Dear Friends,
The director of the Mordecai M. Kaplan Center, which is dedicated to preserving and advancing the ideas of Reconstructionism’s founder, recently invited me to participate in a webinar to reflect on the values of Rabbi Kaplan that have most influenced my work in the pulpit. How fortunate that I have half a century of being in the rabbinate, forty-four years of which have been spent with our congregation, to draw upon to use as references to my response. So, what Kaplanian teachings have most directed my work? There are three: that (1) Judaism is the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish People, that (2) Jews in America live in two civilizations – the Jewish and the American, which may inform each other, and (3) that the central focus of Judaism is the Jewish People. At the webinar, I used these principles as a lens by which to review four case studies: (a) my role in facilitating the first female initiated get in the history of Judaism; (b) our community’s communal process in deciding whether or not to sound the shofar on Rosh HaShana when it falls on Shabbat; (c) our decision to include any and all who want to participate in the ritual life of our congregation; and (d) RSNS’s support of the JCC being opened on Shabbat.
What I did not have time to talk about is what drew me to Kaplan in the first place, which was his understanding of God. As many of you know, although I grew up in a non-observant, secular Jewish home, given the nature of my boyhood neighborhood, I was sent to an Orthodox Hebrew day school for the first nine years of my education. I did attend a public high school during which I continued my attendance at a right-of-center synagogue. It wasn’t until college that I had the opportunity to question my beliefs and explore alternatives to my traditional indoctrination. My first stop was my study with a Buddhist monk, who was a professor of Zen. In addition to classes, I began to sit in zazen several days a week while wearing tefillin, by the way. (Yes, you can take the boy out of the yeshiva, but you can’t take the yeshiva out of the boy.) At this time of great external turmoil (i.e., the late Sixties), I did find spiritual meaning and solace in this practice, but I was aware of a profound void in my life. At the suggestion of my Buddhist professor, I began my study of Jewish existential philosophers with Dr. Maurice Friedman (z”l). Martin Buber soon replaced zazen for me spiritually, but it was Mordecai Kaplan who revealed what was missing, which was a connection with the Jewish People. At the same time, Kaplan’s teachings removed what was the impediment to my path back to Peoplehood: I had never resolved the incompatibility of the omnipotent and omniscient God of my yeshiva teachers with the Shoah. Kaplan gave me an alternative to what had become for me an unsatisfying and uncomfortable atheism. Kaplan’s Copernican Revolution in Jewish thought, which shifted the Jewish center from a supernatural God to the Jewish People, unblocked me so that I could fully embrace my Jewish being again. And so my life’s purpose became how best to help Jews become fully Jews, apart from belief or observance.
A few years ago, a rabbi friend of mine who had made his career as a professor of Bible opened the door to what the nature of my rabbinate is and has been. He remarked somewhat mockingly: “The difference between you and me, Friedlander, is that I love Judaism; you love the Jewish People.” Tradition teaches that God gave Torah to Israel from Sinai, and then God left it in Israel’s possession to make it their own. I hope that over the course of the past four-decades-and-a-half that I have used Judaism as evolved by Mordecai Kaplan and Ira Eisenstein for the benefit of you all.
With gratitude and in sincerity, I am warmly,
Rabbi Lee Friedlander
