← Towards a Spiritual Humanistic Judaism · Part IV — Carrying the work
The communal costs of reconstruction are real and should not be minimised.
There is alienation from inherited language. A person who has said baruch atah Adonai since childhood does not simply exchange it for nevarech et ha-ḥayim. Something is lost, and what is lost is frequently not the belief — often abandoned years earlier — but the sound of a parent’s voice saying it.
There is reduced intelligibility to other Jews. This liturgy cannot be said in most Jewish rooms. The traditional formula is a shared possession which allows a Jew to pray anywhere, meaning something different from the person alongside without ever having to say so. That ambiguity is not hypocrisy but a social technology by which a scattered people has held together across enormous theological difference, and it is given up here.
There is rupture with previous generations. To reconstruct a text is to say publicly that what one’s grandmother said is not what one will say. Kaplan’s excommunication at the McAlpin Hotel is the dramatic version of the cost; the ordinary version is a cousin who stops coming.
There is emotional loss that outlives intellectual conviction. A belief can be incredible and still mourned, and a movement should not be surprised by grief for a God nobody in the room believes in.
And there is the risk that a reconstructed liturgy ceases to feel Jewish — the risk worked against hardest here, by retaining the Hebrew, the melodies, the shape of the service and the calendar, and one that has been held off rather than defeated.
There is also the risk that thickness becomes domination. Fuchs-Kreimer’s language of deepened Jewish identification and the contemporary recovery of obligation can be heard as a demand that the community occupy every region of a person’s life. That is not the claim made here. Whole-life Judaism means that Jewish practice can address the table, the week, money, speech, grief and public responsibility; it does not mean that an institution is entitled to surveillance or total control. Boettiger’s image of the semipermeable boundary is the better one: a self and a community must be open enough to be changed and bounded enough not to disappear. Covenant creates obligations, not ownership.
Against these, the principle argued throughout: the cost is unavoidable and should therefore purchase something. Deletion pays the same price as reconstruction and produces silence.
Two conceptual costs. The position sacrifices some anthropocentrism. If animals, places, inherited objects and food stand within the relations through which holiness is constituted, human beings are not the sole locus of value, and a straightforward humanism which says otherwise has been left behind.10 That extension also requires policing at the edges, because it is defensible only while it describes effects rather than essences: the moment the language slides from this clock carries her to she is in the clock, the honesty test bites, and it bites hardest there because the slide is easy and consoling.
Three questions remain open, and each would require its own study.
The objectivity of ethics. Kaplan insists that surrendering divine command must not reduce ethics to preference: the values are underived and independent of expediency, issuing from conscience as the source of the ought. Chapter 7 offers a four-source answer — human experience, consequences, the testimony of those affected and the continuing Jewish argument — and that answer is sufficient to show that the constitution is not communal preference, since a community can be shown to be wrong by each of the four in turn. It is not sufficient to settle the metaethical question. Whether the four converge because they track something, or converge because they are four expressions of a single human situation, is left undecided here; and so, therefore, is the status of anavah is holy as a claim which could be false. Several lines are available — that the middot answer to consequences and are therefore checkable; that moral facts may be underived without being handed down; that a naturalistic account of conscience’s origin no more subjectivises its verdicts than a naturalistic account of the eye subjectivises sight — and the thesis does not adjudicate between them.
Codification of conduct. Kaplan’s instruction is to be flexible with ritual and inflexible with the ethical: justice, mercy and humility, he writes, call for clear formulation and effective elaboration into codes of conduct governing the manifold human relations. The provisional constitution in Chapter 7 supplies the governing principles and the curriculum in Chapter 9 supplies disciplines, but neither yet constitutes a complete code. What would answer Kaplan is the same method applied to conduct — speech, money, obligations to strangers, the treatment of animals, the handling of harm within a community — written, specific, revisable and reviewed. The distinction between constitution and code matters: the constitution states what no policy may violate; the code translates those commitments into procedures which experience can test and amend.
Exclusion. The account of belonging offered here is a practice rather than a proposition: membership requires entry into a stated ethos, passage through a process that leaves evidence, and a practice the person can state. It does not say what forfeits membership. The instinct is that conduct forfeits it where belief never could — that a person who harms others within the community places themselves outside in a way no theological position does — but that is an instinct rather than a policy, and a movement with a radically open door owes its members a stated account of when the door closes behind someone.