Building a Movement Without a God

Wine did not stop at a single congregation. In 1969 he helped found the Society for Humanistic Judaism to organize the growing number of like-minded communities in North America, and later established the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism to train rabbis, cantors and lay leaders for a movement with no theological seminary tradition to draw on, since every existing rabbinical school assumed some form of theism as a baseline. Humanistic Judaism under his leadership defined itself explicitly as a fourth major stream of American Jewish life alongside Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Judaism, though its numbers have always remained far smaller than the three older movements.

Wine remained the intellectual and organizational center of the movement for over four decades, writing extensively on secular Jewish identity, celebrating Jewish culture, history and ethics as sufficient grounds for communal belonging without requiring belief in a supernatural deity behind them. He died in July 2007 in a car accident near Essaouira, Morocco, at age seventy nine, while traveling with his partner, and Humanistic Judaism has continued under a new generation of rabbis he trained, still organized around the same wager he first proposed to a small group of Detroit families in 1963: that Jewish life does not require a God to be genuinely, fully Jewish.