Mordecai Kaplan’s Idea of God — A Lecture by Rabbi Harold ...

Temple Valley Beth Shalom ©2013 Page 1

Mordecai Kaplan’s Idea of God — A Lecture by Rabbi Harold M.

Schulweis

Temple Valley Beth Shalom, Encino, CA

December 3, 1980

(This is a transcription of an audio recording which can be found at www.schulweisinstitute.com)

Rabbi Schulweis: For those of you who would like, I happened to have brought with

me a collection of letters that Kaplan wrote to me. I'm very, very proud of it. I have to

be present when I show it to you. But they're about -- the letter is from ‘52 when I

came to the West Coast, two fairly recent ones. And I wanted you to see his script and

his unusual lucidity, and I'll quote from some of the letters. The thing that sort of

disturbed me was I thought these were very unique, these letters, and then I found out

that they were books, the little quotations, they were from books. But anyhow, maybe

he said it here first.

What I'd like to do this evening is to talk a little bit about Kaplan's understanding of

religion and of God. And I'm going to close the door because it gets me nervous. I

always have a feeling that people are going to walk out [laughter]. A colleague and a

very good friend of mine, Rabbi Jack Neusner, is here. And he is the rabbi of Ma'ariv

Temple, a sister congregation. It used to be a brother congregation. We're getting

closer. And I'd like you to meet him. That's Rabbi Neusner, the gentleman. Could you

stand for just a moment so they know who you are?

Oh, God almighty. I know this man like the back of my own hand, I'm telling you, not

well. It's the beard. Rabbi Jack Riemer, R-I-E-M-E-R -- repeat after me -- of Ma'ariv

Temple who himself is a very fine writer. I think many of you have read some articles

of his and some very fine anthologies including reflections on death and other essays.

And we're really very, very happy that he is with us.

And you had Kaplan so you will be able to testify. But we all see Kaplan differently

because, like all of us, he is a-- I will say this much about Kaplan. We were talking

about Dr. Heschel for a moment. Usually you're afraid to get to know great people

because I have found, in my experience, its better not to know them personally. When

you get closer, you realize all the affluence. Kaplan was really an exception. For me

he was an exception. I felt he was the same way on and off. In fact, as I mentioned to

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you last time, I don't think he had a private persona. He had a public persona -- has a

public persona, and he was always the same way; extremely earnest, extremely

serious, almost obsessive in his concern for Judaism and the Jewish people.

To tie in religion with what we talked about the first two times, it is really fairly simple

because, as I said, if you look at Kaplan from his point of view as a religious

statesman, as a person who was concerned with keeping, with pasting, with cementing

the Jewish people together, recognizing that his central thesis was that the impact of

modernity has shaken the foundations of Jewish life. Remember we talked about the

emancipation and we talked about the enlightenment, we talked about, essentially, the

impact of the way the Napoleonic option that was given to the Jews, either give up your

nationality, give up your national identity or forfeit your citizenship as a Frenchman.

And that choice was a very, very hard choice and we've seen how, subsequent to that,

there have been various ideologies and movements which have attempted to deal with

that phenomenon, that forced split in which religion and ethnicity or religion and

nationhood was torn, asunder.

It was also very clear from Kaplan's point of view that no longer is it possible for us to

keep the Jewish people together by virtue of a set of doctrines, of religious beliefs or

theology. Just imagine, for example, the inability of getting here, a consensus of what

it is, what is absolutely necessary for Jews to believe in in order to be Jews.

Okay. If you cannot do it ideologically, then, obviously, you have to develop a kind of

pluralism. It's a very difficult thing. We are still struggling with this. I maintain – and

this, in fact, is one of Kaplan's great notions. It's sometimes simply thrown away in the

shibboleth - unity and diversity. The point is that I can no longer, as an individual,

whoever this comes from; I can no longer superimpose upon somebody else my

conception of God. And I cannot say -- suppose you don't believe in my conception of

God or better yet, I cannot -- I know that if my option were that I either had to accept

Orthodoxy or nothing, I think I would choose nothing. It's simply not compatible with

my way of life, with my thinking. I don't want to live that kind of life, and I think it's very

cruel. That's a very modern thing that I'm saying. It's very cruel to superimpose upon

other people the particular kind of interpretations of God or revelation or Halacha or

ritual. I simply have got to live with the fact that I'm dealing now with a variety of types

of religious, spiritual expressions. All that I can do is to sort of persuade you. And

that's basically what Kaplan is saying.


That much, that pluralism is Kaplan as a statesman but that doesn't mean that Kaplan

himself does not advocate a philosophy, a theology, a particular interpretation of

religion, of God, of prayer. But he is not saying -- and I think that's one of the important

things that you can pick up around page 81 in the questions Jews asked. He keeps on

saying, “Reconstructionism is a methodology.” I'm not interested in saying that you got

to believe this. Everybody got to be a reconstructionist to be a good Jew. It's

ridiculous. All I'm saying is, methodologically, I want to suggest to you a certain

approach to life. What he has done, essentially, is to -- there's a black board here,

there's no chalk. There's also – oh, there's a chalk, piece of chalk. Good. A billboard.

