The Reconstructionist movement (Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation), a contemporary current of religious Judaism almost entirely unknown in France, has been part of the landscape of American Judaism since the 1920s1. Along with the Reform movement, institutionalized toward the end of the nineteenth century2, the Conservative movement, established at the beginning of the twentieth century3, and Jewish Renewal, constituted at the start of the 1990s4, it is one of the components of the non-Orthodox Judaism that is predominant in the United States. Endowed with a seminary, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (founded in 1968 in Philadelphia), and a rabbinical association, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, the Reconstructionist movement federates more than a hundred synagogues and havurot5 in North America. Since 1990, it has been affiliated with the World Union for Progressive Judaism6, whose seat is in Jerusalem.

Reconstructionism was first a model of thought — that of Mordecai Kaplan (1880-1983) — before becoming a movement. We will present, in a first stage, Kaplan’s biographical trajectory, then, in a second, a few of the major axes of his thought. In conclusion, we will take stock of the present fortunes of this movement.

Mordecai Kaplan: the man

Mordecai Kaplan was born in 1881, into an Orthodox Jewish family, in Swenziany, a small town near Vilnius. His father, Israel Kaplan, who was a rabbi, had received his semikha (ordination) at the hands of distinguished colleagues of the period, the rabbis Isaac Elkanan Spector, Naphtali Tsvi Judah (haNetsiv), and Isaac Jacob Reines, founder of the religious Zionist movement, the Mizrahi. Israel Kaplan was a mussarnik, that is, a disciple of Israel Salanter7. Appointed to New York as assistant to the Orthodox chief rabbi Jacob Joseph, Israel Kaplan left Russia for the United States in 1888. Mrs. Kaplan and her children joined him in New York after a stopover in Paris.

Mordecai Kaplan recounts an anecdote that occurred at this time, when the family was crossing the Atlantic aboard a French ship, in the middle of summer. One evening, dozens of children went up on deck, because fireworks were being set off there. It was the 14th of July, but it was also a Friday evening. Young Mordecai, who wanted to enjoy the spectacle, asked his mother whether he could join the other children. The mother agreed, but first her son had to say his evening prayer. When Mordecai went up on deck, it was too late. The celebration was over, the children were dispersing. He would long hold it against his mother; but this experience of frustration led him to reflect on the challenge that living in two civilizations constitutes for an observant Jew.

Mordecai studied the Talmud with his father, an Orthodox man of great openness, who also introduced him to biblical criticism through the agency of a scholar, Arnold Ehrlich. He attended the public school as well as the yeshivah Etz Haim and the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), the future rabbinical seminary of the Conservative movement. He then pursued a university course at City College, where he obtained the bachelor of arts, and at Columbia University, the master’s. He studied chiefly philosophy and sociology. One of his professors, Franklin H. Giddings, was in fact the first to teach sociology in the USA. Kaplan was a great reader, interested in many fields, whether the social sciences — history, anthropology, psychology, sociology, comparative religion — or the pure sciences, such as physics.

During his university years, Kaplan was enrolled as a rabbinical student at JTS. He graduated from it at the age of twenty-one, in 1902. In 1909, he was hired by Solomon Schechter at JTS to teach homiletics, and he would remain there, as a teacher, until his retirement in 1963. He would exert a great influence on the future leaders and intellectuals of the Conservative movement, such as Louis Finkelstein, Robert Gordis, and Simon Greenberg8. Kaplan thus became an important actor in the teaching of Judaism in the USA. He was also active in the great New York Jewish community: the Bureau of Jewish Education and the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA).

As early as 1904, Kaplan conceived of a “theology of reconstruction”9. In August 1920, in Menorah, the Jewish intellectual review of the period10, he described his program for the “reconstruction of Judaism.” It was a matter of a modern approach to belief. He proposed that one part with mythological ideas about God and the Torah.

The first two rabbinical posts assigned to him pertained to the Orthodox synagogues Kehillat Jeshurun and The Jewish Center. This last synagogue, recently created, became, through Kaplan’s action, a place dedicated not only to prayer and study, but also a cultural and social center. He notably had a swimming pool installed there. The Jewish Center was called “the schul with the pool and the school.”

