Humanistic Torah Podcast – Episode 1
Hosted by James M. Branum
HumanisticTorah.org
Episode for the Jewish week ending on September 12, 2025/20 Elul, 5786
In this episode:
1. An introduction to the podcast and its themes of Unbound Shalom-Centric Humanistic Judaism
2. A short bio of the host
3. A D’var Torah on Ki Tavo, from an unbound humanistic perspective
Comments/Feedback: hello (at) HumanisticTorah (dot) org
A computer-generated transcript (which may have some errors) of this episode is also available below:
Harmonica Playing
James M. Branum 00:00
James, welcome to the very first episode of the humanistic Torah Podcast. I’m James M Branum, and this is episode number one. In our first segment, I’ll be sharing an introduction what this podcast will be about its connection to the broader humanistic Torah project, as well as a little bit about myself. Then in our second segment, I’ll be sharing a preview of some of our upcoming content over the next few months, and then we’ll close with a short, unbound, humanistic D’var Torah about this week’s Torah portion.
TRANSITION-Harmonica Playing
James M. Branum 00:59
So our mission in this podcast is to explore and engage with the idea of Unbound, Shalom-centric, humanistic Torah. So let’s talk about that. What do I mean by that? Well, by Torah, I’m speaking about the wisdom that is of relevance to Jewish and Jewish adjacent people. So it does include the literal Torah, the five books, allegedly of Moses. It includes Tanakh, all of the Jewish Scriptures in Hebrew. It would also include apocryphal writings of Jewish people, the Talmud and this great interpretive tradition, and, of course, all the commentaries. But it also includes modern writings and cultural expressions. In other words, I’m using a very wide net to describe Torah. Also Torah mostly comes from Jewish authors and creation creators, but sometimes it does not. In other words, if there is wisdom in the world and it would be of relevance to Jewish people. It is Torah, in my opinion. So wide net, okay?
Secondly, humanistic. Well, by humanistic, I’m referring to a worldview or theology that rejects the idea of an of a deity who intervenes in human history. This is a very broad net, because it includes, of course, atheists, those who do not believe in God, agnostics, those who aren’t sure about God, and all the other many shades of ideas within that broad definition of agnosticism, including those who say we simply don’t have the ability to ever know about God. If God exists, those who would say, maybe there’s a God, maybe we don’t, but I don’t care about the question. It’s unimportant. All of those, those beliefs under that rubric of agnosticism would would also fit as a humanist. Humanist also include deist people who believe that there was a creator of the universe, but a creator who now is hands off, who isn’t intervening, and includes folks like myself that I lean more in the Pantheistic direction of believing that, yes, there is some kind of divine energy that’s present in everything and everyone, but it’s not something different than the created world. God and creation are fundamentally the same thing. There’s not the separate personality out here who’s intervening in the world. And of course, it’s also humanists also include many who don’t like any of these terms or but, but who are not, but simply are not sure, but they know this, that they don’t resonate with the idea of a interventionist deity. So by this definition, by the way, we’re talking about a huge chunk of the Jewish population. We, of course, are found in the humanistic Jewish movement that includes congregations affiliated with a society for humanistic Judaism, as well as independence and other kinds of affiliations of humanistic Jews. But that’s only a small part of the humanistic Jewish world, because we are present in every Jewish movement. There are rabbis and lay people who are humanists. In the Reform Movement, renewal, conservative, reconstructing, Orthodox, non denominational, pluralistic. We are everywhere. Probably were not a majority yet, but probably closer to it than you might think, particularly in many communities. Also, the number of rabbis who actually are humanist, if you really pin them down, what they believe, is pretty high. And so we are not, in my opinion, we are not an obscure subset of Jews we but what we are by actually claiming our humanism, by speaking about it and being open about it, we are coming out of the closet. We are being open about things that many Jews who may share our views but aren’t yet ready to talk about it. And so this podcast is for all humanistic Jews and all. A Jewish adjacent humanist, people who have connections of various kinds the Jewish community, but haven’t, haven’t formally converted. We’re here for you too. And finally, if you simply are interested in Jewish ideas, and particularly humanistic Jewish ideas, it doesn’t matter what your religious and cultural affiliation is, really. If you’re interested in these ideas, please stick around. I think you’ll find a lot to engage with in this podcast.
