Sherwin Wine, Author at Sherwin Wine

In His Own Words: A Tribute to Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine (1928-2007), By Rabbi Peter Schweitzer

Posted on February 12, 2025February 12, 2025 by Sherwin Wine

In His Own Words: A Tribute to Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine (1928-2007), By Rabbi Peter Schweitzer

Narrator:
Tonight we will honor Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine, beloved founder of Humanistic Judaism. He was a visionary thinker, our teacher and guide. Our counselor, our mentor, and our friend. Tonight we will honor his life, we will honor his works, we will listen to his words.

Reader One:
Each of us tastes the bitter loneliness of the human condition… Within the limits of our possibility we can become what we will become. Within the boundaries of our talents we can achieve what we choose to achieve. The open possibility of our future is a frightening excitement. We can withdraw in fear and seek to hide from its reality; or we can boldly assume its challenge and bravely confront destiny with the courage of free individuals.

Reader Two:
Where does the meaning of life lie? For some people, the meaning of life lies in peace and quiet. They dream of heaven, a place where problems cease and struggle ends, where all is serene. For other people, the meaning of life lies in safety and security. They dream of salvation, a dramatic rescue from all enemies and dangers. The world is transformed into a vision of childhood. For people who call themselves humanists neither of these alternatives is very appealing…Womb-like tranquility and parental rescue are not enough for their dignity. Although striving and struggle may bring pain as well as pleasure, they are the stuff out of which the good life is made. They rescue us from the dullness of apathy and the boredom of needing nothing. They give dignity to ambition. If we are humanists, we do not seek to scale the final peak. The meaning of life is in the climbing.

Narrator:
In 1907, a man named Hershel Wengrowski arrived in America from Poland. He joined relatives in Detroit and became a cap-maker and then a trouser-cutter. He also changed his name to William Wine. He was a born student, who loved to read, and under different circumstances might have become a scholar. But he was from the “old school.” When confronting something illogical, he subscribed to a traditional posture. “Freg nit,” he would say, “Don’t ask.” His son, on the other hand, could not stop asking.

Teible Israelski, known as Tillie, arrived in America in 1914, on the maiden voyage of the Aquatania. She came from a merchant-class family near Bialystok. She was a small woman, but with a loud voice. Later, when her son had amassed a following of some 200 people she was said to proclaim, “Imagine how many would be here if he believed in God!”

On January 25, 1928, Sherwin Theodore Wine was born. His older sister, Lorraine, was then 3.

Reader One:
My life, like that of most Jews in North America, had its roots in the Ashkenazic nation, in the Yiddishspeaking world of Eastern Europe. My immigrant parents were intensely Jewish. Their Jewishness was both ethnic and religious – and they were not able to distinguish between the two. My father was halakhically disposed, but the struggle for survival in America compromised his Jewish satisfactions. A kosher home, no work or school on the holidays, and regular Shabbat attendance at synagogue services in a Conservative shul defined the modern traditional format our family accepted.
Beyond my family existed the Jewish “ghetto” of Detroit, with its bakers, butcher shops, grocery stores, and public schools. My high school was more than 90 percent Jewish. I could easily have come to believe, like my mother, that most of the people in the world were Jewish. When Rosh Hashanah came to Central High School, it was like Christmas in Grosse Pointe. The Jews in my neighborhood came in many varieties. There were the bearded Orthodox…there were hardworking laborers and merchants…There was a sprinkling of German Jews who viewed the “Russian” world with contempt and who found refuge and separation in their Greek Revival Temple. There were nationalists and Zionists…. There were the socialists and communists, often infused with a fanatic secularism, who papered their kitchen floors with either the Forwerts or the Morgen Freiheit. There were the ambitious immigrants and their children who dreamed of fleeing the ghetto and finding success and power in the Gentile world outside…

I loved the intensity and the intellectual passions of this world. But I sometimes wearied of the anxiety, which manifested itself in high-decibel living and arguing with no real issues. I sometimes found the sense of vulnerability uncomfortable, especially when it manifested itself in ego-boosting exaggerations. My Hebrew school – and my Sunday school – were filled with claims that we Jews had invented everything from love and social justice to democracy and science. Even when I left the ghetto, these exaggerations persisted. I did not always enjoy being part of a people too needy to face reality. But I thoroughly enjoyed being part of a “race” whose intellectual and economic achievements had aroused the admiration and envy of the world. I often wondered whether Jews could develop a realistic perspective of themselves without the distortions that the threat of antisemitism conferred.

Narrator:
At home he listened to the radio and heard Hitler’s speeches. His hero was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At school, he excelled, and was the smartest kid in the class. As early as third grade he was memorizing long charts of royal genealogies, which would serve him well years later, on all the tours of Europe that he would eventually lead. He took up debating and developed oratorical skills that he would also draw on in the years to come. In his last year at Central High School he entered the Detroit Times’ Hearst-sponsored National History Contest. The topic was introduced and the entrants had to give their answer orally, on the spot. Sherwin took first prize.

Reader One:
One of my roots is the Anglo-Saxon world of American culture. My ghetto was Jewish, but my public school teachers, my librarians, my department store clerks, my movie stars, and my language were WASP. I have always valued growing up in America, despite the challenges of the Depression and antisemitism. I liked the calm, the good manners, and the understatement of the Anglo-Saxon world. I also admired the political environment of freedom and opportunity that had its roots in the liberal democracy developed by the English and their American descendants. I do not think that Humanistic Judaism, with its affirmation of human dignity, would have been possible without the setting of America.

Narrator:
Sherwin went on to the University of Michigan where he began his serious intellectual thinking. His humanistic connections had already emerged in high school. Now they became refined when he discovered that he loved philosophy.

Reader One:
The idea that truth should be responsible to evidence lies at the foundation of my belief system. I have never been enamored with eternal truths. I have no difficulty living with uncertainty and change. And I would be humiliated to think I would accept an answer to a question simply because it made me feel good. Confronting unpleasant facts is for me the ultimate test of reason. Both liberals and conservatives jump at answers they want to be true.

Reader Two:
To live courageously is to live without guarantees, to make decisions without waiting for every fact, to take action without knowing all the consequences. Brave people do not need the illusion of absolute certainty. They will think before acting. But they will never think so much and so long that it is too late to act. Courage is the refusal to wait for what will never come. It is the willingness to choose when it is time to choose.

Narrator:
During college, Sherwin started having vocational stirrings. He had been impressed by certain rabbis he had met in Detroit’s Shaarey Zedek congregation. He found himself drawn to the field.

Reader One:
I liked what rabbis did, the public speaking, the leading of good-sized congregations. Besides, I was interested in my Jewish identity, but no longer ritually observant. I had become a humanist and had ‘redefined’ God as the embodiment of ethical ideals. Think of the most perfect human being, all that you’d want him to be, and that’s what the word ‘God’ means.

Narrator:
However, Sherwin realized that no seminary that prepared and ordained rabbis would accept him as a rabbinical student if he went public with those ideas. So he kept his views to himself for the time being.

Reader One:
My choice of the rabbinate seemed bizarre to many of the people who knew me at school. How could an “imperial naturalist” choose to spend time with God? While university teaching in philosophy was appealing to me, being the leader of a “philosophic” community was even more appealing to me. I liked the idea of serving families over a long period of time, providing them with both inspiration and information. I enjoyed the poetry of celebration and found that the classroom did not satisfy my aesthetic needs. The closest profession to what I wanted to do with my life was the clergy – and I wasn’t going to allow a trivial issue about “believing in God” to prevent me from choosing the clergy, especially since liberal religion had already given permission to everybody to define God in whatever way he wanted to. I chose the Reform rabbinate. It was the most liberal option available…I discovered that more than half of the student body were humanists. They proceeded to do what I did – define God in a naturalistic way. For me God became the embodiment of the “ideal man.” It certainly was a far-fetched redo of what the word “God” meant in popular parlance. But I was comfortable with my creativity, and I was serving Jews who were interested in being Jewish, but who were not very interested in God.

Narrator:
After his ordination, now Rabbi Wine readied himself for a stint as a chaplain in Korea. Briefly, however, he took an interim summer position, at Detroit’s Temple Beth El, while waiting for his call-up. Meanwhile, while the senior rabbi was away, and without his consultation, the board hired Rabbi Wine to become the associate rabbi. Rabbi Wine kept the position six months before entering the chaplaincy. During this period he made another important discovery. He learned that he wasn’t disposed to be anybody’s assistant. Rabbi Wine was in Korea for two years and made a reputation for himself as the “Salami King,” which he distributed to Jewish soldiers throughout the country. This experience confirmed for him his assessment of where Jews’ heads and hearts really were situated.

Reader One:
The boys came not to pray but to talk – and for the chicken soup. Their Jewish identity was important to them in that strange place. I was a connection…I felt fulfilled serving the needs of Jewish men and women exiled from home. But I became aware that Jews, on the whole, preferred salami to prayer, no matter how many rabbinic tirades against “gastronomic Judaism” were delivered. Now, there is nothing wrong with kosher salami. But most Jews no longer saw Judaism as the place where their primary philosophy of life had its root. The university and the secular world were the settings for that exploration.

Narrator:
Rabbi Wine returned to Detroit’s Temple Beth El for another year and a half. He started growing less and less comfortable with the language of Reform Judaism. In the autumn of 1959, a group of Jews in nearby Windsor,
Ontario, decided to organize a new Reform congregation. Soon enough, Rabbi Wine joined them as their rabbi.
It was during this period that Rabbi Wine made the decision to stick with the rabbinate but, at the same time, do it his own way.

Reader One:
When I returned to Detroit I found myself in the functioning world of Reform Judaism – first as the assistant rabbi at a big old temple and then as the organizing rabbi of a small new congregation. I enjoyed my success but I became increasingly uncomfortable with the intellectual vacuity of it all and with the rationalization about God I had offered myself when I entered rabbinic training. I found the discrepancy between the symbols of Reform Judaism and the obvious beliefs of its members to be more than annoying. Making the Torah the central symbol of Reform Jews lacked integrity in my eyes. I wanted an environment where conviction, not symbols, counted…

In 1963 I made the break. Friends seeking to establish a new “Reform” congregation in suburban Detroit offered me the opportunity to lead, and not to follow. Within the first year of the existence of the new congregation we had laid the foundation of a new movement in Jewish life and we had given it a name – Humanistic Judaism. We faced many challenges. The most pressing one was the intense hostility we experienced in the Jewish community when we went public with our ideology. We thought that we were simply giving voice to what most Jews believed. We discovered that they view our view differently. Ironically, our emergence triggered a rare opportunity for the Jewish world in America to discuss an issue of personal philosophy, rather than the usual unresolved discussions about Jewish identity and Jewish survival. Hostility did not diminish my optimism. It only made me more determined to succeed.

I was particularly amused by the fact that the most hostile people were not the Orthodox, but rather Reform rabbis. Orthodox rabbis sometimes applauded our honesty in contrast to the religious pretensions of the liberals. But the liberal religionists were threatened by the fact that we were saying out loud what many of their own congregants really believed.

Reader Two:
From the very beginning, Humanistic Judaism had to deal with the accusation that it was atheistic. For the enemies of our movement this assault was the most popular. The “God” issue was the primary focus of those who hated us. “How can you be Jewish if you do not believe in God?” “How can you be ethical if there is no divine authority?” “How can you explain the existence of the universe without God?” The God questions were always there in the forefront, even though the God issue was not the central question of Humanistic Judaism.

Reader One:
There are different kinds of atheism. The most popular kind is “ontological” atheism, a firm denial that there is any creator or manager of the universe. There is “ethical” atheism, a firm conviction that, even if there is a creator/manager of the world, he does not run things in accordance with his moral agenda, rewarding the good and punishing the wicked. There is “existential” atheism, a nervy assertion that even if there is a God, he has no authority to be the boss of my life. There is “agnostic” theism, a cautious denial that claims that God’s existence can be neither proven nor disproven.

There is “ignostic” theism, another cautious denial, which claims that the word “God” is so confusing that it is meaningless…And here is “pragmatic” atheism, which regards God as irrelevant to ethical and successful living, and which views all discussions about God as a waste of time.

Reader Two:
Most Humanistic Jews are “atheists” in one of these senses. But for all Humanistic Jews, atheism is not at the heart of their belief system. At the heart of Humanistic Judaism is a positive answer to the central question of all historic religions and pragmatic philosophies: Where do we find the source of power, strength, and wisdom to cope with the problems of life? The central focus of humanism is people and the forces of the natural world. We are not Atheistic Judaism. We are Humanistic Judaism.

Narrator:
This was one of Rabbi Wine’s constant messages. In his characteristic way, he summed it up in one phrase, “Believing is better than non-believing.” In a now-classic article, with that sentence as its title, he urged us to overcome the negative views of so many secular Jews about their identity and outlook and to explain who we are in positive ways. Instead of telling people that we don’t believe in prayer, or in the supernatural, or in the Biblical account of creation, we have a positive message to share. We believe in science and evolution, reason and empiricism. We believe in human dignity and equality. We believe in human freedom and the responsibility that comes with this freedom. We believe in the power of human effort to shape our own lives and the world around us. We believe in the strength and power and courage within us to cope with life’s challenges. We believe in human resilience and determination, and in the possibility of hope.

Reader One:
Unbelief is a loser’s style. It is a posture of inferiority, an acknowledgement that the message of your enemies is so powerful and so positive that you must define yourself by it. Believers tell people first what they believe, not what they do not believe.

Reader Two:
I believe.
I believe in hope.
I believe in hope that chooses
that chooses self-respect above pity.
I believe in hope that dismisses
that dismisses the petty fears of petty people.
I believe in hope that feels
that feels distant pleasure as much as momentary pain.
I believe in hope that acts
that acts without the guarantee of success.
I believe in hope that kisses
that kisses the future with the transforming power of its will.
Hope is a choice,
never found,
never given,
always taken.
Some wait for hope to capture them.
They act as the prisoners of despair.
Others go searching for hope.
They find nothing but the reflection of their own anger.
Hope is an act of will,
affirming, in the presence of evil,
that good things will happen,
preferring in the face of failure, self-esteem to pity.
Optimists laugh, even in the dark.
They know that hope is a life style
not a guarantee.
Reader One:
If Jewish history has any message, it is the demand of human self-reliance. In an indifferent universe there is no help from destiny. Either we assume responsibility for our fate or no one will. A world without divine guarantees and divine justice is a little bit frightening. But it is also the source of our human freedom and dignity.

