Reconstructionist Judaism

Reconstructionism begins from a definition rather than a doctrine. Mordecai Kaplan argued that Judaism is not a religion in the sense that Christianity is a religion, but an evolving religious civilization: a people with a history, a language, a literature, an art, a body of law, a land and a religion, of which the religion is one component and not the whole.

Two consequences follow, and they are what make Reconstructionism theologically the most radical and behaviourally among the more traditional of the American movements.

The first is about God. Kaplan rejected supernaturalism and reconceived God as the power in the universe that makes for salvation and for human fulfilment, not a person, not a lawgiver, not an agent who intervenes. Prayer is accordingly not petition.

The second is about law. If Judaism is a civilization rather than a revelation, then Jewish law is the accumulated custom of a people rather than the command of God, and the community has authority over it. Kaplan's formula is that tradition has a vote, not a veto. In practice Reconstructionist congregations retain a good deal of observance, because a civilization's customs are worth keeping, while feeling free to alter what they judge to be wrong.

The most conspicuous alteration is the rejection of chosenness. Kaplan removed the language of the chosen people from the liturgy, and the movement's 1986 platform states that the belief implies the superiority of the elect and the rejection of others, and is morally untenable.

Kaplan spent most of his career teaching at the Conservative seminary, and Reconstructionism grew inside Conservative Judaism before separating from it. The institutional sequence runs: the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, founded in New York in 1922 after Orthodox rejection; Judaism as a Civilization, the movement's charter, published in 1935; a call for a seminary at a Montreal conference in 1967; and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, opened at Philadelphia in 1968. The college and the congregational federation merged in 2012, and the combined body renamed itself Reconstructing Judaism in 2018, noun to gerund, on the argument that the reconstructing is continuous.

Congregations are strongly lay-empowered, following Kaplan's principle that the community rather than the rabbi decides. The central body accordingly has less authority over its member congregations than the Conservative or Orthodox equivalents have over theirs.

Its most consequential decision came in 2015, when the rabbinical college voted to admit and ordain students in interfaith relationships, the first Jewish body anywhere to permit rabbis with non-Jewish partners. It drew condemnation from the other movements and some resignations from within, and it remains the sharpest boundary marker between Reconstructionism and Reform or Conservative practice. The reasoning is consistent with the rest: if the Jewish people is a civilization that people join, and if intermarriage is the ordinary condition of American Jewish life, then a rabbinate that cannot include it is refusing to serve the community it has.

The United States religion census of 2010 recorded 41,436 members across 95 synagogues, and that remains the most defensible figure. A 2020 survey places Reconstructionist and other movements together at 4 per cent of America's roughly 7.5 million Jews, which is a combined category and must not be reported as a Reconstructionist figure. The movement claims something like a hundred affiliated communities today.

By any measure it is the smallest of the major American movements, and has been roughly flat for decades. Its influence has been very much larger, and the pattern is consistent: Reconstructionism proposes something, the larger movements reject it, and thirty years later they adopt it.

The bat mitzvah is the clearest case. Kaplan gave his daughter Judith the first one in 1922, and it is now universal outside the Orthodox world and common within parts of it. Patrilineal descent, recognising as Jewish the child of a Jewish father, was Reconstructionist before Reform adopted it in 1983. The full inclusion of women, and later of gay and lesbian Jews and rabbis, ran the same course. Lay-led worship of the kind now found across American Judaism came from the same current.

The structural question the movement lives with is why the ideas travel and the membership does not. One answer offered from inside is that a movement whose distinctive claim is that Judaism should be reconstructed by its own communities has, by succeeding, given the other movements everything they needed to reconstruct themselves, and left itself with no particular reason for anyone to move.