Some of the more traditionalist members of the Jewish Center soon organized a revolt against Kaplan, who was thus given notice to leave that community. He then founded, with a certain number of members who had followed him, the first Reconstructionist synagogue, the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, SAJ, in 1922. In this new structure, Kaplan had more freedom to put into practice his conception of a Judaism at once traditional and modern. He would, for example, revolutionize the status of the Jewish woman. His daughter Judith became, indeed, the first bat mitzvah in the United States to read a parashah before the community, in 1922. Within the framework of the SAJ, Kaplan also introduced adult Jewish-studies courses, led by scholars of great renown, such as Shalom Spiegel, on the theme of art and the Bible, for example. Music too became a central activity in the community. At the beginning of the 1930s, Kaplan set himself the task of writing his magnum opus, in which he developed his Reconstructionist conception. Judaism as a Civilization was published in May 1934. In order to disseminate Kaplan’s thought more widely, The Reconstructionist, a bimonthly review of Jewish thought, came into being in 1935. In it Kaplan notably proposed innovations in matters of ritual and liturgy.

In 1941, he created, with Ira Eisenstein (one of his disciples and his future son-in-law) and Eugene Kohn, the New Haggadah, which introduced modifications into the ritual of Passover, such as the suppression of the ten plagues and the addition of midrashic extracts on the life of Moses. The seminary’s colleagues were outraged. But this was not the first time Kaplan had run up against a wall of criticism. For years, the members of the JTS teaching staff had been greatly embarrassed by his radical positions. Thus, the contention that the Torah had not been revealed by God on Mount Sinai, that the commandments ought to be perceived more as folkways (popular customs) than as divine prescriptions, his rejection of the notion of election, or his belief in a God transcendent within the world of nature and not in a supernatural God who would intervene in history. In 1945, the first ritual, the Sabbath Prayer Book, was published by the Reconstructionist Foundation. Barely a month after its publication, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada declared a herem (decree of excommunication) against Kaplan. At this ceremony, which took place at the McAlpin Hotel in New York, someone is said to have burned Kaplan’s siddur11.

Considering the positions we have just evoked, one might think that Kaplan was not very scrupulous in the practice of Judaism. He was, on the contrary, strictly observant, and this until the end of his life. He wore the tallit katan, prayed daily, observed the Sabbath as well as all the festivals and kashrut. Kaplan was opposed to the idea of creating a fourth movement, after the Reform, the Orthodox, and the Conservatives. In fact, he hoped that the Conservative movement would adopt his philosophy, but this did not happen. His son-in-law, Ira Eisenstein, therefore took the decision to create a training seminary, in 1968. This decision would set in motion a separate and autonomous movement.

Toward the end of his life, Kaplan settled in Jerusalem, where he attended the synagogue of Mevakshei Derekh12. He returned to New York, where he died in November 1983 at the age of 102.

Mordecai Kaplan: his thought

Historians of Jewish thought tend to consider Kaplan as a sociologist of Judaism rather than as a true theologian, such as a Heschel or a Buber. It is true that he was particularly interested in the social reality of Judaism in the modern world. His project was the reinterpretation of Judaism in the context of an open, democratic, and multicultural society, such as American society was, where Jewish citizens wished to remain attached both to their tradition and to their community. In the past, antisemitism, on the one hand, and the existence of an organized community, on the other, preserved Jewish identity and Judaism. “In what way did/could Jews want to remain Jews today?”, Kaplan asked himself in the 1920s. The authority of the rabbis had been singularly reduced with emancipation. Belonging to a community no longer went without saying. And yet Kaplan believed in the centrality of what he called, in English, peoplehood.

He maintained that Jews, like other peoples, possess an ethnic consciousness. Thus “the collective activities of the Jews should be conducted with a conscious regard for the solidarity of the Jewish people, as well as for its ethical and spiritual development”13. For this, it was necessary to create innovative communities around the synagogues, as well as Jewish cultural centers, which would indeed become important in the America of the 1920s. In stressing the importance of the group, Kaplan found a common denominator for bringing together Jews of all sensibilities. He thus succeeded in forging ties with personalities and institutions of several tendencies: Orthodox, Reform, Zionist, Bundist, and so on.

In the 1920s and 1930s, he anticipated the behavior of the American Jews of the 1970s and 1980s who, despite their detachment from religious practice, would display a strong bond with Judaism and the Jewish people; this is what sociologists call the “civil religion” of American Jews: the struggle against antisemitism, the upkeep of the memory of the Shoah, and an unswerving and generous support for Israel.

