Certain names echo through history. They won’t be soon forgotten. The name Harry Kaplan is another story. Did Rabbi Kaplan (1901–69) coin ideas or throw his hat in the ring of world politics? Respectfully, no. As the second and longest-serving director of Ohio State Hillel (1934–69), he kept his talents local.

If you haven’t heard the name Harry Kaplan you’re not alone, but his influence permeates Ohio State. Every year the university awards a student the Kaplan Humanitarian award, named after Rabbi Kaplan. The OSU Hillel building stands today in the same place as the first one built for the purpose, a project he oversaw. And his legacy goes further than that, I believe. He modeled for us a way to confront the chief problem of the 21st century: how to get through the next hundred years intact.

Rabbi Kaplan’s Secret to Success

I had heard the name but until this week I knew almost nothing about Rabbi Kaplan. Going through The Hillel Scroll archives, I saw a headline from 1947 that made me want to learn more: “Rabbi Congratulated on His Bar Mitzvah.” Come again? A second headline clarifies: “Hillel Celebrates Rabbi Kaplan’s Bar Mitzvah During Thirteenth Year of His Directorship.” Thirteen years of celebrated leadership. To be followed by 22 more! What was his secret, I wondered?

Search “Harry Kaplan” in the Ohio State University Archives database and you will get 771 results. (For comparison the name of Jim Tressel, coach of the 2002 National Championship Buckeye football team, returns 893 results.) What you find looking through the results is a hint to Rabbi Kaplan’s leadership. Hundreds of blurbs, announcements, features, and reports paint a picture of a deeply learned man eager to gird his community with the strength of knowledge of where they came from, what they faced, and how they could thrive.

Through lectures, radio shows, speaker series, and conversation Rabbi Kaplan brought his wisdom to bear on the issues of the day. Consider a random selection of his programs. In October 1956 he spoke on the idea of Jewish unity on WBNS. In April 1938 he talked with fraternity brothers about the threat to Jewish life in Europe. In January 1957 he gave Hillel students a personal report of his most recent trip to Israel. In February 1946 he spoke at the Knight International House about the problems facing the creation of a Jewish state. At a book review brunch in April 1960 he reviewed a collection of writings by I.L. Peretz, maybe the greatest Yiddish writer. The list goes on.

It’s astounding and also daunting to tally up Rabbi Kaplan’s endeavors. And the OSU archives only document his activities on campus!

On top of everything he was a family man. He and his wife, Rebecca, lived at 2120 Iuka Avenue, where they raised four children while juggling responsibilities at Hillel. That Rebecca was a key ingredient to Rabbi Kaplan’s success was evident to all. “I would be remiss,” wrote Abram L. Sachar in his congratulations on the rabbi’s “bar mitzvah,” “if I did not recognize that Rebecca Kaplan is as central a part of all that has been done.” To cite only one story, Rebecca went toe to toe with the great Columbus philanthropist Leo Yassenoff when he overmeddled in Hillel business. They were a team, Harry and Rebecca, using education to turn hundreds, thousands, of rambunctious co-eds into full-grown Jewish adults.

But the thought came to me: It would never work today.

Rabbi Kaplan’s secret—his indefatigable drive to learn, educate, and share—runs up against a malaise of disinterest. I swipe through Reels and Shorts, open one book then two more, start writing project after writing project, I follow fad workout trends, buy merch, share the viral video, not because I love these things but because I fear disinterest. I dread being out of things to do but worse is the dullness that comes from doing a thing until it loses the lustre of newness.

No, Kaplan’s approach would never work today. It is too single-minded a project of education.

Or is that just what is needed?

Surviving the Bottleneck

The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat predicts that humankind is headed toward a civilizational bottleneck. Driven by AI, digitization, and social media, the loss of most of what we recognize as life and culture awaits future generations. The digital age “is killing us softly,” he says, “by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete.”

Faced by the prospect of total existential unmooring, how can you protect yourself, let alone your descendants or your community? “How much survives will depend on our own deliberate choices,” Douthat argues. He says that families will have to prefer their own to “just some general affection for humanity.” Artists will need to show “contempt for mediocrity” and insist on excellence. “Small nations will survive only” if they embrace the model of the early Zionists. “Some of these choices will be especially difficult for liberals,” he acknowledges, “since they will often smack of chauvinism and fanaticism and reaction.”

