Towards a Neo-Kaplanism | Reimagining Kaplan via Disability Justice & Communal Care
What Would Mordecai Kaplan's Torah Look Like in 2025?
There’s a strange irony happening in some corners of liberal Jewish life. Rabbi Dr. Mordecai Kaplan - the radical, the innovator, the one who broke the frame - is increasingly treated as a fixed authority in certain parts of the Reconstructionist Jewish community. A small but vocal set of Reconstructionist clergy and laypeople cling to his 20th-century formulations like dogma: God is the “power that makes for salvation.” Judaism is a religious civilization. Mitzvot are cultural behaviors. End of story.
But Kaplan wasn’t trying to freeze Judaism in time. The opposite! He wasn’t trying to create a theology that could be handed down unchanged for generations. He offered something much riskier - a method for reframing, reconstructing Judaism in light of our lived experiences, intellectual frameworks, and moral responsibilities.
To honor Kaplan in 2025 is not to quote him or to try to think about how he would feel about various current events topics or theological debates. It’s to do what he did - again. And again. And again.
That is the heart of Neo-Kaplanism - not an update of his ideas, but a reconstruction of his method using the truths that our generation cannot unknow - climate crisis, systemic ableism, racialized violence, post-colonialism, the politicization of Judaism, late-stage capitalism, economic collapse, queer theory, neurodiversity, COVID-19, trans rights, and the slow unspooling of every inherited “certainty”.
We don’t need a God who makes sense to Kaplan.
We need a God who makes sense to us.
A God who holds up under the weight of this world and who helps us stay human in it.
Kaplan called God “the power that makes for salvation.” But in 2025, salvation isn’t something we are all looking for. Not in the Christianized, abstract, individualistic sense Kaplan inherited. We’re not looking to be rescued. We’re looking to survive. Is that a positive take on things? No. But it’s a realistic one.
Neo-Kaplanism reframes God not as salvation, but as collective regulation, ethical resonance, and interdependent unfolding. God is not an external force. God is what pulses into being when we refuse domination and choose care.
God isn’t found in the sky, but in mutual aid networks keeping sick and disabled people alive during crisis. God isn’t found in the synagogue during certain hours of the day on particular days of the week, but in the disabled body that will not conform to capitalist time. God isn’t to be found in meditating alone until a spark comes, but in the sound of the song in the heart of the community.
God is not a being, but being-with. Not a judge, but a direction. Not order, but relationship.
God is what moves when we choose truth over performance, justice over convenience, life over profit. God is not an abstraction. God is not neutral. God sides with the oppressed. God exists in acts of collective survival.
Kaplan taught that prayer should help us orient ourselves toward higher values. In Neo-Kaplanism, prayer becomes a spiritual nervous system reset. Not performance. Not dogma. But a space to re-regulate, to remember our values, to reattune ourselves to the sacred pattern of life we want to move toward.
We don’t pray to flatter a divine ego. We pray because the world is overstimulating and violent and full of contradictions. We pray because we need to pause, co-regulate, and remember who we are beyond the masks capitalism, ableism, and trauma have strapped to our faces.
Prayer is not about belief.
Prayer is not about performance.
Prayer is what happens when an overstimulated autistic person drops into their breath and can reconnect to the world.
Prayer is when a survivor stops fawning and starts naming truth.
Prayer is when a queer Jew dares to bless themselves out loud in the heart of the community.
Prayer in Neo-Kaplanism is not an obligation to God, but a gift to each other - a ritual way of saying: I’m still here. I’m still listening. I still care.
Kaplan rejected Halakha as divine law and saw it instead as an evolving communal structure. But in his time, he did not have the language of disability justice, Queer Theory, post-colonialism, or trauma-informed practice. We do.
For Kaplan, Halakha’s authority was never supernatural. It was functional and relational. It mattered only to the extent that it helped Jewish people live ethical, meaningful, and connected lives in the context of their time and place. He believed Jewish law was valuable not because it was eternal, but because it could evolve.
Neo-Kaplanism insists that Halakha must be reconstructed as a non-coercive, liberatory framework rooted in embodied ethics and the wisdom of those most harmed by systems of control. It must be relational, developed through consent and trust rather than imposed authority.
It must be accessible, honoring disabled and neurodivergent ways of being as valid paths into mitzvah, not deviations from it. It must be anti-colonial, refusing to be weaponized in service of nationalism, supremacy, or conquest. And it must be ethical - measured not by its continuity with the past but by its capacity to uphold dignity, justice, and communal care in the present.
This is not Halakha as obedience, but Halakha as co-creation. Not law as surveillance, but practice as presence. Not divine command as fear, but invitation into sacred responsibility. What we ask of one another is not conformity to a fixed past, but commitment to each other’s humanity in the present. If Halakha is to survive, it must serve the living - disabled and queer Jews, neurodivergent bodyminds, Jews in exile and diaspora, Jews navigating trauma, grief, and rupture. A reconstructed Halakha is not a return to tradition. It is a return to our lives here and now.
Neo-Kaplanism is not about preserving Kaplan’s conclusions. It’s about honoring his courage. It’s about picking up the tools he gave us - critical inquiry, lived experience, ethical imagination - and using them to build a Jewish civilization that can hold us in this world, as we are.
Not one day. Not in theory. Now.
The stakes are too high to retreat into theological nostalgia or spiritual abstraction. If we are to survive - and not just survive, but build something worth surviving for - we need a God who shows up in community care, a prayer life that heals our nervous systems, and a Halakha that grows from the wisdom of our wounds.
That’s the work. That’s the invitation. A Judaism based in communal care and an awareness of the world in which we live in 2025.
That’s the Judaism we are reconstructing.