The intellectual currents that had an important impact on Kaplan’s thought are, first, the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey, but also the theological thought of Alfred Whitehead, Douglas Clyde Macintosh, and Henry Nelson Wieman14. He found in pragmatism an approach and a logic that had recourse to scientific procedures in order to identify the essence of religion and the way in which it operates in the lives of human beings. When Kaplan reflected on the meaning of God, on the sense of the prayers, on that of election, of the commandments, of Israel, he used the pragmatic approach. According to his biographer, Mel Scult, Kaplan posed four questions:

  1. What function did the liturgy, for example, hold in the Jewish tradition in biblical and talmudic times?
  2. How did this function evolve over the course of Jewish history?
  3. Does this aspect of the Jewish tradition answer the same motivations today?
  4. If it does not, how can this aspect of the tradition be readapted in order to recover the function it once had?

As a pragmatist, Kaplan did not accept the idea that Judaism would consist of a set of eternal doctrines imposed on every Jew. For him, Judaism was above all the deep force, a source of life for the people.

Judaism as a “civilization”: a new and inclusive definition of Judaism

Kaplan defined Judaism as the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people. Judaism cannot be apprehended as an entity in itself revealed by God on Mount Sinai but rather as a dynamic creation of the people. Over the course of its history, the Jews have passed through all sorts of changes and ordeals, and all of this has had repercussions on what is called the Jewish tradition. He writes: “the historical approach implies that the Jewish tradition is a human phenomenon which is subject to the natural laws of human behavior and which is also the product of the normal interaction between human life and its environment.”15

But Judaism is not only a religious tradition; it incorporates all the aspects of a civilization: a language, a literature, a history, a land, and so on. In The Religion of Ethical Nationhood, Kaplan advocated that every Jewish school promote Jewish cultural values:

  1. the millennial history of the Jewish people
  2. Eretz Yisrael, a common aspiration
  3. the literature of the spiritual life
  4. the Hebrew language
  5. the messianic vision of a world at peace and the struggle for social justice
  6. the idea that the life of the human being has a deep spiritual meaning
  7. the Jewish calendar punctuated by the Sabbath and its festivals, whose teaching brings into evidence all the values cited above16.

The presence of God in the world

Kaplan approaches the question of God not by way of metaphysics but by way of sociology. Indeed, he questions himself a great deal about the way in which faith in God can improve the spiritual and social life of the person. He maintains that belief in a supernatural God is an outdated idea and that a new conception of God must be found for the believing person of the twentieth century. Kaplan is, however, neither an atheist nor an agnostic17. He explains that in following the course of Jewish history, one sees that the faith of the people has been constant, but that it is the way in which the people conceived of God that has changed over time. For example, in the biblical period, God was apprehended as the leader of the armies who had freed the people from Egypt (Adoshem Tsevaot in the liturgy), whereas in the rabbinic period, it was rather as a Shekhinah (the feminine presence of God) who had withdrawn into exile at the moment of the destruction of the Temple.

In Kaplan’s time, a human being could apprehend God thus: “The divine is that aspect of nature, both in the universe and in the human being, which impels humanity to create a better world and the individual to do the best in his own life.” Kaplan insisted on the fact that “the human being can also discover the presence of God in his search for truth, honesty, empathy, loyalty, justice, freedom, goodwill…” Belief in God is thus associated with what he called “the highest conceivable purpose” in the life of the human being. According to Emanuel Goldsmith, one of Kaplan’s disciples, Jews believed in the biblical period that in following the ritual and ethical commandments of the Torah, they placed themselves in the service of the One God of the universe, and thus bore witness to His oneness. In the talmudic period, the highest conceivable purpose was to attain the world to come by studying the Law, and to observe the mitzvot. In the Middle Ages, for a thinker like Maimonides, it was a matter of arriving at a philosophical understanding of God and His Law, whereas for Hermann Cohen, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was a matter of putting into practice an exemplary conception of ethical life, based on rationalism and German philosophical idealism. For Martin Buber, the highest conceivable purpose was to build an ideal community based on the Jewish spiritual heritage. And finally, for Kaplan, it was to develop an art of living, both on the individual and on the communal level, that would contribute to the intellectual, moral, and spiritual progress of humanity.18

The importance of Zionism in Kaplan’s work

Kaplan was one of the great thinkers of American Judaism of the first twenty years of the century to have embraced, very early, Zionist ideas. Given the central place he accorded to peoplehood, and in view of his convictions concerning the fact that the survival of the Jews as a people depended on their will to live collectively, the creation of a Jewish home in Palestine was something necessary and vital. Kaplan thus became a spokesman for Zionism in the United States and an ideologue of the Americanization of the Zionist project. Indeed, in 1925, the Zionist Organization of America sent Kaplan as a delegate for the inauguration of the Hebrew University.

