As many of you know I learned about Judaism from the classic Reconstructionists, Mordecai Kaplan and his principal colleague and disciple, our own Ira Eisenstein, z'l. In the Hebrew School at the Society For the Advancement of Judaism, as the first and for a long time the only Reconstructionist synagogue in the world was called, we were taught Zionism from a Reconstructionist perspective. We not only learned the story of the resettlement of Eretz Yisrael and about the emergence of the State (through which we were living). We were also encouraged to act upon the Reconstructionist vision of the role Eretz Yisrael would play in the revitalization of the Jewish religion. Based upon that early teaching and experience and a recent review of some of Kaplan's writings about Zionism, I will atttempt in the briefly to summarize the views of the classic Reconstructionists of the Zionist enterprise.
Let me begin with the response of the Reconstructionist magazine, which was then published at the S.A.J. to the creation of the State of Israel. When in the midst of the Palestinian Arab attack and external invasion the Jews of Palestine declared their independence, The Reconstructionist Magazine, published an editorial captioned “ The Miracle Has Happened. The Editorial reported the “spiritual exultation” with which Jews everywhere greeted the news, and it “sensed the transcendent importance of the historic occasion.” “Who would have believed possible fifty years ago what happened today?” it asked. It then enumerated the remarkable steps that led up to thismoment: the revival of the Hebrew language, the settlement by a reviled people that the world thought to be a ghost, that, indeed, had come to doubt its own right to a collective existence; the restoration of a barren and desolate land, and the achievement of statehood in the midst of peoples bent on thwarting that consummation. “Such an achievement smacks of the miraculous,” said the writers.
The editorial went on to quote from the Israeli Declaration of Independence. “The State of Israel will promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; will be based on precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew Prophets; will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens wihtout distinctioin of race, creed or sex, will safeguard the sanctity and inviolability of shrines and holy places of all religioins, and will dedicate itself to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” In italics, the Reconstructionist quoted“Our call goes out to the Jewish people all over the world to rally to our side in the task of immigration and development and to satand by us in the great struggle for the fulfillment of the dream of generations—the redemption of Israel.” That phrase bears repeating: “the redemption of Israel.” For that is how the Reconstructionists then and now see the return of Jews to their land, as a step towards the redemption of Israel. Let us see why.
The classic Reconstructionists were Zionists in two senses. First, they believed with the political Zionists, of whom Herzl was the most prominent, but not the first, that the triumph of European nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries made the position of the Jews in Europe untenable. For millennia we Jews had lived in our own, largely self-governing communities, communities that has their own courts, imposed their own taxes, and were governed by our own legal system. The new nation states abolished those communities, leaving the individual Jew naked and alone, and, as an outsider, not sharing in the ethnico-cultural identity of the states in which he/she lived, subject to recurring eruptions of anti-Semitism with its accompanying pogroms and always to discrimination sometimes silent, sometimes virulent. Many political Zionists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries believed that there was no longer any place where Jews would be safe, certainly not in Europe.
Well before the holocaust the early Reconstructionists, unlike most other religious Jews in the U.S., concluded that Herzl was right.“If they are to put an end to their homelessness,” Kaplan wrote, “they must have the courage to come before the people of the world with the just demand of their right to survival as a people be recognized and honored.”That could only happen if the Jews had a homeland where we would be recognized as a nation in our own right. The homeland would function as a refuge for those threatened with extinction and hopefully augment the stature of those who remained behind in the Diaspora.
We happy few raised in the S.A.J. Hebrew school were taught political Zionism well before its basic diagnosis was horifically validated by the War Against The Jews. We didn’t just talk; we practiced the idea of supporting the Yishuv, the Jewish settlement in Palestine. I remember as a ten year old boy walking along Central Park West in Manhattan, where many of my relatives and friends lived, with a book of 10 cent Jewish National Fund tickets and accosting one passerby after another to buy a ticket to plant a tree in Israel. Some did; most refused; one man’s response was stamped indelibly on my young mind. “Why can’t you Jews raise your own damned money?” he snarled. That was hard lesson that brought home the need for a Jewish State and the reality that supporting it would not always be easy.
