The day before, I had stopped by the office of fellow “On Faith”-er (and Israeli music connoisseur) Greg Epstein across the river at Harvard. We had a really good chat about a range of issues and it struck me how despite his lack of belief in God and his “Humanist” label, he is very much a Jew. He has done extensive graduate work in Jewish Studies, he knows Hebrew, and he even attends the General Assembly, the main annual event for worldwide Jewry. It really struck me just how big of a tent American Jewry is.

One of the topics that Greg and I discussed in depth was the thought of Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism on whom I’m currently writing a few papers. Kaplan was a visionary whose thought not only provided the foundation for a new movement but also permeated all corners of American Jewish life (we have him to thank for the Jewish Community Center). In the 1950s he wrote in A New Zionism, “Judaism will have to be conceived as…centered in loyalty to the body of the Jewish people throughout the world.”

But that body is so huge and diverse and so often in opposition to itself! Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, religious, secular, Humanistic, Israeli, American, etc.

The important thing to remember, though, is what unites us, and that is identifying ourselves as Jews. Whether we’re arguing about the existence of God in an office at Harvard or the use of Hebrew in a seedy club, we’re thinking and we’re engaging, and we’re doing it as Jews. To borrow again from Kaplan in the preface to his masterpiece, Judaism as a Civilization, “More dangerous to Judaism by far than challenge, opposition and even misinterpretation is the deadening acquiescence of apathy.”