While Kaplan believed deeply in a dynamic interdependence between Zion and the Diaspora, it is only on the land of its ancestors that the Jewish people can recreate its culture and realize itself. Kaplan was much influenced by the writings of Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginzberg, 1856-1927) and by the idea that the Jewish people, resettled on its land, would be in a position to recreate an original culture. Like Ahad Ha’am, he believed in the idea that the Jewish people must build a society based on ethics.

Mordecai Kaplan underscored very early the ethical problems posed by the fact that the Jews, having need of a territory, would have to share it with the indigenous Arab population. In this he had the same vision as other Zionist thinkers, such as A. D. Gordon, Judah Magnes, and Martin Buber, who held that more attention should be paid to the Arab population. He also criticized the discrimination practiced against Arab workers. In 1939, for example, he wrote that “the Jews should realize that they must live with the Arabs and should not have stipulated in the statutes of the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet L’Yisrael) the prohibition of Arab labor.”19

Liturgy and prayer

Kaplan was a demanding man, endowed with a great intellectual honesty. He could not accept that someone might recite prayers whose content no longer corresponded with his own deep convictions. There had to be a coherence between belief and ritual. Introducing modifications into the traditional text of the siddur (the ritual) was already accepted by Reform rabbis in Germany. When Kaplan created the SAJ, he introduced a certain number of liturgical modifications. For example, he no longer believed in the idea of election (he accepted, on the other hand, the idea that the Jewish people had a vocation). Consequently, in the blessing recited before the reading of the Torah, he replaced the words (in Hebrew and in English) “who chose us from among all peoples” with “who drew us near to His service.” Likewise for a text in the famous passage of the Aleinu prayer20; instead of the following three phrases — “God has not made us like the peoples of other lands / He has not placed us like the families of the earth / He has not set our portion like theirs nor our lot like that of the multitude of peoples…” — Kaplan proposed in their place the words: “who has given us a Torah of truth.”

Other modifications proposed by Kaplan, which had already been integrated by Reform synagogues, concern the suppression of any liturgical reference to a messianic figure. Thus, in one of the blessings of the Amidah21, the word “redeemer” is replaced by “redemption.” Likewise for references to a physical resurrection. Kaplan replaces, once again in the Amidah, the words “Blessed are You, Eternal, who resurrects the dead” with “Blessed are You, Eternal, who in His compassion remembers His creatures for life.” He also thought it important to vary from one week to the next the order of the service. Thus, alongside the Hebrew texts, he proposed the reading of creative texts in English. In his ritual for the Sabbath, half of the work is devoted to additional readings and meditations. He also composed a collection of texts in English for American civic holidays such as Thanksgiving.

Kaplan’s view of American society and capitalism

Kaplan elaborated his thought during the America of the Great Depression. He saw that many Jews were turning to socialism and communism. In his first two works — Judaism as a Civilization (1934) and The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion (1937) — he demonstrated how the capitalist system presented challenges for American society in general, and for Jewish life in particular. Capitalism, in his view, by encouraging consumption to excess, prevented people from developing an intellectual and spiritual life; the builders and active members of the great synagogues of Manhattan were for the most part drawn from the upper bourgeoisie, and, consequently, Jews from more humble social strata were excluded from them. American capitalism created enormous gaps between rich and poor and engendered a great economic insecurity for many employees and workers. Without economic justice, Kaplan thought, one could not work for social justice, fraternity, and freedom. He was also saddened to discover that American Judaism did not take a position in the debate “to denounce, and combat, the social wrongs, the greed, the monopolistic graft that are responsible for this situation.”22