Okay, so the third piece of our podcast is Shalom-centric. Now this word, I’m kind of liking this idea because it really speaks to edits here. So by Shalom-centric, what I’m speaking about is centering peace in its broadest sense, in this and I’m really focusing especially on the Hebrew word of shalom, which does mean peace, but it also means so much more. It means wholeness, it means harmony, balance, health. All of these things are embedded in this word. And it’s my opinion that unfortunately, the institutional, mainstream Jewish word had world has let Shalom not be at the center of Judaism. And so this podcast, one of our goals is to bring it back. And I won’t go into a lot of specifics on this now, there’s obviously a lot of difficult issues in the world right now, in this, in here, in the United States, around the world, certainly in an Eretz Yisrael. And so I’m, I’m going to be, I guess I will say this next part, our fourth principle, unboundedness, may help a little bit of explaining how, how to be Shalom centric at this moment in time.
And so by Unbound, I mean that we are, I should mention, I’m inspired by my friends at the Judaism and bound podcast who really, for me, really helped me to understand this idea better of what it would mean for Judaism that is not so hyper fixated on boundaries. Now I get it. Some rabbis I deeply respect have said, told me boundaries are at the heart of Judaism. The whole idea of kiddush, of holiness, is rooted in the center of Judaism and if, and that’s what it’s all about. And I’m not denying that, in a sense. But I also think we even when we set boundaries, even when we set up boundaries appropriately, we have choices in how we set those boundaries, and we can have a position that we are going to default always towards inclusion and acceptance, that we that’s going to be our default. And unfortunately, right now the mainstream, institutional Jewish world, very often, their default is towards caution. Their default is put up walls, put up barriers. I’m going to argue that an unbound approach is to say no, we’re going to look for ways to tear down walls. We’re going to look for ways to bridge gaps. We’re going to look for ways to connect with people, despite some differences, and so because of that, we are going to, because of our belief in unbounded Judaism, that’s going to shape a lot of what we’re about.
One is that we are going to, from day one, will be accepting and celebrating Jewish converts. This is a very important thing for us, for this podcast, and for myself, I think unfortunately, there’s a lot of hostility, unfortunately many parts of Judaism towards converts, a lot of walls that come up again and again and again, and I’m sick of it. And so this podcast, we’d be pushing back on that.
Also, the unbounded approach will be a factor in who we have on as guests to the podcast, some of the authors will be looking at including people that are not Jewish. We’re going to talk about MRP, multiple religious practice in Judaism too. And these are controversial subjects, but we see some value in taking an unbounded approach in these areas. And finally, I’ll mention that we are unbound in recognizing the power of diasporic Judaism in all its many and varied cultural forms as a podcast. The orientation This podcast is to celebrate the many, many ways that Judaism has manifested throughout the world, and so that’s going to be a part of our DNA.
Okay, so with that philosophy out of the way, I want to share just a tiny bit about me. And part of the reason I want to do this is is that I do think that whenever you’re hearing any kind of cultural expression, podcast, program, book, whatever, it’s always important to know, know the bias and context the person is bringing you the content. And so I’m going to share a very short, abbreviated version of my story for now and again, I may touch on some of these. I may touch on some of these things in future episodes. But for now, this is short version. So I’m a middle-aged convert to Judaism, and I live here in Oklahoma City. I’m a step dad to a very awesome college religious studies and Psychology freshman, and I live with my primary chavrutah in life, Becky, and hopefully I’ll have her on the on the podcast in the future. She’s an extraordinary person.
