continue to believe in God, but we are at a loss as to how to locate convincing evidence of the divine rule. Hence faith must somehow be accommodated alongside theological tentativeness. Emil Fackenheim had this in mind, I believe, when he wrote that, “... faith consists, not of religious experience, however intense, but of a trust in it, as disclosing the Other-than experience; but — and this is the decisive point — this trust must always be on grounds which are objectively inadequate. It is, after all, the same Jewish tradition which believes that God can speak through the human heart which also believes that ‘the heart is deceitful above all things.”5 Fackenheim perceives the limitation of faith as an instrument for the apprehension of truth but nonetheless concludes that we cannot get to the truth without it; faith is an ineluctable element in the rational process. Fackenheim emphasizes trust in what he calls the religious or Other-than experience. I place greater emphasis on the content of that experience. If, as seems implicit in Fackenheim’s stress on trust in the experience itself, then the grounds for that trust can never be disputed, no matter how implausible they might be. In contrast, I am willing to bow to the demands of faith on my conscience and cognition only if I can leave the door open to rational and experiential correction. An initial commitment to a moral value or decision might, indeed, be a whole-hearted act of faith in their truth and validity and of trust in the mind-process that eventuated in that commitment. But mind, too, has to be subjected to critical examination. Its conclusions must not have been acquired from faith-experiences in which decency or reason is violated. For instance, although I think that all of the solutions thus far put forth to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict are acts of faith based on objectively inadequate grounds, they differ sharply in their rationality and moral acceptability. My being resists the call of some Jewish extremists for the Arabs to be driven out or bribed to leave Judea, Samaria, Gaza or the Golan Heights. At some point, faith too has to submit to the critique of reason and propriety. Faith always has an object, and in the instance cited, faith in the justice of Israel’s cause 260

A Theology of Ethics

is an inadequate ground for ignoring the case of the Palestinians. It hardly needs articulation that Arab trust in what they designate as the injustice done to their people is in no way self-justifying. The content of that trust has been too often exposed as morally and rationally deficient. If, as I think, theology cannot produce certainty, can it at least prod us to greater cogency in our ethical judgments? I believe that it can, as I shall now try to illustrate. II When one asks oneself who is the “Thou”* in the Sixth Commandment, one is either struck by the profundity of the question or its silliness. Thou, you, I — these words all apply to an irreducible phenomenon, the conscious being who understands and can respond when addressed. Is it not ridiculous to seek any other meaning for each of these terms? In truth, if one is interested only in consciousness as such, there are only the physiological fact of the organization of the human body and the psychological reality of consciousness. Epistemologists might argue that upper case Thou refers to God, lower case thou to humans. Why worry about the status of the objects of consciousness? For the ordinary affairs of life, it is enough to know that there are men and women who can think and express themselves. In ethical concern, however, the question of Thou or thou is far from simple. The fact that there is a thinking being in no way indicates how that being ought to behave. He or she can think good or evil thoughts or will to do good or evil deeds. Consider the soul. Is it simply consciousness or is it a substance? It has been said that the soul has an independent existence, at least after death. During life, it functions in and through the body, but it is sacred and destined for immortality if it earns this reward. Those who define “thou” in this way conclude that murder is precluded by the nature of the thou. The argument is weak, for the prohibition of murder depends on the truth of the definition of the thou as sacred and immortal. The soul’s immortality, however, is very hypothetical, inasmuch as it depends upon a reality beyond human ken. Are we to assume that 261

C h a p t e r 14

if the thou proves to be mortal, murder would be permissible? Are we further to assume that there is a difference between being sacred and being immune from murder? Is not such immunity an aspect of what we mean by being sacred? Thus, the command turns out to be an ethical tautology. The object of our inquiry, the relationship between thou and shalt not murder, seems to be self-evident. However, we know from human experience that the prohibition of murder is not self-evident at all. Nor was it self-evident to those who conceived this commandment. They sought to counteract a conception of thou in which murder was apparently possible and perhaps a normal and legitimate characteristic of human behavior. Murderous revenge was even institutionalized. To this day, it is even a duty in certain societies. It would seem to follow that the thou in whose very conception murder is forbidden must not be self-evident. Therefore, before we can derive the prohibition from Thou, we need a more satisfactory method than mere assertion. We need a definition of Thou which will legitimize the deduction banning murder. Many a theologian has said that thou is the spirit of God in man. Some have suggested that Thou and thou are inseparable or are separate manifestations of the primeval Oneness. In these instances, murder would be a violation of the divine in man. But God is the destroyer of life as well as its creator and sustainer. He condemns hordes to death by means of cyclones, floods, diseases and other forms of disaster. God made man mortal. Why should man abide by standards less arbitrary? Far from helping us, the claim that every man has a touch of divinity in him confuses us. For if we can explain away the seemingly unjust consequences of natural evil, why should we not be able to justify the murder of enemies of society, oppressors and power-mad men? Yet we are appalled at the mere thought that every individual should have the right to weigh the worth of another human life and to destroy it arbitrarily. So we establish courts and systems of justice to safeguard to the nth degree even the lives of murderers. While we still debate the ethical legitimacy of capital punishment, civilized society eschews execution unless it is decided upon by a socially ordained body and carried out according to conventional, if not universal ethical standards. 262

A Theology of Ethics

In the traditional approach, the system of deduction from God to man, there is an apparent paradox. Man who is capable of murder must restrain himself from using his power. Meanwhile, the God who can create life seems to cause arbitrary and cruel death; yet He commands His creatures to preserve life. Evidently, in the divine scheme, life is natural and death requires explanation. But how can man be required to preserve life when his own end, decreed by God, is death? From such a God, we can logically deduce only a paradoxical concept of man, one that is not to be identified inherently with the prohibition against murder. I conclude that Thou and thou are the objects of ethical search rather than fulcrums on which ethical understanding might be rested. It is not our knowledge of man which determines our ethics but, as we shall see, our ethical presuppositions which determine our conception of man. III The Sixth Commandment prohibits murder (retzah), not killing (harigah). Jewish religionists have not, by and large, preached pacifism. Individual self-defense and milhemet mitzvah (a war of defense or one for securing territory which, according to the divine plan, belongs to Eretz Yisrael) were considered morally mandatory in biblical and Rabbinic tradition. Yet if Jews have not generally been pacifists, they have nevertheless regarded killing as an evil, even when necessary. Beginning with the humanization of slavery, the prevention of blood revenge and other biblical legislation, the consensus among the spiritual leaders of Jewry has been to reduce the spilling of human blood. The talmudic Sages contributed to this tendency by endeavoring to limit capital punishment. In modern Israel, the only execution which has ever taken place was that of the Nazi, Adolf Eichmann. The Jewish people has proclaimed the need to reduce and ultimately to eliminate all killing. Both in the prohibition against killing and in that against murder, there is an implicit conception of the human person as sacred and inviolable. But that sacredness and inviolability are absolute only in 263

C h a p t e r 14

potentiality and not necessarily in practice. The conception of thou emerges from the meaning attached to murder which, as we have observed, is not self-evident. To the Sikh, the killing of any living thing is forbidden, and the swatting of a fly would therefore be tantamount to murder. Thou, therefore, could mean anything above the realm of vegetation. To pacifists of the West, murder is as much the killing of a person in war or as punishment for a capital crime as it is for a similar act in cold blood. But pacifists are divided as to whether killing in self-defense is permissible and therefore not to be included in the category of murder. Those who perceive murder and killing as identical face a difficult ethical problem. Their thou is man qua man. It is therefore impossible for them to conclude from this premise which life, their own or their attacker’s, is to be preserved. In Jewish tradition, thou is a person, but not necessarily any person, not a man or woman merely by the fact that he or she is alive. It is man as potentiality who is implied in the traditional Jewish conception of murder. For murder is the wanton destruction of a human being who respects the life of man qua man. Human existence, by its very nature, is a conditional existence. In the first place, man is mortal. Furthermore, humans depend for their lives on a process of existence over which they have no ultimate control. Human life is conditioned also upon the ability of men and women to understand and manipulate the forces conducive to vitality and those that make for death. Both in the physical and moral aspects of life, human beings are subject to the workings of the universe. This is an obvious fact in the physical realm, where destructive natural events highlight the limits of human power. It is not so apparent in the moral sphere, except insofar as social disturbances and conflicts are predictable when certain types of behavior are manifest in a group. The thou, then, of the Sixth Commandment is man in potentia, man as ideal, as the embodiment of ideal life. It is mortal man who in his higher development does not resent death and can therefore concentrate on life. It is man whose potential, however, cannot be grasped until the fact of murder is explicated and its implications for the future of humankind are fully appreciated. 264

A Theology of Ethics

In brief, “thou shalt not murder” leads logically to the traditional religious view of man as sacred. But where does the prohibition itself have its genesis in the process of life? Call it thought, faith, revelation, intuition, valuation — the answer is that man is ever a potentiality, realizing himself in the flux of his existence. There is a circularity here. The thou is understood as new insights into life are gained. But it is the thou in its consciousness which gains those insights. How can we break through the circle? Only by a conception of transcendence that many of us have become accustomed to term “God.” IV The Ten Commandments6 are introduced by the self-introduction of the Great Thou — “I am the Lord, thy God” (Ex 20, 2). It is fashionable in some theologies to speak of religion as a cosmic dialogue between man and God. I and Thou are the two poles of reality. In intercourse between human beings there can be no communication unless there is a clear recognition of the distance between the I and the thou and the space they share in common. Similarly, it is argued, man would be lost in the loneliness of chaos were he unable to experience a dialogic relationship with the Absolute. Psychologically, it is easy to understand the many ways in which this need for avoiding cosmic loneliness or solipsism expresses itself. Humans crave company. They are social animals. Just as they seek one another, they hunt for an ultimate reality they call God, Thou or Cosmic Mind. They want to be able to relate to the cosmos as they do to their fellows. They speak to God in words of prayer; they hope that God will answer them in acts of revelation. When not pressed too hard, this portrait of the cosmos expresses poetically the truth of human psychology, that man cannot bear the pain of loneliness and a meaningless existence. As a description of cosmic reality, it is misleading and dangerous. For it exemplifies the human propensity to make the wish the father (or nowadays, the mother, as well) of the thought. A wish can never establish the truth or the reality of a thought. A conception of God as Thou gives one a feeling of I-Thou, but existentially there are only the I and its musings. Thoughts 265

