Harold Schulweis’ Predicate Theology
From a divine Subject to the holiness of the predicates
Rabbi Harold Schulweis (1925–2014) supplies the decisive bridge in Spiritual Humanistic Judaism’s thinking: a way of relocating religious significance away from a supernatural Subject without abandoning the seriousness, the language, or the discipline of Jewish spiritual life.
From God to Godliness
It is not the attributes of a divine Ego, but the divinity of the attributes themselves, which demands our allegiance.
This is predicate theology in a single sentence. Rather than asking whether a divine Subject exists, possesses these qualities, and therefore deserves worship, Schulweis asks us to attend directly to the qualities themselves — justice, compassion, truth, healing — and to treat them, wherever they appear, as sacred. “Religion is behaved, not believed.” What matters is not the metaphysical status of a hidden Actor but the reality and cultivation of goodness, wherever and however it is enacted.
Where Schulweis Stops — and Where We Go Further
Schulweis relocates divinity from the Subject to the predicates, but he stops one word short: godly still carries the noun inside it. Spiritual Humanistic Judaism takes Schulweis’s insight to its conclusion. Where Schulweis says godly, we say holy.
God, in ordinary use, evokes a personal or intentional agent, whatever the theologian privately stipulates it to mean. Kadosh — holy — carries no such implication: it means set apart, marked off, treated differently from the ordinary. This distinction lets us keep faith with Schulweis’s insight while retiring a word that, in plain English, keeps smuggling an agent back in.
Consecration and Holiness Are Not the Same Thing
Sacredness as consecration is descriptive: it simply names what a community has set apart. Holiness as an ethical value is evaluative: it names a consecration which survives examination — one answerable to human dignity, justice, truth and consequence. Consecration proposes; the constitution disposes. A ritual, a text, or a tradition can be consecrated by a community and still fail the test of holiness, if it cannot be defended before those it affects.
A Theology With Nothing to Defend
A theology holding God to be both good and in control is under permanent pressure to reconcile suffering with goodness — producing sentences like “everything happens for a reason.” Predicate holiness declines that trade. With no Subject to acquit, there is nothing to explain, which permits the true thing to be said and the room not to be left. Meaning can be found within suffering by the sufferer; purpose must never be assigned to it from outside.
Where a supernatural system answers suffering with an explanation, Spiritual Humanistic Judaism — following Schulweis — answers it with a room: the tradition’s structural answer to grief is that Kaddish cannot traditionally be said alone.
Schulweis’s predicate theology, carried through to its conclusion, gives us a religious language that asks nothing to be believed and everything to be behaved — see how this plays out across Kaplan’s civilisational framework on the Mordecai Kaplan page.