Reading Mordecai M. Kaplan with an Autistic Torah Lens
There’s a pattern I keep seeing in history (both Jewish and general), and once I name it, it refuses to fade. Autistic thinkers reshape worlds. We build structures that become foundational. We imagine possibilities that others can’t yet see. And then, once those ideas become normal, the world forgets who made them. No one embodies this more clearly than Rabbi Dr. Mordecai M. Kaplan.
Kaplan wasn’t simply another rabbi with a new angle on Jewish life. For me he is the single-most important Jewish thinker and leader of the 20th century. He was the architect of the Judaism we recognise today. His fingerprints are everywhere - in our language, our educational systems, our communal structures, our rituals, and the very way modern Jews understand ourselves. And yet, he remains a marginal figure in the Jewish imagination, often reduced to being the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism and little else. But Kaplan wasn’t marginal in the slightest, but monumental and without his work, Jewish life in 2025 would be unrecognisable. His influence was so vast, so structural, that it became invisible. The institutions he founded or shaped - the first bat mitzvah, Reconstructionist Judaism, Masorti Judaism, Young Israel, Jewish Community Centres, Jewish summer camps, Jewish Federations, adult Jewish education, the American Jewish University, the very idea of a synagogue being more than a place of prayer, the entire concept of Judaism as more than a religion - are all direct products of his vision. Even movements that claim no connection to him rely on his categories of civilisation, peoplehood, democracy, and culture. Kaplan made possible the Judaism we now take for granted.
And yet he’s rarely recognised as its architect. The vast majority of Jews have never heard of him, let alone the general public. That erasure is not incidental - it’s patterned.
To read Kaplan as autistic isn’t to diagnose him, but to attend to the cognitive, emotional, and relational patterns that emerge so consistently from his writings, especially his diaries. A mind that works the way many autistic minds work - systemic, analytical, intense, principled, socially out of step, deeply sensitive, and relentlessly unwilling to perform what others demand. His reflections are full of the inner texture that so many autistic humans recognise: the loneliness that feels like exile, the frustration at communal expectations that feel hollow, the exhaustion of masking, and the unbearable sensitivity to moral and spiritual slippage in the communities around him.
On 23 September 1916, he writes:
Most of the time, however, I experience here all the solitude and isolation of a prison… here I am all alone; not a human being who is interested in or troubled by problems similar to mine. But the less said the better… I have gotten to a point where I realize the futility of all my moanings about the hopelessness of the task in life to which I am tied down. I am simply resigned.
Kaplan’s loneliness wasn’t incidental or circumstantial. It was structural, patterned, and deeply shaped by how his colleagues interpreted him. Autistic people are often told we’re isolated because of who we are, but the truth is that much of our loneliness comes from how other people respond to us. Kaplan lived inside that dynamic for decades. His diary entry here is devastating because it’s not simply the sadness of a man who feels alone, but the clarity of someone who understands that his intellectual and spiritual concerns aren’t shared by those around him.