C h a p t e r 14

about God might have reference to a “wholly Other,” but they too are nonetheless generated by or in the human mind. To believe that one has communicated with the Ground of Being, Cosmic Mind, or God is to mistake a state of mind for objective Truth. Certainty, again, is no guarantee of truth; a person is seduced into arrogance when he or she is led to believe in the finality of the human power of apprehension, or into idolatry when the object of a state of consciousness is taken to be an experience of God or ultimate Truth. Whatever humans think of God as a result of their need to feel that they dwell in a friendly cosmos and not in a chaos is mediated through their minds and has a status no more firm than any other idea. A concept of God is an interpretive construct placed upon a person’s experience of the world or, as in the case of a mystic “enlightenment”; it is a state of mind. A God-idea is a natural expression of the need to make sense of our world. However, since it is a human being who interprets, the outcome must always be recognized as an inference. When we address God as Thou, we should know that we are concealing our guess about ultimate reality in a cloud of poetic satisfaction. These considerations should be borne in mind as we try to extrapolate the meaning of God from our moral experience. Stated simply, we have to turn the tradition upside down. We are told that, “Just as He is kind and merciful, so should you be kind and merciful.”7 But how is a human to know God’s kindness or mercy except as he or she interprets these qualities? How are men and women to attribute mercy to a God who often seems to disclose wrath and arbitrary cruelty, unless they refuse to accept these “divine” manifestations at face value and impose their human evaluations on an otherwise ineffable situation? It is man who conceives God in his own image, “As you are kind and merciful, so must He be kind and merciful.” Man conceives “God” in his own image. This does not mean that he can create or even know God. God has to be experienced as good. Were this not the case, life would be meaningless and intolerable. Nevertheless, the reality of God might put the lie to human conceptions of divine kindness and mercy. And then, what would be the worth of man’s ethical speculation? We can now inquire as to the bearing of the conception of man and moral values on the meaning and existence of God. To declare that the 266

A Theology of Ethics

murder of a human being is morally wrong can be validated only if the quality of sacredness belongs inherently to human creatureliness. But that identity of man and sacredness cannot be deduced from what man is as an outgrowth of natural process. It can have logical standing only under a transcendent category of divinity, in which the relationship between human beings and their sanctity is an inherent, necessary factor. At first blush, this might sound like a repetition of traditional supernaturalism, which asserts that ethical values are absolute because God decreed them. However, the argument advanced here differs in several respects from the supernaturalist position. In the first place, ethical values are conceived as inventions of human imagination. Therefore, they are as well-founded or as unacceptable as any other mental product. An idea, as modern pragmatism claims, is a plan of action whose validity is determined by its workability — not in the vulgar sense of agreeing with the wishes of the thinker but in casting the light of reason and reasonableness on a previously problematic situation. Values are ideas which suggest an organization of human behavior to fit human needs8 under specific social conditions. Values are conceived by the same instruments of consciousness that operate in solving other problems. The only mystery about the status of values — and it is a profound one — is consciousness itself. But that is another story, best left at this juncture to the still immature human sciences. Secondly, I am suggesting that transcendence and not supernaturalism is necessary to establish a logical connection between the concept of man and the prohibition of murder. That context is established when the ideas of man and of life’s sanctity are integrated in the transcendent imperative that humans must strive to create societies of love and fellowship. I am suggesting further that the capacity of man to project his behavior against moral vistas beyond what his own experience draws for him is a native human quality. Man requires no supernatural deity to act as a legislator of his values or as a judge of his behavior. He is fully capable of cultivating for himself a logical and compelling ethical system. Every universal ethical evaluation is itself an act of selftranscendence whereby man judges his conduct in a perspective more inclusive than his own self-interest. 267

C h a p t e r 14

Thirdly, all these wider perspectives are man-made inferences, guesses, projections, programs. Their status is consonant with the efficiency and the reach of the human mind. They are instruments for the achievement of human ends. All that man can do is to hope that his aims accord with a transcendent frame of reference that he draws upon to give meaning and direction to his spiritual strivings. God thus comes to mean in ethical terms the Value of all values, the guarantee that man is not chasing the wind. God is known only by inference. Divine existence is an assumption essential to making sense of the human proneness to evaluate life. But human visions of what that existence implies are also natural inferences from limited experience. They fall short, and always will, of exhausting reality. When we conceive of man as a thou, a being whose existence must be dedicated to life, we are pointing to a potentiality and a hope. That potentiality, in turn, rests for its consummation on the existence of a cosmic force that enables man’s capacities to be realized. Belief in that force, in God, underlies any possibility of human salvation. This is what enables men and women to sustain their morale and will to live. But a direct and complete knowledge of the divine force must forever elude humanity’s grasp. However, given a cosmic order, continued efforts in all areas of life make sense. Given our limited knowledge of God, it is in striving itself, in the process of searching for the good, in which we can place our whole-hearted faith. On the other hand, the existence of God, a reality more encompassing than man can ever apprehend, makes our attempts to turn our finite insights into eternal cosmic truths a joke or an idolatry. The moral venture, therefore, requires a liberal sprinkling of skepticism, agnosticism, and doubt. The great spiritual personalities and the sacred scriptures of vital religions all exhibit these sensitivities. However, we should not mistake spiritual caution as a denigration of those ethical values about which mankind has reached a virtual consensus. No civilized society today, for example, disputes the immorality of murder, although there is still a degree of disagreement as to its difference from killing. A remarkable consensus prevails among peoples throughout the world as to what is right and wrong. Nonetheless, skepticism has been aroused by the question of the 268

A Theology of Ethics

ultimate resolution of man’s moral quest. Man yearns for peace, because he needs it and recognizes it as God’s will. But what evidence can he find that his recognition is, indeed, paralleled in the nature of things or in God’s will? Objectively, he can find only conflicting evidence. Only the intensity of man’s yearning persists. The doubter returns to his faith with increased vigor, until the next crisis when the cycle of spiritual uncertainty begins again. I maintain that the ethical business of humankind is to pursue the search for Thou by refining the values that govern life. Values can be refined only by permitting the full light of experience to be refracted through the prism of human intelligence. Intelligence, which includes the faculties of reason and imagination, is the most reliable tool available for comprehending reality. The moment when human imagination discovered the moral wrong in murder, a whole new insight into the nature of man and the universe was gained, an insight which intelligence was quick to adopt. It is only fair to point out the danger in the approach to ethics I have been recommending. I have emphasized several times in this book that man is the measurer, albeit certainly not the measure. However, we must ask, in what sense is this true? As far as we know, man is the only conscious power in the cosmos. If God has a mind, it is so utterly different from ours as to be inconceivable. Even if God has a mind, it is we humans alone who ascribe that quality to Him. It is we alone who advance values as good or bad. We alone aspire to know what is divine or demonic. It is these mental acts which make man the measurer, but in every instance he must avoid at all costs envisaging himself as the measure. What man calls good is sometimes proved to be evil, and vice versa. The ultimate meaning and value of earthly existence and existents lie in the realm of transcendence that no generation of mankind can ever exhaust. Man is, therefore, the measurer of what is in his power to measure; namely, his experience. He can, of course, project his imagination beyond the known, but only future experience can demonstrate whether his evaluation of reality is founded on truth. Insofar as we can tell, having convinced ourselves of the immorality of murder, we have found a divine value. We have discovered in 269

C h a p t e r 14

ourselves and our fellowmen a portion of the meaning of our existence — the preservation and enhancement of the life of all humans within the limits of our mortality. In order to confer on this belief more than a subjective significance, we declare that it is descriptive of the will of God. We hypothesize that it is God’s will which renders the human venture worthwhile. In this hypothesis lies the hope of mankind and the pitfall of every spiritual gamble and leap of faith. The psychological necessity of experiencing a God-belief and of positing a God-idea too frequently results in the deification of man and the products of his mind. We Jews can make a distinctive contribution to ethical theory. Individual philosophizing is valuable and necessary for ethical progress, but the experience of a people as old and as widespread as ours can be a corrective to facile ethical judgments. We should have learned from our history that the long view of things is necessary for the furtherance of rectitude in human affairs. Attending to the lessons of history can help us to avoid action that violates our best ethical insights. It is undoubtedly difficult for many men and women to put their lives into the service of values from which they themselves derive little personal benefit; but once they have caught a glimpse of what those values have meant in the experience of their people, they will often find life to be empty without their guiding light. It may be, however, that mankind needs both men and women who hold on to life even at the expense of values they cherish and those who become martyrs to a cause. Jewish history seems to be the resultant of the interaction of both types. It would be comforting to think that martyrdom rewards mankind unfailingly and that humane values operate with an absolute cause and effect mechanism. But even this modicum of concession to the quest for certainty is denied to the human race. The workings of Providence are mysterious, and only the person who can feel inspired in the act of ethical pursuit will be able to catch a glimpse of redemption. In that spiritual adventure, our people has found God.

A Theology of Ethics

Notes This chapter incorporates many passages of a lecture delivered at a B’nai B’rith Hillel

Foundation Institute. In its original form, it is included, with stylistic alterations, in Faith And Reason, ed. Robert Gordis and Ruth B. Waxman (New York: Ktav, 1973), 290-297.

