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RECONSTRUCTIONISM: from "HERESY" to "IT'S WHAT MOST JEWS ARE"
On June 12, 1945, members of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada(*) gathered together at the McAlpin Hotel in Manhattan to burn a book.
The book was the Reconstructionist prayer book, and the burning was the dramatic conclusion of the rabbis' excommunication of its author, Mordecai Kaplan, founding father of Reconstructionism. Evoking the ancient practice of herem, the rabbis declared that because of Kaplan's "atheism, heresy, and disbelief in the basic tenets of Judaism," no Jew was permitted to sit within four feet of him or come within that range to speak to him, nor eat with him, nor count him as one of the ten men needed for a prayer service. Kaplan had earned the group's condemnation because his prayer book deleted all references to the divine revelation of the Torah at Mt. Sinai, to the Jews as God's chosen people, and to the doctrine of a personal messiah. Kaplan's God was not supernatural -- but a transnatural presence that made itself manifest in human striving to improve the world. He saw the concept of chosenness as a barrier to Jewish acceptance in democratic society and rejected it as racist and elitist, though later Reconstructionists would simply redefine chosen as "vocation" -- the special Jewish responsibility to fix the world.
Even then, the influence of Kaplan's thought could be seen in Jewish belief and practice. Today, a half century later, Kaplan's ideas have so affected American Jewry that Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, executive director of the Jewish Reconstruction Federation, recently bragged that 70 percent of American Jews are Reconstructionists at heart -- they just don't know it.
"In Reconstructionism, Jews can have a full spiritual life while maintaining intellectual integrity," he said in a recent interview. "For many years, Reconstructionism was several steps ahead of the American Jewish public, but now we're very much in sync in addressing the questions on people's minds." He pointed to Reconstructionism's "atmosphere of openness" and doctrine of inclusion, of gays as well as intermarrieds, as being responsible for the movement's present expansion rate of ten percent a year.
"When you explain Reconstruction to American Jews, they say, `That's what I believe.' It's like an...