The early Reconstructionists were not only political Zionists. They were also cultural Zionists. Kaplan was a follower of Ahad HaAm who had warned that, salutary though it was, the Haskalah, the movement of Jews to become educated in secular subjects, threatened to lead to the assimilation and eventual extinction of the Jewish people. The attraction of secular learning, with the hopes it raised of economic and professional advancement, would be so great that Jews would neglect their own culture, which would suffer by contrast. Soon, Jewish life would be extinguished in a wave of assimilation. To prevent this denouement Ahad HaAm and others called for a renaissance of Jewish culture that would include the revival of Hebrew language, the creation of new Hebrew literature, and a Jewish press. The renaissance would be Jewish, but it would be infused with the ideas of the enlightenment, of Haskalah.Thus strengthened, Jewish life would be enriched and preserved.Many of the cultural Zionists (including Ahad HaAm himself)were not political Zionists. They were convinced that their program could be implemented in the Diaspora. But all were dedicated to energizing and changing the face of the Jewish people.
Kaplan and his followers embraced both political and cultural Zionism. But they were persuaded that the cultural renaissance that Ahad Ha Am called for couldnot flourish in the Diaspora. It required a homeland where all Jews spoke Hebrew, and therefore had easy access to the riches of the Jewish past,and where Jews could pursue secular learning without shedding their Jewishness.
Kaplan went further. Political and cultural Zionism Kaplan would not be sufficient to sustain the Jewish people either in Israel or in the Diaspora. In his view, Zionism had to be nothing less than a program for the regeneration of the Jewish people. And that required religion. Kaplan saw religion as a natural product of a people’s growth. Without religion, their souls would atrophy and they would not survive. Kaplan did not use the term “religion” the way most people did as referring to a body of beliefs and rules of behavior revealed by a supernatural Being and preserved in an authoritative text. Rather, Kaplan understood religion as the ethical ideas and values, philosophical beliefs, spiritual experiences,narratives, and rituals that sustained a group’s inner life, that is, that gave the people that possessed itpurpose and hope. Without religion, Kaplan feared,political Zionism could degenerate into mere nationalism, if not chauvinism.
As you know, Kaplan was not satisfied with the Jewish religion of his day. He on their own. and he was alarmed at the compromises the Yishuv and then the State of Israel made with the orthodox in Palestine/Israel. He insisted that Israel had to adopt the pluralist approach that had worked in the U.S. Indeed, he urged that Israel embrace the separation between religion and the State that prevailed here. That was necessary, he thought, not only because the Jews of Israel and elsewhere were not religiously of one mind but because he saw the need for a radical reconstruction of the Jewish religion that could never take place if the force of the State lay behind the “old time religion” which he decried. One of the early Reconstructionist hopes for Israel was that it would become a center for religious change as, faced with the real life problems of a nation and enriched by the possibilities that statehood created for implementing cherished values in the social and political life of the people, Israel turned to the things of the spirit. Kaplan had created a rich program of religious change that he argued would revitalize Jewish religious life, and Israel, he expected, would adopt it. After all, unlike Diaspora Jews, Israelis spoke and wrote in Hebrew and therefore had access to the rich Jewish culture of the past and the tools to build upon it that, except for a few scholars,Diaspora Jewry lacked. And the Israelis were steeped in modernity. It was natural, he thought, that they would infuse our religion with the breath of modernity, as he sought to do, to the immense benefit of the Jewish people everywhere. championed a new, this worldly religion that embraced human freedom, individual liberty, and intellectual tolerance. That vision required a new Torah, one that selectively incorporated materials from Torah in the narrow sense, from the later documents of the rabbinic tradition, and from the best insights of other peoples.That concept of Torah would make us more “fully human,” as Kaplan often put it. Pursuing it would “render” the Jewish people a “highly civilized and humane factor for universal freedom,justice, and brotherhood.”The vision, Kaplan believed, could only be implemented through creative interaction between Jews living in Israel and Jews in the diaspora.