What he says is what's, of course, is quite traditional. Every rabbi knows this; it's a

quotation from the Zohar in which it says, essentially, that God, Torah, and Israel are

one. But usually what is meant is something like this: There is God who reveals

himself through a process of self-revelation, the truth, the Torah to a particular people

whom he has chosen, Israel. That's the relationship. I think it's a vertical relationship

and there's no question about it that that's how, at least, schematically, it looks; God,

Torah and Israel. I think what Kaplan is saying when he also believes that God, Torah

and Israel are one, he wants to say that -- and very often you will see shifts from God

to religion, and from Torah to culture, and from Israel to peoplehood. He wants to

insist that these things are correlates, they are interdependent, and they are

interrelated.

You can't do on without the other. You cannot do God without doing Torah. You

cannot do Torah without doing Israel. These are so interrelated. They are so

intertwined. They are so interdependent that they have got to be understood in

correlations. It's a very important principle because what it basically means is that God

and Israel, basically that relationship, is so bound that you cannot understand Jewish

theology without understanding the Jewish people. You may not be able to understand

the Jewish people either without understanding their theology but they are interrelated

in a remarkable way.

The difference between -- now, if this is the traditional picture, we have a vertical

picture of God, Torah and Israel. God through self-revelation, self meaning, God

himself reveals himself through miracles, and miracles are very important. I will say a

word about it in a moment as being a night of Hanukkah. Miracles and Israel, this is a


vertical relationship. I think what Kaplan has done is to horizontalize Judaism. That's

part, I think, of his own reconstruction. Mainly, it's no longer God, Torah, and Israel but

it's -- if I could now do it this way, it would be related in such a way that the

relationships are dialectical. I'm going to have to explain to you what it means or what I

think it means, especially.

If you read Kaplan you will see that the thrust of his argument is: What do you want?

What do you want as a people, as an individual? What are your wants, not what are

your beliefs, what are your wants? Because if you're going to talk about God is going

to come through revelation but the revelation is not going to come from out here, it's

going to come from out here, it's going to come out from an experience of a people in

its transaction with the environment. And the keyword that is very important is -- it's

not as if God says "I am the Lord who has taken you out of the land of Egypt." That

looks like this relationship.

It's something else. A people is a slave people. It lives through hell. It's whipped. It's

spat upon. It's humiliated. It's placed in dungeons. And they begin to groan together,

to moan together, and they begin to recognize that it's bad to be a slave. Freedom is

important. And they discover it from what? Not because somebody up there

whispered it. They discovered it from out of the Kishkahs of their existence, out of the

viscera of experience. And it's a discovery. It's a discovery. People don't know it.

They have to live through it. This is the emphasis that Kaplan is now making from a

kind of self-revelation of God in which God is a separate entity, a separate being telling

you about something from this kind of a movement.

When I say want, I mean the following, and I think I can do it fairly easily by some

illustration. I'm going to read to you -- if you read the prayer book of Kaplan, this was

the book that was burned. Remember I told you about the book that was burned. It's

not the exact book because obviously it's – but a book -- a reasonable facsimile. He'll

start talking at the end, at the supplement of the prayer book -- which is an interesting

prayer book itself, it has many deficiencies, and we’ll talk about it separately, a lot of

deficiencies. But I will say this: Were if not for this prayer book-- and I say this in the

presence of two of my colleagues, two of my conservative colleagues -- were it not for

this prayer book which was the first of its kind to really take theology so seriously which

Jews don't really do, that you really are going to have an effect, the prayers that you

pray. We don't care what we pray. We don't really care what you pray at all. Mean it

because that meant to be meant. It's meant to be prayed. For example, if you walk


around asking “Listen. Do you really believe that you want to have the temple

reconstituted? Do you want to have animal sacrifices? Do you want to slay all these

animals?” I don't want to do it. So why are you singing Shehibaned Bet- Hamigdash?

Oh, come on. It's not a song. It's a prayer. Do you really want to have the restoration

of animal sacrifices? If you don't want to have it, how can you dedicate a whole to

nothing else but a dedication? The answer is; well, if you mean it, then you got no

problem. But the real answer is – look, I mean. You got to understand, prayer is

prayer.

If you take a look at the conservative prayer book you will see very often, on the right

side, a lot of Hebrew, on the left side, a little bit of English, a little bit of English with a

little reference note. And if you ask why should that be? Why shouldn't the left have

what the right is? The answer is because the right side is talking about the fact that

you're going to take two little Kvosim lach two little kvesim lach and you're going to kill

them every single day on Yom Ha- Shabbat and the hazzan is going to sing it. You

don't like that so what do you do? And this is part of the dilemma. What you do is you

have the English not completely translated, but you give a little reference to Leviticus

which nobody is going to look up. Who in the middle of the davan is going to go to the

bible and look at Leviticus? Impossible.