I lived most of my life in Oklahoma, but I’ve also traveled a good bit in North America, and because of that, I feel a connection to a lot of places all across Turtle Island. I grew up in a very fundamentalist Christian tradition in rural Oklahoma, and that’s where I began. But I started asking questions and pushing back as a teenager and especially as a young adult, and eventually transitioned away from that and towards more moderate forms of evangelical Christianity. Eventually, though, I became persuaded that the teachings of Jesus were pacifistic, anti nationalistic and anti capitalist, which led me to question a whole lot of things, and eventually it led me to finding my next religious home in the progressive wing of the Mennonite Church, a really good place in many ways, not perfect. I can tell you some stories about that too, but the good parts were really good, and that’s where I ended up getting much of my education and activism, but also where I was given the chance to serve as a minister for about a dozen years in middle age, I got married.
Oh, before I go on, I should also mention that professionally, I work as an attorney by this point in my journey, and I became a, I guess, I guess, got my bar license when I was in my early years at the Mennonite Church. And most of my professional work has been working with military service members who are seeking an early discharge to the military or who are facing issues of injustice.
So anyway, in middle age, I was going through some pretty intense, intense time of professional burnout, but I also connected with an old friend who I ended up marrying, a life changing event. But what I didn’t expect from this late, later in life, marriage and fatherhood was that it would also lead to religious evolution. About eight, nine months into our marriage, my wife confessed to me that she had been secretly studying and engaging with spiritual Jewish spirituality for the past few years. By the way, there’s something she wrote about very eloquently at Kveller.com so I’ll have a link in the show notes to that article or that essay, she also shared me that she really wanted to explore it more. Well, I liked this idea. I was by this point in my life, I had become a student of many religious paths. I’d seen a lot of value in exploring other paths. And so I said, Let’s do it.
And so we started observing Jewish practices at home, especially for the holidays in Shabbat, and it really, really was sweet and rich. So the next few years, our Jewish practices became more and more important to us. But I also encountered one really big challenge, which was that one of my Mennonite friends, a friend in activism confronted me and said that he believed that our family’s private practice of Judaism was a form of cultural misappropriation. This issue troubled me greatly then and now. I don’t really agree with my friend’s assessment for a lot of reasons, which I won’t touch him now, but nevertheless, even the issue that this was adjacent to misappropriation really troubled me, in part because these practices had become very dear to me, I didn’t want to quit doing them, but I also didn’t want to quit, didn’t want to have to quit being involved in my Mennonite Church. And so I decided I needed to find a way to become Jewish, so I could do Jewish things as a Jew, but also keep doing Mennonite things.
Unfortunately, I quickly discovered after a lot of reading that for much of the mainstream, institutional Jewish world, this was impossible, and that for almost all rabbis, synagogues and conversion programs. One would be asked at the Bet Din, the rabbinic court, the final step before you go to the mikvah. You’re often asked this question, “do you commit to observing Judaism to the exclusion of all other paths?” Well, this obviously wouldn’t work for me, but I did find an exception that was workable for me, and that was the conversion program of the Society for humanistic Judaism. It was a good fit for a lot of reasons, but one of the biggies was that also I was starting to understand that my own theology, my own way of really understanding the divine, looked a lot more like humanism than theism. And so I pursued that path. I got my conversion certificate signed by one of my heroes today, Rabbi Miriam Jairus, of the society to humanistic Judaism. And I have a picture of my conversion certificate in the show notes.
And it was a good thing. And that, course, after I did this, that led me to doing what. All new Jews should do, which is to embrace the mitzvah of study. And so I, of course, read through all of the introductory materials you can find online my Jewish learning and like so much good stuff out there today, and of course, every book I could find in the public library on Judaism. But eventually that led me to Punk Torah and their Darshan Yeshiva program, which was a great, great introduction of the breadth of Judaism, and especially of the possibilities of doing Jewish work, not as a rabbi, but as as a as a lay person.
