• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Reconstructionist Judaism

The Reconstructionist movement, founded in the 1940s by scholar Mordechai Kaplan, is the newest and smallest division of Judaism (the other groups are Orthodox, Conservative and Reform). In America, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, envisioned Reconstructionist Judaism and elaborated on the idea of Judaism as not only a religion but also a peoplehood. Reconstructionists see in Judaism principally a certain culture and a certain set of ethics.

Kaplan spread the Mishnah of the Zoram in a long series of essays: it is an attempt to continue to hold on to Judaism even in a modern context, while avowedly renouncing any supernatural element within it. Even the belief in God is translated into ideas accepted on the mind of each person, and even the Jew will be an atheist who disbelieves in the ontological existence of God as an independent being. Since 1990, the movement has been a member of the World Union of Progressive Judaism , and is the only non- Reform body that is a member of the union.

The basic reconstructionist conception rejects the belief in some kind of divine revelation , and along with it the ideas of the election of the people of Israel , miracles and theism . According to this method, a person's personal autonomy prevails over the Halacha , but seeing Judaism as a civilization and as a cultural heritage dictates consideration of the opinion of the community and the past. Because of this, the conduct of the stream and the manner of keeping the mitzvot are often more traditional than what can be found in Reform Judaism . Reconstructionist Jews reject the concept of the Jews as God's chosen people, yet maintains rituals as part of the Judaic cultural heritage. By the mid-1990s, both the Reform and the Reconstructionist movements had revised their prayer books to strike a delicate balance between tradition and innovation and to make important contributions to the shape of American Judaism.

The movement for renewed Judaism is the fourth largest religious movement in North American Judaism. This is the youngest current, and the only one, whose origins are not rooted in 19th century European Jewry and whose entire existence today is in North America. Regenerative Judaism is also the stream that gains the greatest rate of growth and growth in North American Judaism, and in certain issues it also has a great deal of dynamism and fertility. Unlike the other currents, which are founded on a complex development of which philosophical and theological thought is only one of its many aspects, the founding of the Movement for Renewed Judaism and its institutions is directly influenced by the personality of a philosopher and theologian: Rabbi Professor Mordechai Menachem Kaplan.

Kaplan designed this movement in the beginning together with his student, Professor Ira Eisenstein, in the image of a highly detailed and defined Gothic Mishnah. Understanding the path of this movement in the past and the present therefore directly involves standing by the principles of the teaching of its founder and designer of its path during its main period. Kaplan was the scion of an Orthodox family of dissidents from Eastern Europe, and a member of the second generation of the great immigration wave of this Judaism to the United States. He received a Torah and secular education and soon found his way to the Conservative rabbinical seminary. After a short period in which he served in an Orthodox community, Kaplan was appointed, in 1909, as a lecturer at the Conservative Rabbinical Seminary where he worked for 60 years, most of it as the head of the school of education of this institution. He developed his views on the need for re-construction of Judaism and the renewal of its values while serving the rabbinical and educational elite of Conservative Judaism, when his hope was that these ideas would cross the various currents of Judaism and serve as a meeting point for their believers. Only gradually did Kaplan lend a hand to the establishment of a separate, fourth current in North American Jewry.

Two fundamental principles guide Kaplan's extensive teaching. The first is his functional, pragmatic approach to the question of the status of religion in general and Judaism in particular. This view is based on the assumption that Judaism is a comprehensive national culture developed by the Jewish people for generations, it expressed its way and sustained it as a people. Kaplan indicates this fact by using the term civilization, which in his eyes emphasizes the combination of material, ethnic, cultural and religious elements. Kaplan, who is deeply influenced by his teacher and rabbi Ahad Ha'am, sees in this creation of the spirit of the people of Israel - just like in the creations of the spirit that shape the national cultures of every nation and nation - the essence of the nation's being.

Religion is one of the main manifestations of this culture, but it does not exhaust it. On the contrary, religion - like any other manifestation of national culture - should be examined according to the way in which it functions for the Jew in every generation and in every society, according to the extent to which it gives his life meaning and serves as a compass for him in his quest to do what is good and right. Religion, as a public-social phenomenon, seeks to bring redemption to the human soul. She wants to redeem her and sanctify her. This is its true purpose, even though in the history of religions this purpose has been wrapped time and time again in formulations that placed God, revelation, worship and myth at the center. The concept of divinity of each religion and of each religious thought is therefore derived from the way it sees the concept of salvation. Therefore it will not be surprising, for example, that the biblical concept of divinity is not the same as that of the Sages and that both are not similar to the concept of divinity that the Rambam develops from it and the Kabbalists from it. The central question that the Jewish thinker and leader should therefore ask themselves is whether Judaism plays a role for the members of their generation and society. This function means giving meaning to life and direction to action for the sake of the elites from this and developing a sense of national and religious belonging to the members of the congregation from this.

