Visionary or Heretic?: The Judaism of Mordecai Kaplan by Juan Marcos Bejarano Gutierrez

Author:Juan Marcos Bejarano Gutierrez
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Yaron Publishing
Published: 2019-02-08T23:00:00+00:00

“It is sufficient that God should mean to us the sum of the animating, organizing forces and relationships which are forever making a cosmos out of chaos. This is what we understand by God as the creative life of the universe.”[30]

One might argue that there is, indirectly perhaps a connection to Maimonides' Aristotelian views of God which in effect render Him a being far removed from creation. Concerning Maimonides, the unchanging qualities of the Supreme Being, immutable nature, and the articulation of God as ultimate perfection do not reflect the biblical and classical rabbinic view of describing God through His acts on behalf of Israel. The Exodus from Egypt, the splitting of the Sea of Reeds, the revelation at Sinai, are the events through which Judaism understands God and which are found throughout the pages of the siddur.[31] The generalizations of Aristotelian thought adopted by Maimonides regarding the goodness of God or His perfection or the essence of His being diverged from the Biblical picture of God’s character revealed in specific instances for specific people.

For Kaplan, however, having rejected the idea of supernatural revelation, the former issues are largely dismissed, and his agenda is to rescue that which serves the Jewish spirit. In contrast, Solomon Schecter states:

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