← Towards a Spiritual Humanistic Judaism · Part II — Sources, civilisation and reconstruction
Mel Scult’s The Religious Humanism of Mordecai Kaplan is more than a convenient collection of Kaplanian passages. Anthologies make arguments by selection, arrangement and juxtaposition, and Scult’s title states the argument before the first extract begins: Kaplan is to be read not merely as the sociologist of Jewish peoplehood or the architect of Reconstructionism but as a religious humanist. The phrase holds together what later movements have often separated. Kaplan’s rejection of supernaturalism did not make him secular in the sense of abandoning religion; his humanism did not reduce Judaism to universal ethics; and his account of civilisation did not exhaust his religious life. Scult’s anthology recovers the Kaplan who sought reverence, piety, hope, inward discipline and spiritual practice within a naturalistic world.14
This recovery matters because Kaplan’s most portable formula — Judaism as an evolving religious civilisation — can be received sociologically while its second adjective is neglected. Civilisation explains the interdependence of Jewish language, peoplehood, institutions, art, food, memory and practice. Religious says that these are not only ethnographic contents. They are organised around questions of sacred value, obligation, ultimate concern, mortality and human fulfilment. Scult’s editorial achievement is to make the second claim as difficult to overlook as the first.
The anthology as an editorial argument
The anthology is co-published by Mosaic Press and the Mordecai M. Kaplan Center for Jewish Peoplehood and edited by Mel Scult, Kaplan’s biographer and a scholar who first interviewed him more than fifty years before its publication. Its source base is unusually broad. Scult draws upon Kaplan’s books and essays, lectures and interviews, family materials and, above all, a diary extending to twenty-seven volumes. Portions of that diary had already appeared in Scult’s three volumes of Communings of the Spirit; the anthology makes a further thematic selection from a body of writing whose scale has itself impeded access.14
Scult describes the work as an instrument for teachers, students, rabbis, lay readers and scholars already familiar with Kaplan. His method is curatorial and interpretive. He selects passages that have spoken to him or that he judges especially powerful and representative; he supplies their context; and he places materials written at different moments beside one another under thematic headings. The resulting volume is not a critical edition or a chronological intellectual biography. It is a guided encounter with Kaplan’s mind.
Its structure embodies its thesis. Part I, Judaism and Peoplehood, contains chapters on civilisation, peoplehood and Zionism; democratic values; and ethics, social justice and community. Part II, Judaism as Spiritual Practice, contains chapters on religion, spirituality and piety; God and supra-naturalism; Torah and ritual; and prayer. Part III, Kaplan on Kaplan and Famous Others, turns to the person revealed in the diary and his encounters with family members, contemporaries and thinkers ranging from Maimonides and Spinoza to Santayana, Dewey, Jung and Buber.
This architecture joins what accounts of Kaplan often separate. Peoplehood is followed by spiritual practice; democratic community by piety; civilisation by prayer. Scult’s editorial claim is therefore not only that Kaplan happened to write about each subject, but that they belong to one religious-humanist programme. The anthology must nevertheless be read with a double attribution. Kaplan remains responsible for the primary texts. Scult is responsible for deciding which Kaplan appears, which passages illuminate one another and which conceptual vocabulary names the whole. This thesis respects that distinction throughout: Scult is treated as an interpreter making an argument through editorial form, and Kaplan’s own claims are tested against his primary writings rather than inferred from arrangement alone.
Religious humanism rather than secularisation
Kaplan’s religious humanism begins from naturalism, but naturalism is a metaphysical limit rather than the whole religious programme. No supernatural revelation interrupts history; no divine person intervenes in nature; no metaphysical election ranks Israel above other peoples. Yet the disappearance of supernatural agency does not entail the disappearance of holiness, prayer, piety or obligation. Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer accordingly reads Kaplan as a spiritual pragmatist, whose naturalism was meant not to secularise Judaism but to strengthen Jewish practice, peoplehood and spiritual life; religious ideas are assessed through the forms of Jewish life and human transformation they make possible.4 The issue is not simply whether a proposition about God is intellectually defensible, but what kind of person and community a religious vocabulary produces.
