Judaism Beyond God

Judaism Beyond God did not launch Humanistic Judaism. It arrived twenty-two years after the movement's real founding moment, the Sunday in 1963 when Sherwin Wine, then a Reform rabbi at Michigan's Birmingham Temple, began omitting prayers addressed to a God he no longer believed existed and replacing them with readings on Jewish history and ethics. For most of the years between that Sunday and 1985, Humanistic Judaism existed mainly as a practice, a congregation's changed liturgy, a coordinating body founded in 1969 to link congregations following Wine's lead, and word of mouth among Jews who wanted an unapologetically nontheistic Jewish community. What did not yet exist was a single text laying out the reasoning in full, something a rabbi in another city, a scholar of American Judaism, or a family considering the congregation could read and weigh on its own terms.

The book supplied that. Its central claim, that Jewish identity rests on a shared history, literature and peoplehood rather than on a relationship to God, and that the God question can be set aside rather than settled, was not new to Wine's own congregants by 1985. What was new was having it argued start to finish, in Wine's own words, available to anyone rather than transmitted congregation by congregation through practice alone. That is the specific job a founding text does that a founding practice cannot: it lets a movement's reasoning travel independently of the community that first worked it out, which is part of why the book has remained the reference statement handed to newcomers and cited by scholars describing the movement ever since.

Judaism Beyond God was not the first twentieth century Jewish response to declining confidence in a personal, commanding God. Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism decades earlier, had already faced the same problem and answered it differently: Kaplan reinterpreted theistic language rather than removing it, redescribing Judaism as an evolving religious civilization and treating God-talk as pointing to something real, the totality of forces that make human self-fulfillment possible, without asking Jews to affirm a personal deity acting in history. The vocabulary of prayer largely stayed; what it was understood to mean changed underneath it.

Wine's book took the further step Kaplan's did not. Rather than keep the language of divine address and supply it with a new referent, Judaism Beyond God argues for dropping supernatural claims from Jewish practice altogether, replacing prayer addressed to God with readings and rituals built around human history, ethics and communal responsibility, on the reasoning that reinterpretation still asks a nontheistic Jew to speak as though believing something not actually held. The two movements sit at different points on the same line rather than as opposites: both start from the same difficulty, an increasing number of Jews who no longer hold the tradition's theological claims but do not want to leave the peoplehood behind, and both refuse the option of simply calling those Jews no longer Jewish. Where Kaplan asked the words to mean something new, Wine's book asked whether Jewish identity needed those words addressed to a God at all, and answered that it did not.