From Self-Realization to Collective Liberation | A Neo-Kaplanism for Our Current Moment | Part I
Reimagining Mordecai M. Kaplan through Disability Justice
Rabbi Dr. Mordecai M. Kaplan is, for me, the most influential Jewish thinker of the twentieth century and whose work has directly shaped all Jewish life in the twenty first. He’s also one of the least properly acknowledged. For as influential and important as he was in his own time, he is rarely spoken about today. His legacy is not just theological, but institutional, cultural, and infrastructural.
He revived the Bat Mitzvah to American (and indeed, global) Jewish life in 1922, creating a model of inclusion that has since become normative across all denominations. He reimagined the synagogue as a full-service communal hub, not just a space for prayer and study, but for recreation, culture, and civic life - his own synagogue on the Upper West Side was the first in the United States to include a swimming pool, laying the conceptual and physical groundwork for what would later become the Jewish Community Center (JCC) system. He championed Jewish camping as a formative tool for cultural and spiritual transmission, directly influencing the founding of the Ramah summer camps.
As the founding rabbi of the Reconstructionist Movement’s flagship synagogue Society for the Advancement of Judaism and a major force behind Young Israel, he shaped the trajectories of Modern Orthodoxy, Reconstructionism, and the emergence of American Conservative Judaism. He trained generations of rabbis during his 50-year tenure at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and helped establish the Teachers Institute and the University of Judaism (now American Jewish University) in Los Angeles. There isn’t a part of the American Jewish landscape that he hasn’t touched directly or indirectly via his students.
His creation of the Reconstructionist Movement - and its journal, prayerbook, and rabbinical training program - laid the groundwork for a new stream of Jewish life via its own congregations and the Havurah Movement of the 1970’s. Even Reform and Renewal Judaism bear his imprint, drawing on ideas he articulated about evolving tradition, halakha, democratic spiritual authority, and the need for Jewish life to speak meaningfully to contemporary people.
Yet despite this head-spinning amount of influence, Kaplan is rarely quoted in contemporary Jewish discourse. He’s not taught widely. His name is mostly absent from courses on Jewish History and mainstream theological debates. His ideas are still in circulation - almost always without attribution, and without the grounding in his broader project.
At the heart of Kaplan’s work was a singular insight: that Judaism is not merely a religion, but a civilization - a living, evolving organism grounded in shared culture(s), language(s), memory, and purpose. From this came his most enduring theological and communal contribution - the Reconstructionist vision of Judaism as the product of the Jewish people, not a static revelation from the Divine.
In Kaplan’s view, the authority of Jewish tradition comes not from a big man (or woman) in the sky, but from its rootedness in the ongoing life, embodied experiences, and praxis of the Jewish community. This view reshaped the role of the synagogue, of Jewish education, of communal institutions, halakha, and of theology itself. Jewish life was to be reconstructed around the needs, values, and commitments of the people - not discarded, but rebuilt with an eye for original purpose in creating community.
Kaplan was, in many ways, decolonizing Judaism. He resisted and fought vehemently against the Christian gaze that had shaped both Jewish self-understanding and external perceptions of Judaism - particularly the framing of Judaism as a “religion” defined by dogma, fixed beliefs, and concrete theological propositions. In contrast, Kaplan reclaimed Judaism as a civilization: multidimensional, cultural, lived, and evolving. He believed that every community in every generation must evolve and rework what being Jewish meant to them (even if it didn’t match his particular views in own time). His work was a protest against the reduction of Jewish life to abstract doctrine or a checklist of ritual observance. It was also a protest against the assimilationist pressures that told Jews they could only belong in modernity by mimicking Christian religious forms. Kaplan’s Judaism refuses assimilation. It was grounded in peoplehood, in communal creativity, and in the lived, complex reality of being Jewish in the Diaspora.
And critically, this meant placing community - not belief, not ritual, not law - at the center of Jewish religious life. As much of a paradox as this sounds, community defines religion, not Divinity. Kaplan saw American Jews drifting toward privatized religion, shaped by Protestant norms of individualized (and industrialized) faith. He viewed this as both a spiritual and cultural danger. In contrast to the increasingly fragmented expressions of American religiosity, Kaplan called for a Judaism rooted in peoplehood and shared responsibility. The community was not just where Judaism happened - it was itself a sacred practice. Through democratic belonging, shared ritual, cultural creativity, and ethical interdependence, Jews could shape a life that was both authentic to tradition and fully alive to the present.