1 2

3 4

Ps. 136: 6 Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, trans. and ed. Alfred Jospe, (New York: Schocken, 1969), 33. Ibid., 99. Mitzvot sikhliot (rational commandments) and dat tiv’it (natural religion) are among the designations of ethical laws to be found in medieval Jewish philosophical works.

5

Emil L. Fackenheim, “Some Recent ‘Rationalistic’ Reactions to the New Jewish Theology,” CCAR Journal 26 (June 1959): 48.

6

The translation from the Hebrew, Ten Commandments, has become ingrained in Western culture. It is time to overcome this tradition and to offer a more accurate rendering of what is meant by the devarim which God is said to have spoken to the Israelites at Sinai. Devarim should be translated as principles or notions or words. Certainly, the self-identification of God in the opening verse of the devarim is not a commandment. Nor should the apodictic form of the genuine commandments blind us to the fact that they really are calls for clarification of what is meant in each case. What does observance of the Shabbat mean, what is stealing, what is murder, etc.?

7

Talmud Bavli, Shabbat 133b. In the above mentioned review of my original article, Emil Fackenheim asks how Jack Cohen can “...make human needs the ultimate standard when he himself has asserted that we cannot derive moral values from the empirical facts concerning man — among which are needs? Possibly he means, not what are in fact regarded as needs, but what ought to be needs.” Ibid., 47. Fackenheim fails to take account of the distinction between wants and needs. Not every want is a need. A want — and moral values are wants--becomes a need only in the context of an organic view of existence. Is my thirst for strong liquor a need? Only if I ignore physical and mental health as accepted criteria for measuring the value of liquor in their furtherance. Similarly, is tolerance a need? It is in the context of building a pluralistic society. It might not be in a situation demanding eradication of falsehood or indecency. If, then, we agree that the pursuit of goodness is not a mere desire of some men and women, but a prerequisite for the salvation of all human beings, then the gap between is and ought, between factual and normative,

8

271

C h a p t e r 14

is not as wide as is generally thought. For once the parameters of goodness are agreed upon, certain types of action or inaction become essential. Furthermore, the determination of needs is subject to refinement and correction. Hence, when I make human needs the “ultimate standard” for the determination of universal values, I do not mean thereby that the needs constitute the values. I assert only that in order to satisfy the needs, we must posit a set of values that, in turn, suggest plans of action. We can be wrong in assessing whether the needs are indeed what they seem to be and not wants or greeds. Equally, we can err in the solutions we recommend for meeting those needs once we have located them. Obviously, at no point in this process can we avoid acting on faith that our premises are correct, our perceptions accurate and our evaluations in accord with the demands of the cosmic order. Fackenheim is right in stating that we must trust in our ability to think correctly and to act properly. But while we have to act on faith in the power of our minds and hearts, we always have to be repared for self-correction.

Chapter 15

“Is This the Meaning of My Life?”

Many years ago, I saw a movie version of the novel, Christ in Concrete, whose final scene remains etched in my memory. The main character, played by Sam Wanamaker, falls into a pit of poured concrete and sinks gradually to his death. As he is about to disappear into the morass, he cries out, “Is this the meaning of my life?” These searing words, uttered by a decent human being whose life was about to be snuffed out for no reason, have in one form or another been thought or stated or screamed out by countless men and women in the course of humanity’s inhuman history. It is not death which scandalizes and horrifies us. What appalls us is a life that has been wasted, lacking in purpose or achievement, needlessly and prematurely cut down or ended in unforgivable agony. Whenever we witness the tragic death of others — knowing also that their lives have been unfulfilled — we are impelled to ask the ultimate question as to the meaning of human existence. Although the question is impossible to avoid, mortals cannot answer it with any certainty. Their very mortality is an indication that they are more the creatures of destiny than they are its creators; but if life’s meaning is to be measured only by destiny, then the knowledge of death would put an end to striving. Men and women respond in one of two ways in order to triumph over the meaninglessness that their inevitable death suggests. One way is that of other-worldly religion, which holds out hope for an after-life of eternal bliss. The other calls upon human beings to seek meaning in the perpetuation of their families and their people, in the fulfillment of their ideals and in the advent of universal 273

C h a p t e r 15

peace. Mankind continues to waver between these options, with none of the choices susceptible to proof or disproof. That fact, however, should not lead us to conclude that it is inconsequential which option we adopt. It is interesting to note, for instance, that a basic text of Western religion, the Hebrew Bible, is overwhelmingly given to a this-worldly vision of salvation.1 The earthy realism of our biblical ancestors is sufficient evidence that a religious Weltanschauung can eschew the promise of eternal existence. Nevertheless, there is no denying that the biblical view that life’s meaning is to be sought on earth was superseded in the Rabbinic period by various versions of an after-life. The hope for and belief in an other-worldly immortality persists to this day among a large number of Jews. It is difficult to determine how many Jews hold to the second approach to life’s meaning. The instinctive will to live suffices to sustain most men and women; only on rare occasions do they feel impelled to articulate how they conceive the purpose of their existence. Many even hide from themselves their emotions about the worth while ness of what they are doing and what they hope to achieve. Nonetheless, the evidence supplied by the human sciences suggests that it is humans who confer meaning on life, affirming an existence from which they are unable to eliminate much pain and tragedy. It is they who define what is and what is not a worthwhile life. The fact that the most important human values are frequently attributed to God strengthens the resolve of human beings to be guided by those values. However, there is at the same time considerable hubris in elevating the products of human imagination to the status of divine will. These reflections have come to mind all too frequently over the decades since my family and I settled in Jerusalem. Whenever I have had to visit friends who had lost loved ones in Israel’s wars or in acts of murderous terrorism, I have been reduced to silence. I could only share my friends’ sorrow and the questions I thought troubled these mourners, especially parents whose sons had been killed in action: “Is this the meaning of our son’s life? Was his sacrifice necessary? And for what purpose? Are we not responsible, along with our fellow Jews, for 274

“Is This the Meaning of My Life?”

assenting to this sacrifice — not only of our son, but of his comrades, as well?” Silence, I suppose, is an appropriate response at such a moment. But the doubt cannot be pushed aside. Can a set of values which demand the sacrifice of human lives be worthy of our absolute commitment? And is the rationale for that commitment to be linked in any way to a belief in God? A positive answer to the last two questions might be easier to offer if the anticipated sacrifice is our own. But do we have the right to answer these questions for those whom we educate to accept our convictions? This is the central point in the dramatic story, known as the Akedah, God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Nowhere in the world does the Akedah account arouse the intense effort at interpretation that it does in Israel. In the years since the establishment of the State and even in pre-State days, the Jews of Israel have had to react to the uncompromising and violent opposition of the entire Arab world to their very presence in the area.2 As a result, for the first time in two millennia, a sovereign Jewish community has possessed both the responsibility and the power to make decisions that might lead to or prevent war, to declare offensive war or to wait for enemy attack, to conscript its young men, send some of them to certain death and cause them to inflict the same fate on the enemy. In Israel, several factors combine to intensify the universal ethical and theological concerns raised by war. Israel’s small size brings its population into intimate contact with one another, an intimacy strengthened by the attention paid to each individual sacrifice. Almost always, following the death of a soldier, his or her picture appears prominently in Israel’s newspapers and on television. This practice is undoubtedly an expression of a spiritual outlook, the awareness of how precious is the life of each human being. It also helps to generate a feeling of disquiet which, given the ceaseless violence of the Arab-Jewish confrontation, leads Jews again and again to ponder the conundrum of the Akedah. Abraham’s unprotesting willingness to sacrifice Isaac is praised in the tradition as an indication of the profundity of his faith in God. This, however, is the same man who would not countenance the injustice 275

C h a p t e r 15

of God’s readiness to destroy the innocent of Sodom and Gomorrah along with the wicked. How could such a man so abjectly obey an order that violated his firmest moral convictions? In trying to make sense of Abraham’s behavior, a modern reader of the Bible might say that Abraham, unlike us, could at least be certain that it was God who addressed him. The Jews of present-day Israel are divided: An authoritative voice ordering them to sacrifice their sons might be too powerful to resist, but is it the voice of God? Some parents do, indeed, see the death of their sons in battle as the high price that must be paid for implementing the divine ideal of Eretz Yisrael — the “silver platter,” as Nathan Alterman put it, on which the Jewish state was delivered. Others reject outright any thought that these sacrifices are necessary. While they approve the Zionist ideal of Eretz Yisrael as the Jewish homeland, they think that the killing of their sons, and sometimes their daughters, for its attainment is a devilish rather than a divine way of achieving that goal. They search desperately for the substitute ram. No people has been able to escape the paradox of desiring peace while having to fight wars for survival or the right to autonomy on ancestral soil. Many nations, it is true, are blessed with geopolitical circumstances that remove them from the whirlpool of international conflict, but most of the ancestral founders acquired title to their lands by conquest. Throughout history, nations everywhere have engaged in armed conflict with enemies, either in offense or in defense. The Jewish people has been distinguished for two thousand years as one of the primary victims of this widespread resort to arms; never, since biblical days, and until the rise of Israel. has it been among the perpetrators. Homeless and weak, the Jewish minority was always an easy target for power-mad rulers and the mobs. The Jews in exile were never called upon to decide for or against war. They could not effectively resist pogroms, even those launched against them in the course of wars between states in which they had achieved citizenship. All this has changed. The Jews of Israel have reentered the arena of power. They now have to judge whether the sacrifice of their children is a divine command or whether it is merely an admission of their incapacity to find a more humane solution to their problems with their 276

“Is This the Meaning of My Life?”