Reader Two:
People give meaning to the universe. If we call to the stars and say “tell us the purpose of life,” the stars are silent. If we caress the earth and say, “what shall we do,” the earth gives no reply. If we pursue the wind and plead, “let us know the path we must follow,” the wind has no answer…People give meaning to the universe.

Narrator:
And so Rabbi Wine gave meaning to his life. And to our lives. From there to here – a movement was grown. Essays and books were written, communities were formed, institutions were built, rabbis and future leaders are being trained. Rabbi Wine lived a whirlwind schedule that would put most of us to shame. He woke at 5am and usually did not get to bed before midnight. He read, he wrote, he taught, he lectured, he counseled. He officiated at
baby namings and bar and bat mitzvahs and weddings and funerals. He goaded, he lent compassion, he shared his strength. His love of travel, and his eagerness to learn about other cultures, led to amazing tours that he guided, often pushing the limits of his traveling companions to walk yet one more mile. He had a loving partner, Richard McMains, and they were together for 29 years. For one month each summer, they traveled the world over. To Turkey and Timbuktu. From India to Japan, from Egypt to Siberia. And, this summer, back again, once more, to Morocco.
No one doubted, of course, that Rabbi Wine’s highest devotion in life was to making Humanistic Judaism a viable alternative in the Jewish world. His energy was endless, his enthusiasm unbounded. A few years ago he retired as rabbi of the Birmingham Temple, but any thought of a condo in Florida never crossed his mind. He
was always making new plans, dreaming up new ideas, eager to visit new, growing communities, pushing and nudging and thinking what had to be done next to secure the future of our movement. At 79, he appeared to be tiring a little bit, seemingly dozing off at meetings and presentations, yet apparently not missing a word that was said and remarkably able to stir in time to tell everybody the real truth, according to Sherwin Wine.

Reader One:
The foundations of Humanistic Judaism have been established. There are communities and organizations to serve the needs of Humanistic Jews. There is a body of literature to articulate the message. There is recognition of our place in the Jewish world as a fifth denomination of Judaism. There are the creative voices of our present and our future. Above all, there is a large mass of unaffiliated cultural Jews out there who will choose to be Humanistic Jews when they discover that we can serve their needs.

Reader Two:
If we have enough years to test our skills, if we can see and enjoy the results of our work, if we can nurture our family and have them near, if we can love our friends and share their pains and pleasures over many seasons, if we have the time to develop our own unique style and know that it will not easily be forgotten, if we can die quickly, without the agonies of prolonged suffering – well, then death is not tragic.
For some people, life scripts are never meaningful unless they last forever. Others derive their grace from the rhythms of growth, fulfillment, and decay. What never ends cannot be very precious. Today cannot be special if there is always a tomorrow. In the flow of life, exits, like entrances, have their own dignity.

Narrator:
How fortunate we are to have known him, to have learned from him, to be the inheritors of the movement that he built for us, for our children, and for their children. We will carry on his work.

Reader One:
Immortality is not an illusion. The selfish kind is. The vision that imagines that each of us is indestructible, exempt from the laws of nature, immune to personal death. But there is a natural immortality. It finds its source in the two billion year old chain of life, in the experience of parents and children, in the sentimental power of human memory. Each of us is an extension of the past. Each us is an intimation of the future. We are more than individuals. We have connections. That is how we are born. That is why we never completely die. We receive our inheritance. We leave our legacy. Let us regard Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine as a special link in this chain of vital existence. May we honor him always with the gift of remembrance.

Narrator:
We pause now for a moment of silent reflection.
Reflection
Zay-kher tza-dee-keem lee-v’ra-kha — The remembrance of good people is a blessing.

The Rabbi Writes – December 1966

Posted on January 7, 2025 by Sherwin Wine

THE RABBI WRITES

A discussion group was recently established in a local Jewish women’s charity society. Considerable reflection was devoted to the topics and literature to be studied. Although there was a vague feeling that something contemporary would be most appropriate to the interests and of the membership, the overwhelming sentiment confirmed the decision that “since they were Jewish, they ought to know more about their Bible’. The inevitable consequence was that another Bible study group with a sense of patriotic devotion to the past was added to the endless roster of Scripture classes that fill the landscape of Jewisksuaboarban culture.

Now a decision to study the Bible or any lamas bank out of the Jewish past is most commendable. Certainly, it would be difficult to understand the origins and early development of Jewish customs and institutions without a familiar use of this early literature. The overwhelming commitment of Jewish piety in the years before the Emancipation was, with good reason, to Scriptural commentary and its derivative legal literature. In a cultural milieu where the Torah reigned supreme in more than a figurative sense no other procedure was morally possible.

But, today, the obsessive interest of the Jewish, religion school and adult education programs with Bible heroes, Scriptural Interpretation and Biblical archeology is an almost absurd affectation. In a secular environment where this Hebrew anthology has ceased to function in any realistic way as the supreme arbiter of thought and behavior, the choice to commit the limited amount of time available for religious study to the unraveling of Biblical “mysteries” is to exclude the possibility of getting to know alternative literature. Countless hours are devoted by talented clergymen to demonstrating how texts which appear to be both historically mythical and ethically irrelevant are, in reality, earth-shakingly significant. Why modern literature which expresses their sentiments more directly is less desirable for immediate study appears initially puzzling.

Liberal Jewish study programs are, to a large extent, unimaginative. They are the function of inertia and the guilt—feeling that allows the opposition to define what is religiously important. They also operate within the environment of a Protestant culture which regards the Bible as the greatest of all possible books and as representative of the only significant episodes in Jewish history. Whatever Jews did and said before the advent of Jesus is gigantic in import and worthy of a cinema cast of thousand; whatever they became afterwards is religiously irrelevant unless, like the State of Israel, the scenery has to do with the Holy Land. The fascination of Jews with the Dead Sea Scrolls cannot be justified either by their inspirational content or their historical wonder. (They are intellectually comparable to the religious pronouncements of some of the more bizarre sects of southern California). It can only be explained by an American Jewish desire to identify with historical moments which small-town Christian culture deems important.

We are to a large extent the prisoners of our interfaith goodwill. Eager to please and to find acceptence in an American culture that worshiped the Bible, we have insisted on passing ourselves off as the People of the Book, and the devotees of Biblical piety. Our defense mechanism against antisemitism is to plead the endorsement of the ‘Old Testament’ and to identify the modern Jew with all those simple patriarchs, Bedouin figures, and shepherd kings that Christians adore. One of the supreme ironies of American religious life is that the one group who through urbanized sophistication are most divorced from the belief framework and behavior patterns of the Scriptural milieu are the most eager to plead Biblical virtue. To the liberal American Jew, the Bible is not merely a record of how early Jews felt and believed; on that level it would not deserve one-half the concern lavished on it. Nor is it the major source of the contemporary Jew’s religious information or inspiration; if that were so, rabbis would not have to devote lecture after lecture, book after book, and class after class to “proving” its significance. Its power derives from its social setting. It happens to be the Jewish book the Gentile world likes most. It is, therefore, our supreme ego defense and our passport to religious respectability. The American Jewish concentration on Biblical study to the virtual exclusion of contemporary Jewish literature has certain harmful effects that prevent a viable and effective Judaism from emerging. These effects are itemized in the following observations.

(1) Contemporary official Jewish publication is still overwhelmingly apologetic, geared to convince Bible-believing Christians of Jewish worth and significance. American Judaism has a defensive quality that devours the easy ‘compliments’ of a James Michener and Max Dimont and resists the sober reality of modern Jewish belief and behavior. So long as Jews deem it socially necessary to indicate that they and the Pilgrims are religious twins, so long will organized Jewish religion of the liberal variety condemn itself to a wilderness of arid Biblical scholarship and the amused indifference of the secular and scientific world that claims our Jewish youth. Platitudes about the whole Bible being summed up in the Ten Commandments may give our behavior a tenuous connection with Levitical and prophetic teaching; but it only sums up the basic ethical irrelevance of the rest.

(2) A proper understanding and appreciation of the Bible is not possible until one is able to divorce it from Jewish ego needs and view it as an historical document that need not reflect our own beliefs and attitudes but did express the collective and often opposed views of our ancestors in the days of the First and Second Temples. In order to understand what we Jews are in the twentieth century we ought to thoroughly study our origins and to be aware of the early experiences that helped to mold the character traits of our social personality. But no objective study of these Biblical origins is possible if we feel compelled to defend the Bible or to prove that what the writers really meant to say is what we believe today.

(3) Most post-Biblical literature is indeed Bible oriented. The Midrash, the Talmud, and the medieval philosophic writings rely heavily on Biblical quotations and perpetually explain and clarify Scriptural verses. No other dependence is conceivable in an age which deemed the Torah a revealed constitution. But the connection is deceptive. In reality, the Biblical quotations are mere pretexts, twisted out of their historical contexts to justify change, innovation, and popular custom. What is most interesting about post-Biblical rabbinic literature is not its artificial connection with Biblical law and history, but its natural connection with the contemporary environment out of which it emerged. Biblical authority was important to the rabbis who preached; but, in reality, it was not something to be learned from; it was something to be used, a power to be invoked for the justification of conclusions the social environment had already dictated. Undue concentration on the Bible hides the true source of rabbinic decision and ethics.

(4) An appropriate Judaism must deal with the Jew as he really is, not as ancient literature conceived him. Since the modern Jew is the supreme product of urban living, his most significant religious literature ought to reflect this fact. Post-Emancipation Jewry, along with most of Western culture, underwent a revolutionary change in its almost total identification with the industrial city. This trauma is reflected today in the obvious truth that socially, economically, and technically our European great-grandfathers were closer to Rabbi Akiba eighteen centuries earlier than to us. Undue emphasis on the Bible distorts the nature of Jewish identity and living in the twentieth century. Shepherd patriarchs, Bedouin sheikhs, and country prophets are incongruous authority figures in the age of the urban technician and professional. If the Jews like the Amish were still identified with rural ‘virtues’, the Biblical emphasis might be tolerable. But the contrary is true. Of all things, the Jew is most identified with the citified professional. In contemporay America, the Bible becomes nothing more than charming nostalgia; it cannot help the Jew deal with his social reality. The economics and social relations of the East European, shtetl might have had some remote connection with the Biblical setting. Modern New York has none at all.

(5) Religion school curricula in liberal synagogues and temples ought to expose the student to important Biblical figures. But they ought to avoid making these personalities the supreme examples of Jewish virtue and intelligence. Like the Christian churches, Sunday School has too often turned into Bible story time. The child is exposed to a continuing series of personalities and events that bear little relationship to his own experience. Unless the genuine character of the ‘hero’ is distorted and violence is done to historical truth, the herdsman patriarch of Genesis is no real competition for the T.V. scientist and the shepherd soldier of Samuel runs a poor second to the astronaut. It may very well be true that if George Washington and Abraham Lincoln with all their embarrassing ‘newness’ can serve as contemporary heroes for little children, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein and Theodore Herzl might even do better ethically ad emotionally than Jephtha and Samson. Little Signumd at least lived in a city despite his Oedipus Complex; and Little Albert hated war even as a child.

Historically, the Bible has dominated the lesson parts of the Sabbath and holiday liturgy. Year after year the continuous Torah cycle repeats itself in synagogues committed to liberalism with no apparent signs of relief. Talented little Bar Mitsva boys arise to recite to Reform congregations the recipe for incense or the requirements for priestly ablutions. Even if the consecutive weekly readings are abandoned and the lessons are chosen by topic from the Bible, the range of lesson literature is confined to a set of documents edited and censored by Levitical priests, and expressive of a dogmatic world view that for all practical purposes died with the rise of rabbinic Judaism. No historical nostalgia can justify that perpetual waste of a congregation’s time. A creative liturgy would select ethical and philosophic lessons, both ancient and modern, that are both lucid, directly applicable, and intellectually respectable. Why is the pedestrian work of a fifth-century Jerusalem priest to be preferred as a Sabbath lesson to the poetry of Martin Buber?

The alternative to Biblical lessons is not rabbinic literature. In many respects the observations of Talmudic and medieval writers are considerably more sophisticated than the perceptions of Biblical authors; but they are no more expressive of the thought patterns and world outlook of the modern Western Jew than their Bible predecessors. Since Jewish identity in European and American culture is no longer a function of belief and ritual commitment but rather of birth and historical memory the criterion for Jewish literature cannot be conformity to a certain set of ideas or loyalty to a particular linguistic tradition. In a society which cherishes the basic necessity of free inquiry Jewish writing is the literary product of anyone who is born into the social identity of being Jewish. The self-awareness that arises from this condition, whether articulated or not, is the single factor that unites this body of writing and identifies it.

The literary works of Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Isaiah Berlin and Sidney Hook, for all their apparent topical diversities and universal relevance, are products of persons who share the Jewish social “fate”; and, therefore, are as expressive of the twentieth-century Jewish reality as Isaac Singer or Agnon. A religious society that purports to reveal the role of the Jewish people in the modern world will prefer their words to merely ancient ones. To the Jew of the post-Emancipation world the Bible may serve his need for historical pride; but a viable Judaism must help him relate effectively to the real flesh and blood people who share his ‘destiny’. Erich Fromm may indeed be a better object of study for a Jewish study group than the Book of Genesis. Outside the romance of venerability he is a much more effective expression of what we are, feel, and really desire to be.

Our conclusion is simple. The ‘sacred’ literature of Judaism must reflect the reality of Jewish life and belief. It must be a faithful record of the social and scientific revolution that has transformed the Jewish mind and made the Bible a book of primarily historical interest.

