The Religious Humanism of Mordecai Kaplan
The Religious Humanism of Mordecai Kaplan, An Anthology
Edited and compiled by Mel Scult
(The Mosaic Press and The Kaplan Center for Jewish Peoplehood, October 2026
Reviewed by Dennis C. Sasso
In the forward to his forthcoming book, The Religious Humanism of Mordecai Kaplan, An Anthology, Mel Scult suggests that “We are in the midst of a Kaplan renaissance.”Mordecai M. Kaplan was the path-breaking 20th-century theologian and leader whose teachings on religious naturalism and the centrality of the idea of Jewish peoplehood and religious civilization helped to define Jewish institutional life as well as personal and collective identity.
The resurgence of interest in Kaplan is attested by the recent acclaimed biography of Kaplan by Jenna Weissman Joselit (Mordecai M. Kaplan: Restless Soul, Yale University Press, 2026) and by scholarly and popular articles, podcasts, and webinars that point to a growing attention to Kaplan’s thought. There is renewed engagement with Kaplan’s legacy through organizations such as the Kaplan Center for Jewish Peoplehood and Beit Kaplan: The Rabbinic Partnership for Jewish Peoplehood, which seek to restore Kaplanian ideology to Reconstructionist institutional and programmatic life. All of this points to more than a scholarly concern with Mordecai Kaplan, the teacher, thinker, and activist who, arguably, best understood, articulated, and defined the meaning of Judaism for 20th-century American Jews. In a groundbreaking study published in 1970 (“Reconstructionism in American Jewish Life,” American Jewish Year Book, Vol 71, pp. 3-99), Charles S. Liebman suggests that “…Reconstructionism comes closer than any other movement or school of thought to articulating the meaning of Judaism for American Jews.” At the end of the nearly 100-page, often critical essay, Liebman concludes that “…Reconstructionism may yet emerge as a most significant force in American Jewish life.”
Mel Scult, who recently celebrated his 90th birthday (ad meah v’esrim – Till 120!), is the respected Kaplan biographer who has spent half a century preserving, editing and teaching Kaplan’s journals and philosophy. In this Anthology he offers us a handy and insightful journey through several unpublished sections of Kaplan’s diaries, arranged thematically along three Categories: 1. “Judaism and Peoplehood,” 2. “Judaism and Spiritual Practice,” and 3. “Kaplan on Kaplan and Famous Others.” The chapters of the book open windows on Kaplan’s ideas on topics such as: Jewish Civilization, peoplehood, democracy, Zionism, social justice, spirituality and piety, theology, Torah, ritual, and prayer.
I found of particular interest the third section where Kaplan’s interactions, both personal and intellectual, with famous Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers are candidly brought to light. From Spinoza to Josiah Royce, from William James and John Dewey to Bertrand Russell and Carl Jung, from Erich Fromm and Abraham Maslow to Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel, we see the pantheon of great thinkers analyzed, affirmed, and often criticized and refuted by Kaplan’s restless mind. An unexpected gift was to find Kaplan’s brief outline for a course on Spinoza that he taught in the early ‘40’s at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He notes, “Spinoza’s importance consists in his crystallizing the spirit of modernism [for] religion in general and Judaism… in particular. He altered radically the universe of thought ….” One might wonder how Kaplan regarded himself in his generation.
Those who think of Kaplan as dispassionate and strictly rational scholar will be surprised and perhaps even moved to find elements of deep religiosity reflected in his personal ruminations and theological reflections: “I prefer God without perfection … than perfection without God. The God of philosophy is perfection with a capital P, cold, impersonal, immovable, infinitely negative. It is because God is to me the warm, personal element in life’s inner urge to creativity and self-expression that I can conscientiously employ the name YHWH when praying.” Here we see Kaplan shaping his process, naturalistic thinking without abdicating spirituality and piety.
Elsewhere, Scult quotes Kaplan musing: “To want to know where the self ends and God begins is like wanting to know where the musician ends and the music begins.” A touching selection is a letter that Kaplan wrote to the youth of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, the congregation he founded in 1922 (and where his daughter Judith famously celebrated the “first Bat-Mitzvah”). Dated on the eve of Rosh Hashanah (1923), the letter is addressed to “My Dear Boys and Girls.” In the body of the tenderly crafted missive, Kaplan focuses on “Happiness” as a spiritual theme, quotes the Psalms, and wishes the young people happiness, informing them that religion “is the art of being happy and making others happy.” This is Kaplan’s distillation for Jewish youth of his notion of “Soterics,” his theory of “Salvation,” which Kaplan identifies not with a supernatural belief in the hereafter, but with Sheleymut, wholeness, the redemption of life to its fullest potential, individually and collectively.
The anthology affords us insights on key Kaplanian concepts, such as his belief in vocation rather than chosenness; his understanding of ritual as sancta rather than commandment, and his thoughts on peoplehood, Zionism, and the American democratic tradition. A most lovely feature of this anthology, however, is the revelation of the inward, doubt-filled, passionate and very human Kaplan that Scult has sculpted for us.
Kaplan found meaning in the poems and meditations of many traditions. Scribbled on a title page of an unpublished manuscript was the William Blake poem:
I sought my soul and my soul I could not see;
I sought my God, but my God eluded me;
I sought my brother and I found all three.
Kaplan was devout and is said to have been the only faculty member at the Seminary who would often begin class with a prayer. To this end, he composed “The Scholar’s Prayer”:
From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth,
From the laziness that is content with half-truths,
From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth,
O, Lord of truth, deliver us.
Mel Scult, in his forthcoming book, The Religious Humanism of Mordecai Kaplan, An Anthology, reveals a great thinker who blends rationalism with reverence, mind with spirit and shows us a faithful, passionate, brilliant and soulful Mordecai Kaplan.
(Page references are not given in this review as I quote from the manuscript provided to me by the author rather than from the final printed edition of the forthcoming book, available through The Mosaic Press in October 2026).