Arab neighbors. Since war and preparation for it have been the norm rather than the exception for every Israeli Jew, it is no wonder that Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac has become a paradigm of the moral and spiritual dilemma faced by every mother and father in this land. It is pertinent, therefore, to examine three conceptions of the Akedah, three visions of God and man, that underlie Israeli approaches to the use of military means to insure the survival and security of the State and its population. The first is that of Adin Steinsalz, the distinguished scholar, who is not only producing new vowel-pointed editions of the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmudim replete with commentary and scientific and historical notes, but who explores the classic texts for their relevance to contemporary spiritual and moral problems. Steinsalz sets out to find an explanation for Abraham’s ready acquiescence to God’s command that he offer his son as a sacrifice. The whole episode, of course, is filled with puzzles. God identifies Isaac as Abraham’s lone, beloved son, whereas Abraham himself clearly loves Ishmael and recognizes him too as his flesh and blood. (“The matter distressed Abraham very much, for it concerned his son” — Gen. 21:11). Abraham’s behavior seems to run counter to his character. Obviously, Abraham is caught up in a cosmic drama larger than himself, in which he acts out a role written for him by a divine playwright. It is not himself whom he represents. Our treatment of the text from the perspective of the Author requires us simply to fathom His message. God wants to test Abraham’s faith and to proclaim that He wants no human sacrifice. However, it is not God’s humane purpose which captures the moral imagination of today’s Israelis. It is the moral agony that inheres in Abraham’s experience as an autonomous being, who must choose between obedience to God and love for his son, that occupies their minds and hearts. Abraham interests the Israelis, as he fascinates all sensitive readers of the Bible, because he is depicted as a morally independent person, having to make high risk decisions. Steinsalz describes Abraham as a torn man: “For the first time in his life, he must now be the messenger of death and destruction, without any hope for 277

C h a p t e r 15

life or rescue. The old man, the leader, the respected patriarch, goes with the young son, the alert, effervescent, smiling youngster, full of life, of blooming, of youth.”3 Abraham, the father, strides along with his son, but he carries a heavy burden in his heart. “That is the decree from on high.” Another puzzle is the seeming innocence of Isaac. Whether one bases one’s inquiry on the view that Isaac was a mere child at the time of the Akedah or whether one follows the text carefully and sees him as thirty-seven years old, the Isaac of the biblical tale is strangely silent. It is this puzzle which Steinsalz tries to solve in his superb retelling of the story. Making extensive use of midrash and traditional philosophical commentaries, Steinsalz penetrates the soul of Isaac. His Isaac is in turmoil. Isaac senses what is to happen to him and what this means for his image of his father. Steinsalz writes: “Doesn’t the son wonder about the unusual gloominess around him? The solitariness begins to frighten him. Never had he observed his father... appear quite like this: proud, melancholy and tense. He notices that his father does not look at him, that his countenance bespeaks a decision. A terrible, fearsome thing is concealed behind this countenance; and suddenly it appears to him that his father is very frightening and strange.” Steinsalz perceives that to Isaac, Abraham now “...belongs to a domain beyond fatherhood, beyond the world, to a cruel Absolute.” Yet Isaac rises above his despair and senses that Abraham’s “...transcendence of fatherhood does not mean its uprooting but a rising beyond it. Isaac interprets his father’s saying to him, ‘Here I am, my son’, as meaning that Abraham and he will always be father and son. The terrible secret, even if it be that horrible thought circulating in his mind, does not break the bond that unites father and son. As long as that bond is strong, Isaac fears nothing, not even death.” In this reformulation, Isaac gradually concludes that he will be the sacrifice, “...because he knows that this is the decree, this is God’s command for which they — Abraham’s family — will give all.” How are we to explain this extraordinary compliance? Isaac’s faith in and love for his father were so powerful that he could deny him nothing, including life itself. A loving father would never harm his son. But the 278

“Is This the Meaning of My Life?”

sacrifice must be made. There is a reason for Abraham’s decision; it is not for Isaac to question it. Now we can discern Steinsalz’s real purpose. Isaac, after all, is not his target. Isaac and his reaction are indeed of great interest, but we might be able to rest satisfied with the explanation that he was altogether a passive person. Yisrael Eldad calls Isaac the ish hanifal, the passive man.4 We might expect that this “nebish” would go like a lamb to be slaughtered. However, the real interest of Steinsalz is Abraham and his obedience to God. What motivated Abraham’s complete surrender to God’s will? Steinsalz deepens the question by relating that only when God substituted the ram for Isaac, did Abraham face the ultimate test. Were he to accept the substitute with joy, his fulfillment of God’s will would not have been without reservation. The demonstration of Abraham’s faith in God had to be devoid of all personal considerations. Thus, when he slaughters the ram, he “...knows that he is slaughtering his son. The ram is Isaac.” Only now will God’s blessing be vouchsafed forever. Isaac is the gift of God; if God demands it, this blessing, like all others, must be willingly returned. God is truly Abraham’s father. As Isaac trusts Abraham, so Abraham trusts God. To respond to God’s love is to offer oneself without reservation, hesitation or doubt. Abraham, as interpreted by Steinsalz, tells us that if we accept the fatherhood of God, we must obey his every wish and command. This vision is compelling enough to elicit the consent of millions of men and women of all nations and religions who are able, on faith alone, to accept as the voice of God a command to sacrifice their sons. Certain of God’s existence, like Job, they set aside their moral doubts, overcome their uncertainty about the need for the sacrifice and justify both God’s arbitrariness and their own surrender to Him. I am appalled by this subtle and beautifully written response to the Akedah and by the theology on which it is founded. I am frightened by its ethical implications. Steinsalz depicts man as a morally responsible agent, yet denies him the capacity and the right to judge his own behavior. If an irrational, immoral power is permitted to override our deepest commitment to the sanctity of life, what hope is there for the 279

C h a p t e r 15

future of the human race? What meaning can there be to the noble conception of man as God’s partner in the ongoing act of Creation? Steinsalz’s message can only encourage the many forms of blind authoritarianism that feed on moral weakness and irresponsibility. The Israelis I know renounce such an approach. They torture themselves because they have been unable thus far to find a better way than war to preserve their national existence. Hope, however, remains as long as their conscience is alert and resistant to what, in their better moments, they sense to be powerful irrationality at its worst. Hugo Bergmann, the first head of the Department of Philosophy of the Hebrew University, sought throughout his long career to synthesize the branches of knowledge into a unified rational, spiritual, humanistically-oriented theory of responsibility. It is no surprise to find him wrestling with the Akedah. Basing himself on Soren Kierkegaard, Bergmann asks whether God would annul the authority of the moral imperative. When God orders Abraham to murder his son, He denies, in effect, the immorality of the immoral. The implicitly evil becomes the implicitly good, because God wants it. God, having fixed the order of good and evil, can upset it at will. This annulment order is given to the individual and not to the community.5 Bergmann’s Abraham, however, cannot match the moral surrender, the serenity and fulfillment of Steinsalz’s patriarch. Moreover, the distinction made by Bergmann, following Kierkegaard, between the individual and the community, calls for further comment. Bergmann sharpens the theological difficulty. “Was the voice which commanded Abraham to slay his son the voice of God or was it perhaps the voice of Satan?” The pricking of Abraham’s conscience is clearly conceived in a well known midrash. Satan meets Abraham on the way to Mt. Moriah and, acting as the guardian of ethics, tries “...to seduce Abraham into believing that the voice he has heard is not that of God but of Satan himself.” How can Abraham accede to the demand that he slay his son? This challenge is posed both by Kierkegaard and the midrash but is given two different responses. Whereas Kierkegaard argues for the teleological suspension of the ethical, the midrash (in its several versions) merely has Abraham reply, 280

“Is This the Meaning of My Life?”

“Yes, indeed.” Bergmann analyzes the distinction. On the one hand, the philosophizer on faith “...gets entangled in insolvable problems and arrives, willingly or unwillingly, at nihilistic conclusions.” In contradistinction to Kierkegaard, the midrash presents a man of simple faith who obeys God’s command even when he does not understand it. Bergmann adds: “Religious persons have reached this conclusion in all ages and in all lands, including Israel today. This understanding of faith among us rests on the tradition ‘we will faithfully obey’, which our Sages saw as the secret of the angels.” Bergmann attributes virtue to the believing and obedient person. He approves of these traits, but, unlike Steinsalz, he comments that, “...this way of faith reduces to nothing the independent light of man, of his responsible decision, and leaves only the one virtue, albeit a tremendous one — obedience. In such a way, man will never be able to stand on his own.” With this comment, Bergmann approaches a complete humanism. He states the case for encouraging man’s critical faculty and supports the authority of reason and intellect. That authority entitles man to accept, reject or refine traditional texts and to set his own moral conceptions against those of sacred writings, whenever his reason or conscience drives him to do so. In certain instances, he feels justified in declaring, “It is impossible to believe that God commanded this.” In such a judgment, individual freedom and responsibility are the ultimate determinants. Then, as if alarmed by the daring conclusion to which his intellect has led him, Bergmann does an about face. He begins his retreat by calling attention to the danger of exaggerated trust in human reason. “When man becomes certain of himself and does not recognize or acknowledge the limits of his reason, there lurks the danger that he will deny everything he cannot understand or explain by his reason...There are other sources of authority, those that are imbedded in metaphysics and religion.” Bergmann erects a straw man. The rationality of the rational man resides in his awareness that reason, by its very nature, is limited and that every person must therefore always be on guard against absolutist assumptions and conclusions. No mortal is capable of seeing the entire 281

