: About Me

I've been a secular humanist as long as I can remember. When they put the words "under God" into Pledge, I said to myself, "I'm not saying that." And I never did. I was 12 years old time.

My writings in Helium are mostly about secular humanism. One of my goals is to give people like me a way to think about the downsides of religious belief (it's like a drug addiction, with the cleric as key enabler) and the benefits of a life without it.

In March of 1979, after reading a Detroit Free Press article about a local "atheist rabbi" named Sherwin Wine, I visited the Birmingham Temple (Farmington Hills, MI). As soon as I saw the Torah in the library and the Hebrew word ADAM ("humanity") in large stylized letters on the front wall of the main room, I knew I had found my spiritual home.

I met the brilliant, charismatic Rabbi Wine, joined the congregation, and for the past 30 years, I have studied, practiced, and written several articles on Secular Humanistic Judaism and, of course, my book on the Torah from a humanistic perspective.

Unlike most people who write about the Bible, I have a PhD in linguistics, which enables me to define and explain the key difference between Torah translation and rabbinical inferences about the text. My motivation for writing the book is a sincere desire to let others know what the Torah really says, so that they can decide for themselves what its place should be in their lives.

I consider the fact that I am not a Biblical scholar to be another asset. It has often been noted that real innovations typically come from outside a field, because the practitioners pursue only the accepted lines of reasoning and inquiry.

That may be the case here. Only an outsider would dare to challenge two millennia of established tradition, taken-for-granted thinking and Torah-centric Judaism.

I bring no awe or reverence to the Torah - only a sincere desire to know what it says, with no interpretation, spin, or clerical filtering whatsoever. This knowledge is what I offer the reader.

I am not a nonconformist by nature. I seek above all the truth. I would love the security that comes from being part of a large group of believers. But if I find what they believe (or profess to believe) to be "ego-dystonic" - not resonant with who I am - if I find it in fact unbelievable, then I can't go along.

The decision to be a secular humanist was for me a realization of who I always was. As a youngster, I waited for God to show up and do something, as he did in the old stories. But after a period of wait-and-see, and especially after the Holocaust, I gave God his walking papers.

It would be such a better world if people could unburden themselves of gods and their many demands. My writings and my blog - www.thejewishatheist.com - are dedicated to such a world.

(PS. I am also a jazz musician, and I sometimes write about jazz.)

My passion is ...

jazz piano, religion, politics

I know too much about ...

language

Why I write ...

To help free people from religious superstition and oppression

My inspiration ...

Rabbi Sherwin Wine

Religion & Spirituality > Judaism What is Zionism from a secular humanism point of view

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"O Jerusalem of gold, of brass and of light, For all your songs I will be your harp." Traditional Hebrew song "Zionism" is an emotionally loaded word, and like other such words, it has sharply different meanings, depending on who's talking and in what context. Zionism has been around, as a word and as a concept, for my whole life. I was born only five years before the State of Israel was created. When I went to Hebrew school, there was a map of the state of Israel on the wall. In the early 1950s, one of the teachers, a very literate college professor, stood in front of that map and declare...

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