← Towards a Spiritual Humanistic Judaism · Part II — Sources, civilisation and reconstruction
Why the name Spiritual Humanistic Judaism
Religion and spirituality are one lived orientation viewed from two directions. Religion names the system by which life is interpreted: its beliefs, meanings, values, inherited narratives and account of obligation. Spirituality names the same religion in practice and emotion: the awe, gratitude, grief, joy, wonder, reverence, belonging and moral aspiration experienced through ritual, relationship and disciplined attention. Religion gives spirituality coherence, memory and direction; spirituality makes religion embodied and inwardly alive.
Each word in the proposed name performs a distinct task. Spiritual foregrounds the practised and affective life recovered in Scult’s Kaplan. It refers to no immaterial substance or supernatural realm. Humanistic locates agency and responsibility in human beings: human beings must repair what they leave broken, and no appeal to divine purpose can excuse suffering. This does not require denial of God; it means that responsibility cannot be transferred to God, whatever a person believes God to be. Nor does it make human beings the sole locus of value, since animals, ecosystems, places and inherited things participate in the relationships through which holiness is constituted.10 Judaism makes the proposal particular: its time is the Jewish calendar, its inherited argument is Torah, its practices are mitzvot reconstructed as folkways, its language includes Hebrew, and its community is joined through Ahavat Yisra’el to the Jewish people across generations.
The omission of religious from the name does not place this Judaism outside religion. It is religious because it orders a life, sets apart time, transmits sancta, accepts obligations, trains character and gives communal form to mortality, joy and grief. The term is omitted because religious humanism already names the Kaplanian programme recovered by Scult, while Spiritual Humanistic Judaism names the constructive response offered here. The proposal can accurately be described as both religious and spiritual because, on this account, the two are inseparable.
The position developed in this thesis is therefore not secular, though nothing here implies that secular Jewish life is shallow. Secular may name a political order protecting religious plurality, an epistemology appealing to public evidence, or a Jewish identity lived outside religious institutions; the first two are affirmed and the third respected. What is rejected is the assumption that a naturalistic interpretation constitutes an absence of religion. This calendar is normative rather than decorative, these folkways are disciplines rather than heritage displays, and this community generates obligations rather than affinity. The particular expression defended here is metaphysically naturalistic and religiously Jewish; Spiritual Humanistic Judaism itself does not require every Jew to share that metaphysical position.
Pulzetti’s intervention is public as well as internal. In the political setting she describes, religious is repeatedly made to mean opposition to queer lives and same-sex families. Liberal Jews who surrender the word concede that exclusion is religion while equality is merely secular preference. Spiritual Humanistic Judaism refuses that settlement. LGBTQ+ dignity and full participation are not concessions made by religion to an external liberal culture; they follow religiously from tsedek, emet, raḥamim and the refusal to turn inherited hierarchy into present humiliation. The past must be heard here and may be overruled here. A civilisation proves that it is evolving precisely where greater knowledge of human lives produces a more adequate ethic.
The Kaplanian test, restated. A system which gains credibility and loses density has not passed it; nor has one which retains inherited forms by concealing what it means by their words. The answer proposed here is conditional. Naturalisation deepens Jewish life only when followed by reconstruction: Torah as inherited interlocutor, peoplehood as covenantal responsibility, mitzvot as religious folkways, holiness as a quality enacted in relations, practices and things.
The test is retained as the governing one even though Spiritual Humanistic Judaism does not require naturalisation, and the reason is that naturalisation is the hardest case. A Jew who keeps the divine noun and interprets it through Kaplan, Schulweis, Spinoza or Rambam has more inherited material available for the work than one who relinquishes it. If a Jewish life can be thickened by the expression which gives up most, the expressions which give up less are not thereby in difficulty. The naturalistic liturgy developed in this thesis therefore functions as a stress test for the wider framework rather than as its boundary, and the chapters which follow set out the reconstruction it requires.
