Jenna Weissman Joselit was looking for a project that wasn’t so “heavily freighted” after her book on the American “embrace” of the Ten Commandments came out in 2017. “Out of the blue,” an editor at the Jewish Lives biography series, a Yale University Press and Leon D. Black Foundation project, asked her to write a book about Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism.
“Without missing a beat and without thinking what this entailed, I said, ‘Yes, yes. Of course, of course,’” the Charles E. Smith professor of Judaic studies and of history at George Washington University told JNS.
She didn’t question why she was chosen. “I’m not the obvious person. I’m not an intellectual historian,” Weissman Joselit said. “I don’t swim in those high-minded philosophical, theological waters.”
The historian had known of Kaplan and had explored a “smidgen” of his diaries, but not all 70 years of them, when she worked on a book about the origins of Modern Orthodoxy in New York. “I knew that there was a really good story there,” she said.
“I’m on the Upper West Side. I’m of the Upper West Side. He’s an Upper West Side creature, too,” she told JNS, of working on the book Mordecai M. Kaplan: Restless Soul, which was published on March 17. “It just seemed felicitous.”
Kaplan, who was born in Lithuania in 1881 and lived until 102, dying in New York City in 1983, kept diaries for much of his life. He filled the pages with “small, tidy and very neat” handwriting, including passages in Hebrew, Weissman Joselit told JNS.
“It’s not a girly kind of diary. It’s actually an account book,” she said. “It’s a ledger, so it’s hefty.”
Prior books on Kaplan have addressed his writings and his thinking, although they didn’t delve as deeply into his extensive diaries.
Weissman Joselit, who works on culture and what she calls the “intrusions of daily life,” found that she would come across “incredibly juicy” passages in Kaplan’s diaries that she thought merited more attention.
“How come much of this material has never been cited before?” she asked. “I mean, it’s right there.”
At times, she felt an “internal tussle” about eavesdropping on writings that weren’t meant for her to see. But Kaplan’s objectives as a diarist changed over time, she found. For years, he was writing for himself in lieu of, say, seeking therapy.
“It became a way to vent, to let off steam,” she said.
But Kaplan also edited his diary entries to reformulate them, suggesting that he had an “eye towards an audience” and that he wanted even his private musings to be accurate to his vision. He also increasingly saw his diary entries as documentation of his life and as “prooftext” as he aged, according to Weissman Joselit.
When Charles Liebman interviewed him in 1970 for the article “Reconstructionism in American Jewish Life” in the American Jewish Year Book, Kaplan invited the sociologist into his home and consulted his diary to verify details. The two also read passages from the diaries together.
“From time to time, Kaplan alludes to a historian, who maybe, just might, chance across this journal, which suggests that he is writing with Cleo, the muse of history, perched on his shoulder,” Weissman Joselit told JNS. “But in the beginning, I don’t know that he was that self-reflexive, that self-conscious.”
At the time, diary keeping was “all the rage.”
“It wasn’t just an adolescent preoccupation. I think Kaplan used it as a sounding board, a crutch, a way to work through,” she said. “He did encounter so many people and so many vignettes and so many challenges in the course of an ordinary day that he needed some kind of outlet to get through the day and head into the next.”
‘Who was he really?’
Kaplan, who came to America as an 8-year-old, studied at the College of the City of New York and Columbia University. In 1902, he was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. It was clear to all, including him, that his views were increasingly out of bounds with those held by the flagship Conservative Jewish educational institution, though he remained at JTS for 50 years.
Looking back on when she accepted the book project, Weissman Joselit thinks she agreed to take it on because it was a chance to engage with the diary and “get to the interior landscape of what made this man tick.”
“How did he come by his ideas? Who was he really? What was it like to be a dedicated communal servant?” she said. “And what were the costs of being a communal servant for one’s entire life?”
She knew that Kaplan was “cranky and disappointed and didn’t have a kind word to say about himself or anyone.” But she also thinks he was right to be “unstinting” in his criticism of American Jewry.
There was an ongoing gap in his life between his message and the intended recipients of his teachings.
“So much of what he has to say—it didn’t land quite well during his lifetime, but subsequently, it’s had such a profound impact on how American Jews live their lives and define their Jewishness,” Weissman Joselit told JNS.
When he founded the Jewish Center, which opened in New York in 1918, he had the novel idea to include a kindergarten in the building, which also had a synagogue—a concept that is “now akin to mother’s milk but was unusual back then,” according to Weissman Joselit.