The Rabbi Writes – November 1966

Posted on January 7, 2025 by Sherwin Wine

THE RABBI WRITES

In a recent conversation with a rabbinic friend he deplored the increasing involvement of organized religious groups in programs of social action. While he clearly affirmed the traditional religious concern with social justice, he believed that the mixing of religion and political action to be a serious mistake. On pragmatic grounds he denied that church and temple programs to promote the passage of liberal legislation enhanced the prestige and significance of religious organizations. And on ethical grounds he rejected the idea that religion best fulfilled its moral idealism by direct assaults on government and public opinion.

He supported his assertion by citing five arguments. Firstly, he pointed out, religious social action is as old as history. Almost every classical priesthood has sought to use existing political power to achieve its moral goals. The Spanish Inquisition and American prohibition are perfect examples of organized church attempts to influence the course of government. They are expressions of the requirements for social stability as conceived by those who proposed them. In fact, the record of religious political activity has been both considerable and reactionary. The traditional American reluctance to allow church interference with state procedures and legislation arises out of this dismal achievement. Therefore, to invite liberal groups to organize the prestige pressure of religion to secure special laws in the area of civil rights and curb civil liberties is to invite all groups to do so. What is fair for religious liberals is also fair for religious conservatives. And, given the past record of church interference, it would be better to sacrifice the small amount of liberal action in order to justify conservative abstinence.

Secondly, social justice is a derivative of the general principle of justice. An appropriate division of labor must exist in our society. While political groups and political parties work out the specifics of implementing the general ethical precept, religious groups should be concerned with articulating and teaching the overarching moral principle. Without a clear understanding of the basic philosophic foundation of appropriate ethical behavior, social action is impulsive. Therefore, let churches and synagogues concentrate on what they can do uniquely and well. Thirdly, religious prestige depends on the public notion that what is taught is eternal and changeless truth. Since any particular social legislation is a testable procedure that may be proved either inadequate or harmful, to identify the decision of religion with what may possibly prove to be false is to squander its power and diminish its influence.

Fourthly, the key to a perfected society is a perfected individual.

Unless the individual citizen through extensive self-discipline is willing to adjust his personal behavior to the stated ideal, appropriate social change is impossible. The function of a religious society is not to influence people in general but to mold persons in particular. If it dissipates its energies in broad programs of social action, it will be distracted form its primary goal of improving the ethical discipline of its individual members. Personal guidance, not collective action, is its special forte; for too often religious social action is premature, a cover-up for unresolved hostilities and self-righteousness. And fifthly, it is more than obvious that dozens of political and social pressure groups are already in existence. From the NAACP to Planned Parenthood, they are clammering for membership and support. Why then should religious congregations duplicate and “deefficientize” the present institutional framework? Would it not be preferable to encourage individual members to join the existing secular action groups of their choice?

When my rabbinic friend finished his reasoned argument, I acknowledged that his criticism was perceptive, but disagreed. I offered the following counter-arguments.

(1) Undoubtedly, most organized religious social action during the past three thousand years has restricted human liberty and supported class distinction. And, undoubtedly, the abstinence of conservative religious groups from political action is conducive to social progress as liberals view it. But the stark reality is often missed. The defender of the status quo does not need to act in order to “act”. Since the existing restrictions and inequalities conform to the desire of the conservative, non-activity is his best defense. Bigots in the South can deplore church pressure for civil liberties because the entire social structure supports their ethical view. And segregationists in the suburban North can applaud the discretion of non-political pastors because the pervading prejudice requires no further confirmation. If liberal religious groups abstain from social action, they do not then deprive the opposition of the justification for political pressuring; they just leave the field wide open to the powerful inertia of the status quo.

(2) To equate religion with general moral principles alone is to turn it into a verbal wasteland. For no person who seeks to rationalize his behavior or to influence public opinion will ever admit to opposing “love, honor, mercy, justice, goodness, truth, beauty – you name it!” Even Prime Minister Vorster of South Africa recently quoted Amos when he exhorted his segregated citizenry to “seek good and not evil.” On the level of general ethical precepts he is in total verbal agreement with Martin Luther King. It’s the “non-religious” specifics that are the rub.

Moral advice that nobody can conceivably disagree with is the equivalent of no advice at all. It has achieved the elevated plateau of the cliche where neither any particular evidence nor any particular action are relevant. The prophets in Biblical times may have spouted the same ethical formulas about loving good and hating evil their enemies were fond of using; but that verbal convention made them neither useful nor controversial. They entered into the realm of a morality that counts when they made specific proposals for political, economic, and ritual reform. If the problem with modern theology is its nebulous character, the problem with much contemporary religious morality is a similar chronic vagueness.

(3) If one is a traditional theist then the question of eternal truth is a real problem and a burdensome one to boot. How one discovers meaningful statements that no possible future experiential evidence can refute is a struggle that no humanist has to confront. Because, for a humanist, the only “eternal” truths are definitions; and, from the informational point of view, they are trivial. All significant assertions about what procedures are conducive to human happiness are “risks”; they must continually face the test of social experience.

If clergymen and religious societies imagine that their prestige depends on always being right, they will never say anything worth listening to. While decisions which are irresponsible to evidence must be deplored, decisions to act which are based on a careful study of the relevant facts must be applauded. For the influence and status of religion in our scientific culture will not be maintained by a pose of infallibility; it will only be confirmed by the courage to be wrong when a social decision is required. To rationalize a desire for safety by pushing “everlasting truth” is a cheap out.

(4) There exists in the revolutionary mythology of America a false notion that the moral reformation of society must begin with the voluntary decision of individuals themselves; and that the most effective procedure for social progress is the personal persuasion and education of individual citizens. The best kind of church or temple, according to this view, devotes it’s energies to helping its members achieve self-respect and proper sensitivity to human need.

While it is certainly true that without a sense of personal worth and the absence of self-righteousness, individual participation in social acti may prove harmful; and while it is also true that a temple must, first and above all, help the individual improve himself through insight and self- discipline, it is not the case that the conditions which will make him a free and creative individual are totally within his personal control. Man is not only the molder of the society in which he lives; he is also the product and prisoner of it. What he is willing to say and do depends on how he views the distribution of power in his society. The collective decisions of the government, big business, big labor, and the military determine his social behavior much more significantly than the preaching of any priest or rabbi. If a religious congregation is genuinely interested in promoting the happiness and integrity of its individual members, it must trascend itself and directly seek to influence the power groups that set the pattern of social acceptance and conformity. Morality without social power remains the fantasy of the Sunday School classroom.

(5) That secular action groups already exist to influence the power structure is obvious; and that individual members of a congregation ought to be encouraged to join the political parties and political pressure groups of their choice is clearly valid. But that does not preclude the collective action of a total congregation or a part of a congregation where the appropriateness of a particular social action is fairly certain.

It is almost a psychological truism that cooperative effort will be more effective where the people involved have more than a peripheral relationship to each other. The problem with many secular action groups is that the individual members are only incidentally connected with one another; while in the small congregation in particular, there is a long history of involved social relationships that precede any group effort. Churches and temples provide the common personal and friendship bonds that hold a group together and flavor work with the pleasure of social intimacy. Many people who would never choose to join an independent action group will involve themselves in social justice if they are provided with the security and continuity of the temple family.

Moreover, the immense residual-prestige of religion in our culture makes organized religion a significant power factor. If social justice is promoted by church institutions, authority which few other groups can confer is given to the support of action. Now it may be true that this authority is presently unearned and unjustified. But that issue is irrelevant; the point is that religious institutions have it.

The Rabbi Writes – September 1966

Posted on January 7, 2025January 7, 2025 by Sherwin Wine

THE RABBI WRITES

The increasing frequency of dialogues between Jewish and Christian clergymen has evoked considerable reaction. Among Jewish laymen who are sensitive to the problem of social acceptance and who are prone to judge the value of their rabbi by his interfaith success, this new development is welcomed and applauded. Any action that will promote the goodwill of the Centile community is unconsciously supported as a factor of security. Among Christian laymen and clergymen who are guilt-ridden by the antisemitism of the past or who have suddenly awakened to the Jewish origins of Jesus and regard this fact as significant, the dialogue is felt as both therapeutic and informative.

However, a recent article by Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits in the quarterly Judaism resists this optimism and throws theological cold water on the entire procedure. Dr. Berkovits who is the chairman of the department of Jewish philosophy in the Orthodox Hebrew Theological College in Skokie, Illinois, disputes the view that anything of substantive value can emerge from these interfaith conversations. While he freely admits that Jews and Christians can get together to discuss ways and means to implement shared ethical ideals like racial integration and civil liberty, he denies that any meaningful dialogue is possible when the ideological underpinnings of these ideals are discussed. A rabbi and a priest may both fervently believe in the value of open housing, but the authority structure which gives them this ideal is different in each case. The Talmudically-defined Torah is clearly distinct from the Pope in Council, although the former may produce the same moral results as the latter. Two radically opposed sets of premises and operating procedures coincide only in certain ethical consequences. It is therefore futile for a group of clergymen or laymen, each committed to a different method for the discovery of religious truth, to sit down and engage in conversation on theological issues when they do not even share a common procedure for dealing with questions. The authoritative utterances of the Mishnaic rabbis are as irrelevant to Christian argument as the papal decrees are to Jewish.

In the Middle Ages, it is true, Jews engaged in forced disputations with Christian scholars. In France, Spain, and Italy countless rabbis were drafted for the humiliating spectacle of hearing their Gentile adversaries quote the Hebrew Bible to prove the truth of Christianity and the falsity of Judaism. But the common use of the “Old Testament” was no indication of a common possession. For all practical purposes, the Bible is only a collection of words, the meaning of which depends on the interpreting authority. It becomes a different book in the hands of each tradition. “Sharing the Bible” is an interfaith cliche which provides no feasible basis for interfaith dialogue.

According to Berkovits the mutual encounter of Jews and Christians in an intimate discussion of religious beliefs is at best boring and at worst useless. No possible good can arise from a conversation in which the participants do not speak the same language. Opposing logics only yield frustration.

Berkovits’s denunciation has been received with mixed emotion by the Jewish public. While certain militant Orthodox rabbis endorse his stand, the overwhelming reaction has been adverse. He has been accused of narrow parochialism, segregationist withdrawal, and interfaith sabotage. But none of his critics has answered his argument. If Judaism and Christianity are indeed distinct religions, each operating out of a special view of a special divine revelation, then to what purpose is any ideological conversation beyond merely announcing each other’s point of view. No genuine discussion exists where the issue at stake is not debatable.

Although I stand at the opposite end of the religious spectrum to that of Dr. Berkovits, I share much of his apprehension. Few experiences can be as valueless as interfaith encounters. Groups of clergymen, gathering together to discuss questions of God, man, and the universe, usually end up spouting the denominational party line and boring each other with their respective pronouncements. No meaningful discussion ensues because none is possible.

The same problem burdens Jewish intrafaith dialogue. Orthodox and Reform Jews can engage in no effective give and take because they lack a common logic whereby to carry on any argument or investigation. Un- less one takes the Orthodox plunge of faith to the infallibility of the Torah, one cannot even enter the conversations. Many Jewish religious debates are purposeless precisely because the opponents cannot help but be irrelevant to each other.

Nevertheless, despite his perceptive criticism, Dr. Berkovits has missed the reality of much “interfaith” dialogue. In many cases the conversations can become genuine ideological discussions because the insurmountable barriers which are theoretically present are not really present at all. Four observations will clarify what I mean.

(1) If the participants in the dialogue enter the conversation as “labels”, as representatives of denominations and theological vested interests, then any “discussion” of religious beliefs is valueless. As “labels” burdened with the tradition of exclusiveness, Protestants cannot talk to Catholics; nor can Catholics talk to Jews.

But if the participants enter as individuals, who are momentarily willing to transcend their denominational roles (for there is no group of professionals who love to play roles more than clergymen) and to “let their hair down”, much positive good is possible.

As individuals, the participants share a common American environment and a host of identical experiences, which serve as an appropriate basis foi commonality. And as individuals they are not as cocksure about their sectarian ideologies as the party line of their respective denominations claim they ought to be. In fact, too many Jewish laymen in dialogue with Christian laymen talk about “what we Jews believe” rather than what they as distinct persons believe.

(2) If the discussants feel the dialogue is a vehicle for defending their religious position as priest, minister, or rabbi; if they are un- consciously more interested in establishing the “superior” observations of their religious teachers than in an honest pursuit of the truth, the dialogue will degenerate into self-flattering declamations of the “best” in Judaism and Christianity. So many clergymen are defensive in the presence of their congregants that they remain defensive in the presence of other clergymen. And so many religious laymen feel guilty about their lack of belief in what their “label” instructs them to believe that, in conversations with outsiders, they compensate by becoming aggressively protective of what their minds and hearts have already rejected. We in the Birmingham Temple have learned this truth through bitter experience. But if the participants can accept their reality without guilt, and not be afraid that th2 truth may embarrass their position; if they can talk together without feeling that the bishop or the ADL is looking over their shoulders, the results can be an opening of soul to soul.

(3) Too many dialoguers imagine that the doubts-they possess are uniquely theirs. They imagine that the bold affirmations of their colleagues indicate an equally bold belief. In most cases, the opposite is true. If the discussion enables the participants to share their religious doubts as well as their affirmations, a bond of mutuality, of “being in the same boat” pervades the conversation and breaks down the barriers of ideological pretense. The religious problems that confront Jews are,-to a large degree, the same problems that confront Christians. It could not be otherwise, since both are exposed to the same naturalistic and scientific environment. A dialogue of shared doubts, therefore, lends to the realization that sectarian exclusiveness is often only a sham.

(4) Finally, and most important, it is necessary to point out that much of the apprehension of interreligious conversations among traditionalists and group survival minded liberals is the frightening knowledge that what often appears to be interfaith isn’t interfaith at all, and the consequent fear that mutual exposure will reveal this fact.

The truth of the situation is that most of the clergymen or laymen who participate in these dialogues are much more the products of their secular environments than of the denominational world that claims them. Given the opportunity to articulate what they really do believe in an atmosphere of security and friendship, they discover that the exclusive Jewish and Christian methods for arriving at religious truth which appeared as unscalable barriers really don’t exist at all and that a commonsensical, fairly empirical, somewhat pragmatic approach to truth is what they all share. And once that realization is achieved, discussion is possible. In fact, in many cases, what is discovered is that while they may wildly disagree on all sorts of conclusions about the world, they share a kind of common religion, a common way of dealing with questions and finding evidence.