Torah: authority without infallibility
Torah is neither the speech of a supernatural legislator nor a dead archive. It is the Jewish people’s accumulated record of argument about how a life and a society should be ordered: morally mixed, historically layered, internally contradictory and indispensable. Its authority is not the authority of an inerrant source but of a multigenerational interlocutor whose words have already shaped the language in which contemporary Jews dispute them.
The governing Reconstructionist formula is that the past gets a vote, not a veto.17 A veto would let inherited texts close an argument regardless of present knowledge or the suffering they produce; no vote would turn Torah into a quarry from which readers take only stones already cut to their preferences. A vote means an inherited position must be heard, understood in context and given presumptive weight without immunity from moral criticism. Sometimes fidelity requires preservation, sometimes revaluation, sometimes explicit refusal — and refusal is itself Jewish when it remains in argument with what it refuses and gives reasons the community can examine.
Rabbi Dennis Sasso makes a related argument through the image of the Reconstructionist “big tent”. A tent can widen only if its stakes are driven deeper. Inclusion therefore does not mean the disappearance of identity, peoplehood and community, credible theology, ethical values, culture and tradition, intellect and spirit, Hebrew, the many languages and literatures of the Jewish people, mores and sancta, Zion and diaspora, memory or hope.18 Nor does “tradition has a vote but not a veto” mean that anything goes. Post-halachic Judaism is not antinomianism; creative ritual work remains answerable to the collective experiences and practices that have bound Jews through time and space. Sasso’s contrast between “customized religion” and “unifying custom” names the same problem this thesis addresses: reconstruction must enlarge the tent without cutting the ropes that make it a tent. A God-optional Spiritual Humanistic Judaism therefore needs a wide entrance and deep stakes — room for different metaphysical interpretations, but shared Jewish forms, standards, practices and obligations.
This authority is dialogical but not merely literary. Torah becomes religious when it enters the calendar, the table, the curriculum and the conduct of a community. Study which ends in appreciation has not exhausted it. The question asked of a text is what practice, warning, argument or obligation follows, and whether that consequence survives the tests of emet, tsedek and raḥamim.
Mitzvot as religious folkways
Kaplan’s category of folkway makes practice possible after divine command.16 A mitzvah is an inherited Jewish pattern for ordering an action, a relationship or a time. Its claim does not depend upon the proposition that God issued it. It arises from what the practice has carried, the community which receives it, the values it embodies and the person one becomes by repeating it.
Calling mitzvot folkways must not make them decorative customs. The entry into a liberal Jewish community is voluntary; the obligations accepted within it need not therefore be renegotiated according to convenience at every occurrence. Shabbat which binds only when nothing else is scheduled does not order time. Shmirat ha-lashon which applies only when restraint is easy does not train speech. A covenantal folkway is revisable at the communal level and dependable at the practical level: one may participate in changing the rule, but while it stands one permits it to make a claim.
Nor are folkways retained solely because they produce pleasant results. Some preserve memory; some create Jewish distinctiveness; some train a middah; some impose a boundary which reveals what ordinary life conceals. Kashrut, on the account developed below, makes visible the animal, worker and ecological system within a meal. Shabbat interrupts the equation of human worth with productivity. Mourning practice makes accompaniment a duty rather than a spontaneous offer. A religious folkway earns its place when its boundary discloses something, its performance forms something and its consequences can be defended.
Reconstructionism’s own democratic alternative to a divinely authorised halachah is Values-Based Decision Making, set out by David Teutsch and embodied in A Guide to Jewish Practice: a process by which individuals and communities identify the values at stake in a question, weigh them against one another and arrive at a defensible practice.13 It is indispensable but insufficient. Values-Based Decision Making asks what a community ought to decide when a question arises; mitzvot as folkways ask what kind of community recurrent practice is making. The first is deliberative, the second formative. Decision without habituation produces policies nobody embodies. Habituation without deliberation produces inherited practices nobody is permitted to question. A reconstructed Judaism requires both.
