Spiritual Humanistic Judaism is still a young body of thought. We are not yet publishing a finished, formal treatment of it — that longer written work is still being developed. But the ideas themselves are not waiting on the writing. Below are the core concepts, each in its own section, so you can see where they come from and where they lead.

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Judaism as an Evolving Civilisation

We begin from Mordecai Kaplan: Judaism is the evolving religious civilisation of the Jewish people. Torah carries real authority without being infallible. Mitzvot function as religious folkways rather than divine commands. And inherited forms are reconstructed generation by generation, through a process in which the past receives a vote, but never a veto.

Read more about Mordecai Kaplan’s Religious Humanism →

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From a Divine Subject to Sacred Predicates

Harold Schulweis supplies the next step. Rather than asking what God is or does, predicate theology relocates sacred significance onto the predicates themselves — justice, compassion, truth, healing — wherever they actually show up in the world. What matters is not a Subject behind the action, but the quality of the action.

Read more about Harold Schulweis’ Predicate Theology →

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Holiness Without a Subject

Spiritual Humanistic Judaism goes a step further than predicate theology. In our affirmative theology, liturgy and practice, we set aside the words God, godly and godliness altogether, while still using them as historical and analytical terms when discussing the tradition we come from. In their place, we speak of holiness enacted — in persons, in relationships, in practices, in moments, and in things.

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Consecration and Holiness

We draw a firm line between two ideas that are often blurred together. Consecration is simply the communal act of setting something apart — a day, an object, a relationship. On its own, consecration carries no moral guarantee; a community can consecrate almost anything. Holiness is different: it is an evaluative term, one we reserve for consecrations that are answerable to dignity, justice, truth and consequence. Not everything set apart is holy. Holiness has to be earned by what it actually does in the world.

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Where Spirituality Lives

Without a supernatural Subject to locate it in, spirituality does not disappear — it moves. We find it in awe, gratitude, grief, joy and wonder; in moral aspiration and in belonging to a community; in ethics as lived practice; and in the ongoing cultivation of middot, the character traits Jewish tradition has always asked us to work on.

Holiness is not a fact about the universe. It is a claim we make, together, about what deserves to be set apart — and we are answerable for that claim.

These ideas are lived out concretely in how we pray, mark time, and gather — see Our Practice — and in what we affirm together, see Our Beliefs. A fuller written account of this thinking is still being developed; we’ll share it here once it’s ready.