Two Ways to Keep Jewish Identity After Losing Confidence in Theism

Judaism Beyond God was not the first twentieth century Jewish response to declining confidence in a personal, commanding God. Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism decades earlier, had already faced the same problem and answered it differently: Kaplan reinterpreted theistic language rather than removing it, redescribing Judaism as an evolving religious civilization and treating God-talk as pointing to something real, the totality of forces that make human self-fulfillment possible, without asking Jews to affirm a personal deity acting in history. The vocabulary of prayer largely stayed; what it was understood to mean changed underneath it.

Wine's book took the further step Kaplan's did not. Rather than keep the language of divine address and supply it with a new referent, Judaism Beyond God argues for dropping supernatural claims from Jewish practice altogether, replacing prayer addressed to God with readings and rituals built around human history, ethics and communal responsibility, on the reasoning that reinterpretation still asks a nontheistic Jew to speak as though believing something not actually held. The two movements sit at different points on the same line rather than as opposites: both start from the same difficulty, an increasing number of Jews who no longer hold the tradition's theological claims but do not want to leave the peoplehood behind, and both refuse the option of simply calling those Jews no longer Jewish. Where Kaplan asked the words to mean something new, Wine's book asked whether Jewish identity needed those words addressed to a God at all, and answered that it did not.