These choices also smack of the zeal shown by Rabbi Kaplan. Concerns such as Douthat raises may seem distant from those of a rabbi born at the turn of the twentieth century. One of his last published essays suggests otherwise. In “The Sexual Revolution and Religious Education,” Rabbi Kaplan writes:

It has already become almost trite to speak of the atomic, nuclear, and space ages. We are just beginning to grasp and understand some of the astounding changes which these physical and scientific miracles will bring to the life of nations and peoples. The terms industrial and scientific revolution have long been accepted…. We have not exhausted, however, the persistent effects of the machine age in all phases of contemporary living.

He stood at the cusp of changes like none before—and he knew it. His program was a preemptive response, an attempt to prepare his community for the coming upheavals. He knew that the Jewish people in particular, less than half a percent of the world’s population, are vulnerable to drift. That Judaism is a fragile inheritance, subject to the commitment of each generation to transmit it accurately and sufficiently to the next.

My malaise of disinterest—and yours—isn’t a sign of the times; it’s an effect of the bottleneck. To fight the grip of the virtual, the addiction to technological ease, will be, let’s admit it, a little boring, a little uncool, a little frustrating, a little reactionary, a little odd. But the reward? The reward is the discovery of what you really love and the means to sustain it through the dark times to come.

Rabbi Kaplan shows one way to find what matters. He advocated learning as a way of life. He wanted to talk to you about Sholem-Aleichem and Ben-Gurion, the perils facing world Jewry and the prospects of statehood, the Canaanites and Moses’s ethics, prayer, poetry, racial justice, the legacy of FDR. He built community through intellectual life, through appreciation of culture. Above all he loved learning with people. And they were challenged by that love to rise to meet him.

A Parting Gift

A passion like that you can’t hide. It shines through. Rebecca Kaplan, of course, knew it well. In 1954, she asked their friend Edward Schlezinger if he could do something for her husband. Would he make the case to Ohio State to award Harry an honorary degree?

On June 10, 1955, less than a year later, the university made him an honorary Doctor of Laws. It was the first time Ohio State bestowed the award on someone who never had a formal relation to the school.

Rebecca didn’t get to see the ceremony. She died at home on a November morning, just weeks after she made the request. It was her parting gift; she knew her time was short.

Harry lived another 14 years. When he died, he too had a parting gift—the model of his life and mission. A life of love, of learning, of being obsessed, to the point of seeming strange to some, risking their boredom or annoyance, but insisting nevertheless on knowledge as a foundation of living. He left us a model for preferring real things to fake ones, ephemeral ones, and real pain, genuine grief to the false pleasures of anesthetized existence.

Choices confront us. New movements lie hidden in the struggles ahead, waiting to be born. Many years before he died, Rabbi Harry Kaplan, a man whose name doesn’t echo through history, wrote sentences that could describe our future. If only we will follow his example.

Birth, as we all know, represents a period of pain and struggle. There were many, both on and off the campus, who regarded the new movement with indifference, fear and even suspicion. There were some… who looked upon college youth as a lost generation…. But the visionaries persisted, and their dreams were translated into the lives and careers of thousands of Jewish youth.

Dark times lay ahead for the Jewish people, predicted a tall man with a firm yet benevolent gaze in a speech at Ohio State’s University Chapel in January 1938. No one yet knew how dark, but the man’s clarion voice, inflected with the rhythms of Talmudic debate, conveyed the gravity of the situation. A writer for The Hillel Scroll reported:

Speaking before the Monday night assembly, which was a near capacity crowd… Rabbi Silver said, “Today there is a great and bitter struggle in the world between that which is represented by the totalitarian states and the right [to liberty] represented by religion.”

Imagine a rabbi with the polished quality of a Noa Tishby and the bearing and statesmanship of a Naftali Bennett and you start to grasp the phenomenon that was Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver (1893–1963). A tireless advocate on behalf of the Jewish people, some believe that without him the State of Israel might never have been established. In these uncertain times, Rabbi Silver’s character and insights, honed through the direst years of modern Jewish history, yield sorely needed wisdom. His visit to Ohio State almost 80 years ago, as reported in The Hillel Scroll, offers a chance to revisit his enduring message of hope.

Rabbi Silver was a figure of world-historic importance, who spent most of his life in Ohio. In Cleveland, where he served as head rabbi of one of the nation’s largest Reform temples, people still revere his memory. My wife’s grandfather, whose wedding he conducted 60 years ago, remembers that:

He urged us to light the Shabbos candles. To be as observant as possible. For the ceremony, he put on a coat with tails. He was tall, well-spoken. He was an impressive figure. Highly respected. And rightly so.

When he wasn’t leading the community from his pulpit on Ansel Avenue, Rabbi Silver participated as a sought-after speaker in the great debates of his time. Invited to speak before United Nations assemblies, rallies at Madison Square Garden, and Zionist congresses the world over, he thundered against bigotry and hate and flashed fire on behalf of Jewish nationhood. Given this demand for appearances, his congregants got as used to his absence as his presence.

