Humanistic Judaism’s Quest to Retain Jewish Culture

By Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press

 

Humanistic Judaism was founded in 1963 by Rabbi Sherwin Wine. As a rabbi trained in Reform Judaism with a small secular, non-theistic congregation in Michigan, Wine developed a Jewish liturgy that reflected his and his congregation’s philosophical viewpoint by emphasizing Jewish culture, history, and identity along with humanistic ethics, while excluding all references to God. 

This congregation developed into the Birmingham Temple in suburban Detroit. It was soon joined by a previously Reform congregation in Illinois, as well as a group in Westport, Connecticut. 

Wine set up the Society for Humanistic Judaism in 1969 and an International Institute for Secular Judaism in 1985.

The movement, which began with a congregation of eight families is now a presence in forty communities across the United States, claiming forty thousand members, and is also found in Canada, Israel, and other countries.

The first Canadian affiliate was the Oraynu Congregation in Toronto, founded in 1969. Eva Goldfinger, its spiritual leader, told the Canadian Jewish News in 2001 that the secular emphasis on personal responsibility can lead to a stronger, more committed Judaism.

The Calgary Community for Humanistic Judaism meets in the city’s southwest.

In an interview with Toronto writer Bill Gladstone in the Globe and Mail in 1999, Rabbi Wine stated that “The Judaism of the ancient world is not the Judaism of the modern world. Judaism adapts itself to new environments. It’s more accurate to view Judaism as a culture, because a culture can accommodate a wide variety of belief systems.”

Humanistic Judaism offers cultural and secular Jews a nontheistic alternative in contemporary Jewish life. It defines Judaism as the cultural and historical experience of the Jewish people yet retains the structure of theistic religions. 

Humanist Jews define Judaism and Jewishness as a matter of cultural identification and not a matter of birth or conversion. They do not believe in the divine, therefore they do not believe in divine providence or sanction. They assert that men and women are responsible for their own destiny. 

The belief in eternal life is the product of wishful thinking and scientists have found no evidence of life after death. Humanistic Jews find religious beliefs that promise a deliverance from death an insult to human reason.

Humanistic Jews do not see Jews as different or better than other peoples or the nation of Israel as a favourite nation in the eyes of God. Neither do they accept the idea that He performed many miracles in order to preserve and promote the good of the Jewish nation.

Nevertheless, they do encourage a positive response towards Israel and its right to survive.

The philosophy of Humanistic Judaism is inclusive and celebrates love wherever it is found. On the basis of this principle their rabbis accept and officiate at ceremonies confirming same-sex commitment. 

Humanistic Jews also see traditional Judaism as an enemy of feminism and abortion as a right that belongs to the woman.

Humanistic Jewish weddings are non-theistic, emphasising the relationship between wife and husband rather than the relationship between a couple and God.

Over the years, Wine created an alternative English and Hebrew liturgy, stripped of references to God. He retained most of the traditional holidays and life cycle as part of their Jewish culture, since they provide a link with Jewish history and a bond with other Jews, but recast them in humanist guise. 

Rosh Hashana affirmed spiritual and natural renewal; Yom Kippur encouraged introspection and self-forgiveness; Pesach celebrated freedom and the political genius of Moses.

Some of the people who influenced Wine’s thinking include Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of the Reconstructionist Jewish movement, who, in describing Judaism as a civilisation, viewed it not only as a form of religion but also as a great source of culture. 

Rabbi Wine, who died in 2007, tried his best not to leave his followers lost in a void. In his 1996 book Judaism Beyond God: A Radical New Way to Be Jewish, he argued that the legitimacy and identity of the Jewish people are not tied to the existence of God.

His earlier book Celebration: A Ceremonial and Philosophic Guide to Humanists and Humanistic Jews, published in 1988, was written to supply a demand within the movement for those who value their Jewish identity but do not want to be linked with conventional religion.

The movement’s challenge remains to engage the many Jews who share its worldview but do not yet recognize the benefit of affiliating with a Jewish community.

A Clash of Civilizations in Central Asia

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

 

Samuel Huntington’s seminal work, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, published more than two decades ago, posits that in the twenty-first century, most major conflicts will pit cultural regions against each other.

One such potential area of contention would be at the boundary between the Islamic world and that of the east Asian Confucian-based civilizations.

Were that to become the case, a small-scale version of this is already playing out in the Muslim regions of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Xinjiang -- officially the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region -- in the far west of the country has already become an arena of conflict.

