← Towards a Spiritual Humanistic Judaism · Part II — Sources, civilisation and reconstruction
Bricolage and the limits of invention
Glanzberg-Krainin describes the work of each generation through Lévi-Strauss’s bricoleur, who builds with materials already at hand. The metaphor supplies the mechanism hidden inside the phrase evolving civilisation: Jewish evolution is not an impersonal process which happens to Jews, but the recombination by Jews of inherited words, gestures, melodies, objects and institutions under new conditions. The materials are not blank. They arrive marked by prior use and therefore limit their own plausible reconstruction. A mikveh can be revalued for healing after trauma because its inherited meanings include embodiment, transition and changed status; the resurrection blessing can be reconstructed around raising those who feel deadened because its verbs already concern supporting, healing, freeing and enlivening. The past votes from inside the material.
Bricolage nevertheless requires tests, because novelty may be clever and still be thin, incoherent or unjust. Six are proposed below, and the process which follows is the order in which a kehillá applies them.
The Spiritual Humanistic Jewish process
The principle of creative fidelity becomes meaningful only when it becomes a method. The most sincere and valuable Jewish decisions are made by the kehillá that will actually live by them. Spiritual Humanistic Judaism therefore does not need to impose one uniform position on every individual Jewish practice. Jews may relate to Shabbat, kashrut, tefilla, festivals and other traditions in different ways. What can be shared is an outlook and a process for making Jewish decisions with integrity.
The process begins with the inherited practice rather than with a conclusion already reached. We ask what our ancestors were trying to protect, cultivate or express; what understanding of human nature lies behind the practice; what it teaches the body to notice; and what kind of person or community it makes more possible. We ask which middah it trains. We ask whether it deepens justice, compassion, courage, gratitude, responsibility or self-discipline, and whether its consequences can be defended before those who are affected by it.
This is not a search through Jewish sources for a quotation which will justify whatever we have already decided. Nor is it a matter of pretending that ancient practices secretly mean exactly what we want them to mean. Reconstruction requires honesty about the sources, honesty about our own lives and honesty about the consequences of the choices we make. A practice cannot be defended only by the beauty of its intention if its actual effects are exclusion, humiliation or harm.
The process has no single mechanical formula, but it has a recognisable shape, and the six tests of creative fidelity are its criteria. A reconstruction should be genealogically intelligible, so that its relation to the inherited form can be explained and the sources are studied rather than raided; semantically honest, so that its public words say what its community means; ethically defensible, including and especially to those most affected by it; communally authorised, rather than resting on the taste of its creator; practically formative, producing habits beyond the ritual moment; and transmissible, capable of being received and reconstructed again by people not yet present. Applied in sequence, these ask what the sources say, what values and assumptions the practice carries, what contemporary knowledge has changed, what those who will live with it report, what habits its repetition forms, and whether the decision can be brought into the life of the kehillá and passed on. The question is not only whether a practice can be defended intellectually. It is whether it can be lived meaningfully, repeatedly and communally. These tests distinguish creative fidelity from religious consumerism.
Kashrut as a case study
Consider the Jewish laws of food. A study of the Torah and later Jewish interpretation may draw our attention to blood, animal life, boundaries, restraint and the transformation of eating into a conscious act. The Torah’s prohibitions concerning blood reflect an ancient recognition that blood represents life. The separation of meat and milk may be interpreted through associations with nourishment, birth, death and the responsibilities involved in taking animal life.
Different people may draw different conclusions from this study. One person may choose ethical vegetarianism or veganism. Another may follow traditional kashrut. Someone else may develop a contemporary form of kashrut concerned with animal welfare, workers’ rights, environmental sustainability and the conditions under which food is produced. Another person may practise a more limited form of kashrut while finding other ways to mark the holiness of eating.
These choices are not equally meaningful merely because they are personal. Each must be examined through its sources, its intentions and its consequences.
The point is not to reduce kashrut to one abstract idea. Jewish food practice can cultivate restraint, gratitude, mindfulness, communal belonging and reverence for life. It can remind us that eating is not an ethically neutral act. It can turn an ordinary necessity into a repeated spiritual encounter with dependence, vulnerability and responsibility.
The question is therefore not simply, “What did the ancient rule say?” It is also: what kind of relationship with food, life and responsibility is this practice asking us to create; what does it train us to see; what does it make easier to ignore; and what kind of person does it form through repetition? Kashrut is a useful example because it shows how a Jewish practice can retain its inherited seriousness while its contemporary form is argued through ethical reasoning, communal responsibility and the conditions of actual life.