And then the hazzan -- and I've always noted that as a kid. I've always noted that the

hazzan always sings pretty songs when it comes to theological matters that are very

embarrassing. You watch it. You'll see the best song. Do you know that I'm talking

about? Have you ever heard that melody? They don't sing it anymore. I said why are

you people -- why is he singing that? He's talking about killing two little shepzalach! I

mean that's not -- why is he so happy? The point that I'm making is that he is very,

very serious about theological belief. If you believe in physical resurrection, if you

honestly believe that there is a time -- you're looking forward to the time in which the

dead will corporeally, physically, vitally be resurrected, I understand. But if you don't

believe in it, how can you keep on saying Mechayay Hameiteem, Mechayay

Hameiteem, Mechayay Hameiteem, who returns souls to dead corpses? But you do

say it. Come on, Kaplan. What's wrong with you? You're taking it so seriously. It's

not to be taken -- that's the kind of person he is. He's a very difficult man to live with,

such a person, because he honestly wants to pray what he believes. He honestly

believes that the mind and the heart and the mouth are supposed to be related.


So when the book was published, when the prayer book was published, he deleted

various things. The point that I was making was that despite that, the prayer book

which we conservative Jews use could never have come about, all of its changes,

were if not for this particular book. You can burn a book but that's not enough. For

example, when you and I read in the morning, if you come in the morning, early in the

morning, and let's say Shabbat is at 8:45, you will hear that the prayers are different.

They're not traditional-sounding prayers. The formulations are different. You don't say

Shelo Assani Isha. You don't say blessed art thou, O Lord our God, who has not made

me a woman. You don't say it. You say something else. You don't say Blessed art

thou, O Lord our God, who has not made me a goy. You don't say Blessed art thou, O

Lord our God, who has not made me a slave. And the answer why is very simple. I

don't care what anybody else tells you. It's because this made already an impact. He

started to get the movements. He shook the movements. So he even had a

movement at that time. He simply said "Listen, take it seriously.” And that's very, very

important.

Now, if you look at this particular prayer book towards the end, there's a criteria of

Jewish loyalty. It says the following: In view of the changed conditions in Jewish life,

the criterion of loyalty to Judaism can no longer be the acceptance of a creed, but the

experience of the need to have one's life enriched by Jewish heritage. There's a shift

now from ani ma'amin, I believe, I believe, to saying "This is what we want. What do

you want?” See, it's much -- it's a very different way of thinking. And I want to give you

an illustration. That experience should be formulated not in terms of dogmas, but in

terms of wants because if I -- and I think this is what prayer is all about. If prayer is

want, "I want certain things," then the answer is very simple. So do something. Come

on. Do something. Well, if it's beliefs, it's a much more calm, intellectual affair. I

believe in physical resurrection. I've done my job, right?

But if I don't simply say the function is merely to believe, but the function is to articulate

what you want and to act on that wanting, then the responsibility becomes

horizontalized, then you can't say, "Well, we'll leave it to God. We'll leave it to God.”

You can't leave anything to God. You can't leave anything to God. You can't pray

anything to God and expect that the prayer, the request itself is going to be answered.

You can't ask anything of God that you cannot ask, at least a portion of it, of yourself.

What do you think you're going to say? Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, who make


peace in the heavens, who make peace on earth, and you're going to fold your hands

and you think that's prayer. That's not prayer. That's magic. That's irresponsible.

And this is what I mean by the horizontalization. So we'll say a number of things. We

want Judaism to help us overcome temptation, doubt and discouragement. We want

Judaism to imbue us with a sense of responsibility for the righteous use of the

blessings wherewith God endows us. We want the Jew so to be trusted that his yea

will be taken as yea, and his nay as nay. We want to learn how to utilize our leisure to

best advantage, physically, intellectually, and spiritually. There are 13 of these like the

13 Ani Ma'amin of Maimonides. The point behind this is simply more than just style.

It's a question of what do you want. And I think in Kaplan, as I read them, religion --

and when it has to do with matters like God has to do with yearning, yearning, what do

you want? What are you striving for? If it is not a description of what already is,

because if the scripture of whatever it is, I would rather go to a physicist than go to a

theologian. I don't need a rabbi for that. I don't need a prophet for that. For that I

need to have a sociologist. I need a psychologist to describe what is. But religion has

to do with what to be. What would you like it to be? What do you want Judaism to be?

No, you don't want to do that. You want to talk about what is Judaism. And now we'll

take out the Encyclopedia Judaica and we'll talk about rabbinic Judaism. That's fine

but that does not move you, and you have to be moved.