As he strode into University Chapel, a campus space that no longer exists, Rabbi Silver must have been relieved that for once his travels had taken him only two hours from the booming industrial metropolis he called home. Columbus was a smaller, quieter city then, a fraction of Cleveland’s size. It wasn’t a given that it would be a stop on the itinerary of someone so notable.

Ohio State Hillel, with its distinguished leadership, was surely a draw. Joining Rabbi Silver on the panel for Religion in Life Week were Rabbis Lee Levinger and Harry Kaplan, the first and second directors of OSU Hillel. It would be hard to match the international stature of Rabbi Silver, but Rabbis Levinger and Kaplan were men of serious learning and distinction. Together, they put Ohio State Hillel on the map, turning it into a leading institution of the Hillel movement. The meeting-of-the-minds between these three Ohio rabbis alone warranted a trip down.

Nothing, however, could have occupied their conversation as much as the fate of European Jewry and the future of Jewish life in the Land of Israel. “Man has turned back to the worship of malevolent deities,” Rabbi Silver told the packed University Chapel, then the largest auditorium on campus. Summing up the double-threat of Nazism and Communism, he warned of efforts “to re-enslave the human mind.” As usual, Jews stood in the way of such efforts. In the Eastern reaches of the Nazi empire, the consequences for that resistance were about to be unleashed.

Is it an exaggeration to draw a parallel between then and now? If Kristallnacht, the largest assault on Jewish life in living memory, served as a prelude to the Holocaust, does October 7th, the deadliest attack on Jews since the 1940s, augur a coming civilizational battle? It’s hard to say as yet, but the times feel plenty dark.

Dark times call for light. In 1954, weighing his years in the spiritual wilderness against the unprecedented victories that followed, Rabbi Silver wrote:

Man cannot wait and should not wait to do the things which need to be done until he sees the road clearly ahead. Sometimes he must act on faith, even when he does not know what lies ahead. Sometimes he must move forward through mist and fog…. Men cannot see beyond the horizon of their own times. What lies ahead, no one knows. But Judaism constantly admonished man not to despair of the future.

Despair is easy. It’s the natural state of a mind that finds the future worrying and inscrutable. But Jews aren’t permitted that despondency. Like the prophets, Jews must believe in a future, in a world redeemed, which seems improbable, if not impossible, amid the violent unfolding of history.

Light the Shabbos candles, Rabbi Silver advised. He didn’t tell my wife’s grandparents to become activists or lobby Congress or endow a chair in Jewish studies. He urged them to light candles, a small gesture. Through that gesture a whole world arose, one in which children and grandchildren grew up to watch the flames dance in the dusk, the light reflected in their eyes and in the eyes their parents turned to look at them. It was a gesture of belief that two pinpricks of light against the falling dark could matter, despite wars, recessions, and the troubles of life.

Sometimes the only certainty you have is that nothing is certain. Rabbi Silver tells us—as he told the Buckeyes who flocked to hear him on a cold January day more than 80 years ago—that the essence of Judaism is the faith, nevertheless, that what you do next matters. Even if it’s just lighting a pair of candles on Friday night.

Editor’s Note: Thank you to our wonderful friends at the Columbus Jewish Historical Society for granting us access to the archives of our namesake The Hillel Scroll. With the help of our friends at CJHS, we present to you “Moments that Matter” revisiting the fascinating history of the Ohio State Jewish community.

Is possession of a land enough to fulfill the dreams of Zionism? Ahad Ha’am (1856–1927), the boldest Zionist thinker of the 19th century, denied it. Statehood, the return to Zion after 1,900 years, he claimed, leave the project of Jewish peoplehood unfinished. Only by reviving the Hebrew spirit could Jews escape the nightmare of history and be reborn as a nation.

Seventy-seven years since the founding of the State of Israel, it’s hard to believe there was ever a debate whether the territorial or cultural dimension of Zionism held more importance. Blended as they were over the decades—by writers, educators, and spiritual figures—the two now seem inseparable. A Hebrew culture without a land or a Hebrew land without a culture—once you have the one, the other must follow close behind, lest you risk the loss of both.

The debate was still lively, however, in 1927, when The Hillel Scroll ran an obituary for Ahad Ha’am by a contributor known only as “H.Z.” Ahad Ha’am, born Asher Ginzberg in present-day Ukraine, assumed his pen name (“One of the People”) at the start of his career, a mark of his commitment to Jews over any brand of ideology. From his first essay, a thunder-clap against territorial-focused Zionism, to his last, he was willing to go against the grain, not least when he suspected that movement leaders were headed toward an ideological dead-end.

