Kaplan's God

Mel Scult, “Mordecai Kaplan and Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Theology of the Individual,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society n.s. 12, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 99–114

Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan famous for founding and defining the Reconstructionist movement within Conservative Judaism, is also famous for refining and reassessing his "formulation" of what God is. Here are some quotes from a wonderful article by Kaplan's biographer and editor of his journals. I chose these quotes as they sum up the point of Scult's thesis which is essentially that although in "Judaism as a Civilization," arguably Kaplan's masterpiece, he defines God as "the Power in the cosmos that gives human life the direction that enables the human being to reflect the image of God," he also certainly never rejected a transcendental God as well, like Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In way of introduction:
"Let us return for a moment to Kaplan’s seminal work 'The Meaning of God.' This work is built around the central theological formulation of “God as the power that makes for Salvation.” Kaplan has always been much more interested in salvation than in God. I am not sure that Milton Steinberg, Kaplan’s primary critic on the metaphysical issue, understood this. Kaplan is continually searching for a proper formulation. Salvation, he says, as if to quote Dewey (his other rebbe who serves as a corrective to Emerson), means growth. Salvation, Kaplan often states, means to become fully human. It means in a very pragmatic way to become fully effective. This is again to assert the ideal of individual perfection we noted above and to embrace democracy as Emerson and Dewey understood it." pg 106

"In a manuscript from the 1950s, Kaplan summed up his ideology of the self this way: “Salvation is redemption from those evils within and outside man which hinder man from becoming fully human, or which obstruct his urge to self metamorphosis [self-transcendence]. Salvation is unhampered freedom in living and helping others to live a courageous, intelligent, righteous and purposeful life.” pg 106 quoting Mordecai Kaplan, “Soterics,” 153

"The quotation is from Joseph Albo, a medieval philosopher, who was quoting Al Gazzali, whose thought, of course, goes back to Aristotle and Plato. The statement Kaplan quotes is “Da et nafshekha ve-teda et borekha”—“know your soul [self]
and you will come to know your creator.” The self, in other words, is the key to the divine." pg 106-7

Classic Kaplan on God:
“It is because God is to me the warm personal element in life’s inner urge to creativity and self expression that I can conscientiously employ the name Y H W H when praying.” Or again, “God is that aspect of reality which elicits from us the best that is in us and enables us to bear the worst that can befall us.” Or again, “God is the assumption that there is enough in the world to meet men’s needs but not their greeds for power and pleasure.” This last formulation, by the way, was the one that was on his mind when I met him in 1972" pg 107 (quoting Kaplan Journal, July 20, l927; Kaplan Journal, May 28, l933; interview with Kaplan, Aug. 1972.)

Kaplan's Transcendent God:
"First of all, there are many instances both early and late in his career when Kaplan denies that he is merely the naturalist. The most striking occurs early in the diary entry for March 30, 1913, where he states that “The moment God is merely identified with the world and conceived as a being immanent but not transcendent, His divinity is denied and He is dissolved into the world. This is the atheism and pantheism which religion so vigorously contends against.” pg 107. Communings of the Spirit, pg 62.

"Witness another confrontation in 1943. Four of Kaplan’s rabbinical students come to him. They were entering the pardes, one might say. Can they serve as rabbis without believing in God, they want to know. One can almost hear Kaplan pounding on the desk, “You just don’t get the point.” Here is the passage from his diary entry for March 19, 1943:
'The purpose of their visit was to air their inner conflicts. They find it difficult
to believe in God and yet they want to serve the Jewish people. Can they conscientiously do so as rabbis? They had of course long ago given up the traditional basis for the belief in the existence of God, namely, revelation. But hey have so far found no substitute. What I have been teaching as the alternative to the traditional basis for the belief in God does not convince them. I evidently have not succeeded in communicating to them my own experience of a transcendent correlative to man’s will to salvation. They admit the existence of a will to salvation, but they see no need for positing a transcendent correlative of that will. Of course, my contention is not that I intellectually posit it, but that I experience it with the same immediacy as I do my own self. Intellectually I cannot posit the existence of a self, for the little I know of psychology tells me that the self is an illusion. Yet if I were to deny the reality of the existence of self as a
center of initiative I would cut the ground from under the element of responsibility,
without which human life is inconceivable. The same holds true of otherhood with its element of loyalty and of godhood with its element of piety. . . .
The main question which they must answer for themselves is this: Am I able to take the idea of God as found in the Jewish tradition and transpose it into the key of modern religion? They have been told by Milton Steinberg in the series of lectures on Theology which he is now giving that there are two kinds of religion, theistic and non-theistic. What they would like to be told is that they could be rabbis on the basis of non-theistic religion. This I told them plainly they could not do, since as rabbis their main function was to maintain the identity and continuity of the Jewish tradition. That tradition minus the God belief is like the play of Hamlet without Hamlet.'

This amazing statement from Kaplan indicates a significant movement from the realm of predicate theology to the transnatural, from the immanent to the transcendent. “A non-theistic” religion was just not acceptable for a practicing rabbi, Kaplan believed." pg 110

Emerson's God from “The Oversoul": There he states: “When the universal soul breathes through a man’s intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love.”

Anyone think that Kaplan really was holding onto a classic view of God trying to incorporate his own formulation with difficulty? Was he never happy with his initial ideas of God being the power in the universe and all that?

While were asking questions, why dont we speak bout God in Orthodoxy? What is God? We know hes not an old man in the sky with an actual body but how can we wrap our futile brains around God and if we cant then why was Kaplan's view so heretical? mekoros please if possible.