Despite its name, it is in fact historically part of Muslim Central Asia, the large region once called Turkestan. 

Most of that area, the home of major Islamic civilizations, was conquered by the Russian tsars in the 19^th century and later became five separate republics in the Soviet Union. They became independent countries in 1991.

Only Xinjiang, once known as East Turkestan, and historically inhabited mainly by Uighurs, remains under the domination of a non-Muslim state.

The Uighurs, along with Turkic tribes like the Kazakhs (including some who also live in Xinjiang), converted to Islam beginning around the year 1000.

Xinjiang is part of the PRC today because the Manchu-ruled Qing empire conquered it in the eighteenth century, in the course of a westward expansion. The local populations, however, were largely allowed to retain their own cultures.

This benign neglect continued into the 20^th century. But with the emergence of the Communist-ruled Chinese state in 1949, as Beijing sought to maintain control over Xinjiang, a debate emerged pitting the old imperial ethno-pluralism against Han Chinese nationalistic assimilationism.

At first Beijing followed the Soviet model of ethno-federalism, granting non-Han peoples official status as nationality or ethnic groups, with special rights enshrined in the Chinese constitution.

Han civilization was, in theory, not considered superior. The PRC celebrated China’s cultural diversity, encouraging publishing in non-Han languages, putting minorities on the currency, and so on.

But many Chinese political theorists blamed the disintegration of the USSR on Soviet nationality policies, so a reassessment of the ethno-pluralist system began. 

They argued that only after assimilating minorities into a broader pan-Chinese ethnicity would China be truly stable.

Not only would ethnic distinctiveness have to be eliminated, but the religion underpinning it would have to also be wiped out, because religious belief itself was contradictory to the unitary pan-Chinese identity.

In October 2017 the Xinjiang Communist Youth League used a medical metaphor to malign the Uighur belief in Islam.

“There is always a risk that the illness will manifest itself at any moment, which would cause serious harm to the public.” That is why, they insisted, the devout “must be admitted to a re-education hospital in time to treat and cleanse the virus from their brain.”

Hence the introduction of today’s “re-education” centres – in effect, gulags and prisons – and redefining independent Uighur groups as terrorist organizations.

Today there are tens of thousands of security personnel in the region. As well, a vast and expanding surveillance network of facial-recognition cameras, GPS vehicle tracking, and fingerprint, voice-print, and even walking-gait scans are linked to a database of personal information about the population.

Uighur religious and other cultural practices are increasingly circumscribed or legally banned. School instruction in the Uighur language has been eliminated.

Xinjiang authorities now define as “extremist” veils, head coverings, “abnormal beards,” long clothing, fasting at Ramadan, avoiding alcohol, religious education, mosque attendance, and avoidance of state radio or television.

Members of the Uighur cultural, academic, and business elite, including top administrators of universities and chief editors of presses, have been singled out for detention.

Over a million people are interned in the re-education camps, where detainees must sing anthems of the Chinese Communist Party, disavow Islam, watch propaganda films, and study Chinese language and history.

The state now increasingly finds Islamic faith and even non-Han ethnic culture to be inimical to the goal of homogeneous Chinese identity.

If Huntington is right, and the Muslim and east Asian world will eventually collide, this is a foretaste of what’s to come.

Is Sudan's Ruler on the Ropes?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

As they used to say in Brooklyn, in a sarcastic tone of voice, “It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy!”

Omar al-Bashir, indicted as a war criminal by the International Criminal Court, has been the president of Sudan for three decades. 

A ruthless murderer who took power in an Islamist coup d’état, he was responsible for genocidal campaigns against fellow Muslims in the western region of Darfur and against African Christians in the south of the country.

In the early 2000s, he recruited ethnic Arab militias known as the Janjaweed to Darfur where they committed mass murder and rape.

The second war in the south ended in ignominious defeat, when South Sudan seceded and became a sovereign state in 2011.

His regime also for a time harbored terrorists, including Osama bin Laden, leading to economic sanctions. 

Though he managed to survive all of this, he’s now in trouble. His current problems stem from the government’s attempts to prevent economic collapse, exacerbated after the secession of South Sudan, which had three quarters of the country’s oil production.

Most of Sudan’s national budget goes to the military and security sector, as the country is dealing with insurgencies in the South Kordofan, Darfur, and Blue Nile regions. In 2018, only three per cent of the national budget was allocated to education and even less to health. 