The danger of dialogue to the existing sects, Jewish and Christian, is that it may reveal the “painful” discrepancy between institutional allegiance and personal belief, even among clergymen, and expose the underlying unities that the professional theologians wish to deny. The “blessing” of the dialogue to the welfare and integrity of religion is that it may give strength to timid clergymen and laymen to be more honest

The irony of the new opening in religious “confessions” is that, given one set of circumstances where clergymen and laymen play their institutional roles, nothing can be more insipid; given another set of conditions where individuals and friends respond to each other in free security, nothing can be more meaningful.

The Rabbi Writes – April 1967

Posted on January 7, 2025 by Sherwin Wine

THE RABBI WRITES

A non-Jewish friend recently confided in me certain feelings and observations that he was afraid to articulate in public. He revealed that during the past year he had been consumed by an irresistible desire to discover the source of Jewish intellectual distinctiveness and creativity. Fascinated by the liberal and anti-authoritarian character of most of the Jews he encountered in the academic and political world he was intrigued by the origin of this phenomenon. In his intent to be a serious student he took the suggestion of every interfaith institute rabbi he encountered and proceeded to investigate the ‘sacred’ literature of the Jewish people. He spent many hours reading and rereading the Bible, and patiently supplementing the classic with selected passages from the Talmud in English translation. Nevertheless, the more diligently he studied, the more puzzled he became. While he discovered many statements that were ethically significant and many stories that were aethetically precious, he very quickly noted that the mood of the literature was conservative, pedantic rather than intellectual, and decidedly authoritarian. The Jew of the Bible and the Talmud seemed to have absolutely no relationship to the urbane and humorful American Jew he so frequently encountered.

If I had been on my proper ‘interfaith’ toes I would have assured my friend that his reading of the ancient literature was superficial and without profound insight. I would have showered him with effusive complements about the earth-shaking influence of both the Bible and Talmud. I would have reminded him that the entire structure of contemporary Western religious civilization rests on the pronouncements of this sacred literature. I might even have tossed at him the observation that human moral sensitivity depends on the insights of the ancient Jewish writers. But I didn’t have the heart – because he was right.

It is simply an observable fact, obvious to any reader that can transcend his interfaith defensiveness, that the ‘ancient books’ of Judaism do not correspond in mood and temperament to the reality of the modern Jew. While a certain ethical continuity prevails, the chief characteristics that philo-Semites find so admirable in present day Jewry are totally absent. The distinguishing marks of internationalism, intellectuality, liberalism, humorful skepticism, and urbanity which earn the ecstatic praise of Jew lovers and the passionate denunciation of Jew haters are quite alien to the solemn and pious temperament of the writers. With the exception of the pseudo-sophistication of Ecclesiastes, temperamental identity between ancient past and modern present is essentially non-existent.

This reality points up the problem that the study of Jewish history presents. If, in our attempt to understand the nature of contemporary Jews and Judaism, we concentrate on the verbal utterances of famous authority figures, we shall achieve no more insight into the nature of the Jewish personality than my diligent Gentile friend. To concentrate our investigation on the famous or less than famous sayings of prophets and rabbis is to pursue the kind of naive historical study that gives no indication of how we got from Jeremiah to Freud. It is to assume that the major forces influencing Jewish life arise out of the conscious instruction of official teachers, while the truth of the matter is quite the opposite. For the chief historical factors in Jewish development have been ‘unconscious’ and completely unarticulated by the prestige figures of the past. We are what we are in many cases – not because of our sacred literature but in spite of it.

An honest Judaism is always more interested in the nature of the Jew than in the verbalizing of official spokesmen. The problem with much of modern Jewish education is an overemphasis on what Jews said they were and an under-emphasis on an objective and critical study of Jewish history. Since religious institutions are notoriously conservative, they are the last ones to reflect social change. Their creeds and pronouncements often take many centuries to articulate the operating beliefs of a culture. To explore the reality of what it means to be Jewish by tasting the spoken words of famous ancient Jews is to eat cake by simply licking the frosting.

A few observations may clarify the thesis.

(1) The overwhelming majority of modern Jews tend to be internationalist in their outlook. While antisemitism and the Hitler holocaust have made them passionate defenders of Israel; and while social insecurity often turns the small-town American Jew into a verbal superpatriot, fanatic chauvinism is largely absent from the operating ideologies of the western Jew. Most Jews are identified with political and social movements that subordinate nationalism to international cooperation and view racial and cultural differences as less significant than human unity. The epithet ‘the international Jew’ with which the antisemite assaults his enemy, is, in reality perceptive. Although the bigot views internationalism as a sin, he rightly observes that the contemporary Jew tends to regard national boundaries as less significant than others.

To explain this phenomenon by picking odd quotations from the Bible and Talmud is irresponsible. The sacred scriptures exude a mood of passionate nationalism and Zionistic fervor which back up the eternally sacred character of Palistine for the Jew with the firm endorsement of a universal deity. Even the Messianic dream involves the vindication of the superiority of Jewish insight and the return of all Jews to their land. If it is true that Jahveh punishes our people and complains about them, it is also true that he has chosen us, and us alone, as his priests.

The internationalism of the Western Jew finds no congenial home in the old texts. It finds its source and inspiration in the often unrecorded experiences of the Jewish dispersion. The Jew, the most passionate of ancient chauvinists, acquired the potential for universalism through the pain of his ‘exile’. Dispersed to the four corners of the earth and regarded as an outlawed pariah by the Christian world, he became by necessity the first internationalist. Although his daily study introduced him to nationalistic fantasies, his daily experience divorced him from the intensity of local patriotism. To be a Jew required the mentality of the wanderer and the world citizen. His prayers may have been filled with devotion to Zion, but his realistic encounters made him wary of patriotic fervor. National chauvinism and antisemitism were too often companions. When the Emancipation came, the Jew had been transformed. Although he might verbally pose the superpatriot, his histrical memories resisted the role. By his fears and not by his study he had been temperamentally converted.

(2) The image of the modern Jew is that of the intellectual. Although the claim is a bit pretentious, it is certainly true that the European Jew, once exposed to the delights of university education, swallowed the experience more zealously than others. Jews today are noted for their penchant for secular education and the high value they place on the academician.

Yet nothing in their official literature would suggest such a bent. The Talmudic rabbis railed against the Greeks and denounced their style of inquiry. Neither the Bible nor the Talmud is structured in the logical way that would meet the minimum standards of a competent abstract thinker. Although literacy and Torah study were widespread among Jews, neither suggested intellectuality. For the character of the intellectual is not determined by the ability to read or by the amount of study. It is always determined by how one reads and studies. The curriculum of the Polish heder or yeshiva was no more intellectual than the study program of an Algiers Koran school.

The proverbial verbalness of the modern Jew is a much better clue to the origin we seek. For intellectuality and abstract thinking always starts with a fascination with words. Verbal people enjoy words and the manipulation of words; and this disposition leads inevitably to logic and analysis. Verbalness is not the product of abstract thinking. The reverse is true; manipulating words is the mother of abstraction. If Jews are intellectual, it is because they became verbal.

The Jewish fascination with words is not the product of Bible study or prescription. If that were the case, the Muslims in their devotion to the Koran and the Protestants in their devotion to the Scriptures would be equally verbal. The Jewish attachment to words is the result of the indispensability of speech for Jewish survival. In the post-Talmudic period, when Jews were stripped of any form of physical defense and when they were thrust into the nascent professions of the middle class, the only weapon of survival the Jew possessed was the persuasion of speech. If words hold a special charisma for Jews, it is with good reason. By their power alone did Jews meet the assault of the outer world. The verbal finesse of the Polish Jew is not something the Talmud gave to the Jew; it is something the Polish Jew gave to the Talmud. With the opening of the secular schools to his participation, the European Jew brought the same precision to the social and physical sciences.

(3) Jews, in the modern world, are notorious anti-authoritarians. They feature a skeptical humor that deflates the pompous and shatters pretense; where others tend to be accepting of obedience, Jews resist it and find it emotionally necessary to question and challenge. Jewish creativity in the arts and sciences has largely been due to the Jewish willingness to resist conformity and defy established theories.

A free and healthy society requires a reasonable resistance to authority. And yet historic Judaism, no less than historic Christianity or Islam was an authoritarian culture in which a scholar class posed itself as the guardians and interpreters of God’s truth. While rabbis might disagree among each other, every rabbi in his own baliwick, demanded obedience. And, while Jews might grumble and complain, they accepted the authority of the scholar class and did not resist. Within the community, the Jew was an obedient conformist and the temper of the Bible and Talmud reinforced this attitude.

But the Jewish attitude toward authority was not determined after the dispersion so much by the inner community as by the outside world. Away from the comforts of ‘home’, the Jew found himself placed in a general environment where the Gentile rulers were invariably hostile. The princes might talk a great deal about justice and mercy but the Jew was never the recipient of these ideals. As the centuries advanced, the Jews developed a well-deserved skepticism to outside authority. While within the framework of their own community, they remained loyally obedient, their attitude to the more powerful rulers that dominated their lives was one of severe reservation tinged with the revenge of laughter. When the trauma of the Emancipation destroyed the structure of the ghetto community, the free Jew then directed his long-acquired healthy scepticism to the authorities of the inner community. The rabbis and the sacred literature now received the critical grilling the Jew had repeatedly used against the commands of the Gentile world.

(4) Jews today are generally regarded as liberals. Although the bigots of Wayne, New Jersey may find the quality reprehensible, philosemites adore it. By the label ‘liberal’ we simply want to indicate that an individual finds social change desirable, as opposed to a ‘conservative’ who prefers to retain the status quo. The Jew of today is often a pioneer of change. If fashions alter, if new ideas are to be tested, the Jew is emotionally susceptible to try the new. Even in the promotion of social experiment, the Jew is conspicuous by his presence.

Why? Certainly, Jewish literary indoctrination is conservative. The sacred texts promote the immutability of the law and the eternity of the Torah. If changes are allowed, they are justified as painful necessities not as desirable events. While conservatives initiate change, they do so with sadness and reluctance. The mood of rabbinic Judaism is pervaded by this regret.

The contemporary Jewish mood owes little to this religious conservatism. If Jews are easily amenable to change, their adaptability is a function of their history not their official literature. Against their will, the Jews were compelled by the necessities of persecution to adapt to new environments. Although their indoctrination denied the value of change, their experience affirmed it. Moreover, early in their dispersion Jews abandoned the agricultural and pastoral pursuits of their Biblical era and became reluctant devotees of city living, urbanized as a people long before other groups, they abandoned the stable patterns of agrarian living for the more dynamic style of bourgeois existence. While their religious literature made heroes our of patriarchal shepherds with dispositions for simplicity and stability, the Jews assumed a new pattern of living within the city culture. It is a supreme irony that while the Jews have been among all European peoples, the most addicted to urbane living, the sacred literature is supposed to define the Jewish personality is utterly divorced from it. Liberalism is a by-product of the most significant Jewish social experience an experience which Sabbath study and Sabbath reading never reveal to any congregation.

The conclusion is clear. If an effective Judaism must describe what Jews are and not what they were, a revamping of the history program in most temples is indispensable. One will never discover the origin of the significant modern Jewish personality traits by studying the official texts of ancient times. Contrary to public belief, the Biblical and Talmudic periods are less significant in understanding the nature of the modern Jew than the almost unrecorded centuries of the Dispersion. The unconscious social forces that do not speak must be spoken for.

The Rabbi Writes – March 1967

Posted on January 7, 2025 by Sherwin Wine

THE RABBI WRITES

In recent years I have encountered a persistent objection to the vocabulary of the Birmingham Temple. Many perceptive and sensitive observers have affirmed the value of the Temple philosophy and program. They readily acknowledge that the group work and fellowship are meaningful experiences. But they counter with the objection, “How can you call your organization a Temple?” Humanism may be a ‘great’ philosophy of life. It may even be the ideological answer to man’s twentieth century needs. Yet, if there is one thing it isn’t, it isn’t a religion. If you’re so concerned about the meticulous use of vocabulary that you abstain from God-language, why then would you not be equally careful with the word ‘religion’?

The question is a significant one. If we are going to designate our philosophy and institution as religious, then we must be as precise and accurate with the phrases we employ as we expect the theologian to be with the words he uses. After all, there is something called the ethics of words! One has a moral obligation to be faithful to the historic meaning of ordinary words.

Now to discover the authentic significance of ‘religion’ we must clarify the unique characteristics of the religious experience. It will not do to either arbitrarily pick a definition that is convenient to one’s vested interest or to cite those qualities of the experience that it shares with other human possibilities. A proper definition must rely on what is peculiar to the event under analysis. Nor will selecting a vague phrase that makes ‘religion’ the sum total of everything promote understanding. To define religion as ‘the Pursuit of fulfillment’ or the ‘pursuit of salvation’ or ‘the act of relating to the universe as a whole’ is to consign the term to the limbo of words that have lots of prestige but refer to nothing in particular. For after all, what human activity from psychiatry to politics is not concerned with human fulfillment? And what human procedure does not involve relating to the universe ‘as a whole’?

Initially we must do away with the verbal debris; we must clarify what religion is not. Many liberals are fond of designating the religious experience as the moral dimension of human life, as the ethical commitment of the individual. However, while it is certainly true that all historic religions have been vitally concerned with social right and wrong, it is also true that there are hosts of activities, normally designated as religious, that have nothing at all to do with ethical propriety. Lighting candles and celebrating spring festivals are part of piety and morally neutral. Moreover, large numbers of sincere and sensitive people think of themselves and are regarded by others as both ethical and non religious.

Many popular definers prefer to associate religion with the act of faith as opposed to the procedures of empirical reasoning. Religion is viewed as a unique approach to questions of truth. While this definition may be attractive by its simplicity, it will not “hold water”. Certainly the act of reasoning through observable evidence is common to parts of all sacred scriptures; and the procedure of intuitive trust in the truthfulness of self-proclaimed authorities is as common to the daily procedures of politics and business as it is to those endeavors that are normally regarded as religious.

