← Towards a Spiritual Humanistic Judaism · Part I — The claim and its theological location
This chapter is written in the first person. The remainder of the thesis is not.
The primary evidence in what follows is my own: a siddur, two workbooks, a congregation’s use of them, and the life which made those texts necessary. That requires a statement of method, because a theologian examining his own liturgy is in an obviously compromised position and the reader is entitled to know how far to trust the results.
The vantage is a liturgist’s. A liturgy is a theology that has to be said aloud, at speed, by people who are also serving food, with no footnote available. That is a more demanding test than a seminar, and it is a different one. Ideas that survive scrutiny do not always survive a kitchen table, and some of the findings reported here were arrived at by watching a formulation fail in a room.
How I arrived. I came to Liberal Judaism as a teenager, on my own. I went to shul because I had heard that the movement was open-minded, and what I found confirmed it: a woman on the bimah, a community already discussing equal marriage, and a movement that accepted patrilineal Jews without argument. Religion was already a large part of my life. I was not leaving religion but looking for a form of it that did not require me to leave parts of myself at the door.
By the time I was an adult and in a same-sex relationship, I was at shul regularly with my partner and keeping Shabbat at home. For a period I experimented with strict observance of Shabbat and kashrut, and kept it more strictly than most Liberal Jews I knew — probably than all of them. What I did not love was the amount of English in the service. Aesthetically I was drawn to Orthodoxy for exactly that reason, and I often went to the Orthodox shul with my Moroccan friend and namesake. I had a warm and respectful relationship with its rabbi, Leonard Tann z”l, and learned only later that he had been the ordaining rabbi of Mark Solomon, one of the most influential gay rabbis in Progressive Judaism.
Among friends I have sometimes called myself a Frumanist — a frum humanist. It began as a joke and I have kept it because the joke carries the argument. Frum ordinarily implies halacha, divine command and a God who minds. To claim it while holding no belief in God is meant to sound like a contradiction. My contention is that the contradiction lives in the assumption rather than in me. I am not frum, and I would not claim the word in front of someone for whom it carries the full Orthodox meaning. What I do claim is the relative point the joke is making: my Judaism is observant in ways for which the vocabulary available to Humanistic Judaism has often had no name.
There was no Humanistic Jewish community available to me in Britain when I was beginning to work this out. In my early twenties I read Sherwin Wine’s Judaism Beyond God, had already read Kaplan’s Judaism as a Civilization, and managed to get hold of a copy of Kol HaNeshamah, the Reconstructionist siddur. Almost nobody I knew in Britain had heard of any of them. I did what I could. I adapted my own observance of Shabbat, the High Holidays and Hanukkah, setting English blessings alongside the traditional Hebrew. The effect was immediate and practical: my home practice became something my mixed family could actually take part in.
The kippah, the bus and the failure of the binary. The problem with the religious/secular distinction became clearest to me through the kippah, because the kippah is visible while most of the practices which give it meaning are not.
On one Friday night I went to an LGBT nightclub in Tel Aviv that played Middle-Eastern music. We had brought in Shabbat at the home of an Algerian Jewish family in Ashdod, and had worn kippot throughout the meal and the socialising afterwards. The heads of the household refrained from switching the lights on and off in communal areas, while younger members of the family had no problem switching the bathroom lights. Everybody drove to the meal and subsequently drove home. I took my kippah off before getting into the car and we listened to music on the radio. In the club I saw several men wearing kippot and dancing, alone or with other men. It did not seem strange or out of place. The kippah was functioning as a marker of Jewish identity rather than as a complete statement of observance. Paying to enter a nightclub and buying drinks on a Friday night would, in another vocabulary, have been the antithesis of being religious. In that room the contradiction was not experienced as a contradiction.
This contrasted sharply with a more recent experience on public transport in London. My partner was wearing a kippah after attending a Friday-night service. We were sitting on the bus when a young man opposite us looked intensely at him and eventually said, “You’re wearing kippah on the bus and it’s Friday night?” My partner answered without hesitation, “I’m Reform.” I pointed out that the young man was using his phone on Friday night. He giggled, said, “Oh yes, and I’m on the bus,” and put the phone in his pocket as if to signify that he now recognised it was Shabbat.
The exchange was funny, but it was also a small encounter between two different ways of deciding what counts as religious. The young man treated the kippah as evidence of a complete system and the phone as evidence that the system had been abandoned. My partner gave him a denominational answer because that was the answer most likely to make sense in the room. What neither of those answers could express was the more ordinary truth: a visible Jewish practice can be meaningful without being a declaration that every associated prohibition is being observed.
I was similarly asked why I was wearing a kippah when I entered a synagogue in Toronto that hosted Oraynu Humanistic Jewish Congregation. I answered, “Because I’m in a synagogue.” The response was, “Yes, but you know you don’t need to wear it, right?” I said that I believed I should wear a kippah out of respect for the place and the people who owned the building. That seemed satisfactory to my interlocutor, but the question has stayed with me. The kippah was being treated as a theological claim which Humanistic Jews ought to remove. For me it was a form of respect, belonging and ritual decorum. It did not require a supernatural explanation.
These experiences do not prove that all Sephardi or Mizrahi Jewish practice works in the same way, and I do not present them as ethnographic evidence of a single cultural essence. They do show that the categories through which Ashkenazi denominational Judaism often reads Jewish practice are not universal. A person can wear a kippah, keep some aspects of Shabbat, drive, listen to music, observe kashrut selectively and still experience the whole as recognisably Jewish. The question of whether the practice is “really religious” is imposed from outside. It is not necessarily the question the practitioner is asking.