And then later, I discovered the Judaism bound podcast, which absolutely changed my life, exposing me to a very different way of Judaism. Eventually, because of them, I got involved with their brand new program, the UN yeshiva, their school of Jewish learning and unlearning, and I recently completed their certificate program, so I’m now officially a certified unbound Jew. Today, I am involved with two Jewish congregations, the Spinosa Havurah, an international online, humanistic Jewish community. I’m one of the, part of the leadership team over there. I get to lead services, sometimes, that kind of thing.
But I’m also involved at Temple B’nai Israel, a Reform temple in Oklahoma City. It’s a big tent congregation, and a lot of good folks there. (unintelligible) Of course, it means I don’t agree with everybody. I have strong disagreements sometimes with folks, but yet we stay in fellowship with each other. We stay connected. And I’m really proud to be part of that community.
And while I no longer work for them, I do remain a proud and somewhat active associate member of joy Mennonite Church in Oklahoma City as well. I’ve I really I reconnected with them, especially after the war in Gaza over the last few years, I needed to be with these folks again in the spiritual context, and so I’m really glad to have that connection with them again.
I should also mention that a big part of my life, especially for the last 24 years, has been peace activism. This informs my professional work as an attorney, but also has been a motivator and component of my spiritual life for a long time.
Lastly, and I share this by helping you as listeners to understand my context and potential biases. Do what you know, I’m on the autism spectrum, and I’m pretty open about that, because most of the time, I see that as a good thing, something to even be proud of.
I also have a complicated ethnic heritage, including both European and indigenous American ancestry, and I would describe myself as being on the fringes of the LGBTQ community, both as an ally, but also as someone who doesn’t 100% fit into the CIS het binary paradigm.
So anyway, that’s the short version of my story. Went a little longer than I wanted it to, but I did think it’d be helpful you to understand a little better where I’m coming from, particularly for those of you who get into this podcast.
TRANSITION-Harmonica Playing
James M. Branum 18:11
So I promised a bit of a teaser for some of our upcoming episodes. So here’s a little bit of that. First of all, though, I do want to mention this will be a magazine format show, which means that most episodes will be, will consist of short segments spliced together, much like some of the big radio shows, like All things considered on NPR and so a lot of the time it will the the format will include a short, unbound humanistic D’var Torah message. But we also have other stuff, including short essays. We may do some interviews. I’m hoping time also to do some music and poetry.
We also definitely will have some holiday programming in the works. I’m as we speak, I’m working on a Rosh Hashanah show, but we will also be doing special shows for Sukkot. And Hanukkah will be another focus of the podcast.
And so some weeks we will have some prep, we’ll be exploring practical examples of things that ordinary folks can do to be about the work of Tikkun Olam, of world repair.
And of course, given our unbound orientation, you can count on the fact that we will be talking about subjects that many other Jewish groups won’t touch, the stuff that makes people nervous. We’re going to be talking about things like cannabis and spiritual practice. We’re going to discuss multi religious practice. We’re going to engage in talking about civil disobedience and protest of unjust policies, conscious objection of war, and, of course, the full range of issues at stake for LGBTQ plus folks at this time, particularly in, let’s be frank, this fascist time of history in much of the world, we’re going to be talking about all of this stuff, by the way.
So speaking of boundaries of what we won’t be touching or what we’ll be doing in different ways, I do want to mention that this podcast will also be, at times, breaking with the minhag or the tradition of the movement of humanistic Judaism in one key area, and that is liturgy. While I respect the value of non theistic liturgy and the intellectual integrity that comes from only saying what one really means. I also see value in traditional theistic liturgy, from the standpoint of both literature of history, but also more generally, by engaging with the ideas expressed to the power of metaphor. And so this podcast will not be afraid to explore and celebrate both non theistic and theistic liturgy. But please understand we’re not going to be doing it from a literalistic standpoint. We’re going to be looking at it humanistically.
