Kaplan’s Approach to Prayer Appreciated and Challenged

Abstract

Kaplan’s Approach to Prayer Appreciated and Challenged Eric Caplan Introduction Mordecai M. Kaplan (1881–1983), the ideological founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, is an important figure in the development of American Jewish liturgy. Kaplan and his closest followers—Eugene Kohn and Ira Eisenstein among others—coedited the New Haggadah (1941), the Sabbath Prayer Book (1945), the High Holiday Prayer Book (1948), the Festival Prayer Book (1958), and the Daily Prayer Book (1963). Prior to the publication of these works, Kaplan oversaw the publication of two collections of readings to be used to enrich prayer services. How can we account for Mordecai Kaplan’s obvious interest in liturgy? The most common way of responding to this question is to point to Kaplan’s famous desire for intellectual honesty in prayer. Kaplan believed that “In religion, as in everything else, we must not say what we do not mean.”1 Having concluded that it is no longer possible to believe, among other things, that the Bible was revealed, that God will send a personal messiah, and that the dead will be physically resurrected in the future, he could no longer pray the traditional liturgy and believed that many contemporary Jews were in a similar position. This explained, he thought, why so many stayed away from the synagogue. Kaplan’s liturgical efforts were definitely motivated by his desire to put into congregants’ hands a text that reflected modern belief and thereby made prayer more possible for them. But the desire for intellectual honesty only partially explains Kaplan’s liturgical efforts. It does not explain, for example, why over half of Kaplan’s prayer books were devoted to supplementary readings, the majority of which do not serve as a counter voice to prayers that Kaplan found theologically troubling. It also does not provide any insight into why Kaplan was so concerned, in the first place, that Jews continue to pray. After all, he could have responded to the empty pews of his time by seeing the death of communal prayer as simply another stage in the natural evolution of Jewish practice. Sacrifices, too, were once an essential component of Jewish ritual life but ceased after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70CE. Not every component of Jewish tradition that dies needs to be revived. Mordecai Kaplan, however, could not stand idly by while Jews abandoned traditional prayer because he believed that prayer was essential to the realization of religion’s primary purpose: motivating people to strive for a more just world order. And it is this belief in the importance of prayer that provides the most comprehensive explanation for Kaplan’s liturgical creativity. For Mordecai Kaplan, “The problem of serious‐minded religionists is not: how can we get people to become religious? But, How can we get religion to make people better?”2 Kaplan wanted religion to serve both as a catalyst for individual moral growth and for inspiring collective progress in the “struggle against poverty, disease, ignorance, oppression and war.”3 He recognized that achieving progress in these areas was not easy and believed that to persevere in the task an individual needed to have strong faith that the world and its people could indeed be perfected. Fostering that faith is an essential function of religion. It requires the cultivation in people of two complementary states of mind: appreciation of the world’s blessings—for if the world already has good within it there is reason to believe that this good can be expanded—and the conviction that there exists a Force in the universe (God) that supports the human quest to achieve a better world and thus makes this goal attainable. As Kaplan explains, Every experience of success in overcoming the misery of cowardice, envy, hate and greed is an experience of God. Faith in God is faith in the possibility of such achievements, without which we inevitably sink into moral defeatism. That is why religious belief, in the sense of faith in the Power that makes for salvation, is indispensable to modern man no less than it was to his forefathers, as reinforcement for ethical living.4 The purpose of prayer For Kaplan, engaging in prayer is of great help...