Sherwin Theodore Wine (Hebrew name שמעון בן צבי, Shimon ben Tzvi; January 25, 1928 – July 21, 2007) was an American rabbi and a founding figure of Humanistic Judaism, a movement that emphasizes Jewish culture and history as sources of Jewish identity rather than belief in any gods.
Wine attended Detroit public schools with almost completely Jewish student bodies, and his religious upbringing was in Conservative Judaism at Congregation Shaarey Zedek.
Despite his movement away from theism, Wine decided to join the clergy rather than academia and in 1951 enrolled in the rabbinic program at Reform Judaism's Hebrew Union College.
In the fall of 1959, he joined a group in Windsor, Ontario, just across the Detroit River in Canada to organize a new Reform congregation, also called Beth El.
Working with members of this small group to develop language which reflected their true beliefs, Wine eventually made the decision to eliminate the word "God" from the services and instead to use new liturgy that extolled Jewish history, culture, and ethical values.
A storm of controversy arose when it became known that Wine, who had by then left Temple Beth El in Windsor, was leading a congregation that did not recognize God.
Rather, reflecting his acceptance of the basic outlook of the logical positivists, he declared that it was not possible empirically to prove or disprove the existence of God and, therefore, the concept was meaningless.
The Masonic temple in Birmingham in which the congregation was meeting at the time expelled the group early in 1965 because it had rejected God.
The congregation, now known as the Birmingham Temple, purchased land in Farmington Hills, Michigan, and moved into a newly constructed building in 1971.
Instead, the sanctuary was adorned with a large sculpture spelling out in Hebrew the word Adam, meaning "man" or "people."
Wine served as the rabbi of the Birmingham Temple until his retirement in 2003, at which time he began devoting most of his efforts to his work as Dean for North America and Provost of the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism as well as to lecturing on a wide range of topics under the auspices of the Center for New Thinking, which he had founded in 1976.
[4] As the outlook and practices of the Birmingham Temple attracted people in other locations, Wine assumed the responsibility for founding several organizations designed to link these adherents together.
This educational institution was sponsored jointly by the Society for Humanistic Judaism and the Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations.
The rabbinic program of this Institute has educated and ordained seven rabbis in North America in addition to over 50 leaders (called madrikhim or madrikhot in Hebrew or vegvayzer in Yiddish) who have less training than rabbis but are certified by the Institute to officiate at weddings and other life cycle events.
In 1981, he and others created the Voice of Reason for the purpose of responding to the upsurge of right-wing political activism by religious leaders such as Rev.
In 1982, The Voice of Reason merged with the Center for Moral Democracy, which had been started by Ethical Culture leader Edward L. Ericson and others, to form a new organization, Americans for Religious Liberty, which continues as an advocacy group for the separation of church and state.
While secular Jewish culture thrived in the United States in the first half of the 20th century, its principal manifestations, Yiddish-based schools and Zionism, were in decline by the beginning of the 1960s.
A typical passage developed by Wine for the Sabbath (Shabbat) is, in transliterated Hebrew and in English: Na-eh ha-or ba-olam.
Wine composed a poem that is considered to be the central expression of the outlook of Humanistic Judaism: איפה אורי?
The Torah and other traditional Jewish religious texts are, for Wine, important historical documents that need to be evaluated scientifically to determine their origins and degree of factuality.
Wine's view has been that criticizing people for marrying whomever they choose is not only unethical but also counterproductive to efforts to ensure Jewish continuity.