One New Age guru still on a roll is Rabbi Sherwin Wine. Twenty-three years ago, before his rise, he was an unbelieving rabbi without a congregation. Known for his willingness to violate Talmudic law by marrying Jews to gentiles, this fall Wine became co-chairperson of the International Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews. At the Birmingham Temple, Wine’s congregation in Farmington Hills, Michigan, the synod fulfilled his dream of receiving emotional support and legitimacy from his soulmates around the world. The conference, wrote Wine in the December 1986 Jewish Humanist, confirmed that the philosophy of the Birmingham Temple was not a bizarre local phenomenon but a movement supported by an international gallery of celebrities, from Haim Cohn to Amos Oz.

Since secular humanism usually disguises itself as a neutral science, the candor of Wine’s movement appealed to the Peeping Tom in me. Hanukkah was a day away, providing an opportunity to view Wine conducting a godless holiday service that I could not pass up. I rang up the temple for service times and was told that the building would be closed for the holidays. The congregation ministers to the “mid-winter travel plans of various members.” I bided my time reading Wine’s book, Judaism Beyond God, as well as his other publications, until the tanned brethren returned.

I discovered that the godless religion rejects prayer and worship: Prayer wastes time. When Wine had led prayers, during a stint as a Reform rabbi, nobody upstairs listened. Judaism Beyond God considers prayer a psychological kink caused by lingering nursery power-fantasies about the magical ability of baby sounds to procure milk delivery.

In Wine’s eyes, worship resembles the appeasement rituals of wolves and is dangerous, irrational, and inappropriate for services. Dangerous because no power is sacred, taboo, or beyond human challenge; irrational because no power requires obsequious honor and devotion. Wine blames ancestor worship for “this bizarre ritual appeasement of invisible powers, immortals, icons, books, and abstract designs.” Prayer and worship are replaced by silent meditation—which eliminates prayer books and Torahs from his start-up costs.

I attended an outreach session in early January at the temple, a rectangular brick and glass structure that resembles a suburban medical plaza. The only exterior ornaments were flat wood panels that framed the glass entrance to the large empty lobby. Wine waited for us to find him behind the windows of the cubical library, fidgeting his elbows against the formica tabletop and disparagingly looking over the small turnout. He wore a dark brown wool suit and a matching silk tie, and hogged a table-width to himself.

The pitch was theatrical. Vivid gestures followed the words, palms sweeping the verbal spill off the formica tabletop. While he talked about unseen forces, his pupils dilated and brows lifted: “As secular humanists, we hold four tenets: naturalism, skepticism, consequential ethics and humanism,” he said, and went on to explain each tenet well enough for a bubblegum card.”

“Can you show me a supernatural being?” he asked, swaying spread palms and smirking.

He spoke of the scientific revolution: “There are no eternal truths, only fleeting objective scientific facts that the scientific method tells us are true. But who knows how long their truth will last in an age of active change or what science will discover tomorrow?”

Moral laws are as obsolete as close extended families. Anything that calls for unthinking submission to authority is unsuited to our individualistic age: “In the century of the Holocaust, we find it unrealistic to depend on a supernatural being for our safety and direction. Humanism, however, affirms the individual’s limited but extraordinary abilities.”

The human objects of the outreach ask questions: How do you console the bereaved?

“Let me tell you what I saw at a shivva that turned me completely off. A beautiful 32-year-old woman, in her prime, died in a ear accident. The rabbi, a conservative, told the devastated husband, ‘Maybe it’s for the best.’ It was too much to heap this absurdity upon his pain.

“I console people by complimenting them for taking it well and I tell them how much I admire their strength.”

How do you tell kids that there is no God?

“You need not waffle because kids don’t care,” he said. Though afterwards, in private, he told a mixed couple, about to tie the knot, whose kids thought that Wine’s services were not for the best, that “Rejecting secular humanism is all part of the process. Be sure to bring them back.”

Do you observe any dietary laws?

“No, most of our members are on diets.”

I asked, “What are your rituals like? How do you celebrate your holidays?—People’s Day, for instance?”

“The few rituals we have are for the people. People are not for the rituals.

“People’s Day affirms there are other people besides us. It falls November 1st. Children collect for Unicef. The congregation celebrates by singing secular songs, like ‘It’s a Small World.'”

I asked for a tour of the Temple. Since that was the last question and I was the only one interested, Wine and I soon stood in the service room.

“Notice our flat ceiling; the temple architecture is modern; it’s not designed to let heavenly light in,” he said.