So that the beginning of the quest for divinity, the quest for religion, the quest for God

stems not from the self-revelation of God, but it starts from your own self-revelation.

Who are you? What do you want? What would you like to become? Are you unhappy

with yourself? What do you need? What are your needs? Tell me what your needs

are. There are biological needs. They're very important. There are socio-

psychological needs. They're important. There are spiritual needs. They're very

important. It's out of this kind of recognition of yourself, what you need that you

develop a conception of God.

What did I do with that thing? I interrupt, huh? Which pocket did I put it in? I put it in

my pants? No, it can't be. Alright. Here it is. No, I would never do that. Now, just

thinking, there is my friend, Jack, and he always tells me -- whenever we speak to

each other, he gives me a Dvar Torah. This is a Hasidic Dvar Torah. It's a very, very

reconstructionist one. I'm not saying that Baal Shem Tov is a reconstructionist

although I'm not so sure by that. I'm not so sure. That's a talk that I want to give in

January 12 which I'm going to say, in fact, that there's so much more traditional stuff. It


sounds very radical but it's not. Baal Shem Tov says "Dah ma le'maala." The whole

phrase is dah ma le'maala mimach, no one is above you. But he said, "Dah ma

le'maala," no one is above, "michah," from out of yourself. And I don't think that this is

so very, very different in tone than from what Kaplan is talking about.

So you begin with these: what is it that moves me? What do I want? What do I need?

What do I yearn for? And when you now collectivize it because I am not an individual,

if I did that -- by the way, if I talked now and developed a conception of God by saying

that which answers, that which supports my yearnings and my needs and my wants,

those identifiable powers that answer those things that represents God, that's the stuff

out of which the God-idea is formulated, I would have an individual religion. It wouldn't

be Jewish. It will be Schulweis’s God. Everybody has that kind of God but that's not

what I'm talking about. As a Jew, I have gone to speak about what are the wants, what

are the needs, what are the yearnings of the Jewish people. What do they want?

What do they experience? And those experiences are expressed in things like what

we're doing tonight. I mean Hanukkah, the victory of the Maccabeans, what we do on

Passover. And that is the stuff out of which the God-idea is formed but it's discovered.

It's not arbitrary. It's not arbitrary. It's an experience that cannot be denied.

Okay. So do we understand the difference between a traditional way of looking -- if

you are a traditionalist you really look to a God and you look for miracles. Now, one of

the things you will see -- and I hope you're reading this stuff so that I don't have to do

the elementary things -- Kaplan is very concerned about miracles. Now, most of you

don't believe in miracles. Most Jews that I talked to don't believe in miracles. That is to

say we don't base belief in Judaism on the miraculous. The ones that I know of will not

say that the reason that we believe that there's a God is because he split the sea, the

Red Sea. We don't believe in God because he made the mouth of the earth open and

swallowed up Korach and the mutineers against Moses. But the truth of the matter is,

and I think here Kaplan is very correct, is that Judaism is a very substantial part of

tradition which argues that Judaism is based upon the miraculous, not upon the human

effort but upon the miraculous, a supernatural matter. And if you want to test it, take a

look at one of the great, perhaps the greatest piece of traditional philosophical

literature that was ever written.

In the 11th Century Yehuda Halevi wrote the first Jewish philosophical dialogue

modeled after Plato called Kuzari. You may have seen it. And you will see that it's a

wonderful, wonderful dialogue at which there's a Muslim and a Christian and a


philosopher and a rabbi arguing the various virtues of their own traditions that miracle

is something that everybody seems to believe in. Certainly, the Muslims believes in it.

The Christian believes in it. The Jew also believes in miracles. Only his miracles are

better miracles because whereas the Christian miracle and the Muslim miracle is a

private miracle verified by an individual, Jesus and a few people -- how can you

compare that kind of miracle to 600,000 Jews publicly witnessing the revelation at

Sinai. Publicly witnessing, that's the argument. Now, you have to understand that very

few Jews -- I don't know any Jew who takes miracle. You don't celebrate Hanukkah

because of the miracle of the eight thing. Nobody takes it seriously. Why? Well,

because you really -- you're all moderns. You’re all moderns. So when you see very

often Kaplan talking about the change, in that sense I think he's quite correct that there

is a radical change between these ways.

Now, what is this conception of God now? Again, where do you locate? Where do you

locate the matrix out of which the conception of God comes? Now, remember again

what I said earlier. I think I said it earlier, if not I'm going to repeat it again. We are not

talking about God. We are talking about God-idea. That's one of the things that

Kaplan insisted on in class, insisted upon in the books. A God-idea means you have

an idea of God, you have an idea of God, you have an idea of God. That does not

mean to say that this is, in any sense, synonymous with, identical with, equal with God

in himself or itself or whatever you want to say. In fact, that is really quite, not only a

question of modesty, theological modesty, that's what really, if you follow through the

mystics all the way or the rationalists like Maimonides, all the way, he's going to come

up with the same thing because he’s going to say, “What God is, we do not know.” At

most, the rationalists will say, “I know that God is. But what God is, I really don't

know.”

