Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine (1928–2007) founded Humanistic Judaism. He built its first congregation: a community that celebrated Jewish life without praying to God. His founding achievement was honesty: a Jewish community should not solemnly say what it does not believe. Spiritual Humanistic Judaism takes that standard as its own. Where we part from him is over what should be built once the words that cannot honestly be said have been removed.

His life

Wine was born in Detroit on 25 January 1928 to Polish immigrant parents and grew up in a Conservative synagogue, Shaarey Zedek, in a home that kept kashrut and Shabbat. He studied philosophy at the University of Michigan, entered Hebrew Union College in 1951 and was ordained a Reform rabbi in 1956. After serving as a US Army chaplain in Korea, he returned to Temple Beth El in Detroit, and then helped found a new Reform congregation in Windsor, Ontario.

In 1963 he began leading services for eight families in the Detroit suburbs. That small group became the Birmingham Temple, the first congregation of Humanistic Judaism. It dropped the word God from its services. In 1965 Time magazine called him “the atheist rabbi”, and the Masonic hall where the congregation met asked it to leave. Wine himself preferred the word ignostic, which he coined: since the existence of God cannot be tested, he argued, the question has no meaning.

From that congregation grew a movement. The Society for Humanistic Judaism was formed in 1969. In 1985 Wine helped found the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism, whose rabbinic programme he began in 1992, and in 1986 the International Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews. He was active in the wider humanist movement and in the defence of religious liberty. The American Humanist Association named him Humanist of the Year in 2003, the year he retired from the Birmingham Temple. Wine was openly gay at a time when very few rabbis were.

He died on 21 July 2007, aged 79, in a car accident in Essaouira, Morocco, where he was travelling with his partner of more than twenty-five years, Richard McMains.

His ideas

Say what you believe, and believe what you say. Humanistic Judaism is often summed up this way. Large numbers of Jews were reciting, every week, statements about God they had abandoned years before. Wine insisted that liturgy should mean what it says, without an explanation printed underneath to tell the congregation what the words “really” mean. Spiritual Humanistic Judaism calls this the standard of the siddur without footnotes, and holds itself to it.

Judaism is the culture of the Jewish people. For Wine, Judaism was not a set of beliefs about God but the history, culture and fate of a people. A Jew was anyone who identified with that people. His posthumous book A Provocative People (2012) reads Jewish history in human terms, as a story of survival, adaptation and creativity rather than covenant and providence.

Human power and human responsibility. Wine taught that people must rely on their own strength and on one another, because no one else will repair the world for them. This is the message of his best-known song:

איפה אורי? אורי בי

Ayfo ori? Ori bi.
Where is my light? My light is in me.

Celebration without supernaturalism. Wine rewrote services for Shabbat, the festivals and the High Holy Days so that they celebrated human courage, dignity and the Jewish past. His Shabbat liturgy opens Na’é ha-or ba-olam, “How wonderful is the light of the world”: a blessing that names something precious without addressing anyone.

Spirituality as empowerment. Wine did not hand the word spirituality over to the supernaturalists. In a 2002 essay he described it as an experience of empowerment. It can come from outside us, from nature, family or a shared cause, or from within, from courage and self-reliance. Either can go wrong: the first into passive conformity, the second into self-importance. “A healthy secular spirituality is a balancing act,” he wrote. He wanted the word kept optional, and its ethical, aesthetic and courageous sides cultivated. Read “Spirituality as Empowerment” →

Hear him

Where Wine stops — and where we go further

Wine’s honesty came at a real cost. When the Birmingham Temple dedicated its building in 1971, the Torah scroll was placed in the library rather than in the sanctuary, and the sanctuary was decorated with a large sculpture of the Hebrew word Adam, “humanity”. It was an act of integrity. It was also a subtraction, and subtractions have to be accounted for.

Spiritual Humanistic Judaism keeps Wine’s standard without accepting his subtraction. We do not say what we do not believe. But we do not stop there. We reconstruct rather than delete. Hebrew prayer is kept, its direction turned towards the community, our ancestors and our responsibilities. Shabbat and the festivals are kept as holy time. Character is trained through the middot and Mussar. And we speak of holiness, which a community enacts, rather than of a God it cannot honestly address. Wine taught us what we may not say. Our task is to say, honestly and in Hebrew, what we can.

Books by Sherwin Wine

• Humanistic Judaism (1978)
• Judaism Beyond God (1985)
• Celebration: A Ceremonial and Philosophic Guide for Humanists and Humanistic Jews (1988)
• Staying Sane in a Crazy World (1995)
• A Provocative People: A Secular History of the Jews (2012, edited by Adam Chalom)

Read more about how Wine fits into our lineage, alongside Kaplan and Schulweis, in Chapter 4 of Towards a Spiritual Humanistic Judaism →