Wanted: Alternative title for rabbi

By Amiram Barkat, Ha'aretz, January 7, 2004





A piece for harp preceded the brief ceremony, which was followed by a festive Shabbat evening service: "As the first Israeli rabbi ordained by the movement, I was the highlight of the evening," says Maas.



Sivan Maas' ordination ceremony may have followed the standard procedure of various modern religious movements, but the impression is misleading: the movement that ordained Maas for the rabbinate defines itself as a secular humanist movement that does not recognize the existence of God or any other supreme power. Maas is, therefore, the first secular Israeli rabbi.



The International Federation of Secular Humanistic Judaism was established in 1986 and unites humanist Jewish organizations and institutions in the United States and elsewhere. The living spirit of the movement is Rabbi Sherwin Wine who serves as the dean of the movement's seminar, the Institute of Secular Humanistic Judaism in Detroit. Wine was a ordained a rabbi in the 1950s by the Reform Movement, but after a few years, he decided he no longer believed in the existence of God. In 1963, he left the movement and established the first humanist Jewish community in Detroit. Other senior officials in the movement are the British Jewish philanthropist Felix Posen, who serves as its chairman in Europe, and former minister Yair Tsaban, who serves as its Israel chairman.



It is a small movement; the number of active members does not exceed 50,000. But its target audience - secular Jews - is apparently the largest stream among the Jewish people. A Jewish Identity Survey conducted in 2001 by the City University of New York found that 49 percent of the 5.5 million Jews living in the United States define themselves as "secular." That same year, a survey by the Guttman Institute found that 43 percent of Jews living in Israel define themselves as "not religious," and 5 percent defined themselves as "anti-religious."



The secular humanist movement offers its members faith based on the ideas of the Enlightenment. "The basic idea of humanistic Judaism is that man is responsible for his fate," says Maas, "and stemming from that as well is the belief in supra-human values, such as equality and human rights for others. Judaism is an equal component of supra-human humanism. There is no human system not connected to a nation and our nation is Jewish."



Maas is the daughter of Prof. Reuven Malchin, who among other things edits the journal Free Judaism about the Israeli movement for secular humanistic Judaism. Maas relates that the connection between her father and the secular humanistic movement in the U.S. developed through her. She herself found out about it in 1993, when she worked as a Jewish Agency emissary to the Detroit Jewish community. "I visited Sherwin Wine's synagogue [the Birmingham Temple] on Yom Kippur, and I saw that this was something unique that spoke to me from a values perspective," she says. However, she felt that the characteristics of the movement in the U.S. could not be replicated in Israel.



One of the most non-relevant features in Israel, she feels, is the title she bears, which she says prompts antagonism among secular people in Israel. "I'm very uncomfortable with the title "rabbi," she says. "The problem is that I still haven't an alternative to it, and I'll be happy to hear suggestions."



Thirsting for a secular community



Maas sees the rabbi's role as a key tool for creating a framework. "I mean a certain kind of unit, the kind that in English is referred to as congregation as opposed to a community." Her amazement at the thriving congregational framework of American Jewry is the force that motivates her. "The Jewish community in Detroit amazed me with its vitality, its pluralism, with the fact that a group of 100,000 Jews spread across a huge urban area manage to generate so much joint communal activity, from the Federation and various volunteer organizations to the wide range of synagogues and the education system."



According to Maas, many bodies offer Judaic studies to secular people and "do a fine job, but they focus on education. What I think is missing is the congregational outlook, especially in the urban environment where it is so lacking."



In 1998, she enrolled in the rabbinical ordination program at the secular humanistic movement's seminary and studied in Israel while adhering to the American curriculum. For five years, she studied Jewish culture, Jewish creations in art and the social sciences and gained practical experience in congregational-educational work, with an emphasis on preparing programs related to the holidays and Jewish life cycle. "I believe that the secular public in Israel needs someone to function in a role that resembles that of a rabbi in a religious congregation," she says.



There are others who share this belief. The Oranim Seminar, one of the veteran institutions involved in disseminating Judaism to secular people, will soon begin a program to train "congregational leaders." Shay Zarchi, the pedagogic coordinator at Oranim, explains, "Until now, we had learning communities. Now there is a desire to influence life styles and create a more values-oriented Jewish language." Zarchi says that seminar leaders sense that the secular public is today thirsting for something new, beyond the learning of the texts. As an example, he cites the secular Shabbat evening services that have recently been held in the synagogue in Nahalal and have been very popular.