So remember that when Kaplan -- and this is a very important distinction because I find

that 90% of my problems with Jews who tell me they don't believe in God is they don't

believe in a particular God-idea. And it is wrong for them to say since they don't

believe, let's say, in a super naturalistic conception of God, George Burns' "Oh, God!"

kind of conception, a Cecil B. DeMille conception of God, which is the prevalent

widespread notion, they now say they don't believe in God but it's not true. You are

not saying they don't believe. You have no right to do that. You don't believe in his

God-idea. Come and I'll show you other God-ideas. Let me introduce you to Kaplan's

idea of God, to Rosen’s idea of God, and Heschel's idea of God, to Hermann Cohen's


idea of God. We don't have a single God-idea. We have many God-ideas. God

remains one. And I think that's a very, very important notion. So where did this God-

idea come from? This God-idea comes from when we talk about a Jewish God-idea,

from the experience of the Jewish people. This is that correlation.

You cannot talk about a Jewish conception of God without talking about the Jewish

people because if you're going to accept the idea of God and what God is on the basis

of reason, there is no such thing as Jewish reason. Reason is reason. Logic is logic.

There's like German logic, a Jewish logic, Christian logic. So it's not the particularity of

the Jewish conception of God is that it is related growth out of and is responsible to

whom? The Jewish people. A real live Jewish people that goes through all kinds of

things; victories and defeats, out of which they begin to identify certain things as holy

and lifted up from the world and celebrate it. They celebrate it in prayer. They

celebrate it in festivals. They celebrate it in fests. That is how it comes. It's natural but

it is not arbitrary. It is not arbitrary at all because there are a lot of things that you love

to do that your God-idea doesn't allow you to do. But it comes out of experience, the

collective experience of the people. Okay. And its yearnings.

God is real for Kaplan. And one of the pages -- I've forgotten now which so I marked it

down for you to look at in questions. I think it's on page 94. Page 94, he talks about

God being real. What does it mean to be real? To be real doesn't mean that it's

physical, that it's material. When I say to you what is real in a religious context, in a

spiritual context, I mean to say what is it that makes your life worthwhile living when

you're overwhelmed by despair, by tragedy, by cynicism. What is it that makes you

able to overcome it? What kind of meaning do you find? That's what's really real. I

know that money is real and you know that money is real.

But tell me when you're really in an ultimate crisis, is that what you're going to say,

“This is the real thing”? At that particular point, money is nothing. It's the most unreal

thing in the world. So for Kaplan, and not just exclusively Kaplan, this notion of reality

is not real in the sense that this is real, in physical sense, but in the sense what is it

that answers the question. What gives meaning to my people and its salvation, its self-

realization, and to myself as a Jew who is part of that people and upon whom that

people I depend for my own realization? Because Kaplan viciously attacks all forms of

isolationism, privativism and selfishness saying that you cannot be fulfilled without a

particular identity with a particular people. Now, he will argue that from many, many

grounds sociologically, psychologically and, of course, historically. The Jewish people


conceived of a notion that you cannot do it by yourself. You're not going to be happy

by yourself. You must belong, and I don't mean belong to a small little group, I mean

to a group that has a vision of its own actualization.

Okay. Let's go a little bit further. Let's see how far we can go with this. One of the

things that Kaplan emphasizes over and over again is that this term "God" -- and here,

we have to sort of pause a little bit and understand it's a noun, right? It's a noun but it's

a peculiar kind of a noun. And when I'm talking now about grammar, I'm talking about

the grammar of the spirit, not just simply ordinary dictum. There is, says Kaplan, a

thing called a substantive noun. Let's say wood, gold. Wood is wood. Gold is gold.

Stone is stone. That's a noun. There is, however, and this for Kaplan is very

important, a functional or -- yeah, I guess it's called functional noun. And that

functional noun is invariably a correlative -- gee, how do you spell correlative? Two

R's? Alright. Any idiot knows that. Come on. I was just testing you [laughter] but I

didn't know. Thank you very much correlative. Correlative means just that. It is

correlated.

For example, let's take a word like teacher. A teacher is a teacher if a teacher has

students, right? A teacher without students is that of unemployed. A father is a father

if it has -- if you see me, do you know I'm a grandfather? You don't know me. I'm a

grandfather. Now, what is that? When I say to you I'm a grandfather, I am revealing

something that you cannot see, by the way, but it indicates what a relationship

between me and the children of my son or daughter, a relationship, very, very

important. So whether it's a teacher to students, if I talk to you about a shepherd --

how do you spell shepherd? With an E? A shepherd, it means sheep. If I talk to you

about, again, husband and wife and so forth, and when I talk to you about God, what

kind of noun is that?