Religious folkways as spiritual formation
The category folkway can sound sociological, as though mitzvot merely preserve group identity. Its religious force lies in formation. Spiritual Humanistic Judaism treats the rituals of Jewish life as disciplines through which perception, emotion, character and communal morality are cultivated. They do not point beyond the world to a supernatural source of holiness. They organise attention within the world so that what is sustaining, vulnerable, beautiful, unjust or morally demanding becomes harder to overlook.
The question asked of every ritual is therefore double: what dimension of life does this practice disclose, and what quality does its repetition train? Shabbat discloses that human value exceeds production and trains rest, joy, sufficiency and presence. A berachah discloses dependence and trains gratitude. Kashrut discloses the bodies, labour and ecosystems concealed within food and trains restraint and responsibility. Torah study discloses membership in an inherited argument and trains humility, truthfulness and morally serious disagreement. Mourning practice discloses the social obligations created by loss and trains accompaniment. The festivals disclose recurring dimensions of Jewish memory — liberation, vulnerability, renewal, grief and joy — and return a changed person to them each year.
The yetzer ha-tov names the capacity these practices strengthen. It is not a metaphysical substance competing with an evil substance inside the person. Nor is it a permanently higher self whose authority licenses contempt for appetite or anger. It is the cultivated availability of life-enhancing action: the increased possibility of choosing truth over convenience, compassion over self-protection, justice over advantage and repair over denial. Ritual serves the yetzer ha-tov when it makes those choices more imaginable, affectively compelling and habitual.
Ritual does not form character automatically. The claim of this section is conditional, and stated absolutely it would be false. A rite can train what nobody intended: deference to whoever leads it, contempt for those who perform it wrongly, the private satisfaction of belonging to those who know the melody, or the anaesthetic comfort of repetition without attention. Ritual has been used to rank people, to exclude them and to make cruelty feel orderly. The accurate formulation is therefore that every Jewish ritual can be reconstructed and practised as a discipline of spiritual formation, and none is guaranteed to be one: its spiritual value depends on what it discloses, what it trains and what it produces. This is why the double question above is asked of each practice, why the curriculum in Chapter 9 attaches a named quality, a drill and a written account to each discipline, and why the weekday test exists at all. A practice which discloses nothing, trains nothing and changes nothing beyond the room has not failed for want of belief among those performing it; it has failed on the only criterion this thesis offers.
Formation must be judged communally as well as individually. A person may experience awe during worship while participating in an institution organised by humiliation, secrecy or unequal power. A congregation may observe Shabbat beautifully and treat workers unjustly. Spiritual experience cannot certify the morality of the community that produces it. The ethical constitution set out in Chapter 7 therefore asks what the folkways make visible in the distribution of dignity, labour, voice, care and responsibility. The weekday test applies to institutions too.
Ahavat Yisra’el: peoplehood as obligation
Kaplan’s civilisation has a subject: the Jewish people. Without that subject, reconstruction becomes the activity of unaffiliated individuals arranging Jewish materials for personal use. Ahavat Yisra’el names the affective and ethical bond which makes the civilisation more than a repertoire.
It is not agreement with all Jews, obedience to Jewish institutions or immunity for conduct undertaken in the name of the Jewish people. Love without moral criticism becomes indulgence, and peoplehood treated as an end in itself can sanctify collective self-preservation. Boettiger is right that community becomes religious only when it carries its members beyond self-absorption. Ahavat Yisra’el therefore means responsibility for Jewish persons, memories, languages, communities and futures, joined to the obligation to oppose cruelty, chauvinism and injustice within Jewish life as firmly as outside it.
The reconstructed Torah blessing states the relation exactly: ki anu baḥarnu et am Yisra’el — for we have chosen the people of Israel. Election becomes commitment rather than rank. The choosing is renewed by Jews by birth and Jews by choice; it creates no claim of human superiority and no exemption from universal obligation. Particular love supplies a place from which responsibility begins, not a border at which it ends. Gemilut ḥasadim is owed first to the person whose need is in front of us and cannot stop there.
That completes the account of what a Spiritual Humanistic Jew receives: a name, an inherited argument, practices which form character, and a people to whom the whole is answerable. It does not yet say who decides what any of it requires, or what limits the decision. That is the work of the next chapter.