Bryan Schwartzman:
From my home studio, welcome to Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations.

MUSIC:
[foreign language 00:00:08].

R. Deborah Waxman:
Kaplan believed, and I think we believe to this day, that voting was a mitzvah, a commandment.

MUSIC:
[foreign language 00:00:23].

Bryan Schwartzman:
I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman, and today, I'll be speaking with two rabbi scholars, Rabbi Deborah Waxman and Rabbi William Plevan. We'll be talking about how Reconstructionist Judaism has long upheld democracy as a civic and a religious value. That's particularly true in the teachings of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan and his son-in-law, Rabbi Ira Eisenstein, who were two of Reconstructionism's founders. With this election just about a week away, we'll be talking about two essays, Rabbi Waxman's Evolve essay, A Jewish Embrace of Democracy: Early Reconstructionist Judaism and America's Promise, and Plevan's essay, Sustaining Democracy Amid Cultural Pluralism: Mordecai Kaplan's Vision.
We'll also be discussing Evolve's recent symposium, Practices for Defending Democracy, which includes some 20 essays and is based on the 2017 bestselling work On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. That short and very impactful work was written by Yale historian, Timothy Snyder. Okay. With us to help set the table is, as always, my friend, colleague, and executive producer, Rabbi Jacob Staub. Rabbi Jacob, welcome. Welcome back to the program. Always great to see you.

R. Jacob Staub:
Always great to be here, Bryan. Good to see you.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Rabbi Jacob, why so much content? Why so many essays on the site right now connecting Judaism and Democracy?

R. Jacob Staub:
Two reasons. One, we on the Evolve Advisory Board really thought it important to let people know how central commitment to American democratic culture is from the very beginning in the Reconstructionist approach to being Jewish in America when we believe in pluralism, and in diversity, and in celebrating difference. That goes all the way back to the '20s, and '30s, and '40s, and '50s of the last century, and we just wanted to let people know what our motivation is. Second, in this climate in which we are feeling that many democratic ideas, values, institutions are potentially under threat or are under threat, we want to bolster the possibility that individuals can live their lives in ways that promote a democratic anti-authoritarian culture so that it's not just a matter of going to the voting booth, but that how you treat your neighbor and what you say in public are all things that we think are important to preserving democracy.

Bryan Schwartzman:
In this podcast and in a couple of the essays, we discussed Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan. He lived a long time, I believe, from 1881 to 1983, wrote a lot, a lot. On one foot, can you remind our listeners of who was Mordecai Kaplan?

R. Jacob Staub:
Sure. Let me decide which foot. Mordecai Kaplan, first of all, is the founder of Reconstructing Judaism. In 1922, he established the first Reconstructionist synagogue, the Society for the Advancement of Judaism in Manhattan. In that same year, his daughter was the first bat mitzvah back when girls were not celebrated in that way. His basic approach to Judaism is that Judaism is an evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people and has always evolved in the past and needs to continue to adapt to new circumstances. Specifically, with regard to today's topic, he really promoted the idea of living in two civilizations. You didn't have to... which was not obvious, which was not obvious a hundred years ago that you could be both Jewish and American. There was a lot of pressure to submit to the melting pot where everybody would be the same, and he wanted to preserve and enhance the ability of communities to live with their differences and in their distinctive ways, including the Jewish culture. That is something that we continue to strive for.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Lastly, you met him or studied with him as a young rabbinical student, correct?

R. Jacob Staub:
No. I'm four years too young for that. He taught the first class, I think, only, and I was in the fifth class. I met him once the day before my father died.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Wow.

R. Jacob Staub:
My father had his heart attack on Friday. I went to the Society of Advancement of Judaism on Shabbat and asked for an Aliyah and a Mi Shebeirach which was the first time I heard the Reconstructionist version of a prayer for healing. When I sat down, he was 90, he didn't hear well, so whoever was sitting next to him came over and asked... Rabbi Kaplan wanted to know why I went up for Mi Shebeirach. I told him my father was in the hospital, and he wished him well. I was able to go to the Cardiac Care Unit at Bronx Lebanon Hospital and tell my father that Rabbi Kaplan had offered him a blessing.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Wow. I didn't know that. I learn something every time I talk to you. That's a profound connection. Rabbi Jacob, your knowledge is most helpful as always. Thanks. Thanks again for being on the show, and guiding us, and putting out this program.

R. Jacob Staub:
Thank you very much. It's my pleasure, and I really enjoy working with you on this project. It's first-rate. I'm proud to be part of it.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Now, let's get to our guests. Rabbi Deborah Waxman, PhD is President and CEO of Reconstructing Judaism. She holds a doctorate from Temple University in American Jewish history, and her dissertation focused on the early history of the Reconstructionist Movement. Rabbi William Plevan, also a PhD, is Visiting Assistant Professor of Contemporary Jewish Thought at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. He earned his PhD in religion from Princeton University, and during the 2023-2024 academic year, he served as the college's Democracy Fellow which involved organizing programs around the connections between Judaism and democracy. Rabbi Deborah Waxman, Rabbi Bill Plevan, welcome. Welcome to the podcast. It's great to welcome you back and welcome you here for the first time.