Why secular does not describe me. Later, studying with the IISHJ for four years and spending time in Humanistic communities in North America, I found something I had not expected. Humanistic Jewish life was organised around culture and services, but not, in the communities I encountered, around spirituality or religion. The culture in question was also almost exclusively Ashkenazi. I had already spent years inside an Ashkenazi-dominated Liberal Judaism, and I found myself again slightly outside the room in which I was standing.
The clearest lesson came from being in a Humanistic community over Shabbat on more than three occasions. Had it not been for the Friday evening service, I would not have known it was Shabbat at all. The learning programme continued through Saturday without reference to the day. We went out and bought food from the local supermarket on Shabbat morning, exactly as we did on any other day. Shabbat ended without anyone marking that it had. Nothing improper happened; that is rather the point. A whole day passed and its only trace was an hour on Friday evening.
I do not raise this to score against people who were generous to me. I raise it because that was the moment I stopped wondering whether “secular” described me. For me, Shabbat is not an event in the diary. It is a shape the week takes, and I could not treat a day I hold apart as though it were Tuesday.
There were smaller signals in the same direction. Children at a synagogue school did not know about drawing the hands over the Shabbat candles. When I asked why, I was told that the practice was not used because of its association with the Shechinah. I encountered the same reflex in Humanistic material which argued that the kippah was inappropriate. I had awkward exchanges about not eating pork, and was criticised for it. None of these incidents is a scandal. Together they describe a movement which had decided in advance which traditional practices were permitted to mean something, and my Judaism kept falling outside the line.
Meanwhile I went on doing things traditionally. I wear a kippah. I light candles at the halachic time — I have kept a Shabbat alarm for years. I do not mix milk and meat, or eat pork or shellfish. I fast on Yom Kippur. I want to be inside a synagogue’s learning programme as well as its services. These practices are not evidence that I have secretly returned to Orthodoxy. They are the actual shape of the Judaism I have reconstructed, and they are part of the evidence for calling it religious.
I did not leave religion for humanism. I went looking for a religious Judaism I could keep with a whole heart, and when I could not find one I set about writing it.
From practice to construction. What finally broke was the High Holidays. I could not sit through the whole of those services honestly. I could not say the words and mean them, and I was no longer willing to keep saying them anyway. In 2020 I began seriously compiling my own Shabbat siddur: in Hebrew, and deliberately matched over a substantial proportion of its length to the cadence and rhythm of a traditional Progressive service. The pandemic gave me the time to take it seriously. It took six years, with Rabbi Tzemah Yoreh’s help on the Hebrew and Dr Joshua Bamford-Silberstein’s in trying the liturgy out live.
The result was Tefilotenu. It was not a decision to abandon Jewish form. It was an attempt to make Jewish form say what I could actually mean. The siddur retains Hebrew, the order of the service, the melodies, the calendar and the communal shape. It changes the theological subject and makes the direction of tefilla horizontal: we pray with one another rather than being prayed for. The question is not whether a naturalistic Judaism can retain ritual but whether it can retain ritual honestly and give it enough weight to shape a life.
Seliḥot at the Kotel remains among the most spiritual experiences of my life.
Thousands of people in synchronised teshuvá carry ancient and haunting melodies in their bodies, on behalf of a people and, at its widest, the world. It moves me to tears. Its language is thoroughly theistic and I could not print most of it as my community’s own speech. Neither fact cancels the other. What moves me there is not a proposition becoming credible but a community carrying something I do not have to manufacture privately, something carried for generations before I arrived.
The distinction I work with is between being moved by language and speaking as a community. At the Kotel I participate honestly in someone else’s speech. That is a different act from printing that speech as ours. The task is not to choose between inheritance and honesty but to bring them into a working relationship. That is the work of Tefilotenu, and of the Spiritual Humanistic Judaism proposed in this thesis.
The evidence and its limits. The liturgy has been used in a small online international congregation and led three times at Limmud UK, each occasion more heavily attended than the last; in 2024 it was the only non-Orthodox denominational service on the programme, and in 2025 forty-five people attended. Several participants reported afterwards that they had found something which felt traditional, carried melodies they knew, matched their moral sensibilities, and whose words they could say and mean. What they named most often was its horizontal quality. One participant observed that because the room had introduced itself, the horizontal spirituality was not an idea but something she could feel.
These are small numbers, self-selected and reported to the person who wrote the text. They establish that the liturgy is usable and that its distinctive feature is noticed. They establish nothing about durability, transmission to a second generation or performance in communities that did not choose it. I am the author of the primary texts and cannot examine them disinterestedly. The account of Humanistic Jewish practice in this chapter generalises from communities I encountered rather than from a survey. The reconstructive proposals here are offered as arguments, not findings: they can be assessed for coherence and for fidelity to the sources they claim, but whether they work in the long term would require a longer study than this one.
The personal account is therefore not offered as proof that my Judaism is valid because it is mine. It explains the standpoint from which the argument is made. I began with inherited practice, encountered categories which could not describe it, found that the available Humanistic vocabulary did not fully name what I was doing, and then tried to construct a form of Judaism in which practice, language and conviction could stand together. The theory came afterwards, but it did not replace the life. It gave the life an account of itself.