Kaplan says, insists, that when the bible uses the word God it is a functional noun and

it is always related to a people. It's not simply God. It is the God of Israel. If Chas V’

Shalom, there is no people, does that mean there is no God? No, God is what He is

but there is no God of Israel. There may be an Elohim, a metaphysical God who's the

creator of the universe, very nice and dandy, but he no longer can have that -- he is no

longer the God because he is dependent upon a people just like a people is dependent

upon God, and we'll indicate what those dependencies imply, but they are now

interdependent and you cannot understand one without the other.


And this is Kaplan's way of trying to explain a verse that you find very often in the bible.

V’ Lacachti Etchem Lilaam, V’haiti Lachem L’ Elohim. That's Exodus, you can look it

up, chapter six verse seven, because I know you people don't believe me anyhow.

"And I have taken you unto me" this is God talking, "as a people, and I will be for you

as God." There is now interdependence. You cannot have one without the other.

What does it mean for a people to have a God-Idea, the God of Israel? It means that

that people has become self-conscious, aware.

A people needs to have a conception of God if it is conscious of what? Of what's

pushing it, where it wants to go, what's driving it, what's its yearnings are, what it wants

to become. How are you when you are not self-conscious? You're all right, you're

okay. I mean, you're living, you're eating, you're drinking and so forth. But you require

awareness of yourself or the dignity of awareness, and that you begin to talk about my

personality. If a people has an awareness of itself, then it has a God-idea.

Now, that God-idea can change just as your idea of yourself changes, right? As you

mature, as you go through other experiences, you've changed your conception of God.

Does that mean that God changes? No. We're not talking -- we're talking about a

God-idea. This is the functional noun, it means a relational deal. And this is what sort

of irritates me so much when I read people who write about Kaplan; they say that

Kaplan is a rationalist. He's not a rationalist at all. That he is philosophically. He's not

philosophically-minded in that sense. Not at all. See, a philosopher can do without this.

I'll sit by myself like Spinoza can sit by himself, like Aquinas can sit by himself and

figure out individually what God is? And I will argue, I will give long proofs,

cosmological proofs, Scientological proofs, theological proofs for the existence of God.

Kaplan is not interested in that conception of God. He is interested in a God-idea that

not only grows out of a people, but is responsible to a people. And when that is not

responsible as a crisis, what do you think Zionism is? Zionism is recognition by the

people that it wants something. I am not going to live waiting for the Messiah to come.

I am going to take the destiny of my life and the life of my people in my own hand. I

am going to build an army. I'm going to fight. I'm going to become politically

sophisticated. I no longer want to live on the basis of impotence. I want to now involve

myself in a state, the securing of the state. That is an expression of a discontent with

an old conception of what a Jewish people need. This is Zionism properly understood


from a Kaplanian point of view is a spiritual movement, not a secular movement, not a

political movement, not an economic movement. It is the experience of a people that

simply says, "In order to realize our destiny as a people, we have got to do certain

things." And it involves sacrifice, death, effort and things of that sort.

So you see, I don't think religious people can look at it this way. Religious people in

the traditional -- the way in which we think of religious people because we -- that just

sounds like blasphemy. In fact, that's exactly what they said about the Zionists; they're

a bunch of apikorsim. They are forcing God's hand. They are forcing the redemption.

Why? Because if things are to happen, they are to happen not through the effort of the

Jewish people in its own way of expressing its wants and needs and acting on it, it has

to happen this way. Now, again, I want to correct myself because I'm kind of falling in

to Kaplan's mistake because I don't think the whole of tradition talks this way. I would

say a major part of the tradition talks that way.

When you read, when you come to shul, right over there behind the partition is a shul

[laughter]. And on shul this morning we're talking about Joseph, and you'll see what

Joseph will say. Joseph will say, “Don't get excited, the brothers are very, very angry.”

They're worried that he's going to kill him now because they revealed themselves to

him, he's revealed himself to them and he's going to say, they're going to be killed,

"Don't worry, you don't do anything. You are just an innocent little boy, you're nothing.”

This is all God's will. This is that kind, that model that I talked about before. But you

could never say this if you had a Kaplanian view of the conception of divinity because

divinity, godliness, I don't care what you want to call it, Elohut, is expressed by the

experience of a people in its transaction. And one thing it doesn't have, and I know

that that's why I think it's sort of unhappy for a lot of people, it doesn't have certainty. I

know what you people want. I know what everybody wants. I want it too. I want just a

little bit of magic, a little bit of magic, because what this theology is asking me to do is

terribly, terribly demanding. It's essentially divan three times. What is it -- three times

a day. How long does it take you to davan? If you're a good davaner -- I might say it

took him five minutes to do a Minchah. I'm exaggerating -- 10 minutes. And while he

was doing it, we're studying G’morrah at the same time. It wasn’t a total waste.

