Background
Born in Vilna, Lithuania, at age seven he was taken to New York by his father, Rabbi Israel Kaplan who served in the New York rabbinical court.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00085FZ5C/?tag=2022091-20
1947
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007G32FC/?tag=2022091-20
1966
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/082760193X/?tag=2022091-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0876771428/?tag=2022091-20
Born in Vilna, Lithuania, at age seven he was taken to New York by his father, Rabbi Israel Kaplan who served in the New York rabbinical court.
He attended a yeshiva, a public school, the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York City College, and Columbia University, where he studied philosophy and sociology.
His first appointment was to the Orthodox Kehilath Jeshurun congregation in 1903. He was not happy in the rabbinate and in 1909 moved to the Jewish Theological Seminary as principal of its recently created Teachers’ Institute, which he directed until the 1940s. He was also prominent in the New York community, especially in the attempt by Judah L. Magnes to establish a New York kehilla (organized community). He became increasingly radical in his views, vehemently rejecting Orthodoxy and Reform, and feeling that Conservative Judaism required a new direction.
Kaplan was critical of the traditional liturgy and published a series of prayer books that he felt were more suited to the modern Jew. The Union of Orthodox Rabbis burned his prayer book during an excommunication ceremony against Kaplan in New York. Kaplan continued to teach in the seminary’s Rabbinical School until 1963. When the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College was established in Philadelphia in 1968 with Kaplan’s son-in-law, Ira Eisenstein, as its president, Kaplan taught there. In his nineties, he moved to Jerusalem, but returned to the United States when he was ninety-eight to spend his last years there.
Kaplan’s first and most influential book, Judaism as a Civilization, was published in 1934, followed by many other works containing his teachings, including The Future of the American Jew, The Religion of Ethical Nationhood, and The Greater Judaism in the Making.
In 1922, he founded the Society for the Advancement of Judaism out of which grew the Reconstructionist Movement, based on his teachings. He did not see it as a separate Jewish denomination but as a means to influence the existing ones, and it had a considerable impact in Conservative and Reform circles.
He culled critically from the traditional (which he differentiated from Orthodox), Reform, Conservative, and Zionist traditions. He saw Judaism as an evolving religious civilization threatened by modern naturalism, w'hich challenged supernatural faith, as well as what he saw as the outmoded belief that salvation would be achieved in the hereafter. Zionism he saw as the only trend capable of saving the historic nationhood of the Jews; it had adjusted itself to the modern situation far more successfully than the theological movements but had failed to provide a way of life for Jews in the Diaspora.
His own program synthesized elements from all four trends: “From Reform, the capacity to treat Jewish religion as an evolving historical process; from Conservatism, the identification of the Jewish people as a permanent reality; from Orthodoxy, the acceptance of Torah as the Magna Carta of the Jewish religion and as a covenant with the homeland: and from Zionism the concept of Judaism as an all-embracing civilization rooted in the Land of Israel.” Judaism, he taught, had to be reconstructed and adapted to the modern world. The ultimate purpose of life is salvation and he defined God as that power which makes for salvation.
Quotations:
• The foremost problem in Jewish religion is how to get the Jews to take the Bible seriously without taking it literally.
• To interpret the Torah properly we must remember that the w'hole of it is more than the sum of its parts.
• The ancient authorities are entitled to a vote — but not to a veto.
• The cure for anxiety about the future is not nostalgia for the past.
• People whose religion begins and ends with worship and ritual practices are like soldiers forever maneuvering but never getting into action.