So anyway, that’s what we have in the works. Our goal will be to release episode new episodes on a weekly basis. So if you have any ideas for that we should explore. Any content you think we should discuss, please email me at hello at humanistic torah.org
TRANSITION-Harmonica Playing
James M. Branum 21:21
for this week’s D’var Torah, we’re looking at the Torah portion of Ki Tavo, which is in the book of Deuteronomy. But in particular, I want to look mostly at a few portions of Deuteronomy, chapter 28 now, before we get into that, I will mention just so that for you to know, this is a I’m describing this D’var Torah as being a humanistic, unbound d’var torah, meaning that very specifically, it is being read from humanistic Unbound, from a humanistic, unbound perspective. It’s not a traditional D’var Torah. There will be some elements of a more traditional D’var Torah And that may come out, and I may sometimes refer to a wide variety of sources, both new and old, that may come from a different perspectives, but my own perspective and the end is going to be as much as possible, humanistic and unbound. So ki Tavo, the portion we’re particularly looking at is in a portion of the text that’s describing a set of blessings and curses that are promised to the Israelites. This instruction, by the way, is being given but shortly before they enter the land of Israel. And so in this this kind of preparatory to coming in, they’re being told that all these wonderful things will happen if you follow the commandments, and all these bad things will happen if you don’t. And it’s pretty grandiose. I’ll just read you. To give you one picture of how grandiose The good stuff is. I’m going to read I’m yeah, I’ll read. I’ll read some, starting in verse seven.
The Lord will put you, put to wreck, put trough before you. The enemies who attack you, they will march out against you by a single row, but flee from you by many roads. The Lord will ordain blessings for you, upon your barns and upon your undertakings, He will bless you in the land that the Lord your God has given you. The Lord will establish you as his holy people, as he swore to you, if you keep His commandments, the Lord your God and walk in his ways. And all the peoples of the earth shall see that the Lord’s name is proclaimed over you, and they shall stand in fear of you. The Lord will give you a bounding prosperity and the issue of your womb, the offspring of your cattle and the produce of your soil and the land of the Lord swore to your fathers to assign to you. The Lord will open for you his bounteous store the heavens to provide rain for your land and season and to bless all your undertakings. You will be creditor to many nations, but debtor to none. The Lord will make you the head, not the tail. You will attack always. You will always be at the top and never at the bottom, if only you obey and faithfully observe the commandments of the Lord, your God that I enjoin upon you this day and do not deviate to the right or to the left from any of the commandments that I enjoin upon you this day. And turn to the worship of other gods.
So grandiose, amazing blessings, to be the head, not the tail, to always be on top, to always win. Wow, who wouldn’t want that? So then the text gives a set of curses, all the bad things that will happen. And boy, they are explicit. One of the more explicit parts is in verse 27 the Lord will strike you with the Egyptian inflammation, with hemorrhoids, Boral scars and itch from which you shall never recover. And that’s just one of them. There’s some pretty graphic bits of cursing going on in this text. But what I want to especially look. That is starting in verse 62
you shall be left to scant few after having been as numerous as the stars in the sky because you did not heed the command of the Lord your God. And as the Lord once delighted in making you prosperous and many so were the Lord now delight in causing you to perish and in wiping you out, you should be torn from the land that you are about to enter and possess. The Lord will scatter you among all the peoples from one end of the earth to the other, and there you shall serve other gods, wood and stone, whom neither you nor your ancestors have experienced. Yet even among these nations, you shall find no peace, nor shall your foot find a place to rest. The Lord will give you there an anguished heart in eyes that pine and a despondent spirit.
So the question I have today, or a few questions, one is, as humanistic Jews, what do we do with this text? Number two, is it even true or ours? What can we what can we make it knows that this text has a better fortune telling to it. It’s telling about the future. Did it happen the way it said? Let’s talk about that.f
First of all, as humanistic Jews, we do not believe in an interventionist deity. We do not believe that, if there is ago that humanistic Jews as a whole have a wide variety of views about God, whether God exists or doesn’t exist, what we all agree on is that if there is a God, this God does not interfere in human history. In other words, we’re in this by ourselves. Fundamentally, we have to make these decisions. And so obviously, this text speaks of a God who does interfere in human history, who actively blesses everything to the needing voles, to the lambs calving, and that curses us in every way possible, even even into things as intimate as the hemorrhoids we might have.
