What is Reconstructionist Judaism?

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 Congregation Beth Emeth 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."