As for the persistent attempts to identify religion with the worship of God, they may be appropriate within the narrow framework of Western culture but invalid universally. The Confucian ethical tradition and the Buddhist Nirvana are religiously as significant as God and yet are quite distinct from the normal notion of deity. Nor will the Julian Huxley definition of the religious experience as the apprehension of the sacred quite do. To simply describe the sacred as that which is able to arouse awe, wonder, and reverence is to identify its consequences but not to clarify the nature of its constituent parts. Without analysis the definition simply substitutes one mystery for another.

A proper view of religion requires an honest confrontation with certain historical realities. Too often clerical liberals choose to designate what is ‘unpleasant’ about traditional religious practice as secondary and peripheral. They refuse to confront the possibility that what they stand for may in any way be ‘less religious’ than what the traditionalists proclaim. In a culture where to be ‘more religious’ is to be more respectable, the refusal is understandable although it is hardly conducive to an objective study of religion.

What are the historical realities which our study cannot ignore? Six facts are most significant.

(1) In almost every culture religious institutions are the most conservative. It is historically demonstrable that ecclesiastical procedures change more slowly than other social patterns. Ideas which are regarded as radical and revolutionary within the framework of church and synagogue are usually regarded as commonplace in other areas of human behavior. While most institutions resist change, organized religion has been the most supportive of the status quo. Intrinsic to established ‘priesthoods’ is the notion that change may be necessary but not desirable.

(2) Religious teachers and prophets persistently refuse to admit that their ideas are new. If they do, the indispensable sacred character of their revelations disappear. From Moses to Bahaullah the religious radical must always demonstrate that he is, in reality, the most genuine of conservatives. Moses pleaded the endorsement of Abraham; Jesus insisted that he was but the fulfiller of old prophecies. Mohammed posed as the reviver of pure monotheism; and Luther claimed that he desired only to restore the pristine and authentic Christianity. As for Confucius, he denied originality and attributed all his wisdom to old emperors. Even the Jewish Reformers vehemently affirmed that they were guilty of no basic novelty but were simply recapturing the true message of the true Prophets. No historic religious ‘genius’ has ever desired to claim a new idea. Change is made to appear an illusion. ‘New’ concepts are either old ones long forgotten or old ones reinterpreted. Novelty is historically irreligious.

(3) In ordinary English the word ‘religious’ is usually equivalent to the Yiddish ‘frumm’. Both adjectives are tied up with the notion of ritualism. An individual is judged as ‘more religious’ or ‘less religious’ by the degree of his ritual behavior. The liberal may protest that this usage is narrow and primitive. But he still has to explain why even sophisticated speakers, when they relax with the word ‘religious’ and are nondefensive, choose to associate it with repetitive ceremonies.

(4) The annual cycle of seasons, as well as the life cycle of human growth and decay are universal concerns of all organized religions. Spring and puberty may have no apparent ethical dimension but they are certainly more characteristic of historic religious interest than social action. We may deplore the religious obsession with Bar Mitsva. But then, after all, we have to explain it.

(5) Despite Whitehead’s popular definition of religion as that, which man does with his solitude, most religious activities have to do with group action. In most cultures sacred events are not separable from either family loyalty or national patriotism. The very word ‘religion’ is a Roman term for the sum of public ceremonies that express the allegiance of the citizen to the state. Even the ancestor cult which defines the popular religion of most the Eastern world is an act of group loyalty that diminishes the significance of the isolated individual and enhances the importance of family continuity. Historic religion started with the group and is not easily separable from it.

(6) The notion of the saint or the holy man permeates most religious cultures. This revered individual achieves his status not only because of his impeccable ritual and moral behavior but also because he is able to enjoy the summit of the religious experience. To be able to transcend this messy world of space-time change and to unite mystically with what is beyond change, space and time is his special forte. The mystic experience has almost universally been regarded as the supreme religious event and the entree into the supernatural.

Any adequate theory about the nature of the religious experience and its unique characteristics must be able to explain these six facts. It must find the common cord that binds these disparate events together. While many factors can account for some of them, only one theory takes care of all of them. And this theory is inseparable from the initial concern of historic philosophy.

It is interesting to note that the origin of philosophic inquiry and metaphysics lies in a disdain for the sensible world of continual change and, in a persistent love of what is eternal and beyond decay. Plato was adored by later theologians because of his ‘religious’ temperament. He detested the world of impermanence and asserted that wisdom was only concerned with entities that never change. The chaotic world of space-time events which modern science investigates was anathema to his pursuit of knowledge. If the Greeks were unable to develop the rudiments of a real empiricism, herein lay their problem. Whatever they searched for had to be deathless and eternal.

In fact, the search for the deathless is the psychic origin of the (religious experience. The human individual is a unique animal. He alone is fully aware of his personal separateness from other members of his species and conscious of the temporary nature of his own existence. He fears death and often needs to believe that dying is an illusion. In his anxiety he probes the world for persons and forces which enjoy the blessing of immortality. With these he seeks to identify and find the thrill of being part of something ‘bigger than me.’ The religious experience is universally an act of feeling ‘at one with’ what seems to possess the aura of eternity.

If we take this definition, and test it by the evidence, it works superbly. It explains the essentially conservative nature of historic religion. Change, experiment, and mere opinion are in spirit nonreligious. Only eternal truths will do. All seeming change is pure illusion; and even the most radical steps must be covered up by the cloak of ‘reinterpretation.’ The definition also clarifies why all new truths must be labelled as old. The religious temperament requires the solace of age, and venerablity. Even if the good word is humanly new, it turns out to be ‘divinely old.’

The theory explains the religious power of ritual. Traditional ceremony is not significant because of its ethical symbolism; that excuse is a sop for the modern intellect. Ritual acts derive their psychic punch from the fact that they are meticulously identical and repetitive. In a world of continual and frightening change they give to human behavior the feeling of eternity. Their power is not symbolic; it is intrinsic to the ceremony itself. New observances that are labelled as new may be aesthetically charming, but they lack the religious dimension. As for the seasons and life-cycle events, what greater evidence is required to substantiate the thesis? Societies may undergo revolutions and violent social upheaval; they may experience the overthrow of every existing value and idea. But the explosion is powerless to alter the relentless sequence of spring, summer, fall, winter – birth, puberty, maturity, and death. Nothing is more ‘ternal’ than the seasons. Their continual repetition is an ultimate ‘security’.

Moreover, the group character of most religious observance reflects the human desire for permanence. The family and the nation have always been inseparable from the major religious experiences of any culture, simply because they suggest the immortality the individual does not. And the mystic experience is equally explained by this need to defeat change and death. The ecstasy of the ‘saint’ is rationalized as an encounter with the changeless. To ‘transcend’ the world of space and time may be informationally absurd; but as an exclamation of victory over the fear of death it has emotional significance.

If then the unique character of the religious experience is the act of identifying with what appears to be ‘permanent’, a proper understanding of humanism requires the following observations.

(1) The religious temperament and the pursuit of knowledge through empirical procedures are imcompatible. Humanism is committed to the techniques of modern science; and all proper statements within this framework are tentative, subject to the refutation of future evidence. Empiricism cannot tolerate eternal truths about man and the universe. The conditional character of all knowledge with an infinite capacity for adjustment is its special power and glory. Whenever the religious need and the pursuit of truth come together there is disaster. The Greeks prove that point magnificently: they could never end up being interested in what was tentative and conditional.

(2) Humanism is a total philosophy of life, which does not allow the religious temperament to invade every area of its discipline. However, there is one aspect of living where religion is indispensable. If man has a need to transcend his temporariness and identify with something or someone more permanent than the individual ‘I’, this need cannot be ignored. Within the framework of humanism, two ways of satisfaction exist. By asserting that every man is composed of the same matter-energy that all other events in the universe derive from, humanistic teaching affirms that each of us shares an intimate bond, a basic identity, with any conceivable happening in this universe. Stars and flowers are material brothers to our nature. And by proclaiming that before and beyond the individuality of any person, each of us shares an essential oneness with all men, humanism proclaims that all of us individually share in the immortality of mankind as a whole. In fact, the very basis of ethical behavior lies in this religious experience. If every person can only feel himself as an individual, the social character of morality is impossible. Ethical behavior is only feasible when men sense that the essential nature that binds them together is more significant than the individual differences that separate them.

(3) Humanism is more than a religion. There are certain areas of its discipline which provide the religious experience. But there are many involvements where the religious temperament is either irrelevant or harmful. In opposition to the temper of much traditional philosophy where the mood of ‘eternity’ pervades, humanism affirms the value of conditional knowledge and change. Therefore, the humanist never regards the description ‘less religious’ as a threat. He rather views it as a compliment. He is delighted by the opportunity of the religious experience, but is quite aware of the fact that the balanced life requires much more. While he resists the invasion of all life by the religious temperament, he, at the same time, affirms the value of the religious experience in the simple rehearsal of nature’s seasons and in the image of immortality in mankind’s survival.

The Rabbi Writes – September 1967

Posted on January 7, 2025 by Sherwin Wine

THE RABBI WRITES

If Vietnam seems far away, it needn’t. After all, Detroit can serve as an adequate local Substitute. Why travel to distant lands for the “excitement” and devastation of war when Twelfth Street is so easily accessible? An inner city tour will rival all the grim horrors of either the London Blitz or Haiphong harbor. While America is expending billions of dollars to cure the “disease of communism” a more debilitating sickness has struck the vitals of our urban culture.

The Negro riots in Detroit and Newark have struck terror in the hearts of white America. They assault the vested economic interests of the bourgeoisie and the newly won prosperity of the industrial working class. They also arouse a nameless feat which whites cannot articulate without embarrassment, and which derives from the unconscious image of the black man in an Anglosaxon world.

No solution to the problem of this violent civil disobedience can be devised until an adequate and honest analysis of its causes is undertaken. The following observations, whether, pedestrian or otherwise, are intended to promote this understanding.

(1) It is asserted by many that the riots in Detroit were not race riots. The open fighting between white and black which characterized the 1943 tragedy was absent; while the looting of stores and the sniping at policemen were happily indulged in by scores of whites. It seemed as though the mob directed its anger to symbols of privilege, property and the police, and not to race difference. Economic helplessness, not ethnic hatred, appeared the major cause.

Yet this assertion misses the point. Being privileged and being white go together in our society. While a small percentage of whites are divorced from a vested interest in our social structure, an overwhelming percentage of blacks are totally without effective status. If serious clashes between Negro and white have been avoided, it is simply because the lower-class is. So effectively sealed off by distance from the white heartland. The ghetto is so vast that only the police and the Store owners are easily accessible targets. And these hostile authority figures are, with few exceptions; white.

To believe that the Negro easily makes the distinction between being an oppressor and being white is to believe that the average suburban housewife takes time out to distinguish between being a looter and being black: Only the professional sociologist is emotionally disposed to such logic.

(2) A careful distinction must be made between the working classes and the lower classes. The working class, in prosperous America, enjoys employment, security, and group solidarity. Whether Irish, Polish, or Italian, their participation in effective unions gives them a sense of real power; and they can pleasurably help to shape their own destiny. The lower class, like the lumpenproletariat of Marx, are quite distinct. Deprived of regular employment, job security, and any form of esprit de corps, they languish in urban ghettos. Both passive helplessness and despair dominate their lives. Having no vested interest in the preservation of law and order, they are hostile to all authority; and, possessing no hope for the future, they live entirely in the present, resisting permanent human relations and indulging momentary explosive fantasies of power of rioting and violence.

The urban poor live without hope. They are atomized individuals, panic stricken by their dependency on hostile authority, hungry for any “cure” which will appease the terror of their loneliness. If drugs, promiscuous sex, and ecstatic violence thrive in the black ghetto, they are convenient ways to “lose” oneself in the present. Only people with hope worry about the “consequences” of their actions. The self-righteous bourgeois denunciation of the “looters” is boorish and without empathy. Why should Negro teenagers obey the rules of middle-class morality when middle-class rewards are beyond their reach?

(3) A wide chasm runs through the middle of the Negro community. On one side is a small minority of securely employed, adequately housed, and suitably educated Negroes who display all the features of the law-abiding bourgeoisie. They have tasted the social pleasures of a semi-integrated society and desire to increase them. Untold opportunities in private industry, the universities, and civil service have opened to their selection (in fact there is a shortage of sophisticated blacks to fill the demand of large corporations for the voguish integrated look). If the non-violent civil rights movement has benefited anyone, it has benefited them. Like the social-climbing German Jews who feared the stigma of identification with Russian immigrants, their greatest social enemy is not the establishment but the hordes of lower-class Negroes who comprise their security by sharing their color. No one fears the ghetto destitute more than his middle-class brother. The latter has neither money, nor understanding, nor compassion for the former. His fear yields only contempt.

On the other side of the chasm stand the masses of rural poor and urban outcasts who have no share in the middle-class triumph. Open housing and open employment mean nothing if they possess neither the money nor education to enjoy them. While the bourgeois Negro comes into contact with the more liberal and “respectable” elements of the white community, the ghetto Negro encounters only well-armed policemen and small-time merchant intruders who view the local population apprehensively as hostile natives on a vast African reservation. Reading about “successful” Negroes in Ebony is no consolation for misery. It only points out how few have really made it.

(4) The problem of Negro social assimilation is different from any other. While the Irish, the Poles, the Italians, and even the Greeks can adopt the protective camouflage of Anglosaxon culture, the black man cannot. While the behavior and appearance of the acculturated American Jew is indistinguishable from the image of the Mayflower descendant (with the exception of having to announce one’s last name), the socially ambitious Negro encounters only frustration. For the black man carries his difference on his face; and neither his language nor his manners can compensate for that variation. Regardless of his achievement, his social inferiority is defined by his color.

The only solution to the Negro’s dilemma is extensive interracial marriage. But miscegenation is less likely in bourgeois America of the twentieth century than in the slave culture of Virginia in the seventeenth. White masters in the South never had to confuse sexual relations with middle-class marriage. If public interracial unions in an Anglosaxon milieu may achieve tolerance, they will never, in the conceivable future, secure wide acceptance. The Negro community in America is simply too large to be “absorbed” by even the most enlightened of white majorities. Black assimilation is a social impossibility.