There's a wonderful little article written by a sociologist by the name of Charles

Liebman in which he said, "Most Jews really are reconstructionists." I really believe

that to be the case, too. From there the question is how come he's not successful? I

don't know either. I don't know. I can't understand it because I think most Jews really


also want magi. And I don't know what to do. As a rabbi I have a very, very difficult

time. But let me continue a little bit with this thing. Where are we? Okay. We talked

about what a functional. Now, let me give you one other way in which Kaplan treats it,

and that is the way of talking about it. I'll tell you where you can look it up to examine

what I'm saying. It's on page 102 and page 129. A little bit not as clearly as I'm going

to give it to you right now. 102, did I say? And 129.

When I say to college students, to other people "Do you believe that God is merciful?" I

invariably get a negative response. They say no. You put that in proposition. "Do you

believe that God is merciful?" "No." Then I used an inversionary principle.

Inversionary principle is a principle that actually Feuerbach talked about, and I once

wrote an article and I told Kaplan that Feuerbach said it way before him, and he said,

"You can't say that because I never read Feuerbach.” By the way Freud also was like

that. You remember Freud did not want to read Schopenhauer because he was afraid

that he would find other people had similar notions of the unconsciousness and so

forth. You want to read it. Anyhow, that's partly a jest because I must say that Kaplan

-- and here I can talk a little bit in terms of personal experience -- is not a vain man

intellectually. It is not important for him to have invented the wheel.

And when I wrote a piece on Soterics -- it was the first thing I ever wrote in my life -- he

embraced and accepted it even though it was not at all, in all senses, compatible or

congenial with his own articulation. If I say God is merciful, very often they say no.

And I say something like this; but mercy is Godly, they say "Yeah, I'm willing to buy

that.” And I can go down a list if we had more time. And we would say -- I say the

same thing about God is. Give me anything. “God is good.” “I don't know.” “No, I

don't think God is good.” “All right, fine. Do you think goodness is godly?” They say,

"Sure". God is -- and so forth. "God is just." "No.” “Justice is Godly." “Do you believe

that God is the creator?" "No." "Do you think that creativity is Godly?" The answer is

yes.

I have a question that I ask myself -- and I'll give you an article of mine that I wrote

which is really, in some sense, spawn from Kaplan's thinking in which it seems to me

that as a Jew, what I'm interested is in proposition, too. I'm interested in talking to

myself and talking to other people and saying mercy, intelligence, goodness,

compassion with all the attributes. Those are the marks that I believe in. When I

believe them, I want to imitate them. That's what you mean by Imitatio Dei. I want to

imitate God as whatever He is. I don't know what he is. I do know that these attributes


which are discovered, I used the word advisedly, discovered from out of the

experience, not only of myself, but of my people and which I now hold up as holy.

These attributes are manifestations of elohut, and that's the word that I like to use

because elohut, which could be translated as godliness or divinity, is different for me

than a term even like God which makes it look like a substantive noun. This is only a

functional deal.

What is it that I believe in? I really believe in the attributes of divinity. I believe it

completely. I believe that they're real. I think it's the most real thing in the world. The

question is not "Do you believe that God is love?" The question is "Do you believe that

love is godly?" Of course I believe that love is godly. And I know darn well that if I

want to express what the bible put so brilliantly in the beginning that God created me in

the image of divinity that that is what it means to do. I've got to live out God, to behave

God, not to believe but to behave God. That's the deepest vindication, testimony of the

existence of the truth of godliness. What is good is it going to do me? You believe that

God is love and you hate. What good is that? What's the meaning for you? I'm not

interested in that. What is this God thing? Is it an intellectual proposition? This is all

part of Kaplanian. This is what he talks about in terms of process. If you read in those

two particular pages, he writes about it and uses Maimonides.

That's about all I can really squeeze in in an hour and I want to just a few minutes for

questions or comments or aggravations or whatnot? Yes.

Rabbi Schulweis: It comes from the “is” and it comes “ought,” and everyone of us has

it. "God is," that is to say reality principles exist. But I don't worship reality principles.

What I do know is that out of those reality principles -- out of butting my head against

the wall, I discovered certain things. First of all, not to butt my head against the wall.

Secondly, there is a wall out there. Thirdly, that if I want to get through, I better build a

door. But you need to have it. Otherwise – see, to have just ought and just yearnings

alone is not rich enough, then I can become just a luftmensch. I become a fantasizer.

I become a dreamer. Judaism is not just dreaming.

You know how you experienced that mercy is important? Because you experience

what it means to be treated unmercifully. All right. That's the experience. The

yearning [foreign language] [00:55:05]. It comes, that's what I meant to say, it comes

out of terrible -- you didn't discover the fact that God -- how do I know that God loves

freedom? How do I know that freedom is godly? Because I just simply had a fantasy?