In the 1930s, Kaplan gave several lectures on the theme of Judaism and communism. He was even suspected of being a radical (read “communist”!). More astonishing still, he evokes, in his private journal, the idea of returning to Russia and taking part in the creation of a new society! But Kaplan was lucid and understood that neither communism nor socialism would be panaceas for resolving the grave problems of American society. In certain writings, notably Judaism in Transition (1936), he expresses his reservations with regard to communism. Thus he was in profound disagreement with the Marxist idea according to which religion would be the opium of the masses. For him, precisely, the prophetic tradition and a modern religion could incite human beings to work for the moral improvement of humanity and the transformation of society. Kaplan also criticized communism for its refusal to recognize the spiritual dimension of reality, and he reproached it for focusing solely on the idea of class struggle. He did not accept the communists’ rejection of the role of nationalism in the culture of a nation and the denial of the importance of Zionism for the Jews in Russia. Finally, he was opposed to violence and hoped that the transformations of society might come about without passing through a bloody “revolution.”

In a general way, in his political thought, Kaplan strove to find points of convergence between the Jewish tradition and progressive commitment, in order to reconcile, among his coreligionists, communal belonging and political involvement23.

“Reconstructionism” today

Kaplan’s ideas continue to exert a definite influence on American Judaism; witness a recent issue of ZEEK, the American Jewish avant-garde review, which devotes its central dossier to Reconstructionism24. Just as American Jews today have a sensibility and an ideological orientation different from those of the American Jews of the 1920s or 1930s, so too the Reconstructionist movement has evolved toward other modes of thought since Kaplan. Today, indeed, a great number of Reconstructionist rabbis develop a fairly eclectic philosophy of Judaism, in which the classical ideas inspired by Kaplan cohabit with Hasidic traditions, Buddhism, and political orientations such as feminism or ecology. This tendency began to come into being in the 1980s at the Reconstructionist Seminary. In 1984, a forum entitled “Neo-Hasidism and Reconstructionism” gave rise to much debate and polemic. Thus, Ira Eisenstein, Kaplan’s son-in-law and president of the Seminary, harshly judged the neo-Hasidic phenomenon, arguing that it was not only a sterile mimicry but also a “pathetic nostalgia for a way of life that few were prepared to adopt.” Far more conciliatory, and no doubt preparing the ground for his eventual appointment as president of the RRC, Art Green, for his part, expressed himself thus: “neo-Hasidism shares with Reconstructionism not only the transcendence of conventional theism, but also the feeling that the God we seek is more an essence to be found everywhere, rather than a being who would be different, cut off from the world. While at first glance Hasidism seems remote from Reconstructionism, notably in its singular poetry, in fact certain theological aspects of this current are closer to Reconstructionism than one believes.”25

Kaplan believed greatly in science, in technology, as well as in the human being’s capacity to improve and to make society progress. But since the Shoah and the atomic bomb, American Jews have entered a time that may be described as post-modern. Consequently, a strictly rationalist and pragmatic presentation of the Jewish religion no longer really answers contemporary questionings. Moreover, the synagogue or the community center no longer play the central role they held twenty years earlier. The relationship between the individual and his community has changed. Let us recall that Kaplan’s public was made up of traditionalist New York Jews, most of them from the first or second generation settled in the United States. Those were very attached to the idea of the group. Today, with a high rate of intermarriage, a certain distancing from Israel, and the possibility of forging ties outside the traditional community structures, young American Jews have lost this “ethnic” consciousness. Belonging today, in the era of the Internet and of Facebook, can be virtual. Indeed, the Reconstructionist rabbinical school has just decided to devote 10 percent of its budget to a project entitled Digital Outreach Initiative, whose object is to create new forms of Jewish life online.

Bibliography

Kaplan’s works have not yet been translated into French. But his ideas were the subject of an international colloquium organized at the Palais du Luxembourg on January 17, 2010, by the Alliance Israélite Universelle.

