Mordecai Kaplan's Salvation as Autistic Unmasking
A Kaplanian Frame for Autistic Becoming
Mordecai M. Kaplan (1881–1983) is not only one of the most influential figures on my spiritual life, but on my work as an autistic peer-support coach and educator as well. He was a rabbi, theologian, educator, and the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, my spiritual home. Born in Lithuania and raised in a deeply Orthodox home shaped by the Musar (Ethical Living) movement, Kaplan immigrated to New York in 1889. There, he pursued dual tracks of Jewish and secular education, studying at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS) and at Columbia University. At Columbia, he was deeply influenced by Felix Adler, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emil Durkheim, and John Dewey, whose emphasis on ethics, community, and pragmatism would leave a permanent mark on Kaplan’s religious philosophy. He was also shaped by modern biblical criticism through figures like Arnold Ehrlich, pushing him away from inherited dogma and toward a historically grounded, evolving understanding of Judaism.
Kaplan served as a rabbi and educator for decades, founding the Society for the Advancement of Judaism (SAJ) and pioneering the first public bat mitzvah in the U.S. He taught at JTS for over 50 years, often at odds with its leadership. His writings - especially Judaism as a Civilization - laid the groundwork for what became the Reconstructionist movement. Though he never intended to found a new denomination, Kaplan’s vision of Judaism as an evolving religious civilization influenced every major stream of American Jewish life. Central to that vision was a lifelong concern with meaning, coherence, and belonging.
Kaplan didn’t know about autism, at least not in the same way we understand it today. He also didn’t know anything about what we call Autistic Unmasking. But he did know what it felt like to be out of step, out of sync, and always in tension with the world around him. He knew what it felt like to yearn for integrity - to want to live a life that made sense from the inside, not just looked acceptable from the outside. And he spent his life building a theology and an ever-changing and evolving world-view that made that possible.
Kaplan called it Salvation. The word is typically understood in Christian terms, but Kaplan didn’t mean it in that way. The Hebrew term Shlemut means wholeness - an integrated state of body, mind, and spirit. For Kaplan, salvation wasn’t about rescue from sin or damnation. These concepts are inherently not Jewish. It was about the ability to become oneself without obstruction. It was an embodied, relational, this-worldly striving for coherence. Shlemut implies completeness - not perfection, but integrity. A sense that our internal world is not at war with itself. A state where we are able to live meaningfully in relation to others, the world, and the Divine. This is a dynamic state, not a fixed endpoint. It’s about fullness of being.
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… Salvation is unhampered freedom in living and helping others to live a courageous, intelligent, righteous and purposeful life.1
For me, that definition feels like home. Because that’s what autistic unmasking is. It’s the work of removing all the protective performances we learned in order to survive - the scripts, the smiles, the contortions of language and posture - and beginning to live as ourselves. Not just for comfort, but for coherence. Not just for survival, but for flourishing. Not just alone, but in relationship. This is how we live our fullest lives. Not by shedding who we are, but by reclaiming who we’ve always been beneath the layers. It is a slow, nonlinear process of shedding and returning, again and again, toward integrity. And like Kaplan’s salvation, it’s not just for the individual. Unmasking creates space for others to unmask. It transforms communities. It is both personal and collective liberation.
Kaplan was an anxious man. His diaries, one of the longest on record in human history, are full of emotional searching, ambivalence, and inner turmoil. He often felt misunderstood by his colleagues. He had few close personal relationships outside of his family. He experienced spiritual restlessness, rejection sensitivity, and depression. He longed for connection - to others, to the Divine, to his own sense of purpose. And so he did what many of us do: he built a system to make the world intelligible.
Only by identifying the cosmic process at work in ourselves and mobilizing all our energies and inner drives in accordance with its demands are we likely to achieve our fulfillment as human beings.2
This is not abstract philosophy. This is theology as self-regulation. Kaplan created a religious framework that let him feel more coherent, more connected, more grounded. Just as autistic humans unmask not just to express ourselves, but to stop living in contradiction - Kaplan theologized his way toward coherence.
Kaplan’s understanding of salvation cannot be separated from his understanding of the Divine. For Kaplan, God is not the source of salvation in the traditional theistic sense - a supernatural being who rescues or redeems. Rather, salvation emerges through relationship with the Divine as a process. The power that “makes for salvation” is the same power that animates life, drives moral growth, and makes meaning possible. To understand what Kaplan means by salvation, we have to look at how he reimagines God itself - not as an external force, but as the dynamic energy within and between us that enables transformation.
He rejected the concept of supernaturalism because it didn’t fit what he felt or believed. He rejected the concept of Jewish Chosenness, divine intervention, and metaphysical perfection. But he didn’t reject the Divine. He transvalued it. He reimagined it in terms he could live with:
It is sufficient that God should mean to us the sum of the animating, organizing forces in relationships, which are forever making a cosmos out of chaos… God is experienced as creator every time our thought of Him furnishes us an escape from the sense of frustration and surprises us with a feeling of permanence in the midst of the universal flux.3
Is that not what unmasking is, too? A cosmos out of chaos. A return to our own rhythm, our own texture of reality, our own wholeness. So many people I meet speak about autistic unmasking as a form of spirituality, and indeed it is. Kaplan gives us the language.
He insists that salvation is not about a supernatural afterlife. It’s not a one-time event. It’s not static. It’s always about the here and now.
Nothing dynamic can be perfect. To be dynamic implies to be in a state of becoming.4
That idea - that we are always becoming, always turning, always in process - is foundational to both his theology and to what we call unmasking. Kaplan’s entire theological method reflects this: his ideas evolved over the course of his century-long life. He returned to concepts again and again, refining, adapting, responding to new experiences, to developments in science, to the political and emotional shifts in Jewish life. His theology grew with him.
That same fluidity is what defines unmasking. Too often, autistic people are told that once we "come out" or start stimming or disclose a diagnosis, we are "unmasked." But that’s not how it works. We unmask over and over, in layers, in stages. We unmask and then re-mask in some situations to survive. We unmask internally, emotionally, spiritually, even if the world around us never sees it.
Unmasking is not a single act of liberation - it is a lifelong, dynamic relationship with self-awareness. It shifts depending on safety, context, relationships, and capacity. It requires flexibility, intuition, and a deep trust in one’s own rhythm. Like Kaplan’s Judaism, unmasking is not about adhering to a fixed identity, but allowing identity to unfold. And like salvation, it’s not about arriving - it’s about making movement possible.
Religion is the endeavor to invoke these animating and organizing forces in relationships and to get us to place ourselves en rapport with them… the world has not reached finality, but is continually being renewed by God and in need of improvement by man.5
Salvation, like unmasking, is always happening. It never steps, unless we force it to do so (and often with disastrous consequences).
Rabbi Kaplan offers us a framework that sees self-realization, authenticity, and ethical living not as luxuries, but as sacred. A framework that says the Divine is not some being outside of you, but the force that draws you toward coherence, belonging, and growth.
Kaplan didn’t use the language of Neurodiversity. But he gave us a theology that holds it. He gave us a process, not a prescription. A way of seeking salvation that begins with the self and expands outward - toward community, toward justice, toward wholeness.
That’s what autistic unmasking is.
Kaplan said: “God is the power that makes for salvation.”
We might say: unmasking is that power, too.
And the work is never done, just as God is understood to have no ending and no beginning.
Soterics (1935)
Judaism as a Civilization (1934)
The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion (1937)
The Diary of Mordecai Kaplan, January 15, 1931
The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion (1937)