← Towards a Spiritual Humanistic Judaism · Part I — The claim and its theological location
Humanistic Judaism’s founding achievement is honesty. Sherwin Wine’s principle — say what you believe and believe what you say — put an end to a situation in which large numbers of Jews recited, weekly, propositions they had abandoned years earlier, and it did so at real institutional cost.2 Wine moved the Torah scroll and the ark from his temple’s dais to its library and replaced them with a sculpture dedicated to human achievement. That was an act of integrity. It was also a subtraction, and subtractions have to be accounted for.
The standing risk of a movement built on removal is thinness: that in taking away what cannot be said, it also takes away what it cannot replace, and is left with good ethics, good company, and nothing that holds a person at three in the morning when someone has died.
The charge is not only made from outside. Kenneth Shuster, writing from a position with no stake in Humanistic Judaism’s fortunes, argues that the liberal branches — Reform, Reconstructionist and Secular Humanistic alike — have failed to produce a Judaism that is actually lived. Their rituals are consulted on a need-by-need basis, at the High Holidays, at life-cycle events, at funerals, like a resource drawn on when an occasion demands it; they have not produced Jews for whom Judaism shapes the week. His remedy is that Judaism be kept religiously, by which he explicitly does not mean supernaturally: he means holistically, habitually, and with commitment.3
The question also arises from within Reconstructionism. Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer describes Kaplan’s project as an experiment in whether Torah, Israel and God can be naturalised — deprived of supernatural revelation and metaphysical election — while religious practice, Jewish identification, normative commitment and connection with holiness are intensified rather than diminished. That is the Kaplanian test governing this thesis.4 Naturalisation cannot be judged only by whether it produces credible ideas. It must be judged by whether those ideas can sustain a lived Jewish civilisation.
Scult’s recovery of Kaplan’s religious humanism
This thesis begins as a response to Mel Scult’s The Religious Humanism of Mordecai Kaplan: An Anthology. Edited after more than half a century of Scult’s work on Kaplan, the volume gathers passages from Kaplan’s published writing, lectures, interviews and twenty-seven-volume diary. Scult describes his method directly: he selected passages that seemed outstanding, powerful or especially illustrative of Kaplan’s thought, supplied context and commentary, and arranged them by subject so that a body of writing otherwise formidable in scale could become usable.1
The book is divided into three parts. Judaism and Peoplehood treats civilisation, peoplehood, Zionism, democratic values, ethics, social justice and community. Judaism as Spiritual Practice turns to religion, spirituality, piety, God, supra-naturalism, Torah, ritual and prayer. Kaplan on Kaplan and Famous Others presents the diarist in relation to his family, contemporaries and intellectual predecessors. This arrangement is not neutral. Anthologies make arguments through selection and juxtaposition, and Scult’s title announces his: Kaplan is to be read not merely as the sociologist of Jewish civilisation or the institutional architect of Reconstructionism but as a religious humanist.
The distinction between voices must therefore be kept clear. The selected passages are Kaplan’s; their headings, sequence, contexts and interpretive connections are Scult’s. When this thesis says that Scult argues, it refers to that editorial architecture and commentary. When it says that Kaplan argues, it refers to the primary passage, checked where necessary against Judaism as a Civilization and Kaplan’s other writings. An anthology can disclose a unity dispersed across decades, but the unity it discloses is also partly the achievement of its editor. The present study treats Scult’s arrangement as a substantive interpretation of Kaplan rather than mistaking it for a continuous book Kaplan himself wrote.
What the arrangement recovers is a Kaplan concerned with piety, wonder, hope, conscience and spiritual practice as well as democracy, peoplehood and institutions. These are not two unrelated Kaplans. The civilisational account gives the interior life inherited language, collective memory and communal form. The interior life gives the civilisation its human purpose. Without the former, spirituality risks becoming private and generically uplifting; without the latter, civilisation risks becoming machinery for perpetuating Jewish existence without saying what that existence is for.