That’s why Kaplan matters now more than ever. In a moment when so many of our communities are unraveling - under the weight of systemic inequality, racialized exclusion, ableism, the politics of hate, transphobia, and capitalist dehumanization - his call to center community as the axis of Jewish life feels both urgent and incomplete. Urgent, because we desperately need collective frameworks that reject privatized survival in favor of mutual care. Incomplete, because Kaplan’s model, for all its brilliance, was not built to fully account for the lives of those at the margins. The communities he envisioned presumed a kind of functional citizen - the culturally fluent, civically engaged, reasonably healthy member of a democratic polity. But what about those whose needs do not neatly fit into that framework? What about those who cannot function on normative timelines or who are seen as burdens to communal life?
This piece is my attempt to reimagine Kaplan’s project - what I call (a) Neo-Kaplanism - through the lens of disability justice and communal care. Like our teacher, I believe that the future of Jewish life depends not just on sustaining tradition, but on transforming it. My difference, is the terms of the belonging. Kaplan gave us a model for how Jewish community can be constructed through democratic values. I want to ask: how do we build Jewish communities through the values of care, interdependence, and access? What would it mean to reconstruct our civilization around the needs of those who have been most left out? Not just disabled people, but all those of us pushed to the margins. All of us who have been made to feel that we are too much, too dependent, too complicated. Kaplan began the reconstruction. It’s time to continue it - more radically, more lovingly, and more justly.
Kaplan’s view of Jewish civilization is rooted in the interplay between individual and community - but importantly, not in opposition. He doesn’t ask the individual to make sacrifices for the sake of the group, nor does he glorify self-expression and American individualism in isolation. For Kaplan, the individual and the community are co-constitutive and creating each other: the individual becomes themselves through the community, and the community is only meaningful when it supports and reflects the full development of its members. It’s a dynamic, mutually sustaining relationship. Neither comes first. Neither is sufficient on its own.
And yet, from the perspective of disability justice - and from my own experience as an autistic educator and community leader - Kaplan’s idea is not so simple, as much as I’d love to believe that it is. Communities are not automatically nourishing. In fact, many are extractive. Especially for those of us on the margins. They demand performance in exchange for conditional belonging. We are always on the thread. They ask us to show up masked, to mold ourselves into something tolerable, legible, productive. Again, as long as we “behave”.
When Kaplan writes that the self is realized through community, I hear the aspiration - but I also hear the risk and recognize my own lived experience and the lived experience of many in my own community. What happens when the community cannot receive our full selves? Or when they don’t want to? When our very existance makes our community “uncomfortable”? When participation itself requires hiding, draining, or contorting who we are? What Kaplan names as “realization” only becomes possible when we are held in authenticity - not performance. When we are supported not just to join, but to arrive fully. We are still a long ways off from this in most communities and in the greater Jewish community as a whole.
Kaplan’s move was bold for its time. Early 20th-century American Jewish life was being pulled in two directions. On one side: the fierce individualism of Protestant America, where religion was a private affair (with aspects performed publicly) and self-worth was tied to personal success. The Reform movement at the time moved strongly in this direction (though there were those who were opposed to it). On the other hand, the older communal structures of Eastern European Jewish life were replanting themselves in the United States - often hierarchical, patriarchal, and resistant to dissent. This was represented in various forms from the Conservative movement to the Orthodox movements. Kaplan rejected all. He dreamed of democratic communities that could hold shared tradition and personal growth, collective ritual and intellectual freedom. As we saw, he was involved with the Conservative, Modern Orthodox, and mainstream Orthodox movements at various points in his career.
He wasn’t dreaming in a vacuum. Kaplan was a product of the American Progressive Era. Like many thinkers of that time, he believed that education, democracy, and culture could redeem society. He was deeply influenced by John Dewey’s pragmatism - the idea that truth is not fixed, but emerges through experience, experimentation, and social cooperation. Dewey helped Kaplan articulate his vision of Judaism as an evolving civilization: lived, practiced, reshaped through and by time. But Kaplan also drew from other sources - Nietzsche’s emphasis on self-overcoming, Durkheim’s insights about collective consciousness, William James’s focus on the pluralism of religious experience and the pragmatic value of belief, Emerson’s insistence on moral self-trust and spiritual democracy, and Maimonides’s commitment to reconciling reason and tradition, philosophy and halakha. His turn to democratic community was both philosophical and political.
