What is Reconstructionist Judiasm?

         Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, who founded the reconstructionist school of thought, made a profound and indelible mark on the American Jewish community. He sought to make Judaism more alive, more relevant, more permeating, more understood, and more 'lived,' and offered as a solution to the 'synagogue community center,' an all-encompassing Jewish-life venue which RCBE is rapidly and proudly becoming. The synagogue center -- and all that it represents, implies, calls for, and offers -- is to be a focal point of our 'Jewish lives,' permeate into our 'secular lives,and ultimately transcend certain perceived divides between them. Aiming to balance the demands, luxuries, and benefits of living in a secular society with the beauties, obligations, and inspirations of living fully Jewish lives, Kaplan offered a contemporary, reconstructionist understanding of Judaism as the 'evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people.' This philosophy infers the continued subtle reshaping of our people's faith and traditions in our own day, a practice which has characterized the Jewish People over the many centuries of its existence; an understanding of the sovereignty of God as an acknowledgment of the paramount importance of social righteousness, of our accountability for our actions, of a higher law and authority than one's own arbitrary will, of our own first-hand experience of that larger life -- which is God. We embrace this most demanding -- and rewarding -- reconstructionist approach to living Jewish life, which Kaplan summarized as "...not intended to abet laxity in ritual observance or indifference to religion [but rather] definitely intended to motivate in Jews a maximum and not a minimum identification with Jewish life."

Click here to go to the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation's web site.

Those who complain that Reconstructionism requires thought are like the man who complains bitterly that he has nothing to eat but food. --- Mordecai Kaplan

Rev'd 9/ 2/2003