The salaries and allowances of national and state government officials put more burden on the annual budget. The country is crippled by corruption; Sudan ranks 175 out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index.

Late last year Bashir instituted emergency austerity measures and a sharp currency devaluation.
Prices rose, because the government reduced subsidies on fuel and bread. This triggered mass protests in the capital, Khartoum, and other parts of the country.

They started in the eastern city of Atbara on Dec. 19 when the headquarters of the governing National Congress Party (NCP) was torched.

The demonstrations have morphed into demands calling for the end of Bashir’s rule. They denounce his corruption and disastrous economic management, which has focused on military spending rather than on necessities such as health and education.

The protests have also created a tenuous unity in the ethnically and regionally divided Sudanese society. Major General Salah Abdallah, the director of the Sudan Intelligence and Security Service, tried to use a divisive strategy to break the momentum of the protests by blaming non-Arab groups from Darfur for the unrest. But protesters in Khartoum responded by chanting, “The entire country is Darfur.” They have been numerous enough to fill stadiums and the square in front of Bashir’s palace.

Since the unrest began, Sudanese security forces have used live ammunition to break up demonstrations. Thousands have been swept up in mass arrests and at least 50 have been killed, according to human rights groups. 

A government assault on a hospital in the city of Omdurman drew international condemnation  The Sudan Doctors Syndicate called for the release of at least 12 physicians arrested during recent raids.  In speeches in front of his supporters, the president, who remains defiant, has described the protestors as saboteurs.

His government has tightened censorship of the country’s broadcast and print media, arresting journalists and confiscating newspapers with coverage of the protests. Access to social media websites has been blocked.

The Sudanese armed forces, who back the president, warned they would not allow a collapse of the state.

But on Feb. 2 more than 3,000 people protested his rule following the brutal death of an anti-government demonstrator.

While Sudanese, including a coalition of 22 opposition political parties, are calling for Bashir’s resignation, the ruling NCP has other plans. The current constitution bars Bashir from seeking re-election, but it has called for an amendment so that Bashir can run next year.

But can he even last until then?

Some Upcoming African Elections in 2019

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Several African presidents who will be fighting to remain in power in elections in 2019. 

In South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, who inherited the political crown from the scandal-ridden Jacob Zuma, will lead the governing African National Congress (ANC) in its bid to extend its 25-year rule in May. 

The leading opposition parties will be the Democratic Alliance (DA) led by Mmusi Maimane; and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) led by Julius Malema.

The ANC, the party of Nelson Mandela, has been the governing party since the 1994 transition from apartheid to “non-racial” democracy.

It has been the party of the black majority, which comprises about 80 percent of the population.

The DA is center-right, and in South Africa’s racial calculus, has been the party of whites, coloreds, and, increasingly, Asians. It is aggressively seeking black electoral support, and its leader Maimane is black.

The EFF has radical economic and social policies; among other things, it calls for the expropriation of white-owned property without compensation.

At the last parliamentary elections in 2014, of the 400 seats in parliament, the ANC won 249; the DA won 89; the EFF won 25. Six other parties also altogether hold the remaining seats, a reflection of South Africa’s system of proportional representation.

Although few expect the ANC to lose, it may not be an easy fight as its reputation has been damaged by corruption, high levels of unemployment, and the slow pace of land reform, which is bound to raise emotions ahead of elections. 

The ANC has promised to amend the constitution so that it will be easier to expropriate white-owned farms without compensation, but its opponents to the right of the political spectrum have vowed to resist the plan. 

In Malawi, President Peter Mutharika of the Democratic Progressive Party will be battling a strong opposition which hopes that voters fed up with electricity blackouts, drug shortages and corruption will propel them to power. 

A leaked report from the country's elite Anti-Corruption Bureau accused Mutharika of receiving a $195,000 bribe from a contractor tasked with supplying $4 million worth of rations to Malawi's police. He has faced no formal charges.

Former president Joyce Banda of the People’s Party will be running against Mutharika in the election due in May. She lost to him in 2014 by a wide margin, in fact coming third behind Lazarus Chakwera of the Malawi Congress Party.

Banda has joined anti-government pressure groups in calling for the president to resign – though she was herself implicated in a vast corruption scandal in 2013 which contributed to her defeat in polls a year later.

Nearby Mozambique will hold presidential, legislative and provincial elections in October, President Filipe Nyusi of the ruling Mozambican Liberation Front (Frelimo) recently announced.

The date was unveiled amid negotiations on consolidating peace between his government and the former rebels of the Mozambique National Resistance (Renamo). A truce is currently in effect.

