Focus on Issues: Secular Humanistic Jews Seeks to Attract Unaffiliated

How to reach the unaffiliated Jew? It’s the organized Jewish community’s million dollar question.

The small movement of Secular Humanistic Jews believes that it has an answer in its practice of nontraditional, nontheistic Judaism.

“I was an unaffiliated Jew and it is through my connection with this movement that I found that connection again,” said Martin Kotch, a law professor who was trained as a leader of Secular Humanist Judaism.

Founded more than 30 years ago, Secular Humanistic Judaism is an organized effort to codify into a movement the reality of Jewish life for a substantial number – perhaps the majority – of American Jews.

Most American Jews – 55 percent – are not affiliated with any Jewish organization at all, according to the 1990 National Jewish Population Study.

And most of the unaffiliated – 83 percent – describe themselves as having a secular, or “just Jewish” background, rather than one rooted in the Orthodox, Conservative or Reform movements.

More than 1.1 million American Jews – some 20 percent of the population – describe themselves as having a Jewish identity, but not as part of the Jewish religion.

They are, in short, the secular Jews who might feel at home within a framework that focuses on the cultural and historical doorways into Jewish connection, but at the same time disavow the religious.

“The problem is that the [Jewish] institutions are not relevant to the people out there,” said Rabbi Sherwin Wine, leader of the effort in North America and co-chairman of the International Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews.

But the movement Wine founded has yet to attract these people in large numbers.

As many as 10,000 North Americans are affiliated with Secular Humanism through congregations or other types of secular Jewish institutions, said Wine.

There are another 20,000 affiliated Secular Humanistic Jews in Israel, Europe and South America, he said.

In North America, 26 congregations are connected with the movement through its umbrella, the North American Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews, said Wine.

The congregations range in size from a handful of people who meet once or twice a month, or just on the High Holidays, to Wine’s Birmingham Temple here, the flagship of the movement, which has about 500 member families.

“Secular Humanist Judaism offers people a group within which we can hash out ideas and learn about the humanistic interpretation of such things as the Bible,” said Esther Friedman, co-president of a 20-member congregation in Stanton, Calif., which has no regular Sabbath service but meets occasionally in someone’s home or in a private room in a restaurant.

“There was something missing in my life” before becoming a follower of Secular Humanist Judaism in 1977, she said. “Reform Judaism just didn’t fit. I was very uncomfortable with bowing down and blessing the Lord. It didn’t ring true for me.”

When Wine, an ordained Reform rabbi, broke from the Reform movement to start a humanistic congregation in the 1960s, the move sparked controversy.

“Humanism caused a great shock,” recalled A. James Rudin, a Reform rabbi who is the American Jewish Committee’s director of interreligious affairs.

“No one knew what to do with it. It was going to be a juggernaut that destroyed Judaism in America, and the Reform movement wanted to throw him out,” Rudin said.

“In the ’60s there was an opportunity to make it into a movement. Either he didn’t or couldn’t. The test of any tradition is whether it can reproduce its own,” said Rudin.

How to reach the unaffiliated Jew – and perhaps broaden the reach of Secular Humanistic Judaism – was the theme of the movement’s first colloquium, held at the Birmingham Temple in October.

An eclectic collection of Jewish academics, historians, cultural critics, sociologists, writers and visual artists came together to address the issues surrounding “The Unaffiliated Jew.”

Speakers included authors Andre Aciman, Charles Silberman and Anne Roiphe, Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai and filmmaker Joan Micklin Silver.

The historical and communal views of Jewish life were also emphasized.

Speakers included Yehuda Beauer, the Israeli Holocaust scholar who is also a founder of Jewish Secular Humanism, Jewish communal leader Shoshana Cardin and sociologist Egon Mayer.

Most of the speakers said they do not consider themselves Secular Humanist Jews, and many are active in religious Jewish life through the Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative and Orthodox movements.

They were there, they said, because they found the colloquium’s topic compelling. Cardin said many people asked her why she was speaking to a gathering of Secular Humanistic Jews.