R. William Plevan:
Thank you, Bryan.

R. Deborah Waxman:
Thanks so much. It's good to be here.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So you're both scholars, and we're going to dive into history. I wanted to start just by giving a nod to the present. I guess it's eight years ago now when I started working for this organization. I met a young rabbinical student, now a Rabbi, Michael Pollack, who talked to me about the dangers facing democracy and democracy being in peril, and I... That didn't mesh with my experience at all as being a journalist. I thought it was overblown and maybe even a little naïve, and it just... Eight years later, it just seems prophetic and how right he was on so many levels. I guess I'm asking... We're talking about a month before the election. This will drop much closer to the election. I'm just wondering both as historians, as scholars, as citizens, how you're feeling about the stability and health of our democracy, just acknowledging how much we can't know about what's going to come to pass. Bill, do you want to start us off?

R. William Plevan:
Sure, I'd be happy to. Well, I'm worried for all of the reasons you mentioned, Bryan, about the things that were set into motion starting roughly eight years ago. Though I think the roots of it go back further, and I think particularly because of the way in which some of the core institutions of political democracy have been called into question and undermined by the rhetoric in particular of a leading presidential candidate and former president. That's done a lot of damage to trust in institutions in our country, and I think that that's very worrisome, and it's very worrisome for what may happen in the aftermath of the coming presidential election. At the same time, I've been working on canvassing in a political vein, and I've seen a lot of people coming out, and organizing, and really coming to understand what the stakes are. So I think there's a lot of strength building up in favor of a more democratic civic engagement for people who really value democratic institutions and value all people having a voice in politics in this country.

R. Deborah Waxman:
I think I really agree with you, Bill, both in the concern and also in the ways and places I feel hope. I will say one of my favorite... It's a funny word to use. One of my favorite academic books, a book that was incredibly influential for me as I was working on my dissertation and as I think about this is a book called American Crucible. It talks about how there have been, since the founding of the Republic, competing visions of what democracy means. The scholar who wrote it, Gary Gerstle, talks about there's always been a strand of civic nationalism which is about expanding rights for everyone and a racialized nationalism which really puts forward the kind of Christian nationalism, the supremacist vision that we see really gaining ground in a way that we assess as a real threat to democracy even as they co-opted the language of democracy for themselves.
Gerstle, in this book, traces the tensions and the battles, And so it's not a static thing. This is a big experiment that we're a part of, and it requires... for democracy to be healthy, it really requires a lot of engagement. Right now, I think that those two visions are very much at war with each other. Again, there's been these strands throughout American history. The stakes feel really high for which vision is going to prevail in the near term, and part of the challenge is... but the more expansive vision makes a lot of space for the people who don't agree, and the more restrictive vision feels incredibly threatening if not terrifying to those of us who don't agree, let alone those of us who are a minority population once, or twice, or three times over.
So I am involved, I am watchful, I am anxious, I am... I see reasons for cautious optimism. So I'm on guard like everybody else which is... The vigilance is probably apt. It's also a bit exhausting, and exhausting in the context of we've just passed the first anniversary of October 7th where we're feeling the effects of climate change really acutely. So vigilance seems to be called for in a lot of different ways which comes at a cost.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So many people might not be aware. There really is a special relationship with democracy and the Reconstructionist Movement or democracy occupies a place in the history and imagination of the Reconstructionist Movement. Each of you have written a really fascinating piece on Evolve looking at that and going back to the intellectual founder, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan. He was writing, and thinking, and developing these ideas at a time of rising in the '20s and '30s, rising authoritarianism abroad, and nativism, and isolationism at home. I guess, Deborah, I'm wondering if you can talk about what was driving him and led him on this path of really upholding or uplifting democracy as a religious value.

R. Deborah Waxman:
Sure. I mean, I think probably we have to talk a little bit about what was driving him in general and why democracy was so central to his solution. Kaplan's part of a whole line of thinkers and leaders who tried to grapple with the reality of modernity on Jewish life. In pre-modern times, Jews understood ourselves... We understood ourselves, and we were understood by others as a group. Everybody was part of a group. There was no such thing as a... It really wasn't possible to live as an individual unconnected from a group, and we also lived at a time where supernaturally revealed religion was the explanation for most of the things that... the answers to most of the big questions that we asked, "Why are we here, and what are we supposed to do while we're here?" Also, religion was the pathway of how we navigated our day-to-day lives in relation to that. It was like the connective tissue between those big questions and how we made our lives.
Part of what modernity brought on us is the emergence of rationalism and the shrinking of the religious answers with ever-increasing secularization. So religion went from being the answer to absolutely everything to being something that was increasingly understood to be just something that happened in church or synagogue and in your home. Also, Jews went from being Jews as a corporate group. Think of our liturgy. Everything is in the first person plural to being individual citizens of nation states. So that introduced a whole series of questions, where did authority come from, and how do we make our decisions?
So Kaplan was trying to answer those questions, and he saw modernity as... It was really challenging. It was really, really disruptive. Most thinkers of his era thought that, and he also saw it as full of opportunity and full of promise as well. I would say that as he was developing Reconstructionism, he really saw democracy as a huge part of the promise. The short definition that ultimately came to the forefront was to understand Judaism as the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people. In terms of evolution, Kaplan saw the Democratic era and is setting aside of Monarch as a supernaturally anointed leader, setting that aside and government according to the will of the people as the next stage of development and as one that was really enlightening and really full of possibility.
So when he put forward the idea of Judaism as a civilization, he also put forward the idea that Jews in the diaspora at least were living in two civilizations in the instance of his primary constituency, the Jewish civilization and the American civilization. He was looking for the Jewish civilization to influence the American civilization in certain ways, most especially with a celebration of group culture and with a focus on ethics and the importance of ethical behavior. He was also open to and interested in the American civilization influencing the Jewish civilization and democratic commitments. Whether they are about polity or governments or whether they were about an ethos or a sensibility, it was at the top of the list of what he thought the American civilization could and should contribute to the Jewish civilization. That's a very, very big answer. There's a lot of ways to drill down more deeply, but I'll pause there. Bill, do you want to add anything?