Schulweis and the predicate move
Harold Schulweis supplies the second point of departure. His predicate theology, offered explicitly as a continuation of Kaplan’s project, proposes that the religious force of a sentence such as God is just lies not primarily in its subject but in its predicate. What demands allegiance is not the possession of justice by a divine Ego but the claim made by justice itself. Compassion, healing, truth and peace need not wait upon agreement about a supernatural subject before they can acquire religious urgency.8
This thesis accepts that relocation and takes it one step further in the naturalistic expression developed here. Where Schulweis speaks of the predicates of godliness, it speaks of the predicates of holiness. The difference is not hostility towards God-language. It is a judgement about public meaning: godly retains the divine noun within it, while holy can name a quality of treatment, relationship, practice and attention without implying a supernatural agent. The next chapter develops that argument and distinguishes the communal act of consecration from the ethical judgement that a consecration deserves to be called holy.
Why Spiritual Humanistic Judaism?
For this thesis, religion and spirituality are not opposing categories or independent layers. 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 assent to 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. 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.
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 the more limited claim that Jewish religion can cultivate moral capacities while also giving communal and ritual form to wonder, love, gratitude, mortality, vulnerability, grief and joy.
The absence of religious from the name is consequently 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 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; Spiritual Humanistic Judaism names the constructive development offered here. The word spiritual foregrounds what this response seeks to make practicable.
Recent Reconstructionist writers sharpen the issue of obligation. Maria Pulzetti reclaims religious as a word of binding and obligation rather than a synonym for conservative theology.5 Joshua Boettiger distinguishes an obligating religion from an unanchored spirituality; Deborah Waxman locates that obligation in covenantal communities which translate shared values into norms and accountability.67 Their challenge prevents spirituality from becoming a name for private intensity without communal claim. It does not require religion and spirituality to be separated: it requires spiritual experience to become religiously coherent, recurrent and answerable.
This thesis argues that the deficit is real and that it is remediable without any retreat from Wine’s standard. Its governing position should be stated without ambiguity. Spiritual Humanistic Judaism is a form of religious Reconstructionism whose centre is Jewish spiritual practice rather than agreement about God. Kaplan’s evolving religious civilisation is its foundation; predicate theology is a major influence upon its language of holiness, not a second metaphysical system placed beside Kaplan’s. God-language is optional within the framework: a Jew may interpret God through Kaplan, Schulweis, Spinoza or Rambam, use the term symbolically or poetically, or dispense with it. What must be shared is not a metaphysical conclusion but a serious engagement with Jewish practice, communal responsibility, humanistic ethics and the cultivation of middot. This thesis develops one naturalistic expression of that framework. It accepts Schulweis’s relocation of religious significance from a divine Subject to the predicates and, in its own affirmative theology, liturgy and practice, dispenses with God, godly and godliness, retaining them as historical and analytical terms. Spirituality is located in awe, gratitude, grief, joy, wonder, moral aspiration, belonging, ethical responsibility and the cultivation of middot, all carried by Jewish civilisation, folkway, calendar and community.
The phrase “the siddur without footnotes” names more than a prayer book. It names the desired relation between inherited form and lived meaning throughout the religion. Shabbat should not require a supernatural explanation in order to be holy; kashrut should not require divine command in order to disclose obligation; mourning should not require an afterlife in order to sustain relationship and memory; and Ahavat Yisra’el should not require metaphysical election in order to bind Jews to one another. The naturalistic expression developed here puts the siddur without footnotes into action: Jewish practices reconstructed so that their public meaning, inward intention and ethical consequence coincide. Tefilotenu is its most concentrated textual demonstration, not the whole of the programme. This is one possible Spiritual Humanistic Jewish reconstruction, not a condition imposed on all Spiritual Humanistic Jews.
This makes ritual a method of spiritual formation rather than an outer shell surrounding an interior experience. The question it asks is not only what goodness is, but what Jewish disciplines make good action more available to persons and communities, and what communal morality prevents ritual intensity from coexisting with harm.
The claim has five parts.
First, that Scult’s anthology recovers the unity of Kaplan’s public and interior religious humanism but also discloses an unfinished connection between them. The civilisational Kaplan and the Kaplan of piety, wonder, hope and spiritual practice belong to one programme. Chapter 5 argues that Spiritual Humanistic Judaism is a constructive response to that programme rather than a departure from it.
