Naturalistic Jewish Spirituality
Spiritual Humanistic Judaism is a Judaism of human responsibility, inherited practice, reconstructed theology, sacred culture, and disciplined ritual life.
Naturalistic. Fully spiritual. Rooted in the evolving civilization of the Jewish people.
This week ·
Parasha:
Shabbat theme:
Start here
Our Beliefs
The purpose of religion, the yetzer hara and yetzer hatov, Shabbat, and the work of repair.
Shabbat
Candle lighting, Havdalah, and how to begin a practice of your own — everything for Shabbat, all in one place.
Tefilotenu
Our own siddur — the full Shabbat liturgy, in Hebrew, transliteration and English.
Becoming Jewish
Belonging before believing: ten stages for those choosing the Jewish people.
About us
Our Practice
Prayer re-authored, sacred time, ritual, and community as the locus of the sacred.
The Spiritual Humanistic Jewish Process
How we make Jewish decisions with integrity — tradition, kehillah, and honest change.
The role of the rabbi
A teacher who creates other teachers: the rabbi as learned participant, pastoral presence and moral voice.
Thinkers
The teachers whose ideas we inherit and build on
Mordecai Kaplan
Judaism as an evolving religious civilization — the foundation of our approach.
Harold Schulweis
From God to godliness: predicate theology and the divinity of the attributes.
Sherwin Wine
The founder of Humanistic Judaism, whose standard of honesty — say what you believe — we inherit and build on.
Marcia Falk
Rewriting the blessing formula itself: prayer without a King, still unmistakably Jewish.
Baruch Spinoza
God, or Nature: the philosopher who emptied the divine of personhood centuries before we did.
Contemporary Rabbis
Rabbis teaching and leading in Spiritual Humanistic and Reconstructionist Judaism today.
Prayer & practice
Blessings for everyday occasions
Blessings for eating, waking, travelling, fragrance, the natural world and life’s turning points — in Hebrew, transliteration and English.
The Jewish Year
From Shabbat to Seliḥot: the calendar as a curriculum for becoming human.
Ḥeshbon HaNefesh
A thirty-day Elul journal of reflection, repair and renewal, by Rabbi Frank Tamburello.
Mussar and Middot
Working on character one quality at a time: what Mussar is, why it matters to us, and a daily practice of attention and return.
Ḥanuká
Eight nights, eight lights: the home service, the dreidel and five fried recipes.
Life cycle
Scholarship
Our Scholarship
“Holiness Without a Subject” — the ideas at the heart of our community, from Kaplan and Schulweis onward.
A Response to Scult
Spiritual Humanistic Judaism: a response to The Religious Humanism of Mordecai Kaplan, by Mel Scult — Martin H. Di Maggio’s rabbinic thesis.
Towards a Spiritual Humanistic Judaism
The rabbinic thesis of Martin H. Di Maggio, chapter by chapter — Kaplan, Schulweis, Mussar and the siddur without footnotes.
Resources
Community
Events
Shabbat services, holidays, and how to join us — hosted by Spinoza Havurah, our online congregation.
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