R. William Plevan:
Yeah. Thanks. I mean, I would want to amplify, Deborah, what you said about Kaplan seeing democracy as both a challenge and an opportunity in a very specific sense of where Jewish life is going in America, that is. I think he saw the challenge of America's emerging democratic society as a challenge in the sense that American society didn't really demand particular forms of group identity and didn't insist on putting Jews in an identity box. It was increasingly possible for Jews to live outside the framework of particularistic Jewish identity and with European modernity in general, but even perhaps more so in the United States, outside the framework of Jewish institutional communal life.
At the same time, obviously, he appreciated the way in which American democracy gave tremendous freedom to American Jews in a way that had been unprecedented certainly in pre-modern Jewish societies, but particularly in Europe. Then, democracy itself as an ethos could, as you wrote about in your article, could really enhance Jewish teachings and make Judaism more compelling. So he saw, I think, both sociologically and theologically tremendous opportunities for growth in Jewish communal life and in Jewish teachings that would involve and require an integration of the democratic ethos with Jewish teachings.

R. Deborah Waxman:
Yes, and I think that your answer and also, Bryan, your introduction pointed out to this tension, and it was what I raised in the book I referenced in my first response. Absolutely, both the threat and the opportunity of Jews being able to exist as individuals, and that's all embedded in America's founding document that each individual has the freedom of religion or the freedom of expression. But then, on the flip side, Bryan, as you mentioned, Kaplan was formulating his theories at a moment of tremendous pressure for homogenization. That's the nicest way of saying it. The shorthand is the melting pot ideology that all those ethnic minorities that were coming over with all the ways of immigration, that the invention of the steamship, and the industrial needs, and the modernizing needs of American society prompted in the late 19th and the early 20th century that they should melt away all their differences.
The ideal was a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant norm. So even as there was all this space for individuals, it was also this effort to really, really push on conceptions of American democracy that were much more inflected by the... I think the shorthand of what I would say is Jews overwhelmingly have been drawn to the vision of civic nationalism and how democracy is a really important tool to bring that to life. Part of Kaplan's project and his embrace of democracy was to use democracy to smash through the more rationalized version of nationalism in defense of that more expansive vision.

R. William Plevan:
I would add to that that I think even Kaplan sees that even within the vision of civic nationalism that has a more flexible approach to religion and culture that Jews and Jewish communal life could be absorbed in a more flexible version of the melting pot that didn't insist on a chauvinistic, White Anglo-Saxon, fascist nationalism, but could still downplay, like a form of civic nationalism that would really downplay religious or cultural differences in a way that would really undermine the richness of Jewish life and really, the many of the wonderful things about Jewish life in, say, the Pale of Settlement within the Russian Empire where there was a real vibrant Jewish civilization. Right?

R. Deborah Waxman:
Yeah.

R. William Plevan:
I think when he talks about Jewish civilization and rebuilding it within the American context, he's thinking about that very vibrant form of Jewish life that did exist in Europe under tremendous political and economic oppression, but nonetheless had different kinds of Jewish institutions, and Yeshivot, and Yiddish, and Yiddish press, and political movements of various kinds. He wanted to see that vibrancy happen in the United States of America, and I think he thought that even a liberal civic nationalism that still demanded more cultural assimilation without chauvinism, even without... It might involve very mild forms of racism by our standards, right? But without chauvinism, without fascism, without a strict racialist conception of itself could still be very damaging, basically, to the vibrancy of a very strong Jewish life that he hoped for in the American context.
So I think Judaism as a Civilization, the book and the concept, is an attempt to address that challenge in a very positive way to embrace democratic values, and to impart what he's doing in that book is arguing that real democracy would allow for a very high level of cultural difference within American society, that real democracy would allow historical traditions, religious and national, and in the case of Judaism, somehow integrated religion and national to be themselves, to grow and thrive, have their own educational systems, have their own communal networks, and have their own institutions that allow them to continue to define their cultural otherness in the way that they see fit.

