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Communings of the Spirit The Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan, Volume 1: 1913-1934 Edited by Mel Scult

Mordecai M. Kaplan (1881-1983), founder of Reconstructionism, is the preeminent American Jewish thinker and rabbi of our times. His life embodies the American Jewish experience of the first half of the twentieth century. With passionate intensity and uncommon candor, Kaplan compulsively recorded his experience in his journal (some 10,000 pages). This first volume of Communings of the Spirit covers Kaplan's early years as a rabbi, teacher of rabbis, and community leader. Kaplan, who trained rabbis for half a century, gives us an inside picture of life at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the center of Conservative Judaism in America. He records his masterful weekly sermons, which were attended regularly by his students. With unflinching candor, he reveals his successes and failures, uncertainties and self-doubts. Undeterred by attacks on his radical beliefs, he never wavered in the pursuit of a more dynamic Judaism.

"Reading Mordecai Kaplan's diaries is like standing over the shoulder of a brilliant and troubled man as he struggles to define his emerging philosophy of Judaism, while at the same time attempting to conceal from disapproving eyes the heterodox views he was formulating. This is an emotional experience for anyone who is himself or herself grappling with religious and philosophical dilemmas." —Rabbi Ira Eisenstein, Founder and First President, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College

American Jewish Civilization Series $39.95s cloth / ISBN 0-8143-2575-0 $21.95s paper / ISBN 0-8143-3116-5 672 pages / 6 x 9 22 illustrations 2002 (2001) contents > introduction [partial] > extract > index >