(5) Black nationalism is a “dirty” phrase among conventional liberals. As a seemingly racist doctrine it assaults the sacred doctrines of integration and universalism we theoretically subscribe to. It appears to be a kind of white supremacy in reverse with its chauvinism and hate propaganda. While it provides the alienated ghetto Negro with a doctrine of group solidarity, it does so by cultivating the “vices” of segregation, violence, and tribalism. It even regards the white liberal as no different from the white bigot and, with gallish “ingratitude” classifies him with the enemy.

Unfortunately, the self-righteous suburban liberal lacks insight into the phenomenon. In his obsession with Negro economic disadvantage, he fails to perceive the massive psychic problems that economic reform cannot cure. Money without self-esteem will not dispel the sickness. In fact, it may only aggravate it. Jewish self-hate was not ameliorated by individual financial success; Jewish frustration was made all the more intense by the knowledge that personal achievement was irrelevant to social acceptance. Only “Jewish power” as expressed in Zionist fantasy and Israeli reality, provided the necessary ego tonic.

Negro self-esteem is essential to Negro well-being. Before the black man can find his self respect as an individual, he has to find his selfrespect as a black man. In a culture where the word “black” has such hideously negative overtones, the sting of rejection proceeds from the very social air the Negro breathes. If he escapes massive self-hate, he has to be either dull or abnormal. While the Black Muslims are a lower class response, the leadership of the new nationalists comes from Negro students and intellectuals, whose origins are middle-class and whose personal grievances have more to do with social rejection than with economic deprivation. After all, the Bolshevik Jewish intellectual wasn’t hungry; he was bitter.

Like the Jews the Negroes may have to play the game for a while that “we are the best of all possible peoples.” Before they can love whites, they will have to learn to love themselves. They will have to abandon the pose of an obsequious and helpless petitioner and practice the rude “hutspa” of addressing whites as social equals. Although, in their desires and ambitions, they want nothing more than middle-class respectability, they will have to act out their rejection of white culture and repeatedly announce their difference and superiority. If they are going to ultimately drain themselves of the tears of self-pity, they will have to be childishly boastful and dangerously boorish. Certainly, they are entitled to the same ego “kicks” that every other persecuted ethnic group requires for maturity. Only after they have exhausted the “virtues” of chauvinism will they be ready for the cult of individualism.

(6) The new patterns of Negro violence (whether organized or unorganized) subvert the goals of genuine black power and self-improvement. While rebellions in countries where the black population is in a majority have long-run feasibility, they are suicidal in America. They only justify “respectable” whites in verbalizing the hatred they are normally embarrasse to express and divert public funds from Negro improvement to the purchase o bigger and better police. The defeat of American policy in Vietnam, couple with massive riots at home, will not persuade the white majority to be generous to blacks. Given the need to find an easy scapegoat, it will only encourage military repression and the fascist glorification of “law and order”. Sniping and looting do not arouse the conscience of the white American; they terrify him.

Negro leaders will have to confine their aggression therapy to verbal assaults. They will have to learn to enjoy vicarious violence. Whether they identify with the success of African independence or thrill to the white fear of African power, they will have to find fantasy substitutes. Short of emigration, there is no other solution. Non-violent protest may not achieve the publicity of riots; but in the long-run it has better results.

(7) Segregation is here to stay for the vast majority of the Negroes. An integrated America is a liberal illusion that inhibits constructive action. If Negroes will continue to live in their own ghettos for a long time to come, then Negro self-esteem demands that the authority figures in that ghetto be as black as possible. If a “practical apartheid” is what we confront, then steps should be taken to encourage Negro merchants and Negro professionals to work in the ghetto and provide the image of bourgeoisie success the slum dweller can identify with.

The middle-class Negro will have to learn that the white world does not distinguish between “white Negroes” and “black Negroes;” the majority simply lumps them all together. He will have to understand that he cannot run away from the ghetto and escape its problems. Wherever he goes, his color brands his difference and makes his social destiny the same as any black man. His self-respect will demand that he spend less time in the futile task of total integration and more time in giving leadership to the real society of black segregation. It would be nice to live in a world where color was unimportant; but then we don’t. If we wait for integration to work on Negro self-respect, we will get neither.

The Rabbi Writes – October 1970

Posted on January 7, 2025 by Sherwin Wine

THE JEWS OF RUSSIA
by Rabbi Sherwin Wine

I took that summer trip to Russia.

Why?

I was curious about a country and culture which were officially dedicated to the principles of a Marxist socialism. As the avowed “enemy of my country” in the Cold War game, Russia was an intriguing mystery.

I wanted to see the land from which my family had come. Russia was the setting of my father’s bitter nostalgia.

I wanted to see the homeland of Yiddish culture. The language of my childhood was not Hebrew. It had nothing at all to do with Jerusalem, Haifa, or Tel Aviv. The sounds of my childhood were a sing-song German, which went together with names like Grodno, Vilna, Minsk, and Pinsk.

Above all, I wanted to find out whether the “reports” were true. I had read story after story about the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union. I was told by the “experts” that the Russian government singled out the Jewish religion for special persecution; suppressed Yiddish culture, forbade Hebrew studies, published antisemitic literature, refused exit visas to Israel, and harassed the Jews through discrimination in the universities and in the professions. The Soviet rulers, the accusers said, were engaged in a campaign of cultural genocide and physical terror.

Was the “accusation” true? I was eager to know.

Although I spent only three weeks in the Soviet Union, and although I was confined to using English, German, Yiddish, and one hundred words of basic Russian, I found many people (primarily students and professionals) who were eager to speak in private about their beliefs and fears. Most of the Jews I spoke to were under 40. In addition to visiting the synagogues (which was a waste of time, since they were badly attended old folks homes) I frequented restaurants, book stores, theaters, and the public parks near universities. Of the five cities I visited (Leningrad, Moscow, Volgograd, Yalta, and Kiev) Kiev was the most Jewish.

Throughout my trip, I was continually impressed by certain characteristics of the Soviet people. The Jewish situation exists within the framwork of these conditions.

I was impressed by how deeply religious the Russian people are. When I arrived in Leningrad, the first road sign I saw had the following inscription: “Lenin lived, Lenin Lives, Lenin will live.” Wherever I travelled statues and busts of Lenin were omnipresent. I could not enter any museum, visit any school, or open any periodical without being confronted with the words of the Bolshevik founder. Just as the Bible ‘koshers’ every Christian decision, so do the writings of Lenin legitimize every Soviet action. No child in a nursery can recite a poem without first invoking the spirit of Lenin. And no wedding in a so-called secular wedding palace can proceed without the blessing of Leninist principles. The Russians may have ceased to be Christians. But they have found a new patriotic religion.

I was impressed by the materialism of the Russian people. Although most citizens I encountered were adequately dressed and adequately fed (only building interiors were hopelessly drab), few individuals seemed to be concerned about politics or personal freedom. The anxieties were directed to better housing, more comfortable jobs, longer vacations, and the ecstasy of owning an automobile. It seemed to me that as long as the Soviet government continues to raise the standard of living, the issue of totalitarian repression of free politics and free speech will be irrelevant to the vast majority of the people. In this respect the Russian people are like every other people. Comfortable survival is the ultimate value.

I was impressed by the elitist character of Russian society. Even though gross distinctions in wealth and status have been eliminated, the “middle class” remains. The new bourgeoisie is the class of educated professionals who have less status and less wealth than party leaders but more status and more personal income than factory workers and farm laborers. While city workers never complained to me about the absence of intellectual freedom, students and young professionals, the children of the middle class, did. The new bourgeoisie is like the old bourgeoisie. Unlike the working class, it is less concerned with equality, and more concerned with freedom.

I was especially impressed by the passivity of the Soviet masses, in particular, the middle class. While many university students objected privately to the repressiveness of the regime and desired a more humanistic face for Soviet socialism, they had no concept of taking individual action to achieve this end. Conditioned by the system to work through state institutions alone, they were emotionally unable to organize in a private way. It was more than fear. It was the inability to conceive of private action as being legitimate.

Within this context the aged bureaucracy of the Soviet system maintains its power. It now allows discontented intellectuals to vent their frustration in private conversation with no real fear that these complaints will lead to any effective public protest.

The Jewish situation mirrors the general Russian one. Although less addicted to Leninism than the working class, the Jews are equally materialistic in their striving, elitist in their social climbing, and passive in their approach to problems.

They have other characteristics as well.

The Jews are primarily urbanized. Just as in America the majority of the Jews live in the biggest cities. Moscow has 600,000, Leningrad has 300,000, Kiev has 300,000, and Odessa has 200,000 (out of a total Jewish population of 3,000,000). Wherever I travelled through the large urban centers, I was overwhelmed by the large number of Jews I encountered. In Kiev it seemed to me that a quarter of all the Soviet people were Jews. I felt like the untravelled New Yorker who imagines that one-third of all America is Jewish.

The Jews I encountered were primarily middle-class professionals. While older Jews over 50 seemed to have more proletarian jobs, those under thirty were an array of engineers, physicians, teachers, and accountants. Being ‘bourgeois’ the younger Jews were finacially better off than the average Russian. And being residents of the big cities, they lived where most Russians preferred to live and count not live. (The Government seems to be discouraging the overwhelming drift to the metropolis.)

Almost all the Jews I encountered under 50 were irreligious. They had no interest in prayer, religion, or going to synagogue. Young Jews, like young Russians, are the product of their state school indoctrination. Even if they are amused by the Lenin cult, their objection is not that Leninism is antireligious. The objection is rather that Leninism is too religious. It seemed quite clear to me that, if the Soviet Union were to allow freedom of religious propaganda and the establishment of religious schools, very few young Jews would take advantage of this new opportunity.

The Jews were overwhelmingly Russified. At one time the Jews of the Soviet Union were more than a religious group. They were a distinct nationality with a distinct national language called Yiddish. Even though the internal passport which every Soviet citizen must carry still labels the Jews as Jewish by nationality, very few under 40 either understand or speak Yiddish. Only in Kiev did I encounter Yiddish on the streets. But those who spoke the language were either middle-aged or old. As far as I could perceive, Yiddish has no future in the Soviet Union. On a linguistic and cultural level, the Jews have ceased to be a distinct nation. As in America, only Yiddish last names survive as a relic of a unique national past.

The Jews are rapidly being assimilated. In addition to Russification, intermarriage was the fashion. Almost half the young Jews I spent time with were either married to non-Jews or were dating them. While older Jews expressed concern about intermarriage, the young showed no apprehension. Having no strong Jewish attachments, they felt no traditional guilt in doing what they did. It seemed as though Lenin’s plan was being fulfilled. Since the Jews occupied no distinct Soviet territory, Lenin refused to see the Jews as a real nation. He maintained that they were an economic caste whose economic role had been superseded by socialism. Assimilation to a Russian proletarian culture seemed to him the most feasible solution to the Jewish problem. Lenin was assisted in his solution by two factors. The first was the Jewish penchant for bureaucratic social climbing. The second was the Jewish preference for big city living. Career professionals and urban intellectuals have very little need for Yiddish. As in America, it has negative ‘social’ value. Had the Jews settled for farm life or shtetl living, Yiddish might have survived in spite of state hostility. But not in Moscow or Leningrad.

The Jews of Russia who wish to remain Jewish suffer disabilities. There are no religious schools (this is not a uniquely Jewish problem). There are no Yiddish schools. There are no Hebrew schools. There are no Soviet-Israel cultured ocieties. And there are no exit visas for young people.

In addition, the Russian press sponsors daily denunciations of the ‘Zionist fascist imperialists’ who are, in the popular mind, hardly distinguishable from Jews. However, for the Jew who does not desire to remain Jewish and who prefers assimilation, there are few disabilities. The Jew who does not care about religion, Yiddish or Zionist culture (and a high percentage of young Jews do not), experiences no material or physical threat to his well-being. While he cannot presently change the nationality designation on his internal passport, he is no more disabled by this situation than the Russified Ukrainian or Armenian who is unable to change his label. Jewish students told me that while antisemitism is still strong among people over 40, among their contemporaries it has greatly diminished. Within twenty years, they predicted, the present bigoted leadership will have died out. And total assimilation will be smoother. Right now, they said, top political positions are closed to Jews. But then, they are now closed to non-Russian nationalities as well (with the exception of a few Russified Ukrainians). The days of a Georgian Stalin, an Armenian Mikoyan, and a Jewish Kaganovich running the show are over. Russian nationalism does not dislike only Jews. It doesn’t really care for most other Soviet peoples as well.

The major disability suffered by the Jews of Russia is not uniquely Jewish. It is the trauma of belonging to the educated middle-class in a totalitarian state. Yuli Daniel, Pavel Litvinov and Alexander Ginzburg did not protest government repression in the arts and literature because they are Jews. They protested because they are Russian intellectuals who desire freedom. Over and over again, young Jews complained to me about intellectual persecution. It was a far more important issue in their world than antisemitism. As middle-class professionals who wish to remain in Russia, freedom of expression is a far more significant problem than Yiddish schools and exit visas to Israel. As middle-class intellectuals they share their major agony with millions of non- Russians.

What then do the Jews of Russia want?

If they want to remain Jewish, then neither religious freedom nor Yiddish freedom are particularly relevant (except for some of the old). The one thing they articulate with great fervor is a strong attachment to the state of Israel. A relevant Jewish institution in Russia would be a school in which modern Israeli Hebrew could be taught either as a primary or as a secondary language, and which could maintain cultural ties to the Hebrew state.

The Jews who want to remain Jews also want the right to emigrate to Israel if they desire to leave. They are asking for a privilege that is granted no other Soviet citizen, the right to depart the “socialist paradise.” In this regard, the Jews are demanding special consideration.

However, these demands have an air of fantasy about them. As long as the foreign policy of the Soviet Union requires the friendship and alliance of the Arab nations, allowing either Israeli culture or exit visas is as probable as the marriage of Nasser and Golda Meir. Protest committees on behalf of Soviet Jewry in the United States are, therefore, ineffective. They only provide an excuse for another Jewish activity in America.