R. Deborah Waxman:
Yeah. I mean, I'm going to read from my own paper where I spell out the different... the very malleable and multiple ways that Kaplan and the circle gathered around him under democracy. One was as a political theory, one was as an economic theory, but here, I'm going to read, "Democracy was a civic theory that fostered volunteerism and neighborliness across political, social, economic, and religious lines, promoting diversity instead of elevating one group at the expense of others, and nurturing self-reliance, self-respect, and overall cultural vitality." I think that's exactly the point you were just making, and I think it's really important to say that Kaplan and that circle that was working this through in the pages of the Reconstructionist and convenings that they did, they were doing it alongside and sometimes in direct conversation with Horace Kallen, a Jewish political scientist.
They were all part of this project of trying to both strengthen American society and also, especially Kallen in those early years, strengthen Jewish society. It was about embracing Jewish particularism rather than melting it away, but what the prescriptions of Judaism as a Civilization, and Kaplan, I think, really did see this as an expression of democracy, was, "Don't Americanize your names, don't change your names, your family names from Europe, and furthermore, don't go by Deborah, go by Devorah. Don't go by Mark," which was one of his many given names, "go by Mordecai." Really seeing that as not only about co-equal Jewish strength and the strength of democracy in America.

Bryan Schwartzman:
How much of revolutionary ideas to say Judaism can be small D democratic? I don't think of pre-modern Jewish communities as being democratic. I think of them as being top-down authority-driven. Maybe that's an overgeneralization. I'm just wondering. Was this a really revolutionary idea that Kaplan is bringing to the Jewish world?

R. Deborah Waxman:
No. I mean, Jews, especially in America, loved, loved, loved democracy. In fact, there's a very strong engagement with and embrace in the Reform Movement as well. I, in my dissertation research, remember coming across this one guy saying, "Jews invented democracy," and so I really... I mean, it's the evolution piece. It is. Democracy became a possibility and a potential tool with the onset of modernity which is when it emerged, and with the emergence... It has everything to do with individual rights and the emergence of nation states. So many of his peers in Jewish communal leadership in the early 20th century, in the first quarter or first half of the 20th century, especially religiously-oriented, really saw modernity as a catastrophe in a certain way, and they were looking backwards and trying to preserve, and Kaplan was as much looking forward as he was backwards. So the revolution was a modernity, and Kaplan was someone who was at the forefront of really trying to wrestle through the implications and the possibilities.

R. William Plevan:
Well, Bryan, one of the things that you raised in your question was about a perception about pre-modern Jewish political life, and I think it's helpful to address that a little bit as a way of understanding what is significant about Kaplan's thought. I mean, first of all, in pre-modern Jewish life, rabbis may have had a lot of power, but they were not really political leaders. Well, for the most part, not political leaders. They had a rabbinic function and in many times, a very strong judicial function in a Jewish community, but there were secular leaders, right? Like people who were non-rabbinic figures who were leaders of the community. So, very often though, there wasn't elitism about that leadership that was more perhaps financial and economic than it was religious or rabbinic.
So I do think that Kaplan is very interesting in the sense. I mean, Deborah, you mentioned in your article, The Commitment to Economic Democracy, right? I think that when you really integrate that ethos into American Jewish life and it's still an issue today about who gets to make decisions about where Jewish communal life is going, I think Kaplan... though maybe even he was delicate on this point for reasons that he had to be concerned about, that Kaplan would really argue very strenuously for real communal, egalitarian, political, and social equality in order to have all people, all Jews have a voice in the way Jewish communal institutions are run. That was not necessarily the case in pre-modern Jewish life. So that's one point in which, I think, Kaplan's emphasis on democracy can be quite... If you want to say radical, it's certainly very challenging to certain forms of establishment, Jewish politics, both in the pre-modern period and today.
The other thing to say here is I think that Kaplan's rejection of both supernatural revelation and chosenness as a theological doctrine are integrated into his way of understanding democracy. I think that for Kaplan, the people and the people working out their relationship with God and their understanding of God and what's asked of them religiously replaces the concept of supernatural revelation and therefore, also makes the doctrine of election of a particular people by God theologically unsustainable, but also deeply problematic from a moral point of view. That, really, is a radical shift that Kaplan pressed on and even many Reform and Conservative rabbis, and leaders, and teachers were very reluctant to give up the language of chosenness and were very quite attached to it-

R. Deborah Waxman:
To this day, to this day.

R. William Plevan:
To this day. For sure. To this day.

R. Deborah Waxman:
Yeah. It's such a great point, Bill, setting aside supernatural revelation. I think about my Bubbie who was born in the old country. Her answers to the most questions of why, the big questions of why is because God said so, and that wasn't Kaplan's answer even though he was older. He was a generation older than she was, and it couldn't be Kaplan's answer. It's not that my grandmother ever said, "I reject rationalism." She was just like a folk... She was just living her life. Kaplan was a very rigorous thinker as he was living his life, and so it's not revelation from above. But if you do believe in something larger than us and it's... But then, he was very influenced by process theology and by this understanding that God is greater than the sum of its parts. Whatever we bring to our always limited understandings of what God and the nature of reality is, it's always going to be limited, and it's always going to be beyond what we can understand, but we want to insist on that reality and that it can place moral claims on us.
Bill, I feel like I'm in your territory much than in my own, but if you want to still make a claim against nihilism and that there are universal principles to proclaim and even to die for, Kaplan looked around and saw that democracy, the back and forth, the conversation, the wrestling, the experimentation, the constant negotiation across diverse communities was the best possible way to gain at least a glimmering, to discern at least the outline of that which was so obvious and inevitable to our ancestors.

