While many Jewish knowledge-seekers will attend Lehrhaus Judaica’s upcoming conference, there will be one notable no-show. God.
“Belonging Without Believing” is a forum on Jewish secular culture. It’s all about the artistic and intellectual achievements of post-Enlightenment Jews who rejected the piety of their forebears.
The event takes place Feb. 6 at the JCC of San Francisco. The Laszlo N. Tauber Family Foundation, the Koret Foundation and the Posen Foundation funded the event.
Ironically, it takes place on the day of America’s most sacred holiday: Super Bowl Sunday (though it should end before kickoff so fans can catch the game).
Workshop topics vary — from Spinoza to the Marx Brothers — all led by Bay Area rabbis and scholars. Monologist Josh Kornbluth caps the day with a new piece, “You Go Yahweh, I’ll Go Mine.”
Instead of a keynote speaker, organizers planned a keynote conversation between U.C. Davis Jewish studies professor David Biale and KQED Forum host Michael Krasny.
Both have new books on the topic of secularism: Krasny’s “Spiritual Envy,” an account of the author’s agnosticism, and Biale’s “Not in the Heavens,” a history of Jewish secular thought.
Secular himself, Biale still reveres Jewish religious tradition, which he says greatly informed the philosophy of the Jewish secularists.
He says secularism provided “a new way of appropriating or interpreting tradition [in a manner] that fits an agnostic or a secular world view. Jewish secularism doesn’t exist independently of the Jewish religion. It is constant conversation with the sources of the Jewish religion.”
Biale’s book grew out of a course he teaches on the subject. He says it has become one of his most popular classes at U.C. Davis.
“The ideas spoke to [students],” he says. “How do you define God? What is relationship of nature to God? What is the status of the Bible if we do not accept it as a religious text?”
When considering which thinkers to include in his book, Biale ruled out anti-religious figures who happened to be born Jewish. Bye-bye, Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky.
Thinkers who made the cut were those raised in Jewish tradition, and who drew on that tradition even as they espoused secular ideals. Hello, Sigmund Freud, David Ben-Gurion and Joseph Hyim Brenner, a radical Hebrew writer from pre-state Israel.
“Freud was preoccupied with what it meant to be Jewish, and what he owed the Jewish tradition,” Biale notes, adding that Brenner’s attitude toward Judaism “was incredibly hostile. In his writings he refers to the Tanach as the Old Testament. He did that deliberately to say ‘This book doesn’t say anything to me.’ ”
Another major figure in the history of Jewish secularism was Baruch Spinoza. Biale touches on him, too, but Lehrhaus senior educator Rabbi Peretz Wolf-Prusan will do a whole workshop on the famed 17th century Dutch philosopher.
Wolf-Prusan considers himself a “failed secular Jew,” but nonetheless an admirer of Spinoza.
“He presents the most learned critique of religion,” Wolf-Prusan says. “He was also a victim of a community that was frightened, and in reaction he chose the path of ethical humanism with a profound faith in a creator of the universe.”
Biale notes the secular-religious divide is much wider in Israel, where most Israeli Jews consider themselves secular, and “church-state” issues still roil society.
Here in the Bay Area, it’s easier to blur the lines. For Biale, that occurs every fall when he, along with family and friends, heads for Muir Woods to celebrate Yom Kippur.
“Is it religious or secular?” he asks. “It’s both.”
“Belonging Without Believing” 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Feb. 6 at JCC of San Francisco, 3200 California St. $15-$25. Information: (510) 845-6420 or www.lehrhaus.org.