No. I had a terrible experience. You know what I learn from the Holocaust? A hell of

a lot of things. I learned to have a different conception of human nature, learned to

have certain kind of suspicions, also certain kinds of faiths. I learned about the need

for Jewish power. So it's not as if the yearnings are just -- you understand a person

smoking a pipe.

Female Speaker 1: (Asks Question)

Rabbi Schulweis 1: Yeah. Good. No repudiating God. You're just simply relocating

God. That's really very important. Location is important. It is a heck of a question. I

really think maybe we ought to postpone it but I'll just give you one notion. I have to

understand what is it that these people are rejecting. What they are rejecting is the

notion that God is a separate, discrete entity, unrelated in a sense, to me, in whom

there is lodged mercy. And then they say -- well, if that's the case, they take a look at

and they see the world and they see that there are acts of obvious cruelty, they see the

Holocaust, and they say, “This is a lie.” Now, I'm saying to these people, “Wait a

minute. Maybe the problem is the way in which you have constructed, fashioned,

shaped your God-idea.” What I'm saying is that wherever, whenever you find an act of

mercy, know and identify that as a manifestation of divinity.

Again, it's the difference between this kind of relationship and this kind of relationship.

See, people have had experiences of mercy. They have had no experience except

conceptualizations. This is an intellectual idea. What I think Kaplan is trying to do is to

get God -- to make godliness so obvious that you can't deny it. Where am I going to

appeal for these things? So I'd have to – see, we have made fun of human beings who

act in a godly manner. We have said this is just human, merely human. And what

Kaplan says is “Wait a minute. That merely human is very, very sacred.”

When I was in a hospital, and I remember clearly being rolled up to that operating room

and I got to faint, the doctor didn't care, as a surgeon he has one job to do. There was

a nurse, I remember very clearly, I didn't fall yet under the anesthesia, who simply put

her hand or a cloth or something wet over my lips and over my forehead. I maintained

that we, as religious Jews, have got to find a term that's appropriate for that act. I

would say that's a godly act. "That's not godly. That's a nurse, she was paid for it."

Boloney. It's not true and if that's not a good illustration, pick your own illustration. But

what I'm saying is if you can see the idea of religion as a concern for the real qualities

and relationships that exist, then I think you have a much less difficult job in saying I'm


a religious personality. Of course, you're a religious people. I don't know irreligious

people. If I sit down with them three minutes, I know that what they're telling me is they

don't believe in bubumisses. So if a guy doesn't want to believe that God is sitting on

heaven with a long beard punishing and rewarding, I'm going to say you're an

Epicurus. Good for Masada, not good for me.

Last question over here. Nice and loud.

Male Speaker: If Kaplan is saying that God is a collective experience of the Jewish

people then is he accepting this traditional point of view, too?

Rabbi Schulweis: Sure. It's a good question. I'm going to repeat it. That’s a very

good question. If you say that the God-idea is a product of the collective experience of

the Jewish people, what about the Orthodox conception of God? And I think what

Kaplan is going to have to say is, in fact, he wants to say it, is that “Here is God of

godliness,” whatever you want to call it. And there are all kinds of ideas of godliness,

and the Orthodox are one amongst many as the reconstructionist and reformist as one

amongst many. But I cannot say to you "My God or out. My God or no God," which is

essentially what the Orthodox temper is why I find it very difficult for myself. But I can't

say that.

I think Kaplan is right for me and for those who I can persuade. And I could see myself

someday rejecting it, possibly. But that Orthodox idea of God, I got to take seriously.

In fact, when I do take it so seriously, I ask myself what do have in common with my

Zayda? And you know what I have in common with my Zayda? The attributes, the

attributes that he ascribed to his conception of God who happens for him have been a

super personal being, a super personal being. He thought of God as a person. So

what? So I don't think of God as a person because I knew we have nothing in

common. Everything in common.

What does his God do? His God does things through mercy, through love, through

justice. And just simply for me it's a little bit easy and less complicated because when

it comes to the question of evil, I think my Zayda has problems that I don't have. I may

have problems of my own but for me there's no question -- I would never be able to say

Ellie Wiesel with this theology, God died in Auschwitz. But once you already have a

particular conception of God of this kind, you're going to get into the kind of problems

that you always get and leave people with a tremendous amount of cynicism, anger

and resentment and hatred against God. What I want to do is to take that hatred out


and direct it correctly. It's misdirected, totally misdirected. It's directed on a wrong

conception of God.

Okay. Next week let's continue a little bit with God because I can't fool around with

God in one little lecture there. And maybe if you have some questions, you will write

them out for me. And I'd like to go from God to prayer because that's a logical

question. How do you pray to a God like this kind of godliness?

[AUDIO ENDS] [Mordecai-Kaplans-Idea-of-God]

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