As for those Jews in Russia who are not interested in remaining Jewish (and a high percentage of young people, if not a large majority, could care less) then foreign rantings and ravings about racial antisemitism are irrelevant. Lectures about why they should remain Jewish are particularly ludicrous when they come from American Jews who have not yet figured out how to persuade their own young people to reject assimilation.

The major anxiety of Russian Jewry is the intellectual prison in which the middle class is forced to live. Intellectual freedom cannot be brought about by Jewish protesters in New York. It can only be brought about by Soviet professionals and students, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who reject their traditional passivity and challenge a tired bureaucracy with the courage of a Daniel, a Litvinov, and a Ginzburg.

The assimilated Russian Jew, who is the most typical of the young, is not asking for more Jewish opportunities. Like his counterpart in America, he is asking for more humanistic ones. The protesters for Soviet Jewry, if they are truly sensitive, ought not to ignore this desire.

The Rabbi Writes – September 1970

Posted on January 7, 2025 by Sherwin Wine

CEASE FIRE
by Sherwin Wine

Will the ceasefire work?

It all depends.

It all depends on how much each of the antagonists wants peace and how much each of them is willing to pay for it.

Golda Meir, the Israeli premier, wants peace. But not at the price of East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, or Sharm el Sheikh.

Yigal Allon, the Deputy premier, wants peace. But not at the cost of a remilitarized West Bank, with Arab armies ten miles from Tel Aviv.

Menahem Begin, the fiery leader of the Opposition wants peace. But not at the expense of the new defensible borders which Israel achieved in 1967.

Gamal Nasser, the tarnished Arab Messiah wants peace. So long as Israel gives up all its conquered territory and does not insist on a formal Egypt-recognition of her right to exist.

Richard Nixon, the Republican president who owes nothing to the Jewish voter, wants peace. Provided that a military confrontation between America and the Soviet Union can be avoided and that American interests in the Arab states can be protected.

Leonid Brezhnev, the dullest of the dull commissars, wants peace. If only Soviet influence in the Middle East is not diminished and the Suez Canal is open to Russian ships.

But they all want peace at different prices.

Cynics say that no common price can be agreed upon. The war will simply start up again with new fury after 90 days.

The optimists say that the United States and the Soviet Union are so afraid of a military confrontation that they will not allow their satellites to renew the struggle. If Israel balks there will be no Phantoms. If Egypt balks, there will be no missiles.

For the optimists, many current developments support their stand.

There is the Russian fear of Chinese intervention. Already the Palestinian guerillas and the left-wing regimes of Syria and Iraq have turned to Peking for military assistance and training. China would like nothing better than to undermine the Soviet position among Arab radicals. Nasser, the darling of Moscow, is generally viewed by the Marxist left as a conservative tool of Russian caution. While Nasser denounces the feudal regime of Morocco and Baudia, the revolutionary left, in turn, finds him just as objectionable. Without peace, the pressure of Arab radicals, stimulated by Chinese agents, could force Russia into a military confrontation with America she dearly seeks to avoid. Russia’s self-interest dictates that she seek American help to resist China. To fight America in the Middle East would be a Russian gift to the Chinese.

There is the total Egyptian dependence on Soviet aid. The United Arab Republic has become a military satellite of the Soviet Union. Totally dependent on the subsidies and armament of the Russian Communists, Nasser is no longer a free agent. He dances to the tune that Moscow plays. He sacrificed his position as the Arab Messiah when he informally conceded the right of Israel to exist. He is now reviled in Damascus and Baghdad as a traitor to the Arab cause. Only determined Russian pressure could force him to make such a concession. If Brezhnev wants peace, Nasser is no longer able to say no.

There is the war resentment of the Egyptian people. While Algeria, Syria, and Iraq make brave statements of no surrender, the burden of the war is sustained by Egypt. Arab dolidarity against Israel has proved an expensive illusion. Neither money nor men are forthcoming from Algiers or Baghdad. Egypt has had to turn itself into a Russian satellite in order to carry on the Arab struggle. Statements by Nasser’s propaganda leaders seem to indicate an upsurge of Egyptian nationalism. War weariness has led many Egyptians to the conclusion that Nasser’s dream of an Arab empire with Cairo as its capital may be less significant than a prosperous Egypt. So long as there was no war, the illusion of Arab unity could be sustained. It is now too clear for even the Egyptians to ignore.

There is the narrow self-interest of the American people. Although it is difficult for American Jews to accept the fact, the loss of the Arab states to the Soviet Union was a telling blow to American power and prestige. Israel is no adequate substitute for the air bases, naval stations, and oil resources of the Arab homeland. It is no adequate compensation for the massive Soviet Presence in the Mediterranean. Outside the less convincing reasons of sympathy and admiration, the Israelis have nothing strategic to offer America. To persist in backing the Israeli hawk position is suicidal for the United States. Certainly, the inevitable loss of South Vietnam pales in comparison to the loss of North Africa and Western Asia. America has every reason to force Israel to accept peace on terms unacceptable to the present Israeli leadership. And, given its present desire to survive as a Jewish state, Israel has no alternative to American aid.

So much for the “optimists.” As for the skeptics who maintain that the ceasefire is only a respite between wars, there is much evidence to back their position.

There is the absence of any point at which Arab concessions and Israeli concessions meet. The overwhelming public consensus in Israel refuses to yield either the Golan Heights or East Jerusalem. The overwhelming public consensus in Egypt will settle for nothing less than a return to the old boundaries. Any Israeli government that yielded East Jerusalem would collapse before the people’s fury. And any Arab government that consented to the Jewish control of the Old City would lose its popular support. The return to the 1967 boundaries is acceptable to only a small minority of Israeli doves.

There is the massive mutual distrust. Arab governments see Israel as a European imperialist intrusion, determined to expand, and unwilling to yield any conquered territory. Israelis see the Arabs as savage fanatics prepared to kill every Jew and committed to using every diplomatic wile to achieve their goal. Israelis find it difficult to believe that Arab leaders are able to do anything but lie. They certainly find it difficult, after the 1967 experience, to imagine that Arab governments would keep their promises. The major problem is the memory of the Holocaust. The psyche of the Jew hovers in the shadow of the six million dead. Neither Israel nor world Jewry can transcend the events of the German War. A deep-seated paranoia paralyzes any attempt at Jewish-Arab reconciliation. Every concession becomes a prelude to Auschwitz. Arabs are seen through the eyes of concentration camp survivors and their rhetoric is heard with the ears of Belsen victims. Every enemy becomes “a Hitler”, and a Hitler understands only One language – the language of force.

There is the veto of the opposition. For Nasser his opposition lies on the left, in the Marxist and Maoist camps. Their accusation is the charge of treason, the assertion that Nasser and Hussein are selling the birthright of the Palestinian Arabs for a mess of bad Jewish pottage. Their weapon is the brush of self-righteous patriotism, which smears every compromise with the label of “surrender.” Even the Russians have to make their puppet look sufficiently patriotic to be effective. As for Golda Meir, her opposition lies on the right, in the nationalist camp of Manahem Begin, and his Gahal supporters. How can a patriotic Jewish government, reared on the literature of the Bible, turn over to strangers any part of the patrimony which was historically Jewish? There is sufficient residual “religious guilt” lingering in the most secular of the Israelis, especially of the older generation, to turn all territorial concessions into acts of disloyalty. Begin and his conservative followers were politically wise in departing the coalition government: They can now safely and irresponsibly pose as the party of patriotism.

There is the fanaticism of the Palestinian guerillas. Committed to the dissolution of the state of Israel, they will turn to whatever source provides them with help. If the Russians will not assist them, if Nasser betrays their cause, they will turn to the Chinese. As the only chauvinistic youth movement in the entire Arab world, they have the power to foment public disorder and to shake (if not topple) the tired Arab regimes (like Nasser’s) that were once revolutionary. With Iraqi help they have the power to destroy the Jordanian kingdom and to establish a guerilla government on the east bank of the river Jordan. Any attempt by Israel to occupy Jordan and destroy the new government would give the Jewish state one million more Arabs she does not need. Peace with Egypt will not be possible until the Palestinians are restrained. And the Palestinians can only be restrained if Nasser is willing to forego his radical and Messianic image, and actively cooperate in the destruction of the Palestinian armies.

There is the age of the Israeli leaders. Born in Eastern Europe and nurtured with the antisemitic fears of the shtetl, the Israeli cabinet lacks the kind of imagination the present situation demands. A host of formidable and irrelevant memories keep them trapped behind old fears. Young blood and young leaders who see through the old myths are needed. It may have been true that the Palestinian Arabs were once a collection of illiterate and incompetent peasants. But today their young men are just as often student idealists who are not willing to be the necessary victims for Jewish self-esteem. It may have been true that you could count on antisemitism to provide thousands of Jewish immigrants to match the Arab birth rate. But today antisetitism is a dying force among middle-class youth; and the concept of Israel as a refuge from persecution is an old man’s view of things. It may have been true that the people that had the strongest cultural bond to the Israeli Jew were the Ashkenizim of New York and the workers of the UJA. But, in the present, it is more likely that the educated Palestinian Arab has more in common with the sabra than a kibbutz lover out of Toledo. (At least Israeli Arabs speak Hebrew). Old men, conditioned by old wars and the culture of their childhood can neither see nor feel these truths. And, therefore, they fawn over the immovable Diaspora and ignore their next-door neighbor. The old leaders come to the peace table with eyes that see only the past.

There is the political pressure of the Diaspora hawk. Israelis are burdened not only by their own struggle for survival but also by the guilt of the American Zionist. The American Zionist is a man more hawkish than the orthodox fundamentalist. Unwilling to risk his life and his standard of living in the defense of his ideal, he offers Israel the gift of his super-patriotism – at a distance of course. He writes long letters to President Nixon; he marches on the Soviet embassy; he protests the Russian refusal to allow the Jews to leave for Israel, even though he cannot bring himself to leave America; he even predicts that, in the future, an antisemitic reactionary regime may force him to go to Israel – and then he will defend her. In the interim, he will play the hawk, and salve his conscience. It’s easy. He doesn’t have to live with Arabs.

Will the ceasefire lead to peace?

America and Russia may be able to enforce a temporary peace. But the resisting causes will prevent a permanent one.

A permanent peace will only be possible when the state of Israel will be willing, to make one concession – when it will be willing to affirm that the Arabs of Haifa are more important to its welfare than the Jews of New York – when it will be able to cast off the burdensome Diaspora and become a Middle Eastern state. Permanent peace will only come when Israel is more interested in a dialogue with her Arab neighbors than with the Jews of Leningrad.

Permanent peace would require Israel to take tile following steps:

(1) Israel would have to become a secular state. A secular state is one in which religious identity is irrelevant to status. Being a Christian, Muslim, or Jew would be irrelevant to any public office a citizen might occupy. And the state would identify with no particular religious tradition, the Bible would cease to be a national textbook; and rabbis, mullahs, and priests would exercise no secular Power: A secular state, for the sake of convenience might choose to make Christian and Muslim, as well as Jewish holidays, national days of rest. In the realm of education it would provide state schools in which all children, regardless of religion, could be trained as Israelis.

(2) Israel would define its uniqueness by its language, not by the family tree of its citizens. Its official language would be Hebrew. As a Hebrew-speaking state, any individual who learned and mastered Hebrew would be a full participant in the national culture, regardless of religion or ethnic origin. After all, most Israeli Arabs learn Hebrew more quickly and speak it more fluently than most European Jewish immigrants. Minority language groups, like the Arabs, would simply be bilingual, and where desired, could attend bilingual schools. But the same ruling could apply to individuals who preferred English, French, or Yiddish. If Hebrew is regarded as a convenient administrative language, rather than as an expression of the ethnic soul (like English in America where there are many ethnic groups) its use by Christians and Muslims, as well as Jews would be acceptable. In a state whose culture is defined by the use of the Hebrew language a Hebrew-speaking Jew would have more in common with a Hebrew-speaking Muslim than with an English-speaking American Jew who chooses to live in St. Louis.

(3) Israel would have to become a territorial nation. A territorial nation embraces all people who choose to live within its boundaries regardless of their racial, linguistic, or religious origins. While it may choose one language to be the official vehicle of common communication, it welcomes secondary languag and encourages their use. America has become a territorial nation. Although, at one time, it was an Anglosaxon Protestant nation, it has become (sometimes relucta a mixture of many ethnic, racial, and religious groups united by a primary language. If Israel were a Hebrew-speaking territorial nation, it would have no diaspora. Jews in other countries would find their homeland in the territorial nation they live in. If they chose to live in a secular Hebrew-speaking environment, they could immigrate to Israel. But if they chose to remain in America or England, they could not ask Israel to be their homeland, and to give them a special status that was not accorded to non-Jewish Hebrew-speaking Israelis. The concept of the ethnic nation, united by tribal memories, and scattered throughout the world would become irrelevant. Israel would exist for Israelis, for those people who with their feet (not their mouths) have chosen to live within the boundaries. It would not exist for the half-baked Zionists of Buffalo or Los Angeles who wish to derive their self-esteem from what other people do or who wish to pay for an insurance policy against pogroms. A Diaspora that will not emigrate except in dribbles will not turn a ceasefire into a permanent peace.

(4) Israel would have to go beyond Zionism. Modern Zionism and the old leadership of Israel exists with the illusion that antisemitism will force thousands of American and Russian Jews to flee to Israel for refuge. (As though Israel could Continue to exist if the American government became- viciously anti-Jewish!) That dream is. a Current fantasy that prevents the old men of Mapai and Cabal, of Left and Bight, from taking the kind of dramatic and imaginative steps that would open an effective dialogue with the Arabs. If the primary con- cern of the potitical leadership were With the personal safety and happiness of the Jews now in Israel, and not with the “ingathering of the exiles,” avenues of reconciliation would open up with the Palestinian guerillas whose acceptance of peace is, in the long run, more important than Nasser’-s.