R. William Plevan:
Well, I think for Kaplan, the... and the whole tradition of democratic thought from which he comes, the essence of democracy is everybody living together in peace and in justice, and being able to care for one another and support one another. In addition to that, it's also a tradition that emphasizes every single person having a voice in creating the society in which they live in having a say about the norms or laws under which they live. So I think for Kaplan, the shift to democracy is really enhancing core Jewish values of justice, and the search for peace, and caring for one another, and extending that too beyond the boundaries of Jewish life and community. But he didn't think that that had to come at the expense of particularistic Jewish community, of robust Jewish community.
In fact, I think what you see in his teaching is a desire to integrate Judaism with democracy in such a way that Jewish communities could be engines of democratic civic engagement. So when he talks about the function of synagogues and the role of synagogues in society, he sees them as not just vehicles for Jewish life, but also vehicles for democratic participation in the broader society when that's appropriate, when that's called for.

R. Deborah Waxman:
Bill, it's interesting. You make me think about how... I do love how much you brought chosenness into this. Kaplan was a great universalist even as he was so interested in fostering Jewish particularism, and he did not fight in, but he lived through two world wars. So, after World War II, which is when he really fully articulated the argument for setting aside the idea of chosenness, he was also a huge booster of the nascent United Nations because he just thought there had to be a universal effort to avert World War. He was a huge supporter of international control of nuclear weapons because he was really afraid that they would be used to promote an authoritarian vision.
I mean, I try not to do a lot of this retrojecting back, but from everything I've read of Kaplan, he would be devastated by the return of the recrudescence of tribalism around the world, the turn toward the authoritarian and the turn toward in-groups really wreaking havoc on those who are not them. I think that especially with a year into the conflict in the Middle East, it's a pressing question for Jews today as much as it was for him, at least back in the '40s and the '50s.
I feel like that's part of the defense of democracy. It's theological, it's sociological, and, "What do we do? How do we articulate our commitments as a Jewish community and build structures around them?" Viktor Orbán, the Head of Hungary, just addressed the European Union yesterday, and they booed him because most of the members of the European Union do not accept the premise of illiberal democracy. Kaplan, for sure, was promoting an expression of liberal democracy, and that too is the one that I buy into. I mean, I have my concerns about liberalism, and I have huge critiques about the extent of individual identity and how much that can be taken to the kind of extremes that we're seeing today, this radical individualism that has led to this epidemic of loneliness in a huge crisis. But as a political system, I do think the vision that Bill just put forward is one that is predicated on a liberalism that I'm all for bolstering.

Bryan Schwartzman:
In Jewish tradition, it is customary to honor the memory of loved ones with name plaques placed on sanctuary walls. Memory Lights the World is a way to honor your loved one's legacy that transcends geographical boundaries, allowing you to see your loved one's name, picture, and story from anywhere in the world during their yahrzeit or any of the year. To learn more, tap on the link on our show notes or visit ritualwell.org. Okay. Now, back to our program.
Earlier, one of you mentioned the idea of civic religion and going back to at least the first Reconstructionist prayer book in the '40s. Probably before that, there's this tradition of including prayers, liturgy, readings for secular holidays, for Thanksgiving, for New Year's, for Labor Day, Memorial Day, even Columbus Day, which is a little hard to imagine now. At first, it seems surprising if you're not used to that. These aren't traditional Jewish holidays. Is this tied to what we're talking about at all and democracy in American society? Did this more come from the civilizational model, and do we... I don't know. Do we still do this at all?

R. Deborah Waxman:
So yes, and yes, and yes, I would say.

Bryan Schwartzman:
All right.

R. Deborah Waxman:
Yes, it is absolutely tied to the civilizational model. I think that even as Kaplan was using democracy to vitalize Judaism, he also really wanted to encourage Jews to be good citizens and to participate fully in American life. So the focus on those holidays felt like it was a really important way of participating in what has come to be seen as a civic religion. He really thought that was important, and that was one of the ways to unite the diverse groups in their particularities is to bring them together in that which they shared even as he was promoting the distinctiveness within their own communities. So you're right, Bryan. It's before the first Reconstructionist prayer book.
At the SAJ, the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, the synagogue that was founded by and for Kaplan and was essentially a laboratory for a lot of Reconstructionist experiments, they used a loose-leaf binder for a prayer book, and we have some of the copies in our archives, and you can see that some of the things that they were inserting or pulling out were different poems or readings that were apt to the moment, appropriate to the moment, including some of the civic... the American holidays.
The apotheosis of this was Kaplan's participation along with his close colleague, Rabbi Eugene Kohn and a Christian minister in the creation of a collection called The Faith of America where they gathered together readings from all religions including... and secular writers to bolster the American holiday cycle. That would be that civic religion uniting everyone. I think it's less of a focus for current contemporary Reconstructionism and remains a focus, for sure. There are all kinds of materials that we are putting out to sanctify the upcoming election and to... Kaplan believed, and I think we believe to this day, that voting was a mitzvah, a commandment. Not commanded by God. One that emerges out of that intuition, that belief in something larger than ourselves, and one that we willingly take on and that it's incumbent on us to act on.