Eretz
Yisrael was indispensable. Jews whose language was Hebrew would have easy
access to the Jewish past and the Jewish spirit, something Diaspora Jewry
clearly lacked.A land that was Jewish
and whose people were inevitably involved in the contemporary world could
foster and enhance the modern, Jewish renaissance that the cultural Zionists
(and Kaplan) felt Jews everywhere needed. Kaplan believed that the new Judaism
that he dreamed of would emerge from the application of the new Torah to the
everyday human and political problems that a modern state must face, tasks and
duties that had never been contemplated by traditional Jewish law. Furthermore,
he argued, the “core” (his term) of Diaspora Jewry would have to be educated in
Israel so that it could become fluent in Hebrew and imbibe the new culture.
Diaspora Jews, immersed in their own lands, their own careers, and the culture
of their countries, would lack the time and incentive to engage in the in depth
learning Kaplan envisioned as essential if Judaism were to be revitalized. He
also, I suspect, had a mystic sense of how setting foot uponthe Land of Our Ancestors and meeting full
time Jews who lived there and spoke
Hebrew would energize Jews, especially young Jews, who lived
elsewhere.You may catch a glimpse of
that vision in the prayer that I have distributed.
On the other hand, Kaplan also saw Diaspora Jewry (and especially after the holocaust and the Arab governments’ expulsion of all but a handful of Jews from their lands this largely meant U.S. Jewry) as essential to the vital survival of Judaism in Eretz Yisrael. Democratic ideas were an integral part of the warp and woof of western Diaspora life, and those who lived in that sea could most easily provide the pearls that Israel needed to implement the democratic, humanist vision that Kaplan felt must undergird the reborn State.
On the more mundane level, Kaplan reocgnized the threat that the political power of orthodoxy posed to the achievement of his program for a revitalized Jewish religion andpeople.He was alarmed at the dangerous fusion between government and religion that began even before the state was declared and continued to expand during Kaplan’s time. The best antidote for that, he believed, was the example and the thinking of Diaspora(read American) Jewry.
That
summarizes the classic Reconstructionist view of the New Zionism. It is
reflected inthe paragraph in our
Birkat Ha Mazon, the grace after meals, that says “Let us give thanks for the
covenant, for the Torah, and for the land of our people’s birth and rebirth.”
And the response? “For the culture, faith, and hope of our people alive once
more in Eretz Yisrael.” I think those words hark back to the early
Reconstructionist aspirations for the new State, aspirations that Kaplan, for
one, never abandoned.
Returning to the article in The Reconstructionist with which I began, let me report that it warned that there were difficult days ahead, that it urged all Jews everywhere to support the newly created State, and to leave political matters to the Israelis because, said the editorial writers, Israel was a sovereign, democratic state and therefore entitled to pursue its own destiny. Our influence, they might have said, should be moral, and limited to helping Israel to fulfill its critical role in preserving and enhancing the creative, exciting life of a newly revitalized,Jewish people all of whose members are, as we are reminded every month, “areyvim zeh la zeh,” responsible for one another.
Another
primary hope that the early Reconstructionist cherished was that Israel would
serve as a cultural center, from which a stream of new ideas and artistic
creations would flow to the Diaspora. They expected that Diaspora Jews would
visit and study in Israel and that immersed in the vibrant cultural and
religious life there, Diaspora Jews would be uplifted and Diaspora Judaism
rescued from the spiritual apathy that Kaplan, at least, thought infected
American Jews.But traffic between
Diaspora and Israeli Jews were not to be a one way street. Kaplan and his
followershope d that Diaspora Jews
would enrich and help sustain the Israeli community not only by speaking out on
its behalf in our own nations and communities but also by sharing the benefits of
their experience and thinking with the Jews of Israel. Because, of course,
Kaplan saw the Jews as one people. He hoped that inspired by the best in the
Torah, the visions of the prophets, the later teachings of the rabbis, and the
worthy ideas of other peoples that he believed should be incorporated into our
religion, our entire people would become a highly civilized and humane factor
pursuing universal freedom, justice, and brotherhood.
Rabbi George Driesen