How an upstart rabbi was excommunicated over his Haggadah for a ‘new US Judaism’ |
A Passover problem vexed Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan in the first half of the 20th century. He felt that the Haggadah had grown outdated in modern-day America.
And then he did something about it: he wrote an updated version.
“The New Haggadah,” published in 1941, omitted the Ten Plagues but brought in Moses, who was notably absent from the traditional retelling of the Passover narrative.
Overall, Kaplan made quite a name for himself trying to refashion Judaism for a more modern era — or, one might say, reconstructing it. That was the name given to the movement he is credited with founding: Reconstructionism, the first, and thus far, only, Jewish denomination established in the United States.
Throughout his long life, Kaplan made many contributions to Judaism — his landmark 1934 text “Judaism as a Civilization”; the aforementioned Haggadah; a similarly revamped Shabbat prayerbook; and a new university of Judaism on the West Coast. Now his life gets reconstructed in a biography published last month, “Mordecai M. Kaplan: Restless Soul,” by Jenna Weissman Joselit.
“I loved writing it,” Weissman Joselit told The Times of Israel of the latest volume in the Yale University Press Jewish Lives series. “It kept me awake at night. The questions Kaplan posed were as relevant today as they were back in his time — sometimes even more relevant.”
She explained: “I think he was worried how [Judaism] would survive simply as it was. He did not… see it as able to sustain itself. He did not see its life as guaranteed… He was determined to be its white knight, saving it from itself, ensuring America does not sound the death knell for American Judaism but in fact constitutes its re-flourishing.”
A professor of American Jewish history and material culture at George Washington University, the author’s previous book tackled the Ten Commandments and their popularity in the US. Here she tackled her subject in part through his extensive diaries — a closetful of volumes, some of which are digitized by Kaplan’s longtime employer, the Jewish Theological Seminary.
“I could not have written the book without them,” Weissman Joselit said of the diaries, which cover a span of 70 years. “They helped me plumb Kaplan’s internal landscape. They’re also quite an account of what American Jewish life was like in the 20th century… He was present at every single major American Jewish-related cultural initiative.”
A new movement born in New York
New York was the place where Kaplan propounded many of his ideas — and where some got a fiery response from traditionalists, including his retooled Shabbat prayerbook. Stretching over 500 pages and published in 1945, the book resulted in the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, or Agudath HaRabonim, putting........