No dead-end lured more prominent Zionists than the belief that the Diaspora would suddenly cease to exist after the founding of a Jewish state. Ahad Ha’am, unlike the ideologues of the movement, understood that such a belief ignores human nature. Whatever the merits or motivations of their decision, many Jews would choose to stay right where they were—as they did in 1947–48, when they were finally given a choice.

A century ago, a Jewish Buckeye sat at a table mulling over these debates, wondering: What’s a Jew in goles supposed to do? In Ohio, Diaspora is the air you breathe; you can’t pretend that your nostrils fills with the scents of the Hermon or the odors of Ben-Yehuda Street. Walk outside and you see the leaves turning to fire in the fall, the gray clouds filling the horizon in winter, and the wind whipping the tender shoots in spring. Ohio isn’t the home of ancient longing, but it’s home.What’s a Jew in the Diaspora supposed to do?

H.Z. found solace in the teachings of Ahad Ha’am, who imagined a role for the Diaspora before and after the establishment of a Jewish state. The Diaspora, he taught, had the chance to mold the new leaders of the Jewish state, and a successful state could in turn enrich the life of the Diaspora. As H.Z. summarizes Ahad Ha’am’s position:

Physical rejuvenation [restoration of sovereignty in the Land of Israel] must be preceded by spiritual renaissance, cultural rebirth. The life of the Jewish people was different than any other people. Its life was very much more than mere physical life. It was not the physical that had sustained the Jewish people through the suffering and endurance of history but rather Hebraic spirit, that spirit which motivated the Prophets of old.

Stuck in the Diaspora, H.Z. concludes, it is still possible to work for the rebirth of the Jewish people in their ancient homeland.

At Ohio State Hillel, for the past hundred years, Jews and their allies have drawn sustenance from the citizens and statesmen, the cultural and technological marvels of the Land of Israel. A voice from the past offers a reminder that the direction of sustenance is reversible. A timely reminder, since today more than ever, Israel needs what the Diaspora can give.

If we choose to remain in the Diaspora, Ahad Ha’am and H.Z. counsel, then the least we can do is fight for a spiritual renaissance, an intellectual rebirth, a cultural revival of Jewish thought and values. That’s a central mission of The Buckeye Scroll, as it was of The Hillel Scroll before it. Who knows what strength and succor will be drawn from these writings a century from now?

Editor’s Note: Thank you to our wonderful friends at the Columbus Jewish Historical Society for granting us access to the archives of our namesake The Hillel Scroll. With the help of our friends at CJHS, we present to you “Moments that Matter” revisiting the fascinating history of the Ohio State Jewish community.

What makes a “real honest-to-goodness” Seder? Most of us are familiar with the ritual of the Passover Seder. On the first night of the holiday, friends and family gather around the table and decorative Seder plate, recall the Exodus from Egypt that brought the Israelites from slavery into freedom, and enjoy a smattering of odd foods like matzah, bitter herbs, salt water, etc. The Seder has become a landmark of Jewish practice, and some consider it the most practiced Jewish ritual across the globe. In fact, there are those who posit that the Seder is better attended in the US than Yom Kippur services.

About one hundred years ago, in the spring of 1927, OSU Hillel students gathered at a local Columbus synagogue to host their own Passover Seder. One can imagine these collegiate Jews sitting across from one another, singing and pointing and partaking in a ritual that has been around for thousands of years. Scholars note that the first mention of the Seder can be found in the Mishnah, the ancient compilation of rabbinic teachings from the 1st century CE. For two thousand years, Jews have been sitting around the table discussing the Exodus from Egypt. And at each table, Jews are instructed to imagine that they themselves were redeemed. The story of the Exodus is not meant to be some historical event tucked away in the shadow of memory; each individual must internalize the fragility of freedom in their own lives.

At that Hillel Seder in 1927, what might those students have reflected on? Perhaps they spoke of the implications of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which severely restricted immigration and essentially halted the flow of Jews from Eastern Europe to the United States. Or perhaps they whispered about Henry Ford and his continuous dissemination of antisemitic propaganda like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which he published in the early 20s. Maybe they had peers on campus at OSU who espoused similar ideas. Or perhaps they shared memories of friends and family who had perished in the Great War, which had ended only a decade earlier. For those young Jews, there was plenty to discuss at their Seder table. Life was precarious, as it always has been for Jews.

Soon, Jews will once again gather around their Seder tables and reflect on the year that has been. We will talk about the hostages who remain captive in Gaza, and the war that continues to rage between Israel and Hamas. We will discuss the growing sense of worry felt in America and across the world over the stability and fragility of the societies we know and love. We will surely acknowledge the rising antisemitism we have all been feeling.