C h a p t e r 15

cosmic Gestalt. If he is wise, he knows that his grasp of truth, goodness and beauty must always be open to the judgment of new information and better equipped minds. However, Bergmann oversteps proper reservations about the power of reason and too easily surrenders man’s autonomy, moral responsibility and courage. He tells us that we need a synthesis between obedience to blind authority and the way of reason. We require an “Inner truth in regard to oneself and in regard to all revelation from above, but together with this a knowledge of the limitations of man, and consequently, a great humility and an awareness that man is not alone. There are transcendent powers and revelations which guide man even if he does not yet understand them.” Bergmann’s ambivalence is more frustrating than Steinsalz’s forthright surrender of reason. The former, after asserting his conviction that God could never demand human sacrifice, proceeds to hint that despite our abhorrence of this irrational and immoral act, we might not only have to perform it but to believe that it is God’s command. What offends us in Bergmann’s fence-straddling is not only that we might be forced to abandon our moral commitment but that we are also asked to accept a theology in which the mind is debased. Divine morality is elevated to a sphere beyond human reach. It is as if the Israeli is told to justify Israel’s wars as part of God’s plan for the stabilization and security of the State. But this is precisely what bothers the sensitive Israeli. He looks upon the security and sovereignty of Israel as desirable and morally-justified ends. He refuses, however, to believe that war is divine. He will stake his rational detestation of war against any theology that would berate him for an excess of moral hubris. He might not know all that God wants him to believe, but neither can he believe in a transcendent power that would undermine his ability and right to make moral judgments and commitments. Along with Bergmann, the average Israeli rejects any revelation that “...contradicts his reason, either logical or moral.” But, then, why claim that there are revelatory forces beyond reason? How are we to recognize them? Abraham sinned against his moral reason when he remained silent and placed his son upon the altar. 282

“Is This the Meaning of My Life?”

Perhaps that is the reason, as suggested to me by a friend, why God never again spoke to Abraham. Perhaps, too, this is a lesson of the Akedah — that man should never play false to his finest instincts, lest he add to the satanic powers in the universe that delight in every sign of human hesitation and weakness. Yehudah Bauer, the noted historian of the Holocaust, stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from Steinsalz. His comment on the Akedah is made in response to a long discussion on the story between kibbutz members and several urban intellectuals.6 Bauer, an avowed secularist and one of the founders of the Israel Humanist Association, perceives the central problem raised in the discussion as profoundly theological. He suggests that “If He is ‘our God’ and not the God of creatures in galaxies light years away, then his morality, if it is such, cannot be relative; that is, He cannot give an order to Abraham that would contradict any moral conceptions of man which bespeak His own nature. In other words, can a God exist who demands an act like the binding of Isaac, the beloved son — even if it be only a test? Bauer has no doubts about whom to trust. It is man alone. If evidence were needed as to which alternative man should choose — God or his own judgment — Bauer brings to witness the millions of Holocaust victims, including the million and a half innocent children. Bauer is no Jewish chauvinist. He also mentions as a further illustration the Biafran victims of genocide. By implication, Bauer would have us recall also the countless other humans cruelly put to death by fellowmen or by the forces of nature. He then remarks: “If our God is omnipotent, that is, if He is truly God, then He could have prevented this slaughter. If He did not prevent it, He was a partner to it. At this point, someone will tell us that the wisdom of God cannot be probed and that we cannot investigate the reasons which caused God not to intervene or to grant permission for the murder.” Bauer has no patience for intellectual sophistry. It does not matter to him whether morality be deemed relative or absolute. He posits simply that, “...a God who permits murder is Himself a murderer, and it makes no difference at all what His reasons are. A rationale of this kind is in shocking contradiction to any human morality; no other 283

C h a p t e r 15

morality interests me.” It follows that, “A God who allows murder is not, therefore, God. He is Satan, or He does not exist at all, or He is a cause with which a prayer or any relationship would have the same significance as the prayer of an ant on the counter of my kitchenette when I am about to wipe it off with a rag.” No, Bauer concludes, the attempt “...to find meaning in life by relating it to an external, supernatural, divine power, is devoid of all logic and is entangled in a web of endless contradictions.” We have to grit our teeth and find an answer other than belief in God. While belief might make it easier to bear the painful vicissitudes of life, rational persons have no choice. For them, Bauer is convinced, this spiritual refuge is closed. It lacks truth, plain and simple. Bauer’s honesty and his defense of freedom, reason, and responsibility are admirable. No theology which ignores or underestimates the dimension of human independence can hold up under criticism. However, neither can a one-dimensional or even a two-dimensional theology suffice. Steinsalz fails us by avoiding or denying man’s capacity to distinguish between right and wrong and by depriving him of the right to participate as an independent figure in the determination of which actions accord with God’s will or an inherent cosmic moral order and which do not. Bergmann, meanwhile, skillfully informs us about the moral tension inherent in the choice between norms — divine or satanic — and sincerely held personal beliefs, but he leaves us at a loss as to how to deal with the tension. In the last analysis both Steinsalz and Bergmann render us incapable of acting autonomously. Whatever we do earns us the charge that we have ignored other, inaccessible authority. Bauer assails us with his moral integrity, but with a set of unwarranted assumptions that can easily escape the attention of the unwary. He informs us that God, by definition, must be omnipotent. Indeed? Is it inconceivable that God might have limits, essential or self-imposed? God’s omnipotence is admittedly a crucial theological problem, but denying God this attribute is surely no less a theoretical possibility and no less theologically respectable than attributing to Him absolute power. For, as we have noted in regard to the problem of theodicy, we are hard put trying to explain how an all-powerful, good God would 284

“Is This the Meaning of My Life?”

permit any evil in His Creation. By denying God’s omnipotence, we avoid the problem of His goodness. Just as a good, loving parent often cannot prevent his or her children from cruel behavior toward one another, so can God be pictured as grieving about human sinfulness. God remains God, but His children will have to learn themselves how to act humanely. It is not the Holocaust which poses the essential theological difficulty. Natural evil is the problem. Moral evil is man’s doing and responsibility — unless we wish to charge God with abdication of His responsibility in not creating us as angels. If Bauer wants to bring charges against a supernatural, omnipotent God, he should concentrate on natural disasters, which he mentions in passing, and not the manmade horror of the Holocaust. The force of Bauer’s case depends on whether or not we accept his assumption that God is “external” or “supernatural.” Bauer’s criticism of supernaturalism is, I believe, cogent. But theology need not be strapped to supernaturalism any more than science has to be identified with Ptolemaic astronomy. Bauer is blind to the possibility that God need not be viewed as “the Wholly Other.” He may be conceived as the inherent transcendent (not supernatural) reality of cosmic organicity, without which the relatedness of things and the connectedness of human experiences make no sense. Bauer’s belief in man is really an appeal to a transcendent criterion by means of which he proposes to rise above the discrepancies and contradictions in human experience. The search for Man follows the same method as the search for God. In both instances, the object of the pursuit is already believed in. That object is the organicity and potential unity, the rationality and purposefulness that responsible men and women seek and which they project onto the constitution of the universe. It is that vision which enables them to sustain their confidence in the possibility of fulfillment for themselves and their fellows. It is no illusion to believe in such an ordered universe, regardless of the disorder and misfortune that occur in physical nature and in human affairs. Bauer’s humanism is insufficient. His attack on supernatural theologies would be more acceptable were he able to recognize the immanent and transcendent qualities of the process that binds man to 285

C h a p t e r 15

the universe. Perhaps then the term “God” would not elicit from him such bitter opprobrium. “God,” like “man,” is a convention, a term applied to a certain conception of reality. To many of us, the “God” of the Akedah is morally unacceptable. Belief in Him can only perpetuate our resistance to the changes in human mentality that are essential to improving the quality of mortal existence. Man can no longer afford to weasel his way out of responsibility for eliminating war, hatred and violence of all kinds. He is no longer justified in putting God’s stamp of approval on his resort to arms. The average person might not yet know how to defend himself against the primitive instincts that still prevent many of his fellows from rising above the bestial level. Yet he must realize that in submitting to those instincts, he too is blind to the transcendent possibilities in the cosmos that should be identified as divine. There is no simple answer to the challenge of the Akedah. We must obey the voice of conscience. But conscience is a human faculty and can easily mislead us. It has to be educated and refined. It must not be abdicated in fear of irrational but mighty authority. It must act out of conviction alone. In confrontation with a traditional but untenable command, with a society exerting irrational pressure or with the tempting call of an undeserving love, conscience must reign supreme. Therefore, the heavy responsibility that conscience bears for the consequences of its working is manifest. All of us must make as certain as we can that the voice we obey is not that of Satan. The process of educating conscience involves a ceaseless, painstaking study of our cosmic environment. We cannot impose our will, good or bad, on a universe we did not create. It is a home we neither planned nor built, but it is up to us to use it, care for it and improve it. It is a home in which we can live in harmony; it can also become a hell. To live in a prefabricated house requires one to accept its limitations and to discover its potentialities. Clearly, despite our vast experience, we humans remain rather inept in adapting to our home. Yet our future can be far more worthy than our present condition — provided that we project our imagination toward an all-embracing vision of cosmic peace and together seek out the path to that end. That means acquiring the ability to transcend ourselves and our mundane world in such a way 286

“Is This the Meaning of My Life?”

as to insure that rationality and decency are not merely possibilities but divine imperatives. Notes This chapter is an edited version of my essay of the same name, which first appeared in Conservative Judaism 43:1 (Fall 1990). 1

Abraham is “gathered to his kin” (Gen. 25:8), as are Jacob (Gen. 49:33), Aaron (Nu. 20:24) and Moses (Deut. 32:50). “The dead shall not praise God, neither all those who descend into silence” (Ps. 115:17). “For there is hope for a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again...But man dies and lies low; yea man perishes, and where is he?” (Job 14:7,10)

2

This is not the occasion for discussing Arab-Jewish relations. In addition to what I have written on the subject in previous chapters, I have dealt with some aspects of this complicated issue in my book, The Reunion of Isaac and Ishmael (Toronto and New York: Mosaic Press and Reconstructionist Press, 1987).