R. William Plevan:
Yeah. I'll speak about this both as a scholar and as a rabbi who's really interested in what's going on in American Jewish religious life that I think we have a lot to learn from Kaplan's development of these civic holiday prayers for synagogues. At the same time, we might want to depart from them and do very different things with some of those lessons.

R. Deborah Waxman:
[inaudible 00:42:40] of it and left.

R. William Plevan:
Yeah. I mean, because I think... So for one thing is what we always do with our students at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College is we want to put things in their civilizational historical context, right, which is to say, "What was going on in the '20s, '30s, and '40s that led Kaplan to think this was important?" I think for a lot of American Jews, at that time, they may not have been so well-educated in traditional prayer, but they were used to what traditional prayer was, and they were coming to synagogue out of some sense of... maybe not religious obligation, but certainly, a sense of communal and intergenerational communal obligation. They felt they were Jewish, and they showed up at synagogue in order to connect with Jewish life.
I think Kaplan was doing something very important by signaling that this place was not just a Jewishness place, but it was also an American place and that Jewish values could flow into civic engagement. I think the era we're living in now, especially after the 1960s where many, many rabbis, not just the famous picture of Abraham Joshua Heschel marching with Martin Luther King. That's just the most emblematic image of that shift where lots and lots of rabbis very admirably engaged in a variety of forms of civic life, not just the Civil Rights Movement, where engaging in civic life for American Jews is more part and parcel of their experience as Jews and that Jews feel very, very comfortable mixing their Jewishness and their Jewish values with their political and civic engagement.
What becomes important within the context of the synagogue may be to make sure that we're engaging people with the prayer itself and with the core of the t'filah which they may be less familiar with and may feel less of an obligation to show up for. Right? So the educational challenges and the demographic challenges of the American Jewish moment are very different now. So I still think we need to re-emphasize for people that Jewish values can flow into civic engagement, but the way we want to do that may be very different. So the prayers that Kaplan wrote may have maybe less relevant or less compelling to us, but there may be different forms for doing that. I've seen some beautiful prayers written in anticipation of voting that Deborah just mentioned. So I think there's a lot of very, very creative activity in that direction, and we may just want to... We can take inspiration from Kaplan's model without following his exact liturgy.

R. Deborah Waxman:
I think that's right. So Kaplan's project was to Americanize the children of immigrants from Eastern Europe. Our project today is more to Judaize people who grew up Jews and the people who love us who... I'm not talking even about a proselytization campaign, but just to the dense, thick identity that you were talking about that used to exist in Eastern Europe to reintroduce that. So it means that the strategies and the tactics are different even as the animating analysis of Reconstructionism still holds sway.
I think a very poignant example of this is so many Jews have been at the forefront of different social justice campaigns, including the voter registration drives of the '60s, or even I know folks from the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable circle, and they're in, they're doing their work because they're Jews, they're choosing to do their justice work through Jewishly identified organizations, but they can't tell you why. They're drawn, it's compelling, but they have no capacity to articulate the wisdom or the practices that are at the root of that impulse. That's the opportunity of this moment, is to give them vocabulary, and conceptual understanding, and practices that could deepen that connection.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So regarding civic engagement from a place of strong Jewish identity, Evolve has this wonderful symposium that was released about a month ago based on Timothy Snyder's best-selling book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, that take each chapter and reframe it from a position of a Jewish value or a Jewish practice. We'll link all that in the show notes. I'm wondering if... for each of you, if there was an essay, if there was a practice that really stood out, especially at this moment as where approaching Election Day and so much about American democracy, even Israeli democracy, which is a whole other topic, are in flux.

R. William Plevan:
Yeah. I thought that forum on the practices of democracy was wonderful, and I'm really grateful to Rabbi Nancy Fuchs Kreimer for suggesting that and for Rabbi Jacob Staub for editing and bringing that together. The practice that I really want to lift up at this moment is embodied politics, practicing embodied politics. There are two essays there, one by Rabbi Michael Pollack and the Other by Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, that I think are very powerful and very instructive because I think in this moment, particularly for people who are used to the institutions of liberal democracy functioning well, how are we going to practice politics if those institutions come under attack, and how are we going to practice politics if those institutions become less able to function in some way?
I think the essays that they have there really take lessons from a variety of forms of political organizing that have been a part of American life for over a century going back to labor organizing in the late 19th, early 20th century, certainly, exemplified by the Civil Rights Movement going back to the '40s and '50s into the '60s down to today where you see a really embodied politics and things like Black Lives Matter and other forms of civil disobedience that have contributed to progressive and liberal causes.
I think that that embodied politics has to be taught and modeled in a much broader way as it has always been the case, has very often been the case in the American context. Religious communities are a wonderful vehicle for teaching and practicing that kind of embodied politics, so I think our congregations have a lot that they... and our congregations already do a tremendous amount of this work, right? But I think really strengthening those capacities, I think, is a crucial priority in this moment.

