Towards a Kaplanism for 2025
There’s a strange irony happening in some corners of liberal Jewish life. Rabbi Dr. Mordecai Kaplan - the radical, the innovator, the one who broke the frame - is increasingly treated as a fixed authority in certain parts of the Reconstructionist Jewish community. A small but vocal set of Reconstructionist clergy and laypeople cling to his 20th-century formulations like dogma: God is the “power that makes for salvation.” Judaism is a religious civilization. Mitzvot are cultural behaviors. End of story.
But Kaplan wasn’t trying to freeze Judaism in time. The opposite! He wasn’t trying to create a theology that could be handed down unchanged for generations. He offered something much riskier - a method for reframing, reconstructing Judaism in light of our lived experiences, intellectual frameworks, and moral responsibilities.
To honor Kaplan in 2025 is not to quote him or to try to think about how he would feel about various current events topics or theological debates. It’s to do what he did - again. And again. And again.
That is the heart of Neo-Kaplanism - not an update of his ideas, but a reconstruction of his method using the truths that our generation cannot unknow - climate crisis, systemic ableism, racialized violence, post-colonialism, the politicization of Judaism, late-stage capitalism, economic collapse, queer theory, neurodiversity, COVID-19, trans rights, and the slow unspooling of every inherited “certainty”.
We don’t need a God who makes sense to Kaplan.
We need a God who makes sense to us.
A God who holds up under the weight of this world and who helps us stay human in it.