3

All quotations from Steinsalz are taken from his narrative, “The Akedah,” Shdemot 25 (Spring 5727/1967). (Translation mine, J.J.C.)

4

Almost all verbs in the biblical chapters on the life of Isaac are in the passive mode. He does not seek or choose his wife; she is brought to him. Esau supplies him his meat. Of all the patriarchs, Isaac alone never travels abroad. Cf. Yisrael Eldad, Hegyonot Mikra (Biblical Reflections), (Jerusalem: Hotzaat Sulam, 1958) (commentary on Hayei Sarah).

5

This and other quotations from Bergmann are from his “Shamayim Va’aretz” (Heaven and Earth), Shdemot (5729/1969), 21-28. (Translation mine, J.J.C.)

6

Quotations from Bauer are excerpted from “The Akedah and the Search for God,” Shdemot 38 (Summer 5730/1970).

Chapter 16

A Rational Approach to the Idea of God

In his Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel writes as follows about the idea of God: “The need to think of the Absolute as subject has led men to make use of statements like ‘God is the eternal,’ ‘the moral order of the world,’ or ‘love,’ etc. In such propositions the truth is just barely stated to be Subject, but not set forth as the process of reflectively mediating itself with itself. In a proposition of that kind we begin with the word God. By itself this is a meaningless sound, a mere name, the predicate says afterwards what it is, gives it content and meaning: the empty beginning becomes real knowledge only when we get to the end of the statement. So far as that goes, why not speak alone of the eternal, of the moral order of the world, etc., or, like the ancients, of pure conceptions, such as being, the one, etc., of what gives the meaning without adding the meaningless sound at all?”1 As I have noted before, the Rambam (Maimonides) puts the matter more clearly and succinctly in his Shemonah Perakim,2 where he states: “The Holy one, blessed be He, is His attributes, and His attributes are He.” The point in these observations of such widely different philosophers is that to speak intelligently about God, one has to do so by relating the concept of the Deity to human experience. This means that the idea of God is to be inferred from man’s knowledge or presumed knowledge about himself and the cosmos. There is, of course, a school of thought which holds that before one can talk about God, one must experience Him directly. Many sophisticated arguments have been advanced to support this second view, but l shall not deal with them in this essay. I shall merely state arbitrarily that the mystic 288

A Rational Approach to the Idea of God

claim cannot be substantiated. We can treat it only as a description of the state of mind of the persons who ask us to believe that they have, indeed, been in direct contact with God. Another well-trodden theological path is that followed by metaphysicians who offer logical proofs for God’s existence. Most of these arguments have come a cropper against the vigorous criticism inaugurated principally by Kant and continued down to our own days. But philosophies have a history of slow deaths and of resurrection in new dress. So, while I shall not examine this metaphysical tradition, I warn readers that they are likely to come upon the old arguments in unsuspected places — maybe, unbeknownst to myself, even in this essay. But reexamining the cosmological, teleological and other metaphysical proofs of God’s existence is beyond our scope here. Let us pick up the thread of our argument. Implicit in the statements of Maimonides and Hegel is the assumption that the predicates to be assigned to the term “God” are humanly designed. Were the mere mention of “God” to bear with it a clear listing of all the divine attributes, there would be no need to do more than utter the Name. But we humans are caught up in the contradictions and paradoxes of existence. Hence those of us who affirm faith in God are forced not only to articulate what we deem to be God’s essence but to try and overcome the doubts and disagreements that arise between our understanding of deity and the often unfathomable divine behavior. The hypothetical character of “God” cannot be avoided, and we must state what we mean when we use the term. I cannot in this limited essay engage in scholarly exchange with the endless number of thinkers who have tried their hand at formulating a convincing idea of God. All I can do is to engage in another such venture of my own. I start with the following assumptions.

1

“God” is a correlative word. It cannot stand alone, any more than “parent” can be conceivable without “child” or “husband” without “wife.”

2

Any mention of “God” necessarily entails reference to human beings and/or the cosmos. 289

C hapt e r 16

3

We must distinguish between God as reality and “God” as designating the meaning we assign to reality when we employ that term. Thus, the concept of God must be subject to all the rules of clarification and proof that apply to all other assertions about the cosmos.

4

It follows that belief in God is never self-explanatory. Belief is an emotional certainty about a palpable or impalpable object and therefore requires a knowledge and description of the object.

5

However, descriptions of God can only be statements of the believer’s conception of the reality to which he assigns the word “God.” The foregoing assumptions should be seen as cutting the ground from under the mental habit of conceiving God only as a supernatural Being. By admitting that “God” is a human construct, we are obligated to search for some common denominator in all the definitions of “God” that would facilitate debate on theological issues. I claim, along with my teacher, Mordecai M. Kaplan, that “God” refers to that quality of existence that enables man to identify his needs (as opposed to his greeds}, to find meaning in striving to satisfy them and to be able to consider his life to be worthwhile. This definition of “God” — not God — is common to all theological visions, whether supernatural or natural. Differences arise between theological systems in the determination of human needs, the understanding of nature and the way in which each system responds to unanswered and unanswerable questions. I argue that “God” and its equivalents are essential for man’s selfunderstanding. Let us ask ourselves what is entailed in the phrase, “I believe in man.” Is it not clear that such a declaration entails enormous leaps of faith in an orderly universe, for which there can be no guarantee? Is it not evident that confidence in human nature is highly speculative? It is Man in whom the humanist trusts. And that step leads him into the category of transcendence, of which he tends to be so wary. The fact is that “Man” and “God” are correlatives in the context 290

A Rational Approach to the Idea of God

of the search for life’s meaning. Belief in Man is a theological statement and an affirmation of God, however much so-called secularists deny the association. To assert that one denies theism in favor of humanism is to deny belief in a supernatural God. But supernaturalism is not the only way of affirming that man is dependent for his fulfillment or salvation on a reality beyond himself. Rationality requires that humans refashion their views as to what constitute their true needs and what qualities of the universe should be sanctified as the sources of their salvation. Such sanctification is necessary for two reasons. First, an orderly life is impossible without consensus concerning facts, that ought not be subject to denial by ignorant men and women. A sense of piety — not certainty — about the most reliable, substantiated knowledge available to man engenders hope that his purposes can be achieved. Secondly, no vision of life can be said to warrant approval which is not based on verifiable and verified information about the physical universe and the human make-up. Many persons are misled by the fact that the God-idea is a human construct. They assert, therefore, that man makes God in his image. But they ignore the fact that ideas have different standings in relation to their truth. It is “God” who is man-made, not God. Our problem, therefore, is to answer the question as to whether the search for God should engage the attention of a rational person. Actually, the question should be put differently. Is it rational for any human being not to seek God? I answer, No, for the following reason: We humans are born into life, and it is the height of irresponsibility for us not to inquire about the destiny of our species and our role in the enhancement of life. Once one enters the arena of these issues, one perforce is theologically engaged. Theology demands modesty. To use the word, “God,” loosely is a sign of arrogance or ignorance. To deny its relevance to the mind of a modern intellectual is a prelude to confusion about man’s place in the universe. But to mistake “God” for God is idolatry. It is time, therefore, that we act maturely and place God on the agenda of responsible intellectual intercourse. What are the questions for the agenda of the proposed encounter? First, let the parties explain the object of their belief or disbelief. When 291

C hapt e r 16

two persons meet, and one declares that he is a believer, while the other says equally vociferously that he does not believe, no intelligible discussion between them can take place, until each party tells the other the object of his belief or disbelief. The two sides must agree on the semantics of their debate. I have already suggested that belief in Man and belief in God both entail leaps of faith, self-transcendence and the assumption of cosmic orderliness that flies in the face of the immanent discontinuities of the universe and of human behavior. What name or names, then, should be assigned to these acts of self-transcendence? Is the divide between secularism and religion an edifying one? Is not self-identification of those who affirm each position a cover-up for their respective inability or unwillingness to confront questions they cannot answer? Can a theologian who insists that religious belief is synonymous with belief in a Creator then go on to claim that the Creator is good? Would it not be more honest to adopt an agnostic view of Creation? Is the argument that we cannot know God’s ways not contradictory to the view that man is created in the image of God and therefore capable of reasoning and discriminating between right and wrong? On the other hand, how can a secular humanist justify his view that God does not exist while, at the same time, he asserts his faith in Man who is a creature of nature and not its creator? Is recourse to “Nature” any more satisfactory than “God” as a means of explaining human existence? Can the self-styled non-religionist avoid recourse to the category of transcendence? The concept “God” is certainly a human invention, but its referent is not. And it is this referent about which the debate is rarely joined. We should abandon the slogans and get down to the business of straight thinking. For myself, God enters human thought the moment humans declare that no matter how existence came to be, life is or can be meaningful and worthwhile. That view, although speculative and not subject to validation, can be substantiated in experience. The believer in God is he who affirms this realistic vision of the universe, in the face of the evils and uncertainties of nature. A genuine atheist is he for whom life is pointless. Ultimately, the secular-religious debate is a matter of temperament and not of intellect. Tough-minded religionists 292

A Rational Approach to the Idea of God

and secularists ask for no guarantees, but they can and must meet and cooperate in order to achieve a mature faith in God-Man-Cosmos. The adjectival theology just outlined has direct bearing on the practices of observant religionists. An example from Judaism will illustrate this contention. In the daily evening service recited by Jewish worshippers, there is a prayer, Ahavat Olam, thanking God for having expressed His love for Israel by granting it the Torah. The prayer states that the laws and the words of the Torah are “our life and the length of our days.” As it stands, the prayer informs us that the rules and regulations of the toraitic tradition, being God’s gift to Israel, are all worthy representations of God’s goodness and graciousness and must therefore be accepted as divine truth. But this tautological reasoning is obviously unacceptable to Jews who find much in the tradition which is reprehensible and cannot be treated as divine or as our life and the length of our days. Is it reasonable to designate as divine the punishment of a bastard for the adulterous behavior of his or her mother? Is the death penalty for the violation of a ritual practice to be attributed to God’s will? Is the election of Israel a concept born of national consciousness or a revelation of God’s wish for mankind? It behooves us to reverse the order of the prayer and declare that Torah designates as divine those ideas, values and observances of whose truth, goodness and beauty we are reasonably certain. Of course, such certainty must be held with a light touch. Before we call a human construct “divine” or “godlike,” we have to put our affirmations to the most rigorous tests available. And even then, God remains an object of faith and continuous search. Notes This chapter is a translation of the original article “Gisha Ratsionalistit Lemusag Haelohim,” Yahadut Chofshit 11-12 (October 1997), 37-38. 1

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , The Phemonology of Mind, tr. J.B. Baillie (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 84.

