Mordecai Kaplan Topics

• reconstructionist rabbinical college
• reconstructionist judaism
• union of orthodox rabbis
• saul lieberman
• seminary professors
• louis ginzberg
• sabbath prayer
• understanding judaism
• religious civilization
• conservative judaism
• reform judaism
• naturalistic conception
• passover seder
• religious denomination
• conception of god
• prayer book
• jewish practice
• target
• separate school

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Mordecai Kaplan, Mordecai Kaplan

Indeed, in 1945 the Union of Orthodox Rabbis "formally assembled to excommunicate from Judaism what it deemed to be the community's most heretical voice: Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the man who eventually would become the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism. Kaplan, a critic of both Orthodox and Reform Judaism, believed that Jewish practice should be reconciled with modern thought, a philosophy reflected in his Sabbath Prayer Book the target of the 1945 fire." In 1909 Kaplan joined the staff at JTS, where he had his greatest impact by teaching Conservative Jewish rabbinic and Jewish education students over a 50-year period. His central idea of understanding Judaism as a religious civilization was an easily accepted position within Conservative Judaism, but his naturalistic conception of God was not as acceptable. Even at JTS, as The Forward writes, "he was an outsider, and often privately considered leaving the institution. In 1941, the faculty illustrated its distaste with Kaplan by penning a unanimous letter to the professor of homiletics, expressing complete disgust with Kaplan's The New Haggadah for the Passover Seder. Four years later, seminary professors Alexander Marx, Louis Ginzberg and Saul Lieberman went public with their rebuke by writing a letter to the Hebrew newspaper Hadoar , lambasting Kaplan's prayer book and his entire career as a rabbi." His followers attempted to induce him to formally leave Conservative Judaism, but he stayed with JTS until he retired in 1963. Finally, in 1968, his closest disciple and son-in-law Ira Eisenstein founded a separate school, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC), in which Kaplan's philosophy, Reconstructionist Judaism, would be promoted as a separate religious denomination.

Source: Wikipedia > Mordecai Kaplan