The kehillá as the site of decision
Jewish decisions are strengthened when they are made in community. The Spiritual Humanistic Jewish process is best carried out within a kehillá, a ḥavurah, a congregation or any group of Jews committed to living a purposeful Jewish life. Communal decision-making does not mean that every individual must practise Judaism identically. It means that individual choices are tested through conversation with others and that communal choices become part of a shared way of life.
A kehillá may need to decide how its kitchen will operate, whether its communal events will be vegetarian, what standards of animal welfare it will follow, how it will mark Shabbat, or which forms of tefilla and blessing it will use. These decisions should involve study, reflection and consultation rather than being imposed casually or inherited uncritically. The community listens to inherited sources, contemporary knowledge and the lived experience of its members. It considers who is included, who may be excluded and what kind of spiritual culture the decision will create.
A pluralist kehillá is not a collection of entirely private religions. It is a community in which people may interpret the meaning of a practice differently while sharing forms, standards and responsibilities. The tent can be wide without becoming shapeless. A practice freely adopted by a community is not therefore unreal as an obligation. Once a kehillá has undertaken a norm, it may revise that norm through a public process, but its members cannot simply treat communal responsibility as optional whenever observance becomes inconvenient. Voluntary entry and meaningful obligation are not opposites.
This is why a Jewish practice is not only a rule. It is a discipline. It forms habits, shapes attention and teaches the body as well as the mind. Decision without habituation produces policies nobody embodies. Habituation without deliberation produces inherited practices nobody is permitted to question. A reconstructed Judaism requires both.
Tradition and change
A Jewish community may preserve a traditional practice because it continues to express a value that remains spiritually powerful. It may reinterpret the practice. It may develop a new form. It may decide that a particular ancient value no longer deserves to govern Jewish life.
For example, many contemporary Jewish communities have concluded that excluding women from a minyan has no enduring spiritual or ethical value. The decision to include women does not represent indifference to tradition. It represents a judgement that the deeper purposes of communal prayer — participation, responsibility, learning and shared spiritual life — are better served through inclusion.
The same process can be applied to questions of gender, sexuality, disability, ecology, economic justice, animal welfare and the relationship between Jewish life and the wider world. Tradition gives us language, memory, practices and accumulated wisdom. It does not relieve us of the responsibility to think. Nor does change require us to abandon continuity. Continuity may be preserved through argument, reinterpretation and transformation as well as through repetition.
This process does not begin by requiring everyone to settle the question of God. A person may understand God through Kaplan, Schulweis, Spinoza, Maimonides or another Jewish framework. A person may speak instead of holiness, the sacredness of life, the yetzer ha-tov, conscience or the light within humanity. Another person may dispense with the term God entirely. These differences need not prevent shared practice. The theological layer may change the value a person finds in a practice, but it need not change the practice itself, its ethical demands, its spiritual formation or its communal Jewish meaning.
The most meaningful Jewish practices are not museum pieces. They are ways of inhabiting Jewish time, Jewish memory and Jewish responsibility in the present. They connect us to those who came before us while leaving room for those who will come after us to continue the work. Judaism is not preserved by refusing to change. It is preserved when its deepest values are given truthful, embodied and spiritually alive expression in every generation.
Democratic covenant and accountable authority
Waxman’s covenantal community gives institutional form to this responsibility.7 Liberal Jews no longer inhabit a world in which rabbinic authorities can compel conformity, but the collapse of coercive authority need not leave only private preference. A community may voluntarily articulate its values, translate them into norms, adopt practices, establish means of accountability and provide routes for teshuvá and repair.
The authority is horizontal without being weightless. The past speaks through texts, precedent and inherited communities. Present members deliberate and consent. Individual conscience retains protection against coercion and abuse. People affected by a decision, including those at the community’s margins, have a claim to be heard. Consequences supply evidence which no declaration of good intention may overrule. Future generations and the more-than-human world cannot speak in the room and must therefore be represented deliberately. No one of these voices possesses a veto; none may be reduced to a ceremonial consultation.
This model also qualifies the language of submission to norms. A liberal Jew does not submit to an infallible text, supernatural commander or unaccountable leadership. The person accepts obligations through participation in a covenant whose processes are public and whose norms remain revisable. A majority cannot vote cruelty, humiliation or falsehood into holiness. Democracy authorises decisions; it does not create moral truth.