(5) Israel would have to declare an open immigration policy. Having established an annual quota based on the potential of economic absorption she would open her doors to any individual, regardless of religion and ethnic origin, who desired to live in a Hebrew-speaking state. Palestinian refugees who wished to return would be allowed to return. Palestinian refugees who did not wish to return would be fairly compensated. If non-Jewish Czech exiles, excited by Kibbutz living, wished to live in Israel and speak Hebrew, they would be as welcome as French-speaking Jews from Morocco. The criterion for entry would be ‘first- come, first-served.” A progressive Hebrew-speaking state, with no necessary connection to Judaism and with the freedom to turn its energies from war to social experiment, would be attractive to many young idealists, both Jewish and non-Jewish.

(6) Israel would accept its old boundaries. In a secular Hebrew state with no necessary connection to the religious shrines of Judaism, possessing East Jerusalem and the Western Wall is no more important than possessing Haifa. In a secular Hebrew state, which has made its peace with the Palestinian refugees, possessing the Golan Heights is no longer strategically important. If the Arabs of Jordan and the West Bank wish to establish a secular Arabic-speaking Palestinian state, in which Jews can choose to live, all the better. Two secular states, divided only by administrative languages, and with complementary economies, would be a feasible solution to the present problem.

Is peace in the Middle East possible?

Not if the most liberal Israeli price never touches the most liberal concessions than an Arab leader can afford to extend.

If the war continues after the ceasefire, or after a short and very temporary armistice imposed by America and Russia, the present Arab governments will be succeeded (with Chinese help) by more radical and more irrational regimes. In such a world, all possibilities for peace will vanish. And Israel will be condemned to fight a perpetual war at a fearful cost in lives and ideals.

The six proposals for permanent peace may, in the long run, prove more realistic than they seem. But they are competing against the memories of the Holocaust and the illusions of a played-out Zionist dream.

The Rabbi Writes – Society for Humanistic Judaism September 1970

Posted on January 7, 2025January 7, 2025 by Sherwin Wine

SOCIETY FOR HUMANISTIC JUDAISM

On the weekend of June 26 – 28 the Society for Humanistic Judaism sponsored a weekend conference on the basic problems confronting humanistic congregations. Over 100 people from the Birmingham Temple, Deerfield Temple Beth Or, and the Westport Congregation registered for the meeting.

The questions of religious philosophy, religious education, public services, and political action were discussed and hotly debated. Although no consensus was achieved on these issues, the spectrum of humanistic alternatives emerged.

On Sunday morning, the 28th, the first annual meeting of the Society was held. The members elected six directors to serve as the executive until the next annual meeting. The directors, in turn, elected four officers from among their number.

Robert Poris, Birmingham, President Robert Seeley, Deerfield, Vice-President Sherwin Wine, Birmingham, Secretary Marshall Davis, Birmingham, Treasurer Daniel Friedman, Deerfield, Barry Waxman, Westport

During the conference a proposed statement of philosophic principles was presented by Rabbis Sherwin Wine and Dan Friedman. These principles were intensively discussed on both Friday and Saturday evenings by all who attended. Irv Rozian, the philosophy coordinator for the weekend, proposed certain changes Sunday morning on the basis of these discussions. Since no final decision was possible (or necessarily desirable) it was agreed that, in the coming year, each congregation should devote serious time to the evaluation of these principles. The proposed statement contained the following twelve points:

Humanistic Judaism is a distinctive religious philosophy in which the following values are affirmed.

(1) Autonomy. Every human being has the right to be the master of his own life, and ought to be encouraged to assume responsibility for his own actions. To abdicate one’s autonomy and responsibility is to lose one’s dignity.

(2) Individualism. Every human being is a unique individual and cannot be defined by any group identity he may have. For example, it is not the task of an individual to conform to the demands of a Jewish group. It is the task of the group to respect the individuality of the person.

(3) Equality. Every human being is an end in himself. And no other person has the right to rule or dominate him without his consent. A humanist society is a society of equality in which each individual affirms the autonomy of others as well as his own.

(4) Independence. There is no authority, human or “divine” which has the right to compel obedience. The demands of any authority (including God, if he exists) may be challenged by critical reason. Therefore, all farms of worship are inappropriate.

(5) Happiness. The purpose of life is the achievement of personal happiness. This human fulfilment must always be compatible with the right of other human being’s to pursue their happiness.

(6) Cooperation. Since human cooperation serves the welfare of every individual, the ideal society is a free society in which every ‘Person may choose the life-style he desires.

(7) Rationality. Human happiness requires a realistic understanding of the world in which we live. The best way to achieve this understanding is through the use of human reason.

(8) Humanism. Reason discloses that the basic source of power for the solution of human problems lies within man and not outside of man.

(9) Naturalism. Reason also discloses that events in the universe can be explained without reference to supernatural causes.

(10) Religion. The human environment consists of two kinds of events – things which can be reasonably changed and things which cannot be reasonably changed. The human response to what can be changed is called ethical behavior. And the human response to what cannot be changed is called religious behavior. Both forms of behavior are valid. The acceptance and dramatization of the seasonal and life-cycles are examples of religious behavior. Activities which demonstrate man’s ability to change his personal and social environment are examples of ethical behavior. It is important not to intrude religious behavior where ethical behavior is appropriate. The danger of historic religion is that, it often persuades man that he can change what, in face, he cannot change (e.g. death), and that he, cannot alter what, in fact, he can alter (e.g. established moral standards). A humanistic philosophy of life clearly distinguishes between what is appropriate to the ethical realm and what is appropriate to the religious realm and seeks to satisfy both needs.

(11) Judaism, Judaism is a form of religious behavior, exemplified in certain distinctive holiday and life-cycle ceremonies. It is one way in which man can choose to dramatize his relationship to the unchanging elements in his environment. It can be associated with many different ethical systems, authoritarian or humanistic, Humanistic Judaism is the association of Jewish ceremonial with humanistic ethics.

(12) Self-Esteem. The goal of a humanistic Judaism as of every genuine humanistic philosophy is to maximize the individual’s sense of his own worth. A person who has self-esteem is aware of his own power and competence and seeks to live in accord with humanistic values.

The consensus of those who attended respected the independence and autonomy of each congregation. No new union of temples was contemplated. The purpose of the Society (in which membership is individual) was to promote the sharing of ideas among existing humanistic congregations, to encourage the establishment of new groups, and to publicize the presence of the humanistic alternative throughout the American Jewish community.

The Rabbi Writes – April 1977

Posted on January 7, 2025January 7, 2025 by Sherwin Wine

THE RABBI WRITES – April 1977

Passover.

Saturday night. April 2.

Seder. Haggada. Natsa. Wine. Haroset. Family together.

We tell the story of the Hebrew exodus from Egypt.

The Torah is clear. About 3500 years ago about two million Hebrews were rescued from Egyptian slavery through the miraculous intervention of a god called Yahveh. This god used a man named Moses to be his human agent. Moses was a Hebrew shepherd who had been raised as an Egyptian prince. Representing Yahveh, Moses threatened the king of Egypt with divine punishment unless he released his Hebrew slaves. Convinced by ten plagues that Yahveh meant business, Pharaoh released his Jews and allowed them to leave his country. Relenting his decision, the king pursued the Hebrews to the Red Sea where Yahveh made his final statement by drowning Pharaoh and all his army. The Jews, now free moved eastward across the desert to reclaim the land of their fathers.

This story, in its longer version, is the traditional reason for the celebration of Passover. It is retold in the historic Haggada which is read before the Seder meal. Unfortunately, it is a myth. Modern archeology and the scientific criticism of traditional texts reveals a different tale.

About 1150 B.C. a small tribe of Hebrews lived on the eastern border of Egypt. They called themselves Levites and worshiped a fertility god named Nehushtan who took the form of a snake. They had originally come to Egypt as part of a large Semitic invasion. For several centuries the Semites had ruled Egypt. But the Egyptians ultimately rebelled against their foreign masters and either expelled them or enslaved them. The Levites were enslaved and were compelled to do public service. The leader and chief priest of the Levites was Moses, who, like many Levites, had an Egyptian name (a familiar form of assimilation). During a period of political turmoil he fled with several hundred members of tribe into the desert. In the desert were other Hebrew tribes. The largest desert group was Judah. Moses and the Levites linked themselves to the Jews in a military confederation and began to plan the invasion of southern Canaan. Northern Canaan was already in the hands of other Hebrews who had conquered the land some three centuries before.

But, even if this story is true, its message has the same limited moral message that the myth had. In both situations the Hebrews pass from one authoritarian situation to another. Moses is no less dictatorial than Pharaoh. Although his dictatorship is less offensive because he is Jewish, Moses issues laws in the name of divine authority, which provide neither for individual liberty nor for free inquiry. Conformity, humility and obedience are the virutes of the Torah system. Freedom, in any meaningful contemporary sense is absent from the scenario.

Certainly small-time Beduin tyrannies hardly provide the stuff out of which epics are made. Primitive, superstitions, snake-worshiping Hebrew shepherds cannot make Passover glorious.

What can?

Is there another exodus story that really celebrates freedom?

Of course.

When I was a child I was struck by an obvious irony. The immigrant Russian Jews who sat around my table chanting the Haggada myth were part of an exodus experience far more dramatic and far more significant in the revoluton of Jewish values than the flight from Egypt they were singing about. My parents and my grandparents had been part of a massive emigration from the pogroms of Russia which dwarfed all earlier emigrations in Jewish history.

The exodus of three million Ashkenazic Jews from Eastern Europe to North America is the greatest and most traumatic exodus in the story of the Jewish people. And, unlike the departure from ancient Egypt, it involved Jews who are still alive today.

Here lies the irony. Jews who have experienced the ultimate exodus, sit around a table singing about an inferior emigration. Justice and good humor would suggest that singing about their own experiences would be more appropriate.

The exodus from Russia, unlike the itsy-bitsy Levite departure from Egypt, altered the whole face of world Jewry.

This exodus, shifted the center of Ashkenazic Jewry from feudal pious Eastern Europe to urban capitalistic secular North America. A century ago two-thirds of the world Jewish community lived in Russia and surrounding lands. Today half of world Jewry lives in the United States and Canada.

This exodus moved Ashkenazic Jews from an economic and social system of poverty and class rigidity to a bourgeois setting of affluence, technological luxury and social mobility. Never have so many Jews been so rich, so well-educated and so intellectually powerful as they are in contemporary America. Going from the opportunities of Egyptian slavery to Beduin poverty hardly compares.

This exodus was so powerful in its social consequences, that the Jewish life style of twenty centuries was replaced by a new one in a matter of months. The movie Hester Street revealed the power of the American environment. What twenty centuries of feudal persecution could not alter, urban seculer society changed in a flash of historic time. The life style of my Russian great-grandfather was closer to that of Hillel than to my own style and the style of my contemporaries.

This exodus was truly an exodus to freedom. Only in countries influenced by the political patterns of Western Europe have Jews experienced the opportunity of individual liberty and free inquiry. The humanistic value system of American Jewry was made possible by this traumatic emigration. The move to North America did bring personal freedom to individual Jews, not just collective freedom. The saga of underdeveloped ethnic groups striving for independence and unity is not the stuff out of which humanistic liberty is made. It is often the prelude to group tyranny. America liberated the Jew not only be rescuing him from antisemitic outrage but also by subverting the traditional communal institutions which held him prisoner.

This Ashkenazic exodus has its contemporary parallel in Sephardic history. Ever since 1948 the overwhelming majority of Oriental Jews have been transported from Muslim countries to the newly founded state of Israel.

The story of Yemenite Jews airlifted from medieval poverty to the Western democracy of the Zionist state – the adventure and terror of Iraqi Jews rescued from the feudal prejudice of Arab Baghdad to the secular environment of modern Israel – equal the Askenazic trauma and surpass the Moses rescued from the feudal prejudice of Arab Baghdad to the secular environment of modern Israel – equal the askkenazic trauma and surpass the Moses trip.

A truly relevant, honest and humanistic Haggada would include not only the story of shepherd Levites, but also the bold tale of twentieth century revolutionary migration.

I’m working on it.

The Rabbi Writes – Center For New Thinking April 1977

Posted on January 7, 2025January 7, 2025 by Sherwin Wine

The Center for New Thinking, an educational group for people of all religious backgrounds who are interested in ethical change, has been formed by Rabbi Sherwin Wine.

The Newsletter of the Center states, “The Center for New Thinking has been established to educate people for meaningful moral change. It will study the whole range of tradional values and explore realistic alternatives, the task is both exciting and compelling.”

The Center for New Thinking offers classes taught by Rabbi Wine which are held at the Baldwin Library in Birmingham. Rabbi Wine also sponsors conferences through the Center which bring in nationally known thinkers to articulate their ideas on the new thinking.

The new group, formed in January, 1977, aims at a broad audience, Rabbi Wine said. “The Birmingham Temple has as its major thrust humanism in the context of Jewishness. The Center is not interested in Jewishness.”
Rabbi Wine also said that the Center for New Thinking is only educational while the Birmingham Temple is religious.

On March 26 and 27 a conference on “The Radical Evolution of Life Styles” was held at the Management Education Center of Michigan State University in Troy. It featured Jonathan Kozol (author of “Death at an Early Age”), Jean Houston (author of “Mind Games”) and Philip Slater (author of “Earthwalk,” “the Pursuit of Loneliness”).

Classes offered by Rabbi Wine through the Center which are currently in session include “Philosophers of the New Morality” and “Pioneers of New Thinking.”

A May 14 conference is planned feauring James Ramsey author of “Intimate Friendships” and Sonya Friedman, local psychologist.

If interested, more information is available at 646-2034.

United States

The Americas

Africa

Asia

Europe

Middle East

Author: Sherwin Wine

In His Own Words: A Tribute to Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine (1928-2007), By Rabbi Peter Schweitzer

The Rabbi Writes – December 1966

The Rabbi Writes – September 1966

The Rabbi Writes – April 1967

The Rabbi Writes – March 1967

The Rabbi Writes – September 1967

The Rabbi Writes – October 1970

The Rabbi Writes – September 1970

The Rabbi Writes – Society for Humanistic Judaism September 1970

The Rabbi Writes – April 1977

The Rabbi Writes – Center For New Thinking April 1977