Sherwin Wine

Sherwin Wine was born in Detroit in 1928, trained at Hebrew Union College, the flagship Reform seminary, and was ordained a Reform rabbi in 1956. Within a few years of taking his own pulpit he found himself unable to continue leading services that addressed prayers to a personal God he had come to believe neither he nor most of his congregants actually held convictions about, a mismatch he judged more dishonest to maintain than to openly resolve. Rather than leave the rabbinate, he proposed to a group of like-minded families in the Detroit suburbs a different kind of congregation entirely, one that would keep the full calendar of Jewish holidays, life cycle ceremonies, ethical teaching and communal identity while dropping the theistic language and supernatural claims that Wine argued were no longer where the real meaning of Jewish life for most modern Jews actually lived.

That congregation, founded in 1963 as the Birmingham Temple in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills, became the first Humanistic Jewish congregation, with Wine writing new liturgy that reframed traditional prayers and holidays around human history, ethical responsibility and communal memory rather than divine command or providence. The experiment drew both strong local support and considerable criticism from more traditional colleagues who argued a congregation without God could not meaningfully be called Jewish at all, a debate about the movement's legitimacy that has never fully settled even as it has grown.

Wine did not stop at a single congregation. In 1969 he helped found the Society for Humanistic Judaism to organize the growing number of like-minded communities in North America, and later established the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism to train rabbis, cantors and lay leaders for a movement with no theological seminary tradition to draw on, since every existing rabbinical school assumed some form of theism as a baseline. Humanistic Judaism under his leadership defined itself explicitly as a fourth major stream of American Jewish life alongside Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Judaism, though its numbers have always remained far smaller than the three older movements.

Wine remained the intellectual and organizational center of the movement for over four decades, writing extensively on secular Jewish identity, celebrating Jewish culture, history and ethics as sufficient grounds for communal belonging without requiring belief in a supernatural deity behind them. He died in July 2007 in a car accident near Essaouira, Morocco, at age seventy nine, while traveling with his partner, and Humanistic Judaism has continued under a new generation of rabbis he trained, still organized around the same wager he first proposed to a small group of Detroit families in 1963: that Jewish life does not require a God to be genuinely, fully Jewish.