← Towards a Spiritual Humanistic Judaism · Part II — Sources, civilisation and reconstruction
Spiritual Humanistic Judaism is not an independent construction. Almost all of its architecture is inherited, and the shape of the argument is best set out by naming what each predecessor supplies and the point at which each stops.
Mordecai Kaplan supplies nearly the whole building. Judaism as the evolving religious civilisation of the Jewish people; the sancta as the persons, places, texts and seasons a people holds sacred, which are not claims about the universe but the furniture of a shared reverence; the practices as folkways retained voluntarily for what they do and modified when they cease to function; revaluation and reconstruction as the method by which an inherited form is examined for its living value and rebuilt to carry it; religion defined by its function rather than by assent; salvation as this-worldly fulfilment; and the standard that governs everything here — that we must mean what we say when we pray.
He stops at the noun. God is retained and redefined as the power that makes for salvation: transnatural rather than supernatural, the sum of forces in nature and in ourselves that make for human fulfilment. The redefinition is intellectually serious and remains one possible Spiritual Humanistic Jewish theology. This thesis develops a different, naturalistic liturgical expression, for reasons Chapter 2 sets out.
Sherwin Wine supplies the standard by which that failure is measured. His test is that a liturgy requiring a footnote is not honest liturgy: what a congregation means by what it says is settled by what the words do in the mouths of the people saying them, not by what an introduction explains them to mean. He stops at subtraction. Having established what could not be said, Humanistic Judaism did not sufficiently rebuild what was lost with it, which is the deficit this thesis addresses.
Harold Schulweis supplies the decisive bridge, explicitly as a continuation of Kaplan rather than a departure. Kaplan’s inversion of 1909 held that the Jewish people does not exist for the sake of Judaism but Judaism for the sake of the Jewish people; Schulweis performs the same reversal on theology. His formulation is: It is not the attributes of a divine Ego, but the divinity of the attributes themselves, which demands our allegiance.8 He makes the liturgical case too, observing that every prayer formula follows subject logic — Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, who… — and offering a reconstructed alternative: Bruchah elohut ha-motziah lehem min ha-arets, blessed is Godliness which brings forth bread from the earth.
Two of his replies to objections are load-bearing here. Asked whether predicate theology reduces religion to ethics, he answers that ethical concern is at the heart of the God-idea but that Judaism encompasses far more — ritual, liturgy, community, celebration, fidelity to the destiny of the Jewish people. Asked whether merely secular qualities can legitimately be called divine, he argues that doing so “raises them from the merely secular into the realm of the sacred — a conscious spiritual act.” Consecration is thus something people do deliberately, which is precisely the claim made below about kadosh.
He stops one word short. Godly retains the noun inside it for those who hear it that way. This thesis therefore receives predicate theology as method and offers holy as the final vocabulary of its own naturalistic expression: it keeps the relocation of significance to justice, compassion, truth and healing while dispensing with God-language in the liturgy it constructs. That choice is not made a boundary of Spiritual Humanistic Judaism as a whole.
Kenneth Shuster supplies the diagnosis from outside, and its terms matter. His word for what liberal Judaism lacks is religiously, meaning holistically, habitually and with commitment — the sense in which a doctor instructs a patient to take medicine religiously. He stops at prescription without instrument: having shown that liberal Jews must choose between going through the motions and staying away, he asks them to keep, religiously, a liturgy he has just demonstrated they cannot say honestly. The gap between his diagnosis and his prescription is where a siddur has to be written.
Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer supplies the Kaplanian test. Reading Kaplan as a spiritual pragmatist, she takes his naturalism to have been intended not to secularise Judaism but to strengthen Jewish practice, peoplehood and spiritual life; and she asks whether removing the supernatural status of Torah, Israel and God can increase commitment to Jewish norms, deepen identification with Jewish life and strengthen the encounter with holiness.4 Her survey stops at the level of theological language. Having found that contemporary Reconstructionism has largely preserved Kaplan’s naturalised Torah and Israel, and that its shifting God-language remains broadly consistent with his pragmatism, she does not ask what would have to be built for the naturalised terms to become a lived discipline. That is the question this thesis takes up.
Maria Pulzetti, Joshua Boettiger and Deborah Waxman supply a contemporary Reconstructionist account of obligation. Pulzetti reclaims religious for liberal Jews as a bond joining people to one another and to Torah. Boettiger makes the claim more exact: community is not sacred merely because it exists; it becomes covenantal when its members accept that they may be surprised, changed and inconvenienced by one another. Waxman gives this a democratic institutional form: people voluntarily co-create communities, articulate values, translate them into norms and build structures of accountability and repair. All three stop before specifying a complete rule of life. Their account tells a community why obligation matters and how norms are authorised; the folkways and disciplines proposed below give those norms recurrent form.
Deborah Glanzberg-Krainin supplies the method of creative fidelity. Drawing on Lévi-Strauss, she describes Reconstructionism as bricolage: each generation makes Jewish life anew from inherited materials which already possess meanings and therefore constrain their reuse.11 She clarifies how a civilisation can evolve without becoming an arbitrary collection of personal preferences. Her metaphor stops short of an ethical test: a skilful reconstruction may still be unjust, and what a community presently needs is not necessarily what it ought to build.
Benjamin Weiner supplies the strongest liturgical alternative. He agrees that Kaplan retained second-person address to a God no longer understood as a supernatural hearer, but finds the resolution in nusḥ: melody turns address into ambience and lets gratitude and trembling survive after the divine addressee has receded from experience. His account prevents religious humanism from confusing honesty with rational aridity. It stops, however, at individual phenomenology. Music can suspend attention to a sentence’s semantic content; it cannot make a public liturgy cease to say what its grammar says.12