← Towards a Spiritual Humanistic Judaism
This thesis proposes Spiritual Humanistic Judaism as an explicitly religious development of Mordecai Kaplan’s Reconstructionism and a constructive response to the religious humanism recovered in Mel Scult’s anthology and to Harold Schulweis’s predicate theology. It is not defined by nontheism or by a single account of God. Religion and spirituality are treated here as two aspects of one lived orientation: religion names its coherent system of meanings, beliefs and values, while spirituality names that religion as practised, experienced and felt. A Spiritual Humanistic Jew may understand God à la Kaplan, Schulweis, Spinoza or Rambam, or may dispense with the term entirely. What is shared is not metaphysical uniformity but the spiritual formation of persons and communities through Jewish practice, Jewish civilisation, Mussar and humanistic ethics. Kaplan provides the civilisational foundation: Judaism is the evolving religious civilisation of the Jewish people; Torah is authoritative without being infallible; mitzvot are religious folkways; and inherited forms are reconstructed through a process in which the past receives a vote but not a veto. Schulweis supplies a way of understanding how different theological accounts can locate value in the predicates — justice, compassion, truth and healing — rather than making one divine subject the condition of religious life. This thesis develops one naturalistic expression of that wider framework, dispensing with the terms God, godly and godliness in its own affirmative theology, liturgy and practice while retaining them as historical and analytical terms. It speaks instead of holiness enacted in persons, relationships, practices, times and things, and locates spirituality within awe, gratitude, grief, joy, wonder, moral aspiration, belonging, ethics and the cultivation of middot. It distinguishes throughout between consecration — the communal act of setting apart, which carries no moral guarantee — and holiness as an evaluative term reserved for consecrations answerable to dignity, justice, truth and consequence.
The argument is developed as a constructive response to Mel Scult’s The Religious Humanism of Mordecai Kaplan. Scult recovers the inward Kaplan of piety, wonder, hope and spiritual practice, but the anthology leaves open how those dispositions are formed and integrated with Kaplan’s public account of civilisation. This thesis identifies them as middot and proposes Mussar as their formative method. An ethical constitution supplies communal limits; a curriculum joins each quality to a discipline, a liturgical anchor and a weekday test.
The principal case study is Tefilotenu, a Shabbat siddur written for a community whose public language is naturalistic and humanistic. It redirects inherited second-person address from a supernatural hearer towards the gathered community, the Jewish people, teachers, ancestors and human responsibility. The siddur functions as communal Mussar: it does not merely describe holy qualities but repeatedly rehearses them through Hebrew, melody, choreography, sacred time and shared obligation. It is “the siddur without footnotes” in action: no explanatory apparatus is required to make its public words mean something other than what they say. The naturalistic liturgy developed here is therefore one expression of Spiritual Humanistic Judaism, not its theological boundary. It is metaphysically naturalist, ethically humanistic, spiritually serious and religiously Jewish. The thesis also sets out the decision-making process by which inherited practices can be studied, evaluated, reconstructed and adopted by a contemporary kehillá.
Keywords: Mordecai Kaplan; Harold Schulweis; Mel Scult; Reconstructionism; religious humanism; Humanistic Judaism; predicate theology; Mussar; middot; Jewish liturgy; Tefilotenu.