Bryan Schwartzman:
That essay is really about getting off our screens, getting off our phones, and showing up at places physically and in unfamiliar, potentially even dangerous situations.

R. William Plevan:
Yeah, and I think it's also about working in coalition with people who are different than we are. I think that that's what the line between danger and safety... I think or the tension between danger and safety has to come through, has to be resolved or has to be addressed through coalition building. The more friends you have, the more coalitions you have, the stronger those coalitions, the stronger you are, and the safer you are from the kinds of attacks on civic democracy and political democracy.

R. Deborah Waxman:
Right, but this traces through to our earlier conversation. I mean, one Jewish response to this moment of rising antisemitism is, "Oh, no, that strategy of coalition building hasn't worked or will not save us." I think I understand the fear that prompts that observation, but I don't know that it's true, and I don't see any other path forward. There's nothing else like retreating into ourselves and believing that we can do it alone whether we're talking about the American Jewish community, which is a tiny, tiny percentage of the larger American population, or frankly, what's happening in Israel right now. I just don't think it's a sustainable strategy. I mean, both in the service of vital democracy and also just as a survival strategy.

R. William Plevan:
It brings us back to Kaplan's rejection of the theology of chosenness. He rejects it because of his own core beliefs, and I think he thinks that most modern Jews will also end up jettisoning a belief in a supernatural God. He thinks that it's important both morally and politically to realize that being chosen comes with the whole theological narrative of God will protect us, right? But if we abandon supernaturalism and we abandon God's protection, right? It is to say if we abandon the idea that God is always going to protect and defend us, then we have to realize that we're in a very different set of political and ethical circumstances. So that kind of coalition building that's the essence of democracy has to come to the fore as a moral commitment as well as a political strategy.

R. Deborah Waxman:
Right, and he formulated... He was already working on this while... There are glimmerings of it in Judaism as a civilization which was the publication of a set of essays that he was working on in the '20s. Really, the '20s because it was in the very, very early '30s that he put it forward for publication. The chosenness is set aside in the first Reconstructionist prayer book which was published in '45, but they were working on it most intensively in '42 and '43 while the second World War was raging. Then, he published the essay that justified the rejection of chosenness in '48.
I lay that all out to say there was a lot of the antisemitism at that time. Kaplan was an optimist. Kaplan was naïve. Kaplan was a utopianist in certain ways, but he was not disconnected from reality. He was putting this forward as a strategy in the face of extremists, not in the most peaceful time and because I think he really saw it as the only path forward. He was a Zionist. He was a cultural Zionist. He was not hugely animated by Jewish powerlessness, by the strictly political analysis, even though he spent a lot of time dabbling in political theory which was not where his training was. In some ways, he was really successful. In other ways, he tied himself up in knots, but I think that he did... in other places, and I talk about this a little bit in my essay, where he was deeply concerned with authoritarianism, including of the Catholic Church, the idea of religious authority married to state power, he thought, was a recipe for authoritarianism.
I think about chosenness whenever I'm in Israel seeing young men, soldiers with guns. Some of whom absolutely believe in chosenness and absolutely believe in divine appointment, empowering, encouraging, permitting them to engage in ways that are... I do believe it's possible to be a... I think I believe it's possible to be a just and moral army. I absolutely a country, any country, including Israel, has its right to defend itself, and I think there has to be moral responsibility. Chosenness married to religious authority, married to massive military might is a volatile mix.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Coalition building. I think it relates to what each of you have written in different times about pluralism and its relationship to democracy. There've been a lot of attempts to define what's happened or explain over the last year or so with the rising antisemitism. One aspect I think we've seen is that Jews who thought they were part of a certain community being a literary community, or an academic community, or an artistic community found themselves feeling excluded on the outs. I guess what each of you are saying is we can't give up on those communities because there's... What's the alternative?

R. Deborah Waxman:
I mean, I think you just quoted me back. I think so. Obviously, I think I agree with you, but I also think that... I think relationships are at the center of all of it. I mean, I just heard a story about a rabbi of one of our larger communities in a big urban setting who basically has been very, very, very active in interfaith activities, and has been very, very active in racial justice initiatives, and who just recently called out the ministerium, just called out the Interfaith Collection of Clerical Leaders to say, "You are missing the Jewish community completely. There is room, for sure, for Palestinian solidarity. There is room, for sure, for a justice analysis and efforts to hold Israel accountable, and you are conflating Judaism with Zionism. You are conflating Israel with Jews, and you are being sloppy, and you were being harmful. This is not okay."
The response was, "You're right, we're getting this wrong." She could do that because she was an integral part of this group, and she had paid her dues, and she had relationships, and she wasn't... It wasn't a letter to the editor. It was an address to "Dear, Reverend X" and "Dear, Imam Y," and the relationships existed for renegotiation. So how painful that that is necessary. It's really regrettable, and I think this is an example of the negotiations and the requirements of democracy.