Religious congregational rabbis who work with secular audiences say they detect among them a new yearning for collectivity after a move in recent years away from institutions associated with collectivism, such as kibbutzim or the Histadrut. Some cite the increasing existential fears of recent times - the terrorist attacks and the economic crisis - as a force motivating secular people to seek a support group.



Rabbi Meir Azari, of the Beit Daniel Reform congregation in Tel Aviv, says that, "a city such as Tel Aviv is today a very lonely place for young people or old people. If you offer these groups a supportive, but totally non-binding framework, like a kibbutz, that can have a very strong draw."



Two menorahs



As the program director of the secular humanistic movement, Maas is now trying to recruit people with master's degrees for the secular rabbi ordination program in Israel following the American curriculum. "This refers," she says, "to professionals who will initiate and run educational programs and set up congregations." In the congregations she is planning, the center of congregational life will revolve around the traditional holidays and the rituals marking life-cycle events. The content, she feels, will develop on its own. Her aim is not to create secular holidays and festivals, but to instill some secular Israeli content into the existing holidays. She intends to extract from Jewish tradition "only what is relevant to our life today."



That, for example, is what she has already done with Hanukkah. "On an ideological level, instead of the perception of good Maccabees and bad Hellenists, I describe the cross fertilization between the Hellenistic and Jewish cultures. On the textual level, I made changes such as the lighting of two menorahs simultaneously - one according to the standard practice as dictated by Beit Hillel and one in the opposite way, as dictated by Beit Shammai [a descending number of candles each day - A.B.]. In this way, I show in a tangible way how important debate was for promoting Jewish thinking."



Rabbi David Lazar of the Conservative Movement, who in recent years has engaged in building congregations, thinks the concept of a secular rabbi can succeed. "In order for the congregation to be viable it has to stand on three pillars," he says, "Torah, i.e., some kind of collective intellectual activity; service, i.e., some form of spiritual practice such as prayer or meditation; and acts of loving kindness, i.e., actions on behalf of social justice." Lazar believes that, "if until now, no such congregations were established, it isn't because it's not possible, but because there was no attempt to do it the way it should be done."



Rabbi Azari of the Beit Daniel Reform congregation favors the opposite approach. He feels that the Reform congregation has proven itself as the best home for the secular public looking for a framework. "On the most recent holiday, over 1,000 people came to us, 90 percent of whom would be described as secular people who vote for Meretz and Shinui," he says. "Nearly all the members of our congregation are Israelis, and they come to a wide range of activities and certainly not just for bar mitzvah ceremonies. I welcome secular rabbis and various learning groups, but I think that the true home of most of these organizations is found in the Reform Movement. It hurts me to see how all those organizations chase the same donors and fight over the same money that the Ministry of Education allocates to non-Orthodox streams of Judaism. In a crazy country like ours, we have to unite. Otherwise, we'll lose out."



Creating art instead of a Holy Ark



The movement for secular humanistic Judaism in the United States offers an alternative to the religious streams of Judaism by building secular congregations. One of the movement's weaknesses is that its institutions and ceremonies are not original and are taken from the experience of religious congregations. The institution of the synagogue, for example, is also a focus of communal life for secular humanistic Judaism. In their synagogues, a work of art replaces the Holy Ark. The work expresses a humanistic message such as, for example, the shape of the word "adam" (human being in Hebrew).



In the synagogue, the humanistic congregation marks holidays such as the arrival of Shabbat and Jewish festivals and life-cycle rituals. The content of these ceremonies is meant to express Jewish culture as opposed to the Jewish religion. The bar mitzvah ceremony, for example, requires the celebrant to spend a year learning about a Jewish historical figure of his choice and to address the congregation about this person. In addition, he must read to the congregation a passage in Hebrew from a modern or ancient literary text. The prayer books used by the `worshipers' contain Jewish texts that express the humanistic ideology. In order to maintain a link to current events, the prayer books are reedited annually.



Starting in the 1990s, the movement has also run a seminar to train rabbis for congregational leadership roles. The rabbis follow an academic program of 800 study hours and specialize in three areas: Jewish culture, educational-congregational work and the Jewish life cycle.

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