He ignored my criticism of the pulpit skylight: White Bauhaus glass is not light-proof Maybe he was right to feel protected against angelic spirits. Only civic spirits were immanent in the service room’s blond wood paneling, stainless steel rails, wing-and-tail floorplan, and textured black plastic chairs. It resembles a modern meeting room, designed to accommodate the local school board.

All icons had been removed. No Torah because “We don’t believe in the word.” But the pulpit was not bare. Upon it stood a logo, a pop art rendering of the Hebrew word for man, “adam” (originally meaning clay), and a Menorah. Not the symbolic Menorah of rabbinical Judaism but one shining with the secular Light of Life, brother to a Rolling Stones’ light show.

I returned for a service called “Celebration of Academic Achievement” as well as to observe a pre-service low-cal chicken dinner, served in an oversized Danish living room with sectional sofas and mini-trees in pots. Before calling tables to the buffet. Wine, beaming and waving a slice of egg bread, said a blessing: “We praise the power of life within the world and within each of us,” and began a people’s eating ritual with “share the bread, pass it around. Behold how good and pleasant it is to be with each other in peace.”

Blessing and handing out the bread baskets, the wandering guru seemed different from the sitting missionary. The guru has the girlish amiability of old Yiddish comedians, like Uncle Miltie, who used to perform in drag. Constantly smiling, slightly tilting, he seems ready to chuckle and do a backwards somersault.

The noshers were from Uncle Miltie’s generation. The women had neat short haircuts and wore sweaters or knit dresses; though one, an academic achiever, let her long curls fall in improvised movements over a black dress amply riveted with rhinestones. The men, who wore stodgy wools, quietly sliced their chicken into small pieces. I counted five kids and teenagers. I could not tell if couples outnumbered singles, but Secular Humanistic Judaism’s future lies outside its reproductive talents.

With many humanists home watching Dallas and Miami Vice, the spectators sat few and far between. Wine said, “We’re a family,” and called on everybody to gather together near the pulpit, where he began the service with an explanation of why college degrees are superior to traditional rites of passage like Bar Mitzvahs or confirmations. Next we heard 20 minutes of Wine’s pop psychology tips alternating with a soprano duet and piano performance of his musical meditations, like: “In a place where there are no real people/Strive to be a person.”

Then came the unexpected. New Age Judaism had been so relentlessly one-dimensional that it seemed powerless to astonish. But, astounded I was when Wine called upon three rational skeptics to answer a question—How does one’s commitment to Secular Humanistic Judaism contribute to one’s career?—and each, alighted with revival-tent fervor, witnessed the power of humanism to set you free.

The first, a teased-platinum blond predator with a tube of foundation cream on her face, told how her faith in Freudian psychotherapy and twoyear submission to its methods unleashed hidden inner powers that enabled her to overcome her doctors’ objective scientific prognoses about her ectopic pregnancy and her infertility.

“With humanism, this was within my grasp. My humanistic commitment began a two-year struggle about myself and my milieu. Psychoanalysis taught me how to feel, who I am, that I am responsible for myself, and how to help others.

“As a clinical social worker from a psychoanalytical base, I help my cases find their humanness through their transfer to me. I remain a blank screen for my patients to look deeply into and see their symptoms. I don’t offer a quick fix like pop psychology. Beginning with the oedipal, I peel my patients apart, layer by layer, like an onion.

“It would be horrible for these people to have to depend on a supreme being.”

She ended her testimony with a wildly applauded miracle, “By the way, I had my baby.”

“Can you beat that?” began the second witness, a soprano lawyer with small flip-out ears and a goatee. He could not; humanism had only made him an altruistic lawyer and raised him above his peers: “Other lawyers are not good guys,” he put it.

The final witness was a frizzy-haired clinical social worker with sagging cheeks and thick lips and a fetus-like body, who told another tale of human might in the teeth of scientific fact. Her heroine was one of her patients, an 85-year-old woman who would not allow a doctor near her. “When I asked, ‘Would you like an appointment,’ she replied, ‘No. Twenty years ago the doctors told me that I would soon be dead.’

“She never saw a physician again, and lived a beautiful life. Listening to her case history, my tears flowed. I learned that seniors have feelings too.

“Now I work as a pregnancy counselor at a clinic, where women must make decisions. My humanistic training helps me reach out to my patients and tell them that the light is within, that the answers are in themselves.”

The happy rabbi called on all members of the flock who earned diplomas in 1986 to march up onto the pulpit and light the Menorah. After replacing the torch, each lightbearer rushed to Wine for a Sammy Davis Jr. hug and kiss—he might have been Robert Schuller.