Renamo and the ruling Frelimo fought a 16-year civil war that ended with a peace deal in 1992, but Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama, who lost five presidential elections, and took up arms again in 2013, died last year. Ossufo Momade has been appointed interim leader.

Renamo has long sought greater decentralisation of power, including elections for provincial governors and the creation of district assemblies, and better integration of its supporters into the country’s police and military.

The country is in an economic crisis, related to secret debts contracted to fight Renamo. The International Monetary Fund and the Western international community suspended cooperation.

The government has now outlined plans to try and control spending, especially the public payroll that absorbs 55 per cent of tax revenue.

Still, analysts suggest that Nyusi, who is eligible to run for one more term, is expected to win this year’s elections.

There is some evidence that Renamo is making gains in the central and northern regions of the country, but not enough to suggest it poses a credible electoral threat, especially as its leadership is now up for grabs.

Frelimo has been victorious in the five multiparty elections since 1994, although the opposition has always alleged fraud, especially in 1999, when it almost won.

Indian's Eastern Tribal States Are a World Apart

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Virtually cut off from the rest of India by Bangladesh on one side and Bhutan and Sikkim on the other, Assam and the small tribal states of northeastern India are a world unto themselves. 

Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Tripura were all created to satisfy demands by small ethnic groups whose languages and religions differ from that of Hindu-majority India.

Nagaland, carved out of Assam in 1963, comprises sixteen separate tribes, each with its own distinct customs, language and dress. However, English is the official language and spoken by most people.

The vast majority of the population of almost two million is Christian, with 75 per cent adhering to the Baptist Protestant faith.

Christianity arrived in Nagaland in the early 19th century with American Baptist missionaries and Nagaland’s people are devoutly religious. 

Manipur, a princely state under the British, was more closely aligned with neighbouring Burma than with India. Its three million people speak a variety of Sino-Tibetan languages.

It was made a union territory in 1956 and a state in 1972.

Hinduism and Christianity are each practiced by some 41 per cent of the state’s population, the latter brought by missionaries in the 19^th century.

Meghalaya was also formed in 1972, by severing two districts from the state of Assam.

About 75 per cent of the population of three million practices Christianity, with Presbyterians, Baptists and Roman Catholics the most common denominations.

Here, too, English is the official, and widely spoken, language of the state. The two largest native languages, Khasi and Garo, are affiliated with the Mon-Khmer and Tibeto-Burman families of east and south Asia, respectively.

Mizoram, too, was part of Assam until 1972, though it didn’t become a full-fledged state until fifteen years later.

Its one million residents are of diverse tribal origins who settled in the state, mostly from Southeast Asia, mainly in the 18th century. It has the highest concentration of tribal people among all of India’s states.

Mizo, a member of the Sino-Tibetan family, is the official language, spoken by 70 per cent of the inhabitants, but English is widely used.

The majority of Mizos, some 87 per cent, are Christians in various denominations, predominantly Presbyterian. Other major denominations include Baptists, Pentecostals and Seventh-Day Adventists.

Buddhism is practiced by most of the remaining population.

Tripura’s 3.7 million people were once part of the Tripuri Kingdom, a princely state in the British Indian empire.

It became a union territory in1956 and a state in 1972.

About 70 per cent of the state’s population comprises Bengali-speaking Hindus, the rest are mostly Tripuri. 

Arunachal Pradesh shares international borders with Bhutan in the west, Burma in the east, and China’s Tibetan autonomous region in the north.

It was known as the North-East Frontier Agency until it became a union territory in 1972. It acquired statehood in 1987.

Its population of 1.4 million can be roughly divided into semi-distinct cultural spheres, on the basis of tribal identity, language, and religion.

Many groups practice traditional indigenous religions, while the remaining population is divided between Christians, at 30.2 per cent, and Hindus at 29.4 per cent.

The state is one of the linguistically richest and most diverse regions in all of Asia, being home to at least 30 distinct languages in addition to innumerable dialects and subdialects.

Most of the languages belong to the Tibeto-Burman family.

Assam itself still has more than 31 million people, of which 61.4 per cent were Hindus and 34.2 Muslim.

An Indo-Aryan language, Assamese is the state’s official language and spoken by almost half the population. Bengali is the second most widely spoken language of the state, at 29 per cent.

Most Indians outside the region know little of these fringe states, but their relative obscurity has allowed them to retain their own cultures.