2

Maimonides, Shemonah Perakim, 20.

Chapter 17

When a Judge Steps off the Bench

In the week-end magazine section of Haaretz (April 11, 2008), Ari Shavit interviewed Aharon Barak, the former Chief Justice of Israel’s Supreme Court. Most of the long article dealt with the legal controversy between Barak and the Minister of Justice, Daniel Friedman, but it is only Barak’s comments, to be found on half of the last page of the interview, that will concern us in what follows. For it is there that Barak provides some insight into his views on Zionism, Israel’s democracy and the status of Israel’s Arabs. I shall also examine a brief theological comment made by Barak in the course of the interview. I think that my reaction to Barak’s opinions is an appropriate way to conclude Part Two of this book. Barak regards himself, with every fiber of his being, as a Herzlian rather than an Ahad HaAm Zionist. Since he does not elaborate on this point, it is difficult to determine the exact meaning of this assertion. However, it can at least be interpreted to mean that Barak fully supports the political status of Israel as the state of the Jewish people. Barak identifies himself as a “Zionist who believes in a Jewish national state whose intent is to solve the Jewish problem, a Zionist who regards a bi-national state as a catastrophe, a Zionist who does not consider the Law of Return to be discriminatory but rather a just law that provides an answer to the desperate cry of the history of the Jewish people. Barak tells Shavit that “Even as an individual, I am a Zionist. Believe me, I had many opportunities not to dwell in this land — the best universities, compensation in the millions, even judicial 294

When a Judge Steps off the Bench

offers. I rejected them all and did not even consider them, because I am a Zionist.” These remarks by Barak help us to understand his Herzlian emphasis and his disregard of Ahad HaAm’s rationale for Zionism. He ignores completely the possibility of living a Jewish life in the Diaspora. Moreover, in speaking of living in Israel, he says not a word about the spiritual and cultural purposes for settling in Israel or of the possibilities for a creative Jewish life in the countries of the free world. Had Shavit delved more extensively into Barak’s Zionist philosophy, he might have uncovered some Ahad HaAmian strains. But these were evidently not on Barak’s mind when he explained his Zionism. I am surprised, however, by what seems to me to be Barak’s rather shallow opinion of the Law of Return. I refer to his claim that the law is not discriminatory. The fact is that all immigration laws that limit innocent foreigners from entering or becoming citizens of any country are prejudicial. Such laws, however, are universal and, in varying degrees, necessary for the economic or social welfare of the absorbing state. In regard to Israel, it can be stated that the prejudice in favor of Jewish immigrants is justified for the historic reason indicated by Barak and as a safeguard against the anti-Semitism that is still rampant in many countries. Nonetheless, the Law of Return is discriminatory and must some day be replaced by a more balanced law which eschews the racialism or favoritism of the current statute. Although Barak does sense the imbalance in the Law of Return, he offers the following justification for it: “However, what is Zionism? The lesson I draw from the Shoah is that Israel has to be the state of the Jewish people. But it must also be the state of all its citizens. There is no contradiction between the two. Israel must relate in equality to all its citizens.” Two problems inhere in this description of Zionism. The first relates to the implication that it was the Nazi horror which justified the Zionist movement and made it imperative that Israel be the state of the Jewish people. Barak blithely glosses over the age-long dreams of Jewish exiles for the Return to Zion, the agricultural and other economic endeavors of the Zionist settlers in late 19th and early 20th centuries and the decades of Zionist efforts that culminated in the 295

C h a p t e r 17

Balfour Declaration and the creation of the governmental instruments that prepared the way for the state. The Shoah was an important factor in Zionist history, but the need for a Jewish homeland and sovereignty long antedated the Nazi terror. Emphasizing the Shoah as the basis or the establishment of Israel lends exaggerated credence to the Arab argument that Palestinians should not be required to pay the price for the cruelties of the Germans and the indifference of the Western powers. Barak’s statement beclouds the essence of Zionism as the movement to restore the Jewish people to its homeland, where they can reconstruct its civilization in its natural setting. The second problem has to do with insuring that Jewish sovereignty be differentiated from Jewish denomination. No one can deny the basically democratic character of the State of Israel. At the same time, Barak misses an indispensable element in the democratic ethos when he overlooks the need to accord to Israel’s Arab citizens the feeling that the state is theirs as well as that of the Jews. When Arabs are unable to sing the Hatikvah or salute the Magen David flag, they obviously feel disenfranchised. I have already considered this issue and shall not repeat myself here. I want only to emphasize that the Jewishness of the State of Israel will have to depend on the ability of Jewish citizens to maintain their majority status. Barak suggests that a solution to the Arab-Jewish conflict should eventuate in a federation of three states — Israel, Jordan, and Palestine. Interestingly, he talks about Israel with an Arab minority but only hints at the possibility of a Jewish minority in either of the other two states. Why should it not be obvious that even in the Middle East, every state should be pluralistic? Apparently, even a liberal like Barak is realistic in his expectations. It will take a long time before Jews will immigrate voluntarily to Arab states at peace with Israel or before those who now dwell in areas that might be turned over to a Palestinian state will willingly remain in their present homes. Even if the new Palestinian state opts for democratic rule, Jews who have built their homes in areas to be turned over to the new state will prefer to live under Jewish sovereignty. In the prevailing atmosphere, both Jews and Arabs, including those who favor democracy, also want to insure the fullest possible 296

When a Judge Steps off the Bench

expression of their national cultures — something that necessitates their preserving their majority status in their national states. A further complication has to be taken into account. There is a considerable gap between Israel’s democracy and the slowly germinating forms of democracy in a handful of Arab states. For the time being, it is pointless even to hope that Barak’s federation will be able to reach a common agreement as to the rights and privileges of ethnic or religious minorities in each of its member states. Meanwhile, Israel, unfairly but necessarily, will have to set the pace. This means, as Mordecai Kaplan declared in 1954, Israel must be an Israeli state of all its citizens and not a Jewish state. That is what is demanded if Israel is to live up fully to the requirements of democracy. Practically, Barak might be correct in calling for a democratic Jewish state, but theoretically and morally, he is wrong in thinking that there is no contradiction between a pure democracy and one which identifies itself with one segment of its citizenry. Admittedly, given the political cultures of today’s Arab states and the likely culture of the Palestine-in-the-making, Kaplan’s argument that Israel cannot be a Jewish state if it wishes to be fully democratic, seems to be unrealistic. Somehow or other, Barak’s argument for a fair balance between Israel’s democracy and its Jewishness will have to be effectuated. Much will depend on the degree to which the Palestinians will enable non-Palestinians to feel at home in the state-to-be. Aharon Barak is as vociferous about a key item in his approach to religion as he is about his suggestions for resolving the Arab-Israel conflict. Unfortunately, in the course of the space allotted for the interview, it was impossible for any interlocutor, even one as skilled as Ari Shavit, to elicit a complete statement of Barak’s spiritual and moral attitudes. Barak made two comments, however, which illustrate in a manner common to many Israeli Jews their shallow understanding of religion. Barak asserts, “I am a secular person. The existence of God is incompatible with the Holocaust. Nonetheless, I regard myself as a Jew, not because my mother and father were Jews. I am a Jew in a national sense, a secular Jew.” Thus, Barak identifies religion with belief in a supernatural God who causes both natural and moral evil. I hope that I have amply demonstrated the falsity or at least the shallowness of this 297

C h a p t e r 17

assumption. However, I cannot engage in a theological polemic with Barak, inasmuch as his interview does not disclose his own struggle with the reality of evil in all its forms and any proposal he might have for dealing with it. Nor can I do more than deny the implication inherent in Barak’s theological declaration that religion is to be seen as another name for belief in a supernatural God. Moreover, when Barak identifies himself as a secularist in a national sense, to what does he refer? Obviously, he is not a racist. His nationalism has to express itself in cultural forms. There is no Jewish people, for example, without the historical and spiritual observances of the Jewish calendar. That same people must also continue to wrestle with the moral problems imposed upon it by its unique history. Barak implies that his secularist theology removes him from the religious framework. But were he to accept Kaplan’s definition of group religion as the effort of a people to seek for the fulfillment of all its members, he would realize that the religious-secularist divide is a spurious one. Both groups of Jews are searching for salvation with the tools made available to them by their common history and culture. I do not discount the differences in life-style between secularists and religionists. Nor can I find fault with Barak’s call for the compromises between the two groups that are necessary for conducting a peaceful and united Jewish society. Nonetheless, there is one more distinction that has to be made before we can get at the roots of the religion and state controversy. The real struggle is not between religion and secularism but rather between religious freedom and religious establishment. Religion cannot be separated from the state, because one of the main functions of every state is to advance as much as possible the fulfillment of all its citizens. No democratic state, however, has the right to foster or to maintain a monopolistic religious establishment, such as is characteristic of Israel today. Barak adds one more element to his brief reference to religion. He claims, “The difficulty with the Jewish religion is that, in contrast to Christianity, it does not recognize the distinction between what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to the Pope… Therefore, a religious person suffers not only when he is forced to ride on Shabbat but also when I ride on Shabbat.” In other words, Barak identifies the Jewish religion 298