And yet, at our Hillel Seder this year we will also sing and be joyful, as they must have been in 1927. We will invite the youngest among us to recite the Four Questions, and we will all lean like royalty as we partake in good food and drink. Despite the inevitable challenges the world faces, and we Jews continue to face, we will not cower nor turn away from the hard things. We will face them and discuss them, as we always have, and turn our memory into ritual.

To join OSU Hillel for the Seder this year, please feel free to RSVP here.

Editor’s Note: Thank you to our wonderful friends at the Columbus Jewish Historical Society for granting us access to the archives of our namesake The Hillel Scroll. With the help of our friends at CJHS, I present to you “Moments that Matter” revisiting the fascinating history of the Ohio State Jewish community.

Last Friday, I took a field trip to the Columbus Jewish Historical Society, spending time amidst their vast Hillel Scroll archives and rich Jewish artifacts. Toby Brief, the Executive Director of the Columbus Jewish Historical Society, brought me stacked folders of old newspaper articles that spanned from 1927-1954. The Hillel Scroll, published semi-monthly by the B’nai Brith Hillel Foundation at Ohio State, gave hundreds of Ohio State students the opportunity to publish the things that mattered most to them during its multi-decade run. On the morning of Ohio State Hillel’s second-ever Shabbat at the Shoe, I am reminded of an April 15, 1927 issue of The Hillel Scroll, which published, “A Friday Night at Hillel.”

“Good Shabbos.” Just a brief little greeting. But if only said with the proper inflection it just grips the hearer who is more or less familiar with the beauty of that institution in the history of the Jewish people.

The scribe behind “A Friday Night at Hillel” is unknown. Signing off the column as “M.A.S.,” it’s impossible to know the full name of this person since they weren’t listed in the masthead, either. However, M.A.S. was onto something — I always joke that the vibes on a Friday afternoon in Hillel are palpable. But it’s true. As excitement for the Sabbath takes over, a desire for work and accomplishment suddenly disappears. Sometimes, I envision the building as a real-time version of “The Office” where killing time at the water cooler is the only way to usher in Shabbat.

Every Friday evening at 8’o’clock this simple, yet meaningful, expression is heard in that beehive of Jewish student endeavor, the Hillel foundation.

If M.A.S. was alive 98 years later, I think they would be proud of Shabbat at the Shoe. Imagine the excitement of the Jewish community at Ohio State in 1927. Founded at 96 East 18th Avenue in 1925, Ohio State Hillel opened as the third Hillel in the nation under the guidance of Rabbi Lee Levinger. “A Friday Night At Hillel” was published less than two years into Ohio State Hillel’s existence, and M.A.S. and the rest of the students were already feeling the effects of Shabbat “permeating” the halls of Hillel. During the most recent episode of “Hot Ones: The Hillel Show,” I asked close friend and current co-president of Hillel Student Board Isaac Weiss about Shabbat at the Shoe and what it feels like to stand on the shoulders of giants.

“In the fall we’re going to be turning 100 years old, so it’s a little naive to say this will be the biggest event ever,” Isaac said with a smile. I’m really excited to be a part of something new in the sense that this is only the second year that this event is happening and I feel a part of something that can be around for a long time. I’m also a part of something that has been around for so much longer than I can imagine.”

“Let’s not play games about the students that we are talking about here. Jews at Ohio State — I’m a nobody. These are Jews that have served in World War II, people that survived the Holocaust, came to Ohio State knowing 4 languages none of which were English and creating a beautiful education for themselves, finding 60 years of amazing Jewish life for themselves and their families in Bexley or surrounding neighborhoods. I only have a lot to learn from them.”

When I am unable to find the correct words, I turn to Isaac. M.A.S. understood the power and meaning of a Friday night at Hillel long before the Wexner Jewish Center existed and long before the concept of Shabbat at the Shoe was hatched. Isaac is right — the editor of the Hillel Scroll in 1927 — Milton J. Yelsky —would serve in the Air Force from 1942-1945. These Jewish students are our heroes; they are the ones who make Shabbats like this evening possible.

As we eat dinner and drink cocktails at Ohio Stadium, their spirits walk beside us. When Rabbi Aaron Portman and Rabbi Josh Warshawsky lead the 500+ attendees in services on the field, the Jewish heroes of Ohio State stand with us. Not just tonight at the Shoe, but forever at 46 E 16th.

Yes, for a quiet, enjoyable Friday evening with a bit of the real Shabos home atmosphere, even at college, spend next Friday at Hillel! Good Shabos! — M.A.S.