Here are a few of his most important works:

Judaism as a Civilization, New York, Macmillan Company, 1934

The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion, New York, 1936

A New Zionism, New York, 1959

The Future of the American Jew, New York, 1949

The Religion of Ethical Nationhood, New York, 1970

Books on Kaplan’s life and thought

Emanuel S. Goldsmith and Mel Scult, eds. and pref., Dynamic Judaism: The Essential Writings of Mordecai M. Kaplan, New York, Schocken Books–Reconstructionist Press, 1985

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

Mel Scult, Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century: A Biography of Mordecai M. Kaplan, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1993

Jack J. Cohen, “Mordecai Kaplan,” in The “Other” New York Jewish Intellectuals, edited by Carole S. Kessner, New York, New York University Press, 1994

Kaplan’s private journals have been accessible for some months on the website of the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Kaplan was perhaps one of the greatest diarists of twentieth-century Judaism. Begun in 1913 and stopped shortly before his death, they consist of more than 27 volumes. Mel Scult has published Communings of the Spirit: The Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan, Volume One: 1913-1934, Wayne University Press.

Notes

  1. Stephen Berkowitz is one of the rabbis of the MJLF. He is the only rabbi ordained by the Reconstructionist Seminary in Europe.↩︎

  2. Union for Reform Judaism (www.urj.org), the majority current in the United States and in the world.↩︎

  3. United Synagogues of America, called Masorti in France.↩︎

  4. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi is the founder of this new religious current in the United States (www.aleph.org).↩︎

  5. Small non-synagogal structures that manage their own religious and cultural activities.↩︎

  6. cf. www.wupj.org.↩︎

  7. Isaac Elkanan Spector (1817-1896), Naphtali Tsvi Judah (1817-1893), Isaac Jacob Reines (1839-1915), Israel Salanter (1810-1883).↩︎

  8. Louis Finkelstein (1895-1991), Robert Gordis (1908-1992), Simon Greenberg (1901-1993).↩︎

  9. The term “Reconstructionism” — admittedly hard to pronounce in French! — was not borrowed from John Dewey and his work Reconstruction in Philosophy, as is often wrongly said.↩︎

  10. The Menorah Journal, published by the Menorah Association of New York, “for the study and advancement of Jewish culture and ideals.” The first issue came into being in 1915.↩︎

  11. According to Mel Scult, Kaplan’s official biographer, there was never any investigation, but he thinks that an Orthodox Jew present in this room is supposed to have burned the siddur on his own initiative.↩︎

  12. Today a synagogue affiliated with the Israeli Reform movement.↩︎

  13. “Jewish group activities should be conducted in conscious dedication to the solidarity of the Jewish people and the growth of its ethical and spiritual consciousness.”↩︎

  14. William James (1842-1910), John Dewey (1859-1952), Alfred Whitehead (1861-1947), Douglas Clyde Macintosh (1877-1948), Henry Nelson Wieman (1884-1975).↩︎

  15. M. M. Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew, N.Y., Macmillan, 1948, p. 377.↩︎

  16. M. M. Kaplan, The Religion of Ethical Nationhood, N.Y., Macmillan, 1970, p. 174.↩︎

  17. It should nonetheless be noted that a number of his critics said that a God devoid of an absolute power and will cannot be considered the true God.↩︎

  18. Emanuel Goldsmith and Mel Scult, Dynamic Judaism. The Essential Writings of Mordecai M. Kaplan, Fordham University Press, 1991, pp. 21-22.↩︎

  19. Jack J. Cohen, “Mordecai Kaplan,” in The “Other” New York Jewish Intellectuals, Carole S. Kessner, New York University Press, 1974, pp. 298-299.↩︎

  20. The Aleinu prayer was the object of criticism from the Catholic Church. The relevant part — “for they (the other nations) bow down before vanity and emptiness, a god who does not save…” — was suppressed in the Ashkenazi rite.↩︎

  21. Amidah, one of the central prayers in the Jewish liturgy, also called Tefilah (the Prayer) or Shemoneh Esreh (the Eighteen).↩︎

  22. “denounce and combat the social wrongs, the greed, the monopolistic graft that are responsible for this situation,” “Journal of Mordecai Kaplan, June 3, 1931,” in Mel Scult ed., Communings of the Spirit: The Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan, Volume One: 1913-1934, Wayne University Press, p. 141.↩︎

  23. cf. Rebecca Trachtenberg Alpert, “The Quest for Economic Justice: Kaplan’s Response to the Challenge of Communism (1929-1940),” in The American Judaism of Mordecai Kaplan, New York, New York University Press, 1990.↩︎

  24. Zeek: a Jewish Journal of Thought & Culture, Fall 2010.↩︎

  25. Ra’ayanot, Summer 1984, [journal of the association of Reconstructionist rabbis].↩︎

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