Spring and the Wu Wei Moon II

Tuesday gratefuls: My furry alarm clock and her Velociraptor teeth. Seeing Shadow’s shadow cast by the nightlight. Maddie. From da region. Hammond, Indiana. New palliative care nurse. Also wanting to convert to Judaism. Reconstruction. Her trick with the tramadol. Darkness of early Morning. The Night Sky. Orion. The Southern Cross. The Teapot. Ursa Major. Polaris. North Star.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: AI and Ancientrails

Week Kavannah: Persistence and grit. Netzach.

One brief shining: Using AI, right now, to organize Ancientrails by thematic sections with chapters related to the themes, an exciting idea which came to me last night before sleep.

My AI monk has begun its oh so rapid read of Ancientrails. I’ve asked it to fill the chapters with content and images from the last four years. For now. Once I see how this works I’ll go for the whole megillah. Try different organizational schemes. Will take some while to get something interesting, I imagine.

What fun.

With the aid of chatgpt yesterday I uncovered something I’d wondered about for a while, the origin of the idea of reconstruction. Reconstructionist Judaism is the brain child (an interesting cliche, if you stop to think about it.) of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan.

Kaplan’s thought was and is radical relative especially to the three thousand year plus history of Jewish life and thought. No supernaturalism. No God behind the Ozian curtain. No chosenness. Jews and Judaism have no special spot in God’s heart. Kaplan’s daughter was the first ever bat mitzvah, a practice now commonplace among all branches of Judaism except Orthodoxy. And much, much more.

What I got to wondering about was the idea of reconstruction itself. Why that word to describe his approach? My hunch was that it had something to with the post-WWI world still reeling from the war and the Spanish Flu epidemic.

That idea came to me because I had a small volume by the pragmatist reformer, educator, and philosopher John Dewey titled simply: Reconstruction in Philosophy. Dewey and pragmatism influenced Kaplan. I knew that.

The idea of reconstruction after the despair and disillusionment of WWI became wide spread after the publication of Dewey’s book, a collection of his lectures in Tokyo. “Intellectuals and policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic began to speak of reconstructing society, institutions and even thought itself—an active, rational process of rebuilding what the war had laid bare.” chatgpt excerpt.

Reconstructionist sentiments soon motivated education reformers like the Frontier Thinkers who wanted to use schools for social reconstruction. It showed up in governments, too. The U.K. had a Ministry of Reconstruction with the responsibility to: “Oversee the task of rebuilding ‘the national life on a better and more durable foundation’ once the Great War was over.” And the U.S created a Reconstruction Finance Corporation which gave “emergency credit to banks, railroads and states to restore confidence amid the Great Depression.”

There were, too, applications in Christianity and broader social circles as this chatgpt excerpt shows:  “Reconstruction also surfaced in liberal Protestant circles (e.g., Henry C. King’s Reconstruction in Theology, re-read after 1918) and in secular planning debates about housing, labour relations and women’s roles. The common thread was the conviction that the old order—political, moral, intellectual—had failed, and that conscious, expert-led rebuilding was both possible and necessary.”

Reconstructionist Judaism is, then, living out a pattern of reform and innovation created by global horror at WWI and its root causes. Since the world proceeded rapidly to WWII, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the multiple conflicts in the Middle East as well as the sinkhole of the Ukraine, I’d say we still have work to do.