The clips from Rabbi Kaplan below give small windows into some of his thinking about the role of the individual in community, different kinds of communities, different scales of communities within communities, and the nature of communities in the past, present and future.

You are about to establish a synagogue. In order that that synagogue shall serve a high purpose, in order that you put it to such uses as will bring out the best that is in you and will enable you to serve your people and your god with all your heart and all your mind, it is only proper that you give thought to the purpose, which it is to serve, and that you try to consider as impeccably as possible the uses to which you want your synagogue to be put when it is finally built. As [inaudible] such thought, it is well that you realize in the first place the fact that the synagogue as an institution has a long history behind it; that its beginning is wrapped in obscurity. It may have started as a gathering the Babylonians used more than 2,500 years ago in the home of the Prophet Ezekiel, who had been exiled to Babylon. The news would come to him to learn when and how they would be redeemed from their exile, when they would be permitted to return to their homeland. That gathering, which would take place in the home of the Prophet Ezekiel, was probably the foundation, the beginning, of the synagogue as an institution that has contributed to the development, the spiritual development, of our people and has enabled our people to make its mark in the history of mankind.

After having served as Rabbi of [foreign] from 1903 to 1909 and the seminary faculty from 1909 to 1915, I became convinced that Jewish life in this country was living under spiritual capital that it had brought with it from the old world. That capital was bound sooner or later to be exhausted. It was therefore imperative to make provision for the development of new spiritual resources in our own American environment. More specifically, I became painfully aware of how lacking we American Jews were in any effective instrument of unity and solidarity without which Judaism could not survive. The only force that held Jews together outside of the waning momentum of the past was the refusal on the part of non-Jews to accept us as their social equals and the discrimination practiced in some of the most important areas of economic life in this country.

I then came to the conclusion that what we Jews needed most was to develop a spirit of permanent and creative fellowship. Such fellowship, I thought, would arise only from the utilization of the available leisure as a means of cultivating the actual and latent cultural and religious values of our great 3,000 year old tradition. The most natural environment where that could be achieved, it seemed to me, was the synagogue. But unfortunately, the synagogue was generally regarded only as a place for worship and for giving our children a smattering of knowledge to enable them to take part in that worship. How could a synagogue be transformed into a center of Jewish life where Jews would come together in their free hours to improve their health, their minds, their souls? Merely talking or writing about that kind of center would not bring it about. What was needed was a practical demonstration.

During the second decade of this century, Jews were moving from Yorkville to the West Side. Among them were some of my friends in the congregation where I had served as rabbi. They were planning to build a conventional type of synagogue on the West Side. There was my opportunity. After more than three years of conversations with them, I persuaded them to put up the kind of structure which would house the facilities necessary for a synagogue center. By 1917, the Jewish Center began to function. Despite my having made it clear to the lay leaders of the group that I was not orthodox in my views, they insisted upon my assuming the spiritual leadership of the institution. For a time, all went well. But before long, it became evident that the expectations which I had cherished concerning Jewish fellowship as the product of the synagogue center were bound to be frustrated. I had assumed that such fellowship was not to be an end in itself. It was not to be exclusive but creative. It was to be a means to the perpetuation and enhancement of Jewish life. To serve that purpose, I assumed that Jewish fellowship would be accepted by those who participated in it in a spirit that would raise the ethical level of their economic interest as well as that of their religious interests.

Instead, I soon discovered that I was naive in my assumption. The ethical level of their business relations and religious observance did not show the least sign of rising. The main effect of all the great ado with rendering Jewish life attractive seemed to be that of fostering a new source of social snobbishness among Jews. The large expenditures on the center and the official religiosity that its lay leaders insisted on were regarded as enough of a tax to pay to Judaism without bothering about ethical and spiritual values as such. I was expected to confine myself to cooing in dub-like fashion from the prophet messages of peace and comfort. My pleading that Jews should not permit themselves to become part of the greedy struggle for power and the heartless exploitation of the underprivileged was deeply resented. I was accused of disturbing people’s piece of mind. Those happened to be the years where the Jewish workers and the needle trades began to unionize. That led one of the main supporters of the center who employed as many as 1,000 to 1,200 workers to announce in my hearing that he would engage no one but Italians because Jews were nothing but troublemakers. Since I could not allow such sentiment to pass unchallenged, some of my best friends urged me not to meddle in economic affairs and to preach only religion.

What religion meant to them became clear to me when on another occasion, I believed that the problem of how to get the Jewish working men to take a more friendly attitude toward Jewish religion might, at last, be solved. In the contracts which were then being drawn between the Jewish unions and the manufacturers, one of the conditions was that the shops be opened half day on Saturdays and closed all day Sundays. A number of Jewish manufacturers being in the center group, I appealed to them to influence the workers to work half days on Sundays instead of Saturdays. I got Mr. Jacob H. Schiff who then stood in well with both manufacturers and the workers to use his influence with both sides. Negotiations seemed to be making progress when the manufacturers who were members of the center insisted that as a price for transferring the half workday to Sunday, they'd be guaranteed against strikes. To me, that exploitative use of religion was of a piece with the unethical assumptions that intellectual freedom and honesty had no place in religion. I believed then as I do now that any authoritarian view of religion which forbids all questioning and commands the suppression of all doubts as to the credence or validity of religious dogma as no less unethical and destructive of character than the suppression of truth in any other department of life, be it business, politics, or science.

The religious school of the center, therefore, I instructed the teachers not to teach what they themselves did not believe, nor to suppress any questioning on the part of the pupils, particularly the teenagers. Some of these teenagers reported to their parents the questions and doubts that were being aired in the classrooms. So scandalized were those parents, that they moved heaven and earth to take the religious school out of my hands. In the meantime, as I realized that the salvation of American jury would not come from the Jewish Center idea, I began to develop a far more comprehensive approach to the problem of fostering the unity and solidarity of Jewish life. The conclusions which I then arrived at led me to do two things. First, to organize a group of affirmative Jews both lay and professional, under the name of The Society for the Jewish Renaissance. Secondly, to publicize those conclusions under the title Toward a Reconstruction of Judaism. That was in 1920. It was this last named action that precipitated the final struggle with the board of trustees of the center. All of whom, with the exception of one man, were determined to force me to resign. I finally did resign. When I left the center, although it was 70% of the membership were in accord with all that I stood for, only 22 families who constituted almost 25% of the membership left the center with me. They did so not merely to express their protest against the actions of the center board but to help me in carrying out the more thoroughgoing changes that had to be affected if there was to be a future to American Jewish life.