It should have been part of a trio: Rice-a-Roni, fog and Humanistic Judaism.
Considering the large number of young, unaffiliated Jews in the Bay Area, the overwhelming liberalism and, dare we say, the open-mindedness prevalent in the region, Humanistic Judaism — a nontheistic embrace of Jewish culture and ethics — should have taken off like wildfire here.
It hasn’t.
Rabbi Sherwin Wine, who founded the Humanistic Judaism movement 41 years ago in Detroit, will be the scholar-in-residence this weekend at Kol Hadash, the Bay Area’s Humanistic congregation, and will discuss the history of Sephardic Judaism.
The Albany congregation features about 100 member families, about the same number it had a few years ago. For the 76-year-old Wine, that’s a little frustrating.
“My feeling is, we have an important message for people in the Bay Area — if only people could hear it,” he said in a phone interview from his Detroit home.
“So, I’m impatient. The city is filled with a large percentage of unaffiliated young people who might be interested in cultural Judaism.”
Wine is impatient about Humanistic Judaism’s failure thus far to carve out a large niche in the Bay Area, but he isn’t mystified.
For one, the movement’s Detroit- and Jerusalem-based seminaries have only just started to ordain rabbis in the past five years, despite the fact that 40 Humanistic congregations are now located in nearly three dozen American cities. (Chicago has two synagogues and New York City four.)
Congregations with rabbis have shown the ability to grow; Wine’s own Detroit-area synagogue houses a thriving 500 families.
Founded in the late 1980s, Kol Hadash hired its first rabbi, Kai Eckstein, last year. The youthful, German-born rabbi was also supposed to alleviate one of the congregation’s other problems — a dearth of young people and families.
And, according to Marcia Grossman, the president of Kol Hadash, he did.
“Since we hired the rabbi, we’ve been attracting more young families. We’re moving toward a younger membership, though we still have a lot of older members and a lot of Holocaust survivors,” she said.
One problem though: Eckstein is resigning his post at the end of the month to move back to his native Germany.
“That will affect things,” Grossman admitted. “Some people will probably not renew their memberships; they joined for Kai. But a lot of younger families joined because we had a rabbi, and the fact that we’ll continue to function as a synagogue and look for another rabbi will keep them with us.”
Wine feels that having a rabbi in place is a key for growth — and it is a problem the movement can only address slowly. With a dearth of Humanistic rabbis, congregations often look outside the movement. (Eckstein, in fact, was ordained by the German equivalent of the Reform movement. Wine is also an ordained Reform rabbi.)
Another key, however, is visibility. And visibility costs.
“Visibility needs to be raised. And in order to do that you need to have in place a fairly large budget for publicity,” said Wine. “To be in San Francisco is like being in New York. The number of [diversions] available at any time is overwhelming.”
Wine admits it would be easier to establish a beachhead in a smaller town, where the “urban life wasn’t so rich with opportunities” that compete with religious activities.
Still, he’d love to see a Kol Hadash expansion into San Francisco.
“In order to attract people from San Francisco, we need to have some kind of presence in the city. And that is its ambition, to do that. A number of [Kol Hadash] events take place there,” he said.
“It’s like Los Angeles. Do you know anyone from Westwood who’ll go to the [San Fernando] Valley? I don’t.”
Rabbi Sherwin Wine will discuss the world of Sephardic Jewry on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, June 25-27, at the Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave. Information: Bert Steinberg (415) 543-4595.