In both contexts, Kaplan claims, contemporary Judaism, and especially American Judaism, is weak. Even for those who insist on continuing to grasp it, it is not seen as relevant and as connected to real life. Its rituals, traditions and values do not correspond to the life and views that the modern American Jew takes part in and therefore cannot give his life what religion should give. Whereas the Jewish stream, which seeks to adapt the Jewish message and the Jewish way of life to the demands of the times, i.e. Reform Judaism as it emerged in Kaplan's eyes, lacks the dimension of cultural national belonging that makes religion an expression of Jewish culture. The connection of this Judaism to tradition and its authentic expressions also seems to him to be flawed.

This state of affairs requires, Eliba Dekaplan, a renewed observation of the Jewish tradition and its building blocks. Loyalty to Judaism and continuing to shape it does not mean adherence to the way in which value-concepts, symbols and ways of expression were perceived in the past, but in renewing them. Kaplan seeks to reveal the fundamental meaning of these elements, while stripping them of the pictorial clothing given to them. He wants to give them a new meaning that matches the spirit of the times and connects them to the life of the Jew of the new age. To this end, the contemporary Jew must overcome not only the mythical foundations of his religion and traditional conceptions of God that no longer correspond to his concept of salvation, but also overcome the idea of revelation as it is perceived in tradition. The Judaism that Kaplan seeks to develop should not perceive itself as the fruit of a revelatory event in which God appears - in one way or another - before the people and gives them theoretical and practical imperatives, but rather as the fruit of the development of a religious culture that seeks to make God present in its lives. Only in this way will the Jewish tradition - with its holidays, customs and symbols - be able to give meaning to Jewish life and truly be a religious infrastructure for the establishment of the Jewish national civilization.

The second element that guides Kaplan is his modernist rationalist concept. Like many of the thinkers of his time, Kaplan believes in human progress, in the supremacy of modernity over pre-modernity and in the need to give human cultures in general and religions in particular a distinct ethical meaning. For the modern man - the apprentice of science and the Enlightenment, whose world of values is shaped by humanistic rationalism - it is necessary for religion to be freed from preconceived views and thought systems that are of no help to him today, and therefore become an ethical religion. The Jewish religion, which can function for the next generation, is therefore a religion that directs all its creative forces to the moral elevation of man, to increasing the degree of participation in him and to the formation of a just and democratic society. Accordingly, the concept of divinity in it is free of any supernatural dimension that characterized pre-modern Judaism in its various forms.

The concept of the divinity of ethical religion, as Kaplan understands it, is functional and intentional - just like the overall tendency of Jewish law: to define the dimensions of human activity derived from it. He is not interested in metaphysical clarifications regarding the essence of divinity and least of all in mystical considerations and devotion beyond nature and historical-social reality. For the ethical religion, which he seeks to promote and develop, God is the force that leads man to transcendence, sanctification, adherence to goodness and morality. Belief in God and devotion to Him, is a matter of the person giving himself fully to the effort of developing good qualities in himself and shaping his society according to them.

It must be said that, although Kaplan's way of discussion sometimes seems as if his entire concern is sociological and not theological, this impression is not in any way compatible with his deeply religious personality and the main trend of his writings. Indeed, he approaches the question of the function of religion as a sociologist, but he does so as a religious person. He does ask about the meaning of faith for the modern Jew and about the way in which those who want to give faith a formative power must fundamentally change it, but in doing so he is asking about his own faith, about his own devotion to his God, about the means of expression that they will buy into a primary and infrastructural dimension that stands at the foundation of religiosity in general and at the foundation of religion The Jewish public in particular. Kaplan talks about the function of divinity in man, but he does so from a religious assumption, that there is a cosmic force that directs him to the good; He talks about how religion should preserve Jewish national existence, but he does so out of a deep belief in the meaning of this existence for humanity.

Judaism bases its condemnation of homosexuality on the purity laws in the Book of Leviticus. Now a group of Jews is beginning to examine those laws, and is coming up with new ideas about them. The most liberal of Jewish movements, the Reconstructionists, allows gay men and lesbians to be ordained and to wed. The relatively new Reconstructionist Judaism was formed to unite all Jews as one people regardless of past upbringing, gender, and sexual orientation. By the 1970s, bat mitzvah had generally become indistinguishable from the bar mitzvah ceremony celebrated by boys in the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist communities.

While throughout its history Judaism has been witness to heterodox doctrinal factions, such as the pre-Paulian Christians, the Essenes, and the seventeenth century Sabbatean movement, and to differences of religious doctrine within the mainstream communities, it has been primarily over the last 250 years that Jews around the world have developed a spectrum of approaches to religious practice, ranging from total non-observance to complete observance of Halakhic law. In the West, the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements emerged as voluntary alternatives to orthodox religious practice. For most of the twentieth century, and especially following the annihilation of European Jewish communities during the Second World War, the vast majority of the world Jewish population has not been orthodox in religious practice.