522 A History of Judaism
Wine’s small congregation in Farmington Hills had originally been
Reform in outlook, but as he developed language to reflect their beliefs,
Wine came to the realization that the word ‘God’ could be eliminated
from the liturgy, and he concluded (following the logical positivists)
that, since it is impossible to prove the existence or non- existence of God,
the concept is meaningless. In light of the intense hostility to such a stance
from the wider public in the United States, and not just from other Jews,
this stance took considerable courage, and only very few Jews have iden-
tified themselves with the Humanistic Judaism movement.^10
The notion of a Humanistic Jew depends to a large extent on the
dual origin of Jewish identity in descent as well as in religious affili-
ation. In the diaspora, a secular Jewish identity without institutional
support has seemed to some too difficult to sustain. Agnostic Jews are
often more comfortable remaining within religious communities and
treating them as a focus of social life, since lack of belief generally goes
unchallenged if not thrust on others, as in many parishes of the Church
of England. In the mid- twentieth century the eminent Harvard historian
of Jewish philosophy Harry A. Wolfson wrote scornfully about ‘verbal
theists’ who would disguise their lack of belief for social and political
reasons. A younger contemporary of Wolfson, the socialist Zionist Ben
Halpern, accused American Jews of retreating into the bastion of syna-
gogues as a way to make their Jewishness more acceptable to wider
American society by treating Jewish identity as if it was only a matter of
private religious faith.
In Israel, by contrast, where Jewish identity is stamped on identity
cards, secular Jews have been much preoccupied in a battle against rel-
igious coercion, and the movement for secular humanistic Judaism has
had as a prime aim the encouragement of pluralism, and of dialogue
between the secular and the orthodox, within Israeli society. Within the
same movement Yaakov Malkin, a professor of aesthetics and rhetoric
in Tel Aviv, has promoted the study of Judaism as a secular culture in
numerous institutions. Some (such as Alma College in Tel Aviv) have
been dedicated specifically to this purpose. In 1988 Malkin produced a
credo of the beliefs of secular Jews, characterized by him as ‘free’:
What do secular Jews believe? Free Jews – that is, Jews free from the domin-
ion of Halachic religion, free from an exclusive religious interpretation of
mitzvot, from a religious interpretation of Jewish celebration, traditions and
culture, Jews free from one inflexible view of the Bible and post- biblical
literature – such Jews believe in: The freedom to choose the ways of realizing