When a Judge Steps off the Bench

as synonymous with the strict halakhic system. He makes no room in his definition of religion either for some of the liberal advances of modern halakhists or for the more wide-spread rejection of the system itself. He does not even mention the fact that when the fathers of the State of Israel, including its avowedly religious members, founded it as a democracy, they had perforce turned their backs on the Halakhah as the appropriate polity of the revived Jewish state. Israel’s democracy does recognize the difference between Caesar and the Pope, but it has not yet learned how to disengage some of the traditional practices of the Jewish tradition from the authority of various religious establishments. I emphasize the plural, because the real uniqueness of religion in Israel is to be found in the hand-over by secularist governments of aspects of religious practice to rabbinical establishments. I believe that in order to understand what is happening today in Israel, we can do no better than to see the situation as the advent of a second biblical period. The Bible, after all, is arguably the most profound religious text in human history. At the same time, it is a record and an interpretation of nearly a thousand years of the evolution of a people, a depiction of that people’s search for the secrets of the cosmos and the meaning of life, and a diary of its endeavor to unite all men under a divine ethic. Another way of putting it is to regard the Bible as an unfinished effort to find the order which underlies the natural world and the moral values that are essential to peaceful relations between individuals and peoples. All these questions confront the Jewish people as it embarks on a new stage in its odyssey. I suggest that Barak and other so-called secularists recognize that they are, despite themselves, fully engaged in a religious adventure.

Index

Adler, Cyrus

16, 25, 103, 121, 140 Ahad HaAm 37,103, 231, 294-295 Akedah ch. 15 Anselm 112 Arabism and Islam 197-198, 231, 237-240 Arabs in Israel ch. 10 Aristotle 105, 184

B

aeck, Leo 126 Barack, Aharon ch. 15; 230, 243 Bauer, Yehudah 283-285 Baumgardt, David 125 Ben-Gurion, David 137, 228, 243 Ben-Horin, Meir 11, 123 Bergmann, Hugo 280-283 Berkowits, Eliezer ch. 7; 124 Bible 96-97 Borders of Israel 224-226, 228 Borowitz, Eugene 76-77, 124 Buber, Martin 126

Character and temperament Chosenness

ch. 5; 46, 192

11

Clermont-Tonnere 199 Commentary 124 Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion 91

Debs, Eugene V.

133 Democracy ch. 4; 28, 36, 38, 47, 135, 175, 198, 200-202, 208-210, 215-219, 222, 230231, 233, 236-240, 242-245, 247, 250, 252-253, 256, 294, 296-299 Dewey, John 97-98, 103,184 Durkheim Emile 103

Eddington, Arthur

170 Education ch. 4; 243-244 Eisenstein, Ira 11 Elazar, Avraham 81 Evil natural and moral 44-45

F

ackenhem Emil 260, 271-272 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 162 Finkelstein, Louis 46

300

Index

Friedman, Daniel

294

G

oldsmith, Emanuel 11 Gordon, A.D. 37 Greenberg, Hayyim 124 Grossman, Mordecai 125 Guide to Jewish Religious Usage

104

Halakhah

41, 90, 129, 135, 171, 216-217, 251, 259, 299 Halakhah and state 202, 216-217, 230 Halevi, Yehudah 115 Hamas 227 Hartman, David 124, 127-134 Hebrew University 25 Hegel, G.W.F. 126, 288

Immortality

70, 190, 261, 274

J

eans, James 170 Jewish Institute of Religion 25 Jewish National Fund 244-245 Jewish Reconstructionist Federation Task Force 187 Jewish state ch. 11; 208-211, 215218, 237-238 Jewish Theological Seminary 24-25

Kant, Immanuel

162 Kaplan, Israel 30-31 Kaplan, Lena 19-20 Kaplan, Mordecai M. at Hebrew University 11 as pedagogue 12-14

at Cejwin Camps 16-17 method of teaching sermonizing 13-15 classic texts 17 defender of the JTS 17-18 on death and eulogies 18-20 cosmopolitanism and universalism 34-35 on Bertrand Russell ch. 5 Kaplan, Rivkah 19-20 Kessner, Carole 49 Kierkegaard, Soren 281 Kipling, Rudyard 223 Kook, Avraham Isaac Hacohen 111

L

aw of Return 242-243 Libowitz, Richard 11 Loewenberg, J. 126,127 Luzzatto, Moses Hayyim 62

M

aimonides 111, 266, 288 Mendelssohn, Moses 258-259 Miller, Perry 83-84 Mysticism ch. 2; 22, 32, 42, 45, 105, 108, 131

National Community Relations Advisory Council 56 Naturalism ch.7; 72, 87, 95, 176-177 Novak, David ch.5

Palestinianism

Petuchowski, Jacob Plato 184

301

241-242 12

Index

Poincare, Henri 122 Prayer 41, 55, 75, 84, 115-118, 122, 137, 139, 165, 190, 193, 195196, 252, 255, 265, 284, 293 Emotion and Intellect in prayer 75, 191-192 Presidents Conference 36

Rauschenbusch, Walter 133

Ravidowitz, Simon 202 Reines, Isaac Jacob 17 Rieger, Eliezer 21 Rosenzweig, Franz 68, 72, 79 Ross, Nicham 138-140 Rubenstein, Richard 69 Russell, Bertrand ch. 8; 48, 64 Ryle, Gilbert 59

Saadiah Gaon

259 Sadat, Anwar 220 Schchter, Solomon 96 School for Jewish Social Work 46 Scholem, Gershom 52, 125 Schulweis, Harold 73 Schweid, Eliezer 124 Scult, Mel 11, 16, 49 Shaftesbury, Anthony 150 Shavit, Ari 230, 294 Soterics 22, 39, 86-89, 94 Soul 260 Spinoza, Baruch 120-121 Steinberg, Milton 124-125 Steinsalz, Adin 277-280, 284

Sullivan, J.W.N 170 Supernaturalism ch.7; 60, 71-72, 85, 87, 114, 118, 129, 189, 267, 285, 291

Teachers College

47

Theology ch.14 Transcendence 40-42

United Jewish Community

36

United Jish Appeal 36 University of Judaism 47

Values

ch. 8; 32, 41, 72, 76-77, 83-86, 8991, 96, 113-114, 122, 132, 145, 148, 151, 159-160, 166-169, 205, 254, 260, 266-272, 274 Ethical values 72, 83-84, 86, 103-160, 174-176, 178, 180, 259, 267-268 Moral values 76, 145, 162, 174, 178, 180, 260, 266, 271, 299 Vernoff, Charles 78-79

Wealth, Jewish

Western Wall

Zionism

96 ch.13

ch. 12; 10-12, 28, 37-38, 53, 57-58, 122, 124-125, 186187, 193, 197, 200, 202, 215, 219-220, 276, 294-296 Zionist state 246-247

Also by Jack J. Cohen

Judaism in a Post-Halakhic Age

2010 218 pages Cloth, ISBN 978-1-934843-92-5

Judaism in a Post-Halakhic Age tackles the following questions: 1. What is Halakhah, and what role has it played in the creative survival of the Jewish people for two millennia? 2. Why is Halakhah no longer capable of functioning as it has until now? 3. What sort of polity and religious culture can be recommended to replace the Halakhic tradition in an era of freedom, democracy, scientific research and religious pluralism? The author, however, out of his great respect for Halakhic culture, asks what it can still contribute to Jewish civilization and the advance of a united humanity. “Venerable Reconstructionist thinker Jack Cohen here offers a thoughtful, balanced, and morally sensitive viewpoint on the place of Halakhah in a contemporary Judaism. His well-reasoned positions will have to be taken seriously as non-Orthodox Jews in both Israel and the diaspora struggle with this key issue.” — Art Green, Irving Brudnick Professor of Philosophy and Religion, Hebrew College

Also in the series Reference Library of Jewish Intellectual History: Basser, Herbert: The Mind Behind the Gospels: A Commentary to Matthew 1-14 Cloth 978-1-934843-33-8 Paper 978-1-934843-34-5

Heinemann, Isaac: The Reasons for the Commandments in Jewish Thought: From the Bible to the Renaissance Cloth 978-1-934843-04-8 Paper 978-1-934843-53-6

Mark, Zvi: Persecution The Scroll of Secrets: The Hidden Messianic Vision of R. Nachman of Breslav Cloth 978-1-934843-93-2 Paper 978-1-934843-94-9

Militarev, Alexander: The Jewish Conundrum in World History Cloth 978-1-934843-43-7

Schweid, Eliezer: The Idea of Modern Jewish Culture Cloth 978-1-934843-05-5 Paper 978-1-936235-09-4

Schweid, Eliezer: The Philosophy of the Bible as Foundation of Jewish Culture: Philosophy of Biblical Law Cloth 978-1-934843-01-7 Paper 978-1-934843-52-9

Schweid, Eliezer: The Philosophy of the Bible as Foundation of Jewish Culture: Philosophy of Biblical Narrative Cloth 978-1-934843-00-0 Paper 978-1-934843-51-2

Strickman, H. Norman: Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra’s Commentary on the First Book of Psalms: Chapters 1-41 Cloth 978-1-934843-30-7

Strickman, H. Norman: Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra’s Commentary on the Second Book of Psalms: Chapters 42-72 Cloth 978-1-934843-31-4