Humanistic Jews Revel in Cultural, Not Religious, Heritage : ‘Children of a Secular Revolution’

In the upper right-hand corner of the front door frame at Bernard Kirsch’s Culver City home, a mezuza has been affixed, the traditional sign of a Jewish household.

Kirsch placed the mezuza there when he and his wife, Rosalie, moved into the home more than 15 years ago, even though he calls himself an agnostic and does not believe that the scriptural passage contained in the three-inch-long case is, as tradition dictates, divinely inspired.

At this point, he rarely notices the mezuza when he passes through the doorway. However, he leaves it there as a symbol of his membership in the Jewish community.

But while Kirsch may be uncertain of the existence of God, he considers himself as much a Jew as any synagogue worshiper.

“I would say many of my friends who belong to regular temples are there for communal purposes for their children, even though they’re not sure about God or don’t really believe in God,” Kirsch said.

‘Mouth the Words’

“They mouth the words because they feel that’s the price you pay for community. I feel that’s hypocritical. I won’t do that.”

Kirsch, a 67-year-old educational consultant, is president of the recently formed Los Angeles chapter of the Society for Humanistic Judaism, one of about 20 local branches that have sprung up around the nation since the first Humanistic Jewish congregation was established in a Detroit suburb in 1963.

In California, other chapters exist in San Francisco, Orange County and San Diego, while a fledgling group still not officially affiliated with the society has also been started in Santa Barbara.

Humanistic Jews, according to Rabbi Sherwin Wine, the 59-year-old, one-time Reform Jewish religious leader who founded the movement, are “children of a secular revolution who have difficulty with the whole concept of invisible rewards and punishments.”

“The purpose of right and wrong is not to satisfy God’s needs but to satisfy the needs of man,” Wine said.

Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist Jews generally maintain belief in some form of deity and hold to widely varying degrees of compliance with traditional Jewish law, known as Halakah. Orthodox Jews, of course, rigidly follow the law, which they view as God-given.

For Humanistic Jews, however, faith in a God and obedience to Jewish law governing everything from diet to relations between the sexes have been replaced by reason. Common sense substitutes for mystery, and reverence has been replaced by challenging inquiry.

Life Cycle Celebrations

Traditional liturgies have been rejected as “pessimistic appeasement rituals” and have been supplanted by life cycle celebrations that honor human achievement.

From a Jewish perspective, perhaps the most dramatic example of this shift in emphasis is that at Birmingham Temple, the Farmington Hills, Mich., congregation started by Wine. A wood carving of the word Adam , Hebrew for mankind, occupies the space on the sanctuary stage usually reserved for the ark containing the Torah scroll.

Meanwhile, the temple’s Torah, the first five books of the Bible viewed as Scripture by traditional Judaism, is kept in a library as an example of Jewish literature with historical significance only.

Most Humanistic Jews are agnostics, uncertain about the existence of God, but some are atheists who say there simply is no God.

But while their premises are radically different, Wine continued, Humanistic and more traditional Jews share many of the same ethical and cultural values, including belief in the centrality of Israel and the desire to preserve Jewish ethnicity.

It is those viewpoints that set them apart from other secular humanists, he noted in a recent interview, including members of the Ethical Culture Society and Unitarians, with whom Humanistic Jews are often compared.

So far, the growth of Humanistic Judaism has been modest. National membership stands at about 5,000 “units,” a term that applies to an individual as well as a family. The Los Angeles chapter--centered on the Westside following the collapse several years ago of an earlier, San Fernando Valley-based organizational effort--has attracted about 60 member units since being formed in March.

Nationally, the movement has six full- or part-time rabbis, all of whom were trained in Reform or Conservative seminaries, and the society has joined with other secular and humanistic Jewish organizations from Europe, North America and South America to jointly sponsor a training center in Israel that it hopes will provide them with future leaders.

Private Homes, Rented Space

Like the Los Angeles group, most Humanistic congregations meet in private homes and rented space.

Despite its slow growth, however, supporters of the movement say they are in tune with the thinking of the majority of contemporary American Jewry, less than half of whom are affiliated with a congregation.

In Los Angeles’ 500,000-plus Jewish community, the nation’s second-largest, that percentage is even lower, with only about 29% affiliated. At the same time, about one-fourth of Los Angeles’ unaffiliated Jewish population calls itself agnostic or atheist, researchers say, and intermarriage, which is fully accepted by Humanistic Judaism without any need for the non-Jewish spouse to religiously convert, is on the rise.

“We’re not saying we have a set of ideas that are very different, but that we may represent what the overwhelming majority of American Jews really believe,” Wine said. “One of the realities of Jewish life is that there are thousands and thousands of closet humanists in the Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist movements.

