← Towards a Spiritual Humanistic Judaism · Part III — Formation, prayer and pastoral life
Mel Scult’s anthology of Kaplan’s religious humanism turns inward at its fourth chapter. After civilisation, peoplehood, democracy and ethics, the reader is given piety, wonder, the higher self, hope and creativity — the private religious life of the century’s foremost Jewish religious sociologist. Three of its moves are gifts to any Judaism that seeks spiritual depth without making supernaturalism a condition of practice.15
Piety is re-grounded rather than discarded. Borrowing Santayana’s formula — reverence for the sources of our being — Kaplan detaches piety from submission to a commanding God and re-grounds it in gratitude and awe directed at whatever has produced and sustains a person: nature, ancestry, community, tradition. The object shifts and the feeling survives intact.
Wonder is brought home. The miracle is not the sea splitting but the ordinary interdependence that puts a meal on a table. The move belongs with Rudolf Otto’s numinous and Heschel’s radical amazement as a serious attempt to locate the non-rational core of religious experience, with the distinguishing feature that Kaplan’s version can be practised on a Tuesday.
The religious affections are stances, not conclusions. Scult says this outright of hope, which does not depend on believing that things will turn out well. It is equally true of reverence, which is not an inference about the universe but a way of standing in front of it.
That claim can be made exact, and the exactness matters, since hope is the disposition on which a naturalistic expression of Judaism is most often challenged. Three things are habitually run together. Confidence is an estimate: it follows the evidence, should move when the evidence moves, and does not require wanting the outcome, since a person may be confident that something bad will happen. Optimism is a favourable tilt in that estimate, a disposition to read uncertainty kindly; it is useful because it keeps a person engaged, and it becomes denial at the point where it will no longer move. Hope is not primarily a prediction at all. It requires that a good outcome remain possible rather than likely, and it requires wanting that outcome. It permits a person to attend to a good possibility, dwell on it and organise their actions around it without predicting it.
The distinction disposes of the standard objection. A naturalist is charged with having no ground for hope because no outcome can be promised; but hope was never a promise about outcomes, and what it needs — possibility and desire — survives the loss of a guarantee intact. The distinction also explains how hope can be obligatory when a feeling cannot be. What is owed is the action: the curriculum in Chapter 9 instructs the practitioner to act as though it matters, particularly when they cannot feel that it does. The wanting is not commanded. It is what the repeated action tends to keep alive.
The chapter’s difficulty is that it supplies no framework saying what kind of thing these qualities are, how they relate to one another, or how a person would acquire any of them. In consequence it returns to reverence, wonder and the higher self from a dozen angles without arriving; its motifs recur rather than develop, and the picture emerges by accumulation. For an anthology this is proper — an editor is assembling a mind, not prosecuting a case — but it leaves the material unusable as instruction.
The category the chapter needs is middah. Every quality it names is a trainable attribute of character: anavah is not a mood that visits but a discipline with a literature; so is hakarat ha-tov; so is ḥeshbon ha-nefesh*, the accounting of the soul, which is what Kaplan’s lifelong diary project in fact was. Scult’s Chapter Four can be read as an unacknowledged mussar text — the phenomena of a mussar curriculum, presented without the organising category.
Shuster reaches the same specification from the institutional side. Holistic, habitual and committed is exactly how one works on a quality of character; it is not how one holds an opinion. Both writers circle the same absent term.
No single noun replaces piety, and the refusal is principled. Kaplan keeps the word; Schulweis would supply godliness. Neither is adopted here and no third term is offered in their place. Moral aspiration is too narrow, since grief, love and wonder are not aspirations. Reverence names something real and cannot contain the whole. Spirituality is serviceable but drifts towards the generic, the individual and the detachable. Holiness is exact about what is set apart, and needs the account given in Chapter 2 before it can be used. What is proposed instead is the plurality itself — awe, gratitude, grief, joy, wonder, love, conscience, reverence, moral aspiration, belonging and responsibility — each given inherited language, rhythm, practice and community by a Jewish civilisation. This is not evasion. It is the same operation performed twice: what Chapter 2 declines to do with justice, compassion and truth, gathering them into a divine Subject, is declined here for the interior life, which need not be collected into a single name before it can count as religious.
Kaplan’s own distinction requires one correction. He separates the prose of religion from the poetry of piety, and the separation is generally taken to sort vocabularies, with civilisational language on one side and the language of the affections on the other. It does not hold. Amenu, our people, is peoplehood language and prose by that sorting; sung among thousands at seliḥot, at the moment a person becomes conscious of an us extending across places, generations and forms of Jewish life, belonging stops being information and becomes astonishment. The same word is prose when recited automatically and poetry when its meaning is felt. What separates them is not the register of the vocabulary but the quality of attention brought to it — which is why a civilisation requires disciplines of attention, and why this distinction cannot carry the weight Kaplan puts on it.
The category also answers a question of provenance. Scult’s Chapter Four draws its vocabulary from Santayana, Emerson, Jung, Otto and Havel; the one substantial rabbinic contribution, the yetzer ha-tov and yetzer ha-ra, arrives late and already reframed in evolutionary-psychological terms. A reader who suspects that Kaplan’s Judaism is thinner than it should be will point here first. The response is not to defend Emerson but to observe that the furniture was already in the house.
Baḥya ibn Paquda composed Ḥovot ha-Levavot — Duties of the Heart — in Judeo-Arabic at Zaragoza around 1080, on the premise that the tradition had systematised the duties of the limbs and neglected those of the heart. Its ten gates give the interior life an order: unity, reflection, service, trust, consecration of action, humility, repentance, self-examination, abstinence and love.20 The second gate, sha’ar ha-beḥinah, is a discipline of reflection on creation — the elements, the human frame, the animal and plant kingdoms, the sciences and arts — which is to say wonder-at-the-everyday, eight and a half centuries before Kaplan reached for Santayana to name it.
