This week’s parsha, Ki Tisa, includes the well-known, dramatic, cinematic story of Moses coming down after 40 days on Mt. Sinai, first edition of the ten commandments in his arms, only to discover the golden calf and angrily smash the tablets to the ground.
But I want to talk for a few minutes about something completely different: three 20th century disciples of Mordecai Kaplan and how they’ve impacted each of our lives.
Rabbi Rachel spoke on Friday about how surprised 16th century rabbis in Tzfat might be to hear us singing their prayers five centuries later. These three Reconstructionist rabbis from the last century may be similarly surprised if they could see the impact they’ve had on all of us.
I first became active in Reconstructionism 40-some years ago when I led what is now Rabbi David’s congregation Naperville to join the movement.
At that point Reconstructionism as a fourth movement alongside Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform was only about a quarter century old.
We know that Mordecai Kaplan had spent earlier decades
- writing books that describe Judaism as the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people,
- publishing a monthly Reconstructionist magazine,
- and trying out Reconstructionist innovations in his New York synagogue –
- his daughter’s Bat Mitzvah
- and a new Haggadah
- and Prayerbook, to name a few.
All the while he kept his day job teaching at the Conservative seminary and had no intention of launching a separate movement. He wanted instead to see his ideas and practices infiltrate the other movements. And the evidence is all around us that he was indeed quite successful at that.
By mid-century he had developed a large following of distinguished Conservative and Reform Rabbis who identified as Reconstructionists.
I want to say a few words about three of those – one a best-selling author whose words resonate today more than ever and two others whose work in Chicago and Evanston hits very close to home for us at JRC.
1. First, the author, Harold Kushner, a Conservative rabbi who spent his career at a Conservative synagogue in Natick, Massachusetts.
Look no further than his Wikipedia entry to learn that he was “Considered to be one of America’s most prominent rabbis, … known for his Reconstructionist views and for his ideological progressiveness within the Conservative movement.
“He argued against the notion of an omnipotent, interventionist God, and instead focused on God’s role in offering comfort and solace to those who suffer.” That’s a theology well-tuned to our troubled times.
Kushner’s first book, When Children Ask About God, published by the Reconstructionist Press in 1971, was life changing for me. And if you haven’t reread his best seller, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, lately, it’s worth another look. I’m pretty sure he is the all-time most widely read Reconstructionist on the planet, influencing people of all faiths.
2. Next, the founder of Beth Emet synagogue. David Polish was a Reform rabbi in Chicago in the late 1940s.
Known to be an ardent disciple of Kaplan, his Zionist views got him in trouble with his very anti-Zionist Reform congregation.
So in 1950 he came to Evanston and founded Beth Emet synagogue. As they say on their website: “Our full name, Beth Emet The Free Synagogue, refers to freedom of speech from the pulpit, a right Rabbi Polish was denied by his former synagogue.”
I have it on good authority (Rabbi Peter Knobel z’’l and Dan Cedarbaum z’’l) that Polish would have affiliated Beth Emet with Reconstructing Judaism if it had existed as a separate movement in 1950. Lacking that option, he went with Reform.
Tuck that bit of trivia away to impress your friends and neighbors. Timing is everything.
3. Thirdly, Mordecai Kaplan’s son-in-law and protégé, Ira Eisenstein.
He titled his autobiography Reconstructing Judaism, not only capturing his mission in life but also foreshadowing our movement’s current name. His wife, Judith, was the aforementioned first Bat Mitzvah in 1922 (and his daughter Miriam used to join the JRC minyan when she visited Chicago and went with Marla and me on a Reconstructionist trip to Israel in 2014).
Eisenstein served for five years, starting in 1954, as rabbi of Anshe Emet, the big Conservative congregation a few blocks from Wrigley Field in Chicago. Anshe Emet was – and is – a progressive Conservative synagogue, and he understood that he was being brought in to establish it as a Reconstructionist stronghold in the Midwest. Misunderstood, as it turned out – Anshe Emet was sticking with the Conservative movement.
When things didn’t work out as he had hoped, he went back to New York in 1959 to establish the institutions that would launch Reconstructing Judaism as a separate movement. His Chicago years may have been disappointing, but he ended his chapter on those years writing “I had planted some seeds which later sprouted. One of my adult students at Anshe Emet, Leroy Shuster, organized a Reconstructionist congregation in Evanston.”
JRC picks up that story on our website (though not mentioning Eisenstein or Shuster or Anshe Emet): “In 1959, a small group of like-minded and spiritually connected individuals and families, interested in following the teachings of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, formed a chavurah… The chavurah formally incorporated in 1968 and joined the growing Reconstructionist Judaism movement.
This chavurah officially became known as the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation (JRC).”
JRC might be a very different place than the one we know and love today but for these three rabbis, the words they wrote and the paths their synagogues didn’t take.
written by JRC member Rick Kulp, March 12, 2025