Humanistic Judaism began with one rabbi's crisis of conscience. Sherwin T. Wine (1928-2007), trained and ordained in the Reform movement, took up the pulpit of a newly formed congregation in suburban Detroit in the early 1960s, but grew convinced that he could not honestly continue leading prayers that addressed a personal, supernatural God in whom he no longer believed. Rather than leave the rabbinate or abandon Jewish communal life, Wine proposed something different to his congregants: a Jewish community built around Jewish history, culture, ethics, and peoplehood, using Jewish holidays, lifecycle ceremonies, and literature, but without theistic prayer or the claim of a supernatural God.
Most of his congregation agreed to the experiment, and in 1963 they founded the Birmingham Temple in the Detroit suburbs, later renamed the Birmingham Temple Congregation for Humanistic Judaism, generally regarded as the founding congregation of the movement. Wine articulated its philosophy at length in his writings and public teaching over the following decades: Judaism, he argued, is best understood as the evolving civilization and culture of the Jewish people, of which theology is only one historical strand, and one a Jew is free to set aside while remaining fully and authentically Jewish.