A Reform Rabbi Who Stopped Praying to God

Sherwin Wine was born in Detroit in 1928, trained at Hebrew Union College, the flagship Reform seminary, and was ordained a Reform rabbi in 1956. Within a few years of taking his own pulpit he found himself unable to continue leading services that addressed prayers to a personal God he had come to believe neither he nor most of his congregants actually held convictions about, a mismatch he judged more dishonest to maintain than to openly resolve. Rather than leave the rabbinate, he proposed to a group of like-minded families in the Detroit suburbs a different kind of congregation entirely, one that would keep the full calendar of Jewish holidays, life cycle ceremonies, ethical teaching and communal identity while dropping the theistic language and supernatural claims that Wine argued were no longer where the real meaning of Jewish life for most modern Jews actually lived.

That congregation, founded in 1963 as the Birmingham Temple in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills, became the first Humanistic Jewish congregation, with Wine writing new liturgy that reframed traditional prayers and holidays around human history, ethical responsibility and communal memory rather than divine command or providence. The experiment drew both strong local support and considerable criticism from more traditional colleagues who argued a congregation without God could not meaningfully be called Jewish at all, a debate about the movement's legitimacy that has never fully settled even as it has grown.