The Day Judaism Put Its Future in Herem |
A recent Times of Israel article on Mordecai Kaplan and the public backlash against his rewritten Haggadah and prayer book offers more than an episode from American Jewish history. It exposes a much harder question: what, precisely, does a religious community believe it is protecting when it punishes liturgical change? The article recounts Kaplan’s 1941 New Haggadah, his 1945 Shabbat prayer book, the herem imposed by Agudath HaRabonim, and the public burning of the book at New York’s McAlpin Hotel.
The article can be read here: https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-an-upstart-rabbi-was-excommunicated-over-his-haggadah-for-a-new-us-judaism/
The sentimental reading is easy and wrong. It says: here was a brave modernizer, there were rigid traditionalists, and history eventually vindicated the reformer. But that reading remains too external to the Jewish stakes of the case. In Judaism, a Haggadah is not decorative literature, and a siddur is not a neutral container of words. They are among the concrete instruments by which covenantal memory is staged, repeated, inhabited, and handed forward. To alter them is not merely to revise language. It is to intervene in the machinery of transmission itself.
That is why Kaplan was dangerous. Not because he ceased to care about Judaism, but because he cared enough to alter its transmissible form. His New Haggadah omitted the Ten Plagues, restored Moses to the center of the Passover narrative, and sought to make Jewish ritual answer to the........