“The difference is we’re saying it out loud.”

Despite the findings of researchers, more traditional Jewish leaders, even liberal ones, take issue with Wine’s contention.

“My instinct tells me there are a number of Jews with poorly defined notions about God, but that doesn’t mean they are humanists,” said Lennard Thal, West Coast director for the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the Reform synagogue umbrella group. “It could be they simply cannot articulate their feelings.”

‘Caricature of God’

Rabbi Harold Schulweis, spiritual leader of Valley Beth Shalom, a Conservative synagogue in Encino, said, “Jews have a much deeper feeling about God than they may even suspect. They just don’t like the caricature of God who is bewhiskered and who punishes and rewards in a fairly arbitrary manner.”

Jews with different ideas about the nature and existence of God have, of course, been around since the time of the biblical prophets.

However, it was not until the late 19th Century that Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews gave birth to the notion of a secular Jewish identity with its own structure. The two leading Jewish sociopolitical ideologies of modern times, Zionism and the labor-socialist movement, owe their development to such secularists.

Southern California has had a Jewish Secular Conference for more than 15 years while the Sholem Educational Institute ( sholem is the Yiddish equivalent of the Hebrew shalom , or peace), now part of a broader community organization, has operated a Sunday school in West Los Angeles for almost 40 years. Among the Sholem organization’s members is Jackie Goldberg, a Los Angeles Unified School District board member.

Hershl Hartman of West Los Angeles, the 60-pupil Sholem school’s principal and a longtime leader of the Southern California secular Jewish community, said the main difference between Jews who identify themselves as secularist and those who favor the term humanist is that while the former emphasize ethnic and national values, the latter see personal ethics as their focus.

One clear distinction is that Humanistic Jews favor congregational organization, while groups like Sholem coalesce around educational aims.

Hartman emphatically insists that organized secular Jews like himself are in no way acting religious, and he takes pains to distinguish between people who are Jewish by reason of birth or self-identification and Judaism, by his definition a faith that constitutes just a part of the Jewish legacy.

Distinction Isn’t Clear

Within the Humanistic Judaism movement, however, the distinction is not as clear.

Wine maintains that Humanist Judaism is “a secular religion,” in that it accepts a minimum amount of resignation to forces that are uncontrollable in life, which he sees as the most obvious sign of religiosity.

Miriam Jerris, executive director of the national Society for Humanistic Judaism, also located in Farmington Hills, Mich., said she considers the movement to be a religion simply because it expounds particular values dealing with life’s ultimate questions in an organized manner and within a set structure.

Others, including Bernard Kirsch recoil at the word religion, fearing that such terminology plays into the hands of fundamentalist Christians who have sought for their own reasons to have secular humanism declared a religion by the courts.

Traditional Jewish leaders also recoil at the suggestion that Humanistic Judaism is religious in nature, but for another reason. For the most part, they regard Humanistic Judaism as a contemporary aberration.

“It blows my mind,” said Conservative Rabbi Paul Dubin, executive vice president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California. “You don’t have to believe in God to be Jewish, but if you start a society with its own rituals, down the line it will have to become something else. God is absolutely essential to Judaism and its survival.”

Rabbi Abner Weiss of Beth Jacob Congregation in Beverly Hills, the largest Orthodox synagogue on the West Coast, likened Humanistic Judaism to “celebrating the light but ignoring the star. . . . There’s something kind of dishonest to cutting off the tradition at its roots, its religion, and then calling it Jewish.”

However, Rabbi Alvin Reines, a professor of philosophy at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Reform Judaism’s major seminary, termed Judaism a “polydoxy” rather than a faith with but one orthodoxy and said that within that broader view of Jewish beliefs there is room for the Humanistic movement.

“What you have among Jews is a situation historically in which over the years you have a had a number of different Jewish religions, each with a structure of their own. The religion of Moses was different from the religion of the Talmudic scholars. Humanistic religion is an option in the polydox structure.”

Wine sees an eventual breakdown to the widespread rejection his movement encounters.

‘Slow to Change’

“Religion is slow to change, and people want to feel legitimate. For many Jews today, the way they feel legitimate is to use the koshered language of the past. With proper leadership that can change,” he said.

But for Bernard Kirsch, who was raised in a Jewish home split between Orthodox and socialist-labor concerns and who flirted with more traditional Judaism most of his life, the future is at hand.

“I’ve always believed as I believe now, but in the past I did not articulate it and there was ambivalence,” he said. “Now I’m in a community of Jewish people who are like me without having to say I believe in God.”