Two things follow. One foundational strand of the Jewish literature of the inner life is Andalusian, which matters for a movement that treats Sephardi and Mizrahi practice as normative rather than as an annual novelty; and that strand long predates the American philosophical tradition Kaplan drew on, so the choice was never between an authentic Jewish exterior and a borrowed interior. The caveat is that Baḥya is a theist whose gates are duties owed to God, so appropriating him requires the operation performed throughout this thesis: keep the form, move the sacred from the subject to the predicate, address the practice horizontally.
And the omission cannot be excused on grounds of access. Scult records in his third chapter that Kaplan’s father studied with Rabbi Israel Salanter, the founder of the mussar movement. The literature of trained moral character was not in a library Kaplan could not reach. It was one generation away, in his father’s study house.21 Why he described the interior life in Santayana’s vocabulary rather than Salanter’s is a genuine question. He may have associated mussar with an asceticism he had left behind, which is a fair reading of parts of its literature; he may have judged that American Jews in 1930 would not read a book that sounded like Slobodka; or the sociologist may simply have crowded out the moralist, since his instinct was always to explain religion by what it does for a group, and mussar is a technology of the individual soul.
A note on the ethical grammar. Alongside its commandments, the tradition carries a second ethical register: middot — anavah, ḥesed, emet, hakarat hatov — attributes cultivated over a lifetime. A middah is an attribute, not an imperative, which means the ethical stratum requires no grammatical repair at all. Anavah is holy works exactly as goodness is holy does. The predicate move this thesis makes on theological language turns out to have been available in Jewish ethics already.
Two qualities require argument before they can be scheduled, because Scult’s Chapter Four leaves each with an unresolved difficulty.
Wonder. If the miracle is the interdependence that produces a meal, has anything religious survived, or has the word been diluted until it means agreeable? Kaplan’s opposition is ordinary against miraculous, and it is a losing framing, since the more ordinary the object the weaker the word. The opposition proposed here is explicable against supernatural. Conscience is not ordinary; it is astonishing, and it is fully naturalisable. The emergence of ethics from primate sociality is among the more remarkable things known about the species, and knowing how it happened does not diminish it. A total eclipse is predicted to the second and can still terrify the people who travelled to watch it. The claim required is only that understanding something does not dissolve awe at it — which is not a religious claim, and which most scientists will grant.
But changing the object leaves the mechanism unexplained, and this is the practical gap. Kaplan never says how the ordinary becomes remarkable, only that it does; his lunch is a miracle because he has decided to regard it so, and a wonder available on demand by decision will not survive a bad week. The mechanism is not attention alone. It is boundary: a durable discipline that keeps directing attention, including on the days when wonder is absent. Kashrut places a permanent limit around eating, and because it applies to every meal rather than to exceptional ones, it lifts the ordinary meal out of the ordinary continuously, whether or not the person keeping it feels reverent. That is kadosh in its root sense applied to a whole category of daily act, and it does not depend on a mood.
The same principle governs which restrictions are worth reconstructing: one that reveals something is worth keeping, one that merely restricts is not. The separation of meat and milk keeps in view what meat is — the flesh of an animal, and the milk meant to feed its young — at the moment it is most convenient to forget, and being visible it must be explained, which obliges its keeper to articulate a position repeatedly. The boundary is epistemic before it is ritual, making visible the relations among human beings, other animals, labour and ecosystems which the food system is organised to hide. This is Kaplan’s lunch extended past the human network to the whole web that produced the meal, including the parts that are not human and the parts that are not comfortable.
The yetsarim: integration rather than suppression
The world’s moral brokenness is humanly caused, but not because human beings possess a yetser hará. Appetite, ambition, self-interest, anger and the drive for self-preservation are necessary energies of human life. They enable us to build, create, protect ourselves, challenge oppression and pursue change. The rabbinic tradition partly recognised this when it observed that without the so-called evil inclination no one would build a house, establish a household or undertake the work by which the world continues.
The yetser hatov does not suppress these drives. It is the capacity of conscience to examine, balance and direct them towards life-enhancing ends. Its content is not disclosed by a supposedly pure inner voice. It is tested through tsedek, ḥesed, raḥamim, emet, human dignity and consequence, and strengthened through repeated folkways, communal expectation and moral repair.
Anger can be morally clarifying, motivating and energising. Anger at homophobia, misogyny, racism, ableism and high-control religion arises because these forces violate human dignity and damage human lives. Anger and despair both begin in an encounter with what is wrong, but they are differently structured. Anger contains the recognition that something should have been otherwise and may still be changed: anger can be the residual heat of hope. It becomes an instrument of justice when it turns towards organising, educating, resisting, protecting and returning to the work.
The danger lies not in anger itself but in allowing anger to become indiscriminate hatred, cruelty, vengeance or dehumanisation. Tsedek tsedek tirdof commands the pursuit of justice rather than its possession. Read as a condition on the manner as well as an intensification of the demand, it requires justice to be pursued justly. A pursuit that reproduces cruelty or dehumanisation has ceased to embody the value it claims.
Spiritual discipline therefore means neither denying our impulses nor rising above them. It means integrating them, directing their energy wisely and remaining accountable for what we do through them. Holiness is not freedom from human passion; it is the cultivation of human passion in the service of life, dignity, relationship and repair. The purpose of Spiritual Humanistic Jewish practice is not to produce religious feeling for its own sake but to make the yetser hatov more available when feeling is absent and choice is difficult.