Second, that the repair must be civilisational rather than merely theological. Spiritual Humanistic Judaism is founded upon Kaplan’s account of Judaism as the evolving religious civilisation of the Jewish people. Torah is inherited as an authoritative but non-infallible record of Jewish argument; in the account developed here, mitzvot are religious folkways rather than supernatural commands; Jewish peoplehood becomes Ahavat Yisra’el, a covenantal responsibility for the flourishing and ethical life of the Jewish people; and communal authority is democratic, publicly reasoned and revisable. The formula governing inheritance is that the past gets a vote, not a veto. Chapter 6 develops that civilisational foundation and Chapter 7 the process and constitution by which a kehillá decides.
Third, that one naturalistic expression of the sacred can survive without a divine subject, and can do so on semantic grounds rather than sentimental ones. Harold Schulweis proposed in 1975 that the theological content of a sentence such as God is just lies in its predicate rather than its subject: not the attributes of a divine Ego but the divinity of the attributes. This thesis accepts the predicate move and, for its own liturgical expression, takes it beyond Schulweis by substituting holy for godly and relinquishing the divine noun. Other Spiritual Humanistic Jews may retain the noun and interpret it differently; this thesis argues only that its own community need not do so. Godly still carries the noun for those who hear it that way; kadosh names a quality of treatment and can be said in public without implying a supernatural subject. Chapter 2 defends this particular substitution as an asymmetry of ordinary public meaning rather than of grammar alone, shows that Kaplan himself supplied its practical demonstration through two contrasting redefinitions, and distinguishes consecration from holiness so that setting apart is not confused with being good.
Fourth, that the interior life a humanistic Judaism is accused of lacking is available from the tradition’s own resources, under a category the movement has not used. The dispositions Mordecai Kaplan describes — piety, wonder, humility, hope, gratitude, creativity — are middot: qualities of character that are cultivated, with practices attached, over time. Chapters 8 and 9 argue that Kaplan’s account of the interior life reads as an unacknowledged Mussar text, and set out a curriculum that supplies what it lacks: for each quality, a discipline that trains it, a place in the liturgy where it is rehearsed aloud, and a test in weekday conduct.
Fifth, that a Spiritual Humanistic Jewish practice can be lived without footnotes. Chapter 10 examines Tefilotenu, a Shabbat siddur composed between 2020 and 2026 and published in the latter year, as the clearest liturgical instance of the naturalistic expression developed here. Where Kaplan changed the referent of the divine noun and left the grammar of address standing, this liturgy dispenses with that noun and redirects inherited address from vertical to horizontal: towards the community present, the Jewish people, teachers and ancestors, the dead who are remembered and the human beings who must act. This is one honest reconstruction, not a test which every Spiritual Humanistic Jew must pass.
The relation to the two principal predecessors is asymmetrical, and Chapter 2 states it precisely. In outline: Kaplan supplies the civilisational architecture, Schulweis the relocation of the sacred into the predicates. This thesis treats Spiritual Humanistic Judaism as Reconstructionist in foundation and predicatetheological in a major part of its method, while leaving the metaphysical interpretation of God open.
The result sought here is a naturalistic expression of Spiritual Humanistic Judaism, but not a definition of the wider tradition as naturalistic. A metaphysically naturalist position states that no divine person commands, hears, intervenes or guarantees an outcome; it is one possible layer of interpretation. Religious describes the form of life shared across the theological range: time is set apart; inherited practices make claims; a people transmits sancta; grief and joy are given communal forms; character is cultivated deliberately; and questions of mortality, obligation and ultimate value are addressed through Jewish language and practice. It is not secular in the narrower sense of standing outside religion or treating Judaism as occasional culture. It is a religious humanism because human beings bear responsibility for enacting the sacred, and a Jewish humanism because that responsibility is learned, disciplined and transmitted through the evolving civilisation of the Jewish people.
A pattern recurs across the argument and is worth naming at the outset. Kaplan repeatedly specified programmes he did not build. He set out at length what an affirmative Sabbath would require and then published a synagogue prayer book serving the one hour of it he rated lowest. He called for conversation on the liturgy inside the service and never printed one. He proposed vocation in place of chosenness and left it in an essay rather than in the prayers. He described an interior life and gave no account of how any of it is trained. These are not failures of nerve; they are the marks of a man doing several lifetimes of work. But they are openings, and this thesis walks into them.