Communings of the Spirit: The Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan, 1913-1934

by Mordecai M Kaplan, Mel Scult

Overview

Selections from the diary of the founder of Reconstructionism in America, covering Kaplan’s early years as a rabbi, teacher of rabbis, and community leader.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814331163
Publisher:	Reconstructionist Press
Publication date:	01/01/1999
Series:	American Jewish Civilization Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	560
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Mel Scult is a professor emeritus of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College and a professor emeritus of history at City University of New York, Graduate Center.

Editorial Reviews

Communings of the Spirit is a wonderful book to dip in and out of, to feel the power of a fine thinker, well educated in Jewish, American, and Western thought, to get a sense of where American Judaism was in his day as a way to look at it in out own.

American Jewish World

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.

Founder and First President, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College - Rabbi Ira Eisenstein