“I am a passionate Jew who believes that being Jewish requires retaining that particularlist, distinctive facet of our people to share with others,” she said.

But “any individual who is willing to assume the privileges and responsibilities of being Jewish should be accepted as a Jew.”

All but about a tenth of the 200 people attending the conference were either speakers or Wine’s congregants. Few people younger than 50 could be found in the audience or on the dais.

Every one of the dozen congregants of Wine’s temple interviewed during the colloquium was a longtime member and is the parent of grown children. Most said they celebrated little Jewish life at home.

In each case, one or more of each of their children had married a non-Jew and most of their children were disconnected from Jewish identity, they said.

“Of course it’s painful that our children aren’t involved” Jewishly, said Birmingham Temple member Skip Rosenthal. “There are no easy answers.”

Still, the congregants observe all of the Jewish holidays here, said temple member Maynard Gordon.

Friday night and other holiday services are held in an auditorium where there is a sculpture of the Hebrew word “Adam,” or “man,” on the wall behind the dais.

The congregation’s Torah is kept in the library and taken out only during the recently instituted hourlong Bible study on Saturday mornings attended by about 25 of the temple’s members.

Jewish ritual, in addition to being nontheistic, is largely divorced from traditional Jewish observance.

Services at Birmingham Temple and at some, but not all, of the other Secular Humanist congregations, are often built around liturgy written by Wine.

A prolific writer and speaker, Wine is venerated by many of his congregants, who describe him as “brilliant, “a genius,” “encyclopedic.”

On Friday night, to celebrate Sabbath and Sukkot, the festival that took place during the gathering, participants recited this benediction, written by Wine: “Where is my light? My light is in me. Where is my hope? My hope is in me. Where is my strength? My strength is in me. And in you.”

The Sukkot service started with a Yehuda Amichai poem and interspersed Jewish folk songs among benedictions penned by Wine.

The service centered around a series of affirmations recited by the audience, including: “We affirm our commitment to the Jewish people. We affirm our commitment to the life of reason. We affirm our commitment to discovering our own power and strength.”

One of the colloquium’s speakers described the congregation’s liturgy and practices as “ersatz Judaism.”

Poet Amichai – who describes himself as a secular Jew but is not affiliated with this movement – said the liturgy was “like an artificial flower, which looks nice but has no scent, no soul.”

Leaders of the movement attribute its inability to attract larger numbers to a lack of leadership.

“If we had 100 rabbis and 200 madrichim we would be a powerful force,” he said in an interview during the colloquium.

Responding to the void, the North American Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews began a leadership training program three years ago.

Eight people are currently studying with Wine in a five-year program to become rabbis, and 49 are training to be “madrichim,” or leaders.

Eight graduated as madrichim during last month’s colloquium; they will work primarily as officiants of lifecycle events, such as weddings and Bar Mitzvahs, in humanistic communities.

A few received interim permission to officiate at weddings before they competed their speech.

“Most of them have been intercultural,” she said, using Secular Humanists’ preferred term for intermarriages.

Wine performs most of the intermarriages in the Detroit area, said several of his congregants.

British businessman Felix Posen, a philanthropist who underwrote a substantial part of the colloquium’s cost, said in his remarks at the colloquium, “Secular Jews are intellectually undeveloped. They will be hard to find and difficult to attract.

“The challenge is to define what we are and sell the positive qualities to those unknown to us now.”

Yet, on the day speakers were scheduled to address the topic “Why be Jewish,” nearly all of them devoted their time to enumerating reasons why not be Jewish.

They talked about Judaism in terms of pain and guilt. And when spoke of mainstream Judaism as authoritarian, one-dimensional and suffocating.

No mention was made of the diverse conceptions of God and expressions of Judaism.

Historian Norman Cantor said the central theme of his Jewish identity is suffering.

“Being a Jew explains the meaning of suffering. It is part of my Jewish nature or destiny,” he said. “To realize one is a Jew is to realize that you have to endure an unfair life.”

Edna Coffin, a professor of Hebrew literature and language, said, “The only way I could escape from the `oy vey’ way of life, to stop waiting for the program around the corner, was to become a humanist.”