Voluntary entry does not make obligation unreal. A folkway which is freely undertaken and communally revisable invites the objection that it is a strong preference wearing the clothes of a duty. The objection mistakes the source of an obligation for its force. Freedom to enter or leave a covenant does not render optional, from moment to moment, what has been undertaken inside it. Once accepted, obligations generate expectations in others, reliance upon which others order their own conduct, and accountability to which a person may properly be held; they are not suspended because observance has become inconvenient, unappealing or costly. This is the ordinary structure of every serious voluntary bond — a marriage, a partnership, a professional undertaking — and the absence of a divine commander alters none of it. What revisability governs is the content of the norms, and it does so publicly and over time; it does not license private exemption in the particular case. A community unable to distinguish between amending a practice and simply not doing it this week has no folkways, only habits.
What authorises the ethical constitution. The claim that a majority cannot vote cruelty into holiness raises at once the question of what gives tsedek, raḥamim and human dignity standing over both tradition and community. A supernaturalist answers with divine command. That answer is unavailable here, and its unavailability must be met rather than passed over.
The answer offered is provisional and non-foundational, and it draws on four sources rather than one. Ethical claims are answerable, first, to human experience — the observable and repeatable facts of what humiliation, deprivation, cruelty and exclusion do to people, and what dignity, care and inclusion do. Second, to consequences: a norm is assessed by what it produces over time in the lives it governs, which is Kaplan’s own pragmatic criterion applied to conduct rather than to belief. Third, to the testimony of those affected, who hold an authority about their own treatment which no majority can override and no tradition retire; this is the working content of the claim that moral standing is equal. Fourth, to the continuing Jewish argument itself, a literature which has been contesting what enhances and what diminishes life for three thousand years and which supplies the vocabulary in which the commitments below are written.
None of the four is self-certifying, and together they do not constitute a proof. They constitute a standing of a different kind. The constitution is not merely communal preference, because a community can be shown to be wrong by its own members’ experience, by the results its practices produce, by the people it has harmed and by its own inherited texts. Nor is it revelation, because each of the four can be examined, contested and revised. It occupies the position Kaplan assigned to religion generally — answerable to experience rather than exempt from it — and is offered as the best available construction rather than as a settled foundation. Chapter 13 treats the difficulty that remains.
The ethical constitution implied by this thesis can therefore be stated provisionally in ten commitments. It presumes the equal dignity and full participation of people across sexuality, gender, disability, ethnicity and route into Jewish life; no inherited norm acquires authority merely by being old, and no majority acquires authority to humiliate a minority.
1. Emet: public teaching and liturgy must say what the community means; correction is a religious duty.
2. Tsedek: institutions and distributions, not only individual intentions, are subject to moral scrutiny.
3. Ḥesed and gemilut ḥasadim: lovingkindness must take material form in acts of care.
4. Raḥamim: vulnerability and suffering call first for accompaniment, not explanation or judgement.
5. Anavah: persons and communities take their rightful space, neither dominating nor disappearing from responsibility.
6. Hakarat ha-tov and simḥah: goodness and joy are noticed, named, shared and protected without denying pain.
7. Shmirat ha-lashon: speech is governed by truth, necessity, dignity and awareness of consequence.
8. Bal tashḥit: waste, ecological destruction and avoidable harm to other beings violate the interdependence on which life rests.
9. Ahavat Yisra’el: Jewish peoplehood creates duties of solidarity, continuity, inclusion and morally serious criticism.
10. Teshuvá: norms are revisable, harms are acknowledged, repair is expected and no institution is beyond correction.
These are not ten beliefs required for admission but ten standards by which practices and institutions are judged, and they must be distinguished from the curriculum of Chapter 9, which shares much of their vocabulary and does different work: the constitution judges institutions, policies and decisions, the curriculum forms persons. Hence the two lists differ. Ahavat Yisra’el and teshuvá govern a community’s conduct toward its members and cannot be reduced to individual drills, while yirah, dan l’chaf zechut, tikvah, menuḥah and niḥum aveilim are trained in a person before they can be required of an institution. Nor do the commitments eliminate conflict: emet may strain ḥesed, Ahavat Yisra’el may conflict with resistance to tribalism, and accountability must be held together with raḥamim. Their function is to make disagreement exact and to prevent spirituality from becoming immune to ethical review.
The foundation and the method are now both in place. Torah supplies the inherited argument; the Jewish people supplies the historical subject; folkways give obligation recurrent form; the process submits a practice to study, testimony and consequence; covenantal community authorises and reviews norms; and the ethical constitution limits what tradition or majority may sanctify. Chapters 8 to 11 now ask how interior formation, liturgy and pastoral practice can inhabit that structure without restoring the supernatural sovereign it has relinquished; Chapter 12 places the resulting programme in the hands of the rabbi and the kehillá.