← Towards a Spiritual Humanistic Judaism · Part I — The claim and its theological location
Talking about God
There is no single Jewish answer to the question of what God is. Classical Reconstructionism sometimes responds that this is the wrong question, and that we should ask instead: How does God function? How does the idea — or reality — of God operate in human lives?
That remains an important question. But Spiritual Humanistic Judaism does not need to reject the question of what God is. Jews have always understood God in different ways. Some speak of God as a personal presence; some, following Maimonides, emphasise that God is ultimately beyond human description; some, following Spinoza, identify God with Nature and the totality of reality; some, following Kaplan, understand God as the power that makes for human fulfilment and moral growth. Others speak instead of holiness, godliness, conscience, the yetzer ha-tov, or the light within and between us.
God is therefore optional in Spiritual Humanistic Judaism — not because Spiritual Humanistic Judaism is defined by nontheism, but because no single metaphysical belief is required in order to participate fully in Jewish spiritual life. The practices, ethics, rituals, stories and communal commitments of Judaism do not depend upon everyone holding the same picture of God. The theological layer may change the value a person finds in a Jewish practice, but it need not change the practice itself, its ethical demands, its Mussar formation or its communal Jewish meaning.
Jewish tradition has long resisted the idea that God can be represented straightforwardly in human terms. The prohibition against making a graven image warns us against confusing any finite image with the infinite. Biblical language speaks of God through metaphor: light, rock, refuge, breath, wisdom, justice, presence and love. Moses Maimonides later developed a theology of negative description, insisting that God cannot be adequately contained by human concepts. In the seventeenth century, Baruch Spinoza rejected the idea of a supernatural ruler who intervenes in the world and identified God with Nature itself. In the modern period, many Jews have found traditional images of a supernatural person increasingly difficult to affirm, particularly in the light of suffering, injustice and catastrophe.
These developments do not necessarily represent a departure from Judaism. They can also be understood as part of Judaism’s continuing attempt to speak truthfully about ultimate reality.
Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan offered one of the most influential modern approaches. For Kaplan, the important question was not primarily the substance of which God is made, but what the concept of God does in human life. Does it help us become more honest, compassionate, courageous and just? Does it draw us beyond selfishness? Does it inspire us to build a society in which human beings can flourish?
Whatever awakens us to justice, wisdom, generosity, responsibility and the repair of the world may be understood as divine. Some people will call that God. Others may call it godliness, the sacred, the moral impulse, the human capacity for growth, or the power of life working through us. The language may differ, but the spiritual direction can be shared.
This is not a reduction of Judaism to ethics alone. Jewish practice gives ethical commitments a spiritual form. Shabbat, festivals, blessings, study, prayer, confession, song, mourning and celebration shape the way we encounter time, nature, community, memory and responsibility. They train our attention. They interrupt habit. They help us become capable of gratitude, restraint, courage and care.
For some of us, God is present in these practices as a reality deeper than the individual self. For others, God-language names the holiness that emerges through human relationships, the natural world and the struggle for justice. For still others, the word God may not be necessary. Spiritual Humanistic Judaism can make room for all these approaches without making any one of them a condition of belonging.
From godly to holy: one naturalistic expression
The move this thesis proposes is a single substitution, and everything else depends on it.
Where Schulweis says godly, the naturalistic expression developed in this thesis says holy. The reason is not that one word belongs to the grammatical class of nouns and the other to the class of predicates. Predicate names a function within a sentence rather than a class of word, and holy is an ordinary adjective which happens to occur predicatively; no fact about English syntax by itself settles a theological question. The argument is semantic and pragmatic. It concerns what the two words do in public, in the mouths of people who have not read the theologian. Other Spiritual Humanistic Jews may retain godly or God and give those words a different account.
The asymmetry of public meaning. God, in ordinary use, evokes a personal or intentional agent — one who wills, commands, judges, intervenes and can be addressed — and it does so irrespective of the specialised definition a theologian has supplied. That is the work the word has done for as long as it has been in the language, and a congregation hears it whether or not the prayer book intends otherwise. Redefinition does not cancel the evocation; it adds a private stipulation on top of a public meaning which goes on operating underneath. Godly inherits the difficulty in reduced form, since the noun remains audible inside the adjective.
Kadosh carries no such implication. It means set apart, marked off, treated differently from the ordinary, and it can intelligibly describe a quality of relationship, treatment or experience without implying an agent who conferred it. To say that a table is holy is not to smuggle in a sanctifier; it is to say that this table, on this night, has been set apart from the week and is being treated accordingly — and the statement is true when said, because the people saying it are the ones doing the setting apart. The asymmetry is thus between a word whose ordinary meaning survives redefinition and asserts itself against it, and a word which needs no redefinition at all.
