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.