This is not something that that we believe in literally as humanistic Jews. However, we do read texts for as literature, and especially to understand what was going on at the time of the people who are writing this text, and what we might learn from them. And so from that standpoint, I think we dig a little deeper. There’s some good stuff for us.
One, of course, is to look at the origins of the text itself. One of the commentators I looked at was Richard Elliot Friedman, who talked about how that depends a lot of probably different sources of the text. And his analysis is that this portion of the text that we just read comes from an exilic period. In other words, it came to be the text. This portion the text, came to be during a time of exile, probably the Babylonian exile, and that’s significant for a lot of reasons. Partially, of course, we do know. We have texts such as from the psalms of where Jews were expressing great sorrow, being apart from the land, of knowing the temple was destroyed, having this sense of rupture of their tradition and faith. At the same time. We also know that Jews in Babylonian captivity lived their lives, and many of them lived rich and rewarding lives. They married, they had families, they had homes and businesses. They were quite successful. In fact, they were so successful that about 70 years into the time of captivity, there was a change in leadership at the top. The Persians had taken over from the Babylonians, and a new emperor was in charge, Emperor Cyrus. Cyrus had much more evolved views than his predecessors, and so he allowed the Jews to return to the land of Israel to rebuild the temple, to rebuild their city, and to enjoy a certain level autonomy within the Persian Empire. And so I have to say, I can’t help but think that that context has to be in play in this text, in particular, for as a way to possibly remind those who were despondent that there’s a reason for this, but also as a way to encourage people to go back to the land. And again, we know most of the Jews did not return. Now, in the big picture, was that a good thing? I would argue absolutely yes, because Jews are in Babylon when the temple was the next temple was destroyed where was Judaism preserved. A lot of it was preserved in Babylon. In fact, a big chunk of our great tradition, the Talmud, comes from Babylon. And so because Jews stayed in Babylon. On continued Judaism in that context. We’re here today, arguably,
and so when you look at this text that says all the bad things will happen in diaspora, is it true? Did it really play out that way? And I say sometimes yes, sometimes Jews were treated terribly in the places in the world that we have wound up at but often not. I live here in Oklahoma, on the other side of the world, from front from Eretz Yisrael, and my life is not filled with despondency and anguish. I’m part of vibrant Jewish community here. I’m surrounded by many neighbors that are not Jews, but most of the time, I’m treated pretty well by my neighbors, not always, but most of the time. In other words, my experience of diaspora living doesn’t look like Deuteronomy. 28:65 would say. And I’m obviously that’s a good thing.
Speaker 1 30:59
And so finally, what really can we take from this text?
James M. Branum 31:04
Well, I think maybe the lesson I’m taking from this text is a reminder of the folly of fortune telling, when we think we can predict what the future holds, even when we have a great religious tradition telling us something or a philosophy of some kind, often reality doesn’t line up that way. Sometimes things are much worse than we thought they would be. Often they will be much better than we thought they would be. But I think this text to me, what I take from it is reminder of humility and do and also a reminder of the dangers of blind religious faith that you could read this text
James M. Branum 31:43
and well, I just didn’t think we can know from how it all played out that this isn’t the whole story. And so maybe that’s the lesson we can get from a key topic today.
TRANSITION-Harmonica Playing
And that wraps it up for this week of the humanistic Torah podcast. I really would love to hear from you, please send me an email at Hello at humanistic torah.org, look for us on Facebook,
and starting in the next few days, you can start finding this podcast on all of your favorite podcasting programs. Also do us a big favor. Please share this on social media. Give it a five star rating on any of your favorite programs to help us to get the word out about this podcast and the work that we hope to be doing in sharing and exploring the world of humanistic Torah
Until next time, Shalom
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