The distinction can be put as a practical test. God is the power that makes for salvation requires a seminar before a congregation can use it. This day is holy to us requires nothing: a hearer who asks holy to whom, and made holy by what? has asked a good question with an available answer. Wine’s standard is not being softened here. It is being satisfied.
A clarification about the word itself. The naturalistic liturgy developed in this thesis dispenses with God-language in its own affirmative theology, liturgy and religious practice. It retains the word as a historical and analytical term, since Kaplan, Schulweis, Wine and the inherited liturgy cannot be discussed without it, and this thesis accordingly uses it throughout in that second mode. The claim concerns what this particular community says when it prays, blesses and teaches; it is not a vocabulary from which Spiritual Humanistic Judaism as a whole, scholarship or theological argument must abstain.
Consecration and holiness are not the same thing
The account so far describes an act: a community sets something apart and treats it differently. That act is consecration, and by itself it carries no moral guarantee. Communities have consecrated conquests, exclusions and cruelties, and have done so with full ritual seriousness. A thing can be genuinely set apart and genuinely wrong. If holy meant no more than consecrated, the claim made later in this thesis — that a majority cannot vote cruelty into holiness — would be empty.
Two senses must therefore be distinguished, and then related.
Sacredness as consecration is descriptive and procedural. It names what a community has in fact done: marked a time, an object, a relationship or a practice off from ordinary use and organised its behaviour around the marking. Shabbat is consecrated by candles, kiddush, the refusal of work and havdalah, and that consecration is a real social fact whatever anyone thinks of its merits. This is the sense in which the semantic point above holds without remainder: the sentence is true when said, because the speakers are the ones performing the setting apart.
Holiness as ethical value is evaluative. It names a consecration which survives examination — one answerable to human dignity, to justice, to truth, and to what the practice actually does to those it touches. Tsedek, raḥamim and emet are holy in this second sense, and it is this sense that the liturgy affirms when it calls a quality holy rather than merely naming a boundary.
The relation between the two is the work of the ethical constitution. Consecration proposes; the constitution disposes. A community may set apart whatever it chooses, but what it has set apart earns the name holy only if it can be defended before those it affects. This is why the sacred on this account is not simply whatever a group happens to revere, and why the weekday test is not an optional supplement to the liturgy but the mechanism by which a consecration is confirmed or refused.
Kaplan supplies the demonstration. This is the most consequential finding in this chapter, and it comes from his practice rather than his theory. He performed the same naturalising manoeuvre on two religious words, and only one caused him difficulty. Asked why the Torah should be considered sacred if it is a human text, he answered by redefining sacred: it would mean any element of human experience which serves as a means of enhancing human life, and objects are sacred because they help us overcome the inertia, doubt and cowardice that stand in the way of our fulfilment. That is a functional account of holiness, very close to the one argued for here, and no one has ever needed a seminar to use it.19
He redefined God by the same method and it required a footnote for the rest of the century. The asymmetry his two cases display — a functional term absorbing redefinition where an agent-naming noun resists it — is the whole of the argument, made in practice by the figure this thesis is otherwise indebted to, without his ever making it explicit.
The relationship to Kaplan and Schulweis can now be stated exactly. Kaplan asks how Judaism can remain a religion when supernaturalism is no longer compulsory: his answer is civilisation, peoplehood, sancta, folkways and the natural processes making for human fulfilment. Schulweis asks where the sacred can be located when a divine Subject no longer commands assent: his answer is in the predicates and in the relational space in which they are enacted. This thesis joins those answers in its own naturalistic expression. Kaplan supplies the Jewish body in which the predicates live; Schulweis supplies the reversal by which that body can speak of holiness without restoring a supernatural ruler. Spiritual Humanistic Judaism as a whole need not require the same metaphysical conclusion.
Either contribution without the other leaves a characteristic risk: Kaplan without the predicate turn leaves a naturalised civilisation still addressing the divine Subject in prayer, while predicate theology without Kaplan’s civilisational frame drifts into a universal ethical spirituality detached from Jewish time, peoplehood and folkway. The distinctive claim here is not merely that justice and compassion are holy, but that a Jewish civilisation can train, rehearse, transmit and hold its members answerable to those predicates without claiming that a divine person commands them.
Two objections. The first is that predicate holiness reduces religion to ethics. Schulweis’s answer holds: the ethical is at the centre of the God-idea, but a religion is also its ritual, its liturgy, its community, its celebration and its fidelity to a people’s continuing life — all of which this thesis retains, and Chapters 8 to 10 describe.
The second is that this is secular humanism with Hebrew ornament. The answer is Schulweis’s third reason: to call a quality holy raises it from the merely secular into the sacred, and that raising is a conscious act performed by people. What distinguishes a consecrated Friday evening from a pleasant one is not a metaphysical difference in the evening but a deliberate, repeated, communal act of setting apart, with a history behind it and obligations flowing from it. Chapter 9 argues that this is not a private feeling but a discipline with a method and a test.