“He talks about having a kindergarten where little kids would ‘gambol their way into Judaism.’ Who uses the word ‘gambol.’ Shakespeare? Who says ‘gambol into Judaism’? I mean, that’s so beautiful,” she said. “It speaks to fun, to joy, to the sloughing off of the doom and gloom and the weightiness associated with Judaism.”
As he offered his novel views, Kaplan often formulated them in “woolly and knotted” ways, which didn’t garner adherents.
The “restless soul” that emerges in the volume can recall, at times, a Shakespearean tragic hero. Weissman Joselit writes that among the jokes that have circulated about Kaplan are either ones where he addressed God as “to whom it may concern,” or it was said that “there’s no God, and Kaplan is his prophet.”
Undoubtedly astute and perhaps quixotic, Kaplan left the center he founded over religious differences after just a few years. He founded the Society for the Advancement of Judaism in 1922. (SAJ was where his daughter, Judith, had the first American bat mitzvah.)
What Kaplan was building up to was the idea of what he called Reconstruction—a mouthful of a word, according to Weissman Joselit—which he saw as a sensibility that could be of use and value to all of the Jewish denominations, rather than be its own stand-alone group.
“He was experimenting with notions of identity well before ‘ethnicity’ came into play. He was very ahead of his time,” Weissman Joselit said. “He comes up with this lofty, weighty ‘civilization’ concept, but it’s predicated on appealing to everyone. So when it becomes a denomination, he’s very distressed on that score.”
“He doesn’t really say how he feels, but I know from reading between the lines that Kaplan is not a happy camper,” she said. “He does say at one point that, ‘I’m really not happy with this’ and that ‘my idea is that just like Zionism is an umbrella and appeals to so many different constituencies, my hope with that would be that Reconstructionism would be cut from the same cloth.’”
“But it wasn’t,” Weissman Joselit said. “Once it becomes a denomination, it loses its potential to be an umbrella to cover all bases. But then he has to go along. How could he not?”
An ardent Zionist, it’s easy to imagine that Kaplan might be concerned, were he alive, about some in the Reconstruction movement, including rabbis, who are anti-Israel. Some of the most vocal anti-Israel protesters quoted in the news and circulating on social media since Oct. 7 have been drawn from the ranks of Reconstructionist rabbis.
Weissman Joselit declined to comment on that but told JNS that “the irony is that he gives voice to this concept that’s reared its head in a big way after Oct. 7—all this ‘peoplehood’ stuff and ‘people,’ ‘people,’ ‘people,’ ‘community,’ ‘community,’ and he himself was not a people person.”
“He’s constantly beating the drum for the significance of the Jewish people, and they drove him crazy,” she said. “He really had a hard time. He lives in his head. He’s on another plane.”
‘Plus Jews’
Kaplan engaged extensively with the idea of post-denominationalism, which has taken hold decades after Kaplan’s death, even before Oct. 7, but more so in the past two years, according to Weissman Joselit.
He saw Jewish ritual as powerful but as a here-on-earth phenomenon rather than one commanded from above, and he wanted Jews to be “plus Jews,” meaning those who embrace their Judaism wholeheartedly and without restraint or embarrassment, rather than “minus Jews.”
“I just think that’s so smart and to the point,” Weissman Joselit told JNS. “He doesn’t say such pithy, poetic things often enough. Too bad, he should have.”
That wholehearted embrace of being Jewish is “what we’re seeing belatedly now, without all of the external institutionalized trappings that have popped up,” she said.
“The ability of so many American Jews to differentiate between the government of Israel and the people of Israel is another case in point,” she said. “I also think that in the wake of Oct. 7, many of us have come to reassess how important Israel is to our well-being and how utterly, utterly diminished and devastated we would be were its existence threatened.”
Kaplan wanted his followers to embrace poring over rabbinic texts with the enthusiasm that he did, even as he banished sin and obligation. He wrote with disappointment and sometimes confusion about people’s reluctance to engage, as he did, with Jewish texts and deep ideas.
Looking out on Jewish communities that seemed to him to lack sturdy legs, Kaplan sought to offer a stronger foundation. “American Judaism seemed really thin, and Kaplan offers something that has more bite and spice, but he couches it in ways that are not too sexy or accessible, drawing instead on lumbering terms like ‘ritual usage,’ ‘ceremonials,’” Weissman Joselit said.
