A response to The Religious Humanism of Mordecai Kaplan: An Anthology, edited by Mel Scult. About the book →

This response is Martin H. Di Maggio’s rabbinic thesis. The full text, Towards a Spiritual Humanistic Judaism, can be read chapter by chapter.

Why Spiritual Humanistic Judaism?

For me, religion and spirituality are not opposing categories, nor are they two independent dimensions which may simply be added together. They are two aspects of the same lived orientation. Religion names its coherent system of meanings, beliefs, values, inherited narratives and interpretations of human life. Spirituality names that religion as it is practised, experienced and felt: through ritual, music, awe, grief, joy, wonder, connection, reverence, belonging and moral aspiration.

Religion in this sense is not reducible to belief in supernatural propositions. A religious system also makes claims about what human beings are, what makes life meaningful, what we owe to one another, what deserves our deepest attention and how individuals belong within communities, histories and inherited traditions. Spiritual Humanistic Judaism has such a system. It understands human beings as natural, relational and capable of moral development; salvation as sheleymut in the person and shalom in society; Judaism as the evolving religious civilisation of the Jewish people; Torah as an authoritative but non-infallible inheritance; mitzvot as religious folkways; and holiness as a quality enacted in relationships, practices, times and things.

Spirituality is the lived, practised and emotional expression of that religious understanding. The religious idea that Shabbat is sacred becomes spiritual when candles are lit, ordinary activity is interrupted, familiar melodies are sung, food is shared and attention is redirected towards rest, relationship and joy. The religious conviction that human beings bear responsibility for one another becomes spiritual through tsedaká, accompaniment, communal confession, acts of repair and the experience of not carrying the work alone. The beliefs and the practices are not detachable. Practice gives religious ideas embodied and emotional reality; religious interpretation gives practice coherence, direction and continuity.

The word spiritual in Spiritual Humanistic Judaism therefore does not identify an alternative to religion. It identifies the dimension of religion this project particularly seeks to recover: religion as lived experience, disciplined attention, emotional depth, intentional connection and the cultivation of character. This is precisely the dimension of Kaplan that Scult’s anthology brings into clearer view. Kaplan’s piety, wonder, hope, reverence and aspiration are not private additions to his civilisational Judaism. They are how that civilisation becomes inwardly and relationally alive.

Nor does spirituality replace ethics. Humanistic morality does not require a person to experience awe or describe anything as sacred. Suffering, dignity and justice make claims upon us whether or not they evoke a recognisably spiritual emotion. Spiritual Humanistic Judaism makes a different claim: that Jewish religion can cultivate moral capacities while also giving communal and ritual form to wonder, love, gratitude, mortality, vulnerability, grief and joy. Ethics remains independently binding, while spirituality enables those ethical and existential concerns to be inhabited through Jewish practice.

The absence of religious from the name is therefore not a denial that this Judaism is religious. It is religious because it offers an account of life and value, receives an inherited civilisation, sets apart times and practices, accepts communal obligations, trains character and addresses questions of mortality, suffering, belonging and purpose. It may equally and accurately be described as a religious humanism.

The naming distinction serves another purpose. Religious humanism names the Kaplanian programme recovered by Scult and examined in this thesis. Spiritual Humanistic Judaism names the constructive development offered in response. The word spiritual foregrounds what this response seeks to make practicable: the affective and experiential life that Scult recovers in Kaplan, embodied through ritual, Mussar, liturgy, sacred time and kehillá.

Spiritual Humanistic Judaism is therefore not secular Judaism supplemented by optional spiritual experiences. Neither is it a movement defined by atheism or agnosticism. It is a Jewish religion whose beliefs are naturalistic, whose ethics are humanistic and whose spirituality is enacted through the inherited and reconstructed practices of Jewish civilisation. Religion is the system through which that life is understood; spirituality is the way that religious life is practised, encountered and felt.