HOME	OTHER WRITING

What is Humanistic Judaism?

Brief Preamble to a Q&A Session at Congregation Kahal B'raira

Dennis P. Geller, Ph.D.

The quick answer is that You are Humanistic Judaism. Humanistic Judaism is a movement whose ultimate objective is to maintain a spiritual and cultural home for Jewish people and their families that is consistent with the modern world. By being here, as members of KB or as visitors, you have expressed your interest in this objective. Your interests and participation are what shapes the movement.

But that is not to say that the movement is amorphous. It proceeds from a philosophy that has roots in Jewish tradition, in the European enlightenment, and in the people who are still active in shaping it. Best known of these is Rabbi Sherwin Wine, of course, but two generations of Rabbis. Madrikhim, educators and lay leaders - not least of whom have also been leaders of Kahal B'raira - have been equally seminal forces in the movement's creation and growth.

What is that philosophy? Broadly speaking it has two foundations. The first is Humanism. Humanism is a much-used word in academic circles. The meanings we are concerned with are those involving "Secular Humanism" and "Religious Humanism. "One excellent source explains it this way:

Secular Humanism is an outgrowth of 18th century enlightenment rationalism and 19th century freethought.

Religious Humanism emerged out of Ethical Culture, Unitarianism, and Universalism. Today, many Unitarian- Universalist congregations and all Ethical Culture societies describe themselves as humanist in the modern sense.

The most critical irony in dealing with Modern Humanism is the inability of its advocates to agree on whether or not this worldview is religious. Those who see it as philosophy are the Secular Humanists while those who see it as religion are Religious Humanists.

Secular and Religious Humanists both share the same worldview and the same basic principles. This is made evident by the fact that both Secular and Religious Humanists were among the signers of [the evolving] Humanist Manifesto. From the standpoint of philosophy alone, there is no difference between the two. It is only in the definition of religion and in the practice of the philosophy that Religious and Secular Humanists effectively disagree.

The definition of religion used by Religious Humanists is a functional one. Religion is that which serves the personal and social needs of a group of people sharing the same philosophical worldview.

To serve social needs, Humanist religious communities offer a sense of belonging, an institutional setting for the moral education of children, special holidays shared with like-minded people, a unique ceremonial life, the performance of ideologically consistent rites of passage (weddings, child welcomings, coming-of-age celebrations, funerals, and so forth), an opportunity for affirmation of one's philosophy of life, and a historical context for one's ideas.

Religious Humanists maintain that most human beings have personal and social needs that can only be met by religion (taken in the functional sense I just detailed). They do not feel that one should have to make a choice between meeting these needs in a traditional faith context versus not meeting them at all.

Is Humanistic Judaism a Secular or Religious form of Humanism? Who cares?! We have members who find the traditional meanings of "religious" to be too uncomfortable for them to use the term themselves. Others agree with Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan [see Mordecai M Kaplan, Judaism without Supernaturalism, The Reconstructionist Press, NY, 1958 ), the person whose writings led to the Reconstructionist movement, that

if followed through to its logical conclusion, secularism has to adopt one of two courses - either, by resorting to the principle of reductionism, it reduces mind to matter and matter to sheer physical energy, and thus robs human life of all direction, meaning and purpose, or it accepts these values of human life as no less objective than the objects of the senses. Once secularism adopts this second alternative, it is bound to accept the goal of salvation which religion, at its best, has set before man. [When religion free]s itself from the shackles of magic with its superstitious fears and fawning flatteries ... it opens up ... vistas of high attainment and achievement. In the long run, this is increasingly coming to be the function of religion, while its function as magic is constantly shrinking.

We in the movement find no need to make a firm or limiting choice on this issue. If you call what we do, and what it is that you value about what we do, a religion then it is one for you.

As far as Judaism, we begin with some simple truths. Judaism can only be defined and viewed as the totality of the culture of organized groups of Jewish people. Judaism is manifestly not "a" religion. There are today, and were for most of history, many religions of the Jewish people, existing in sequence and in parallel. It is not a legalistic and scholarly approach to the problems of human life and its relations with the divine - only one of the many Jewish religions has truly taken that approach. It is not a particular shared experience - not all Jews were born on the lower East side, not all Jews were among the highest government officials in Muslim Spain, not all Jews spoke Hebrew or Yiddish or Judeo-Iranian or Judeo-Berber or Israeli Sign Language, not all Jews who perished in the camps recited the Shema. Yet we find connections to each other that we value. We take pride in our identity as Jews and in the history and achievements of the Jewish people. We find spiritual satisfaction in secular celebrations of Jewish Holidays, study and discussion of Jewish and broader human issues. Believing, as humanists, that people determine the conduct of their lives and must take responsibility for solving the problems of the world, we find that in our traditions there are ways of thinking about such problems - thinking jewishly we might say - that work for us as individuals and as a community. Some of us also study history and philosophy and theologies Ð not because they are essentially or presciently humanistic, but because they contain interesting attempts to solve philosophical, social and civil problems, and because they are the stories and histories of our people.