R. William Plevan:
Yeah. Deborah, I think what you said is a really wonderful example of the importance of relationships. I also think it's a good example of how... I don't think we should give up hope on people who have expressed views about Israel that seem challenging to American Jews or even insulting almost to American Jews. I think there's a lot of work that can be done in bringing greater understanding about why American Jews care about Israel, why we feel connected to Israel, and how we feel connected to Israel. It's hard to do it in this moment as the war is raging in Gaza and in the North, but I think that we shouldn't give up on the possibility that we can be heard and that we shouldn't give up on the opportunities to listen to other people and hear why they care about what they care about, and to hear how their views have been shaped by their experience, their views about Israel and Gaza have been shaped by their experience.
There's no question in my mind that there's perhaps a lot that can be learned by people on the right and the left about Israel and about the Middle East, and about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. There's a lot of education that needs to be done, for sure, but there also needs to be dialogue. Dialogue means not just teaching people what they don't know, but sharing with people what they don't understand about us as people. I think that's part of the work of doing democracy, also, of making democracy really flow and grow.

R. Deborah Waxman:
Bryan, you asked earlier about like are there practices from the Democracy Symposium, and mine, the one I would raise up grows really organically out of this particular conversation. I, too, really want to echo Bill's appreciation for this whole project and gratitude to Nancy, our friend and teacher, Nancy, for suggesting it and Jacob Staub for bringing it to life. Both because it gave me an opportunity to reread Snyder's extraordinary book and then to read these amazing essays prompted by that original source. The one that jumped out for me was "Contribute to good causes," and I know that in my position as the CEO of Reconstructing Judaism where I do a lot of fundraising, one might think it would be a very self-serving practice to recommend.
Indeed, I do think the contribution part is really important. But when you dig into what Snyder is talking about and what... especially the essay by... their two essays on that one as well, the essay that Ruth Messinger put out, what they're significantly talking about is what we call non-governmental organizations. Here, we've been talking a lot about democracy which people often think about political structures, and the good causes that they're talking about is like the fabric, the social fabric of life. Those could be political or religious organizations, but they could be any of the organizations that bring people into relationship that foster bonds of connection and mutuality.
When we talk about the connectedness as a barometer for the health of society, the go-to person is the sociologist Robert Putnam with his monumental book, Bowling Alone, where he observes that in the '50s, Americans were belongers. They bowled in bowling leagues, and they joined fraternal organizations like the Elks or the Masons and everything was... and they joined synagogues and churches, and that now, his study, he wrote it 25 years ago, his studies showed that Americans were bowling roughly as much as they used to bowl, but they were bowling alone.
So, with that, the lessening of those social bonds, and he argued that that was a measure of the health of the ethos and our sense of connectedness, and that it was not trending in the right direction. That's only accelerated in the 25 years since he wrote his book, and then with an exponential push further in that direction by the pandemic. Currently, he's retired, but he's currently pushing very hard that original message with the observation that that connectedness, all those good causes, all those organizations of the '50s, they didn't just happen organically.
I mean, they happened because a hundred years ago, a hundred plus years ago, American society was at the height of one of these... Bryan, you referenced that at the top of the program, like rising nationalism, rising nativism, a lot of income inequality, a lot of concern about immigration, and the bonds were really, really frayed, and there were a group of people who saw the fostering of civic society as a strategy to overcome those challenges, and they succeeded. So it was an intentional effort to build that kind of connectedness back up.
He and I would say I very much agree that that is an essential practice at this time. Obviously, I'm going to say that I think progressive religion. I think liberal religion is a really important pathway in. I look at what is happening in Reconstructionist communities, and the communitarian ethos that we celebrate, and the space we make for individuals to come in in our fullness, and the expectation that we as a community will change as a result of all of these diverse individuals in our fullness coming in, that that's an incredibly important location for that kind of connectedness. But I would never say it's the only place, and I would really just encourage people wherever you can, contribute not just your money, but your time and your energy to places that will bring you into contact, bring you into contact with people who are like you, and also, ideally, those that bring you into contact with people who are not like you so that you can build up those relationships and deepen those connections.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Rabbi Deborah Waxman, Rabbi Bill Plevan, thank you. Thank you so much for this thoughtful conversation and has us feeling hopeful as we head into Election Day and beyond.

R. William Plevan:
Fantastic. Thank you. It's great being with you.

R. Deborah Waxman:
For me, too. It's really so much fun.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So this was a special two-for-one-month. We gave you two episodes instead of our normal one. Did you like having the bonus episode? Was it too much content for you to get through in a month? Let us know. Happy to hear your thoughts. You can reach me directly, my real email address. It's bschwartzman, S-C-H-W-A-R-T-Z-M-A-N, @reconstructingjudaism.org, and I'm waiting to hear from you. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next month with an all new episode. Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations is executive produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub and edited by Sam Wachs. Our theme song, Ilu Finu, is by Rabbi Miriam Margles. This show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism. I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman, and on behalf of the whole Evolve Team, we'll see you next time.

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