Scult’s anthology displays this programme across both public and inward registers. The public Kaplan treats peoplehood, democracy, ethical nationhood, Zionism, ritual and the reconstruction of Jewish institutions. The inward Kaplan treats wonder, piety, conscience, hope, creativity and the higher self. These are not two unrelated Kaplans. The inward life supplies dispositions without which the civilisation becomes machinery; the civilisation supplies inherited language and communal form without which the inward life becomes private spirituality. Kaplan’s religious humanism is strongest when each corrects the other.
That synthesis explains why this thesis is not offered as a secular correction to Kaplan. It develops one naturalistic expression of Spiritual Humanistic Judaism, accepting his civilisational account, religious humanism, democratic authority, revaluation and mitzvot understood as folkways. Its particular dispute concerns the survival of the divine noun in the public liturgy it constructs. Kaplan dispenses with supernatural agency and retains the word God, redefined as the power that makes for salvation; the present proposal judges that redefinition unsuitable for this congregation’s public tefilla and dispenses with the word. What replaces it in this expression is religious life without that word: spirituality located in awe, gratitude, grief, joy, wonder, moral aspiration, belonging, ethical action and the patient cultivation of middot — not evidence for another reality behind human experience, but dimensions of human and Jewish experience itself, made religious by disciplined attention, inherited form, communal rehearsal and ethical consequence. Other Spiritual Humanistic Jews may interpret the same practices differently. Chapter 2 makes the case for this one reconstruction.
What Scult recovers, and what remains unfinished
Scult’s decisive contribution is the recovery of Kaplan’s interiority. Chapter Four brings together piety after Santayana, wonder in the ordinary, hope as a disposition, creativity, the yetzer and the art of beginning again. The collection demonstrates that Kaplanian naturalism need not be emotionally austere. Reverence can be directed towards “the sources of our being”; hope can be a way of acting without a guarantee; wonder can intensify as supernatural explanation recedes. The religious affections survive because they are modes of attention and response, not conclusions drawn from a divine premise.15
The anthology’s form also reveals the unfinished work. Scult assembles a sensibility faithfully, but the passages on civilisation and those on spiritual practice remain largely in adjoining rooms. The reader encounters a public programme and an interior repertoire without a sufficiently explicit account of how the civilisation forms the dispositions or how those dispositions become accountable to the civilisation. Piety, wonder, gratitude, hope and creativity recur as aspirations. The anthology does not supply a common Jewish category for them, a regimen by which they are cultivated, or a public liturgy in which their cultivation becomes shared and recurrent.
This is an incompletion in Kaplan’s programme rather than a defect in Scult’s editing. An editor should not make Kaplan say what Kaplan did not say. Scult’s arrangement performs the prior scholarly task of making the material visible. Constructive theology may then ask what conceptual bridge the material requires.
The answer proposed here is middot, and the method is Mussar. Kaplan’s qualities are not merely religious emotions that arise when conditions favour them. They can be understood as dispositions of character, capable of being named, practised, reviewed and revisited. The move reconnects Kaplan’s inward and public projects through an indigenous Jewish technology of formation. Religious civilisation provides the calendar, texts, community and repeated folkways; Mussar makes their work upon character deliberate; middot name the qualities being formed; and liturgy gives those qualities a shared voice.
A constructive response rather than a repudiation
Scult establishes that the religious humanist Kaplan cannot be reduced to sociology. This thesis asks what institutional and liturgical consequences follow once that recovery is accepted. Four additions result:
1. The anthology’s spiritual qualities are organised as middot rather than left as a repertoire of inward states.
2. Mussar supplies a repeatable discipline of formation rather than an exhortation to feel reverence, gratitude or hope.
3. An ethical constitution ensures that cultivated spirituality remains answerable to justice, compassion, truth, human dignity and the consequences of communal power.
4. Tefilotenu places the middot within communal Jewish speech, music, sacred time and embodied practice, while dispensing entirely with address to God.
These additions also specify the meaning of “completion” in this thesis’s title. Completion does not mean that Kaplan’s work was defective and can now be finished once and for all. Such a claim would contradict the premise of an evolving civilisation. It means carrying several Kaplanian trajectories further by Kaplanian means: applying reconstruction to the divine noun itself; reconnecting the interior life with Jewish practices of formation; extending democratic covenant into an ethical constitution; and constructing a liturgy that performs in public what religious naturalism asserts in prose. Because Judaism evolves, any completion is provisional and becomes part of the past that will receive a vote without acquiring a veto.