“Words that just sag under the weight of their aspirations,” she said.
Weissman Joselit jokes that if Kaplan hadn’t been so opposed to the Old World and Yiddish, he would have used the word “Yiddishkeit” to describe the things he sought.
“I mean, that’s it. Yiddishkeit is the constellation of gestures and movements and foodways and the jokes and the delight in being part of a culture that’s more than the sum of its parts,” she told JNS. “But he couldn’t.”
‘Rooting for him’
Writing the book, Weissman Joselit had no agenda, she told JNS. “Just to know the man and to do right by him,” she said. (And to do right by the Jewish Lives series, which is known for its “concision and tautness and for offering a biography that’s more think piece than a conventional cradle to grave account,” she said.)
She found that she invested emotionally in Kaplan as she pored over his diaries. “I’m really rooting for him, and sometimes, I get upset that he just misses. How can you miss like this?” she said. “I get a little annoyed at him, even disappointed.”
Just as Kaplan felt he had a gift to give to those who were unresponsive, American Jewry today often replaces substance with gestures, according to Weissman Joselit. “He wants a stronger, less rickety structure on which to build a community, and in many ways, today we encounter the same issues but with a different twist to them,” she said.
When she couldn’t sleep at 2 a.m., Weissman Joselit found that Kaplan “kept me company.”
“I would wander around the apartment and yet always had some place to go and so much to read,” she said. “I would spend time—I wouldn’t say seeking solace but finding, inadvertently, some measure of comfort by spending time with him.”
She felt for Kaplan particularly when she saw the “joylessness of being a communal servant.”
“Nobody talks about that,” she said. “The cost, the toll it takes on trying to be, well, Moses.”
If Weissman Joselit found a late-night study partner in Kaplan (whom she now misses having finished the book), the rabbi, during his lifetime, struggled to find someone with whom to discuss Jewish texts.
When he was living in Israel with his second wife, Rivkah Rieger, whom he married after his first wife Lena’s death in 1958, Kaplan was very lonely and longed for someone with whom to study. Rivkah made their home a place where rabbinical students could come on a kind of pilgrimage, but the result was more sociability than substance, Weissman Joselit writes in the book.
“He’s yearning for students, and he’s probably yammering away to his wife about how lonely and unstimulated he is,” she told JNS. “His wife Rivkah Rieger, an astonishing personality in her own right, comes up with this great idea to inveigle her grandson, who is this 10-year-old, soccer-loving, hiloni kid, to study with him of an afternoon.” (Hiloni is Hebrew for “secular.”)
“For some reason, that satisfies him. How does this satisfy either one of the two parties?” Weissman Joselit said. “Go rustle up a 54-year-old. Why are you rustling up a 10-year-old? But the grandson adored his savta with whom he had lunch every day, so I guess he felt that he had to.”
What did Kaplan pick to study with the 10-year-old? He chose his 1934 book Judaism as a Civilization: Toward the Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life.
“First of all, the 10-year-old could barely lift the book. It’s a whale of a book. Secondly, it’s in English. Thirdly, fourthly, fifthly, sixthly, what was he thinking?” Weissman Joselt told JNS. “Obviously, it doesn’t go well, because they have to spend most of their time trying to understand vocabulary words.”
“It’s hard enough for a 30-year-old American to understand it, let alone a 10-year-old Israeli kid,” she said. “The thing goes belly up.”
“Kaplan kind of has blinders on. How out of touch could you be? A 10-year-old kid, who’s at your table every day having lunch. You don’t see him,” she said. “You don’t have your finger on the pulse of what secular culture is like. Somebody who loves soccer, who lives for soccer.”
When Weissman Joselit gave a talk years ago, long before working on the book, in Houston, one of Kaplan’s grandchildren, Dr. Daniel Musher, attended. The two went for lunch.
“Just apropos of nothing, I don’t remember what triggered it—his grandson said, ‘You know, Kaplan had a great sense of humor, and he was very loving,’” she said. “I was incredulous, because that’s not the portrait, the profile that I had known.”
“If anything, scowling, glum, dyspeptic, but that he could be funny and loving, I wasn’t aware,” she said. “That suggested to me there was another side to him.”
She found that side of Kaplan in his diaries and correspondence, where he would write, “Oh, goody! One of the grandchildren is coming to visit.”
“A little more ‘Oh, goody!’ and a little less ‘ritual usage,’ I think, would have gone a long way,” she told JNS. “But that’s me.”