But the Progressive Era had deep and disturbing contradictions. It gave us public libraries and labor reform - but also eugenics, forced assimilation, and the illusion of neutrality in the public sphere. It championed democracy while reinforcing segregation and colonialism. Kaplan inherited this double-edged legacy. I have to admit, he was often not affirming to disabled people at all, and not living up to his own values. In 1936 he wrote, “A parasitic dependence on others is allowed only to the immature, the insane, the physically handicapped and those criminal whom society has not the heart to destroy but cannot trust as operating members”. 1 This is certainly something for us to unpack later.
His commitment to peoplehood and participatory culture, however was real. But so too were the blind spots: the assumptions about who “the people” were, what participation looked like, and who had access to it.
Central to Kaplan’s vision was the idea that Judaism exists to help people achieve what he called “salvation” - not in the Christian sense of an afterlife, but in the this-worldly sense of self-realization. For Kaplan, a good Jewish life is one in which the individual becomes fully themselves through engagement with Jewish civilization. Not despite Judaism, but through it - through shared ritual, culture, language, ethics, and memory. This is the community’s purpose - to cultivate meaning, character, creativity, and moral depth in each of its members.
But this raises a question Kaplan never fully answers: - which individual is being imagined here?
His framework assumes a particular kind of self - competent, autonomous, reflective, mobile. Someone able to show up, participate, and “realize” themselves through that participation. Someone who can contribute, argue, build, grow. Someone, frankly, whose capacities are taken for granted.
Kaplan doesn’t reckon with the reality that many of us do not and cannot enter community on those terms. That some of us are exhausted, or in crisis. That some of us need translation, flexibility, or different pacing. That some of us move through trauma and always will. That some of us - disabled, neurodivergent, queer, poor, immigrant, people of color, chronically ill - have always been on the edge of the very communities Kaplan wanted to center.
More than that - Kaplan treats “community” as if it’s inherently a given good. He assumes the community wants you. That it can hold you. That it sees you as a legitimate part of its body. But many Jewish communities have functioned -actively - as mechanisms of exclusion. Not out of malice, necessarily, but out of the love for normativity. To fit into the greater American (or British, French etc) project. We know this. Converts, patrilineal Jews, disabled Jews, queer Jews, trans Jews, interfaith families - all have been told, implicitly or explicitly - you don’t belong here.
Not like that.
Not unless you perform.
Not unless you conform.
Not unless you fit yourself into our mold.
This is where I begin to diverge - not from Kaplan’s goals, but from the frame he built to get there. Because if we take his project seriously, we must ask harder questions. What does self-realization look like when autonomy isn’t the default? When showing up at all is a victory? When the very architecture of the community wasn’t built with you in mind?
We live in a different world now. Jewish life isn’t confined to American synagogues and seminaries. We are global. We are diasporic. We are digitally entangled. Communities today are porous, multilingual, transnational, decentralized. Belonging isn’t defined by geography or institutions. And power flows differently. Kaplan’s American optimism is no longer enough.
But that doesn’t mean we abandon him. It means we do what he taught us to do - we reconstruct. Kaplan never wanted his ideas frozen in time. His vision was never about preserving his answers, but about building frameworks that could evolve with each generation. Neo-Kaplanism isn’t a break from his project - it’s the next phase of it, rooted in a world he couldn’t have imagined, but whose spirit he insisted we respond to.
Kaplan gave us a vision of community as the source of Jewish meaning. But to move forward, we have to ask - what if community isn’t just where meaning is found - but where care is practiced? What if “salvation” doesn’t mean becoming something - but being held in your full complexity?
Kaplan built the house. Now we need to rebuild it - with ramps, sound proof windows, fun textures, different kinds of doors, and with new assumptions about who it’s for and how it works.
Stay tuned for Part II where I’ll further explore the limits of Kaplan’s framework - how his vision, for all its brilliance, still centers normative ideas of functionality and contribution. I’ll bring disability justice into direct conversation with his theology and world building project, and begin to reimagine what community, self-realization, and even the Divine might look like when we center care, access, and interdependence - not assimilation, productivity, or perfection.
Mordecai M. Kaplan, The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion (New York: Behrman House, 1937), 112.