SECULARISTS DESIRE JEWISH CULTURE - WITHOUT THEOLOGY.

Byline: Gustav Niebuhr The New York Times

Hanukkah, the eight-day Jewish Festival of Lights, which began Thursday at sundown, weaves two stories - one mundane, the other miraculous.

It commemorates a historic event, the victory of the Jewish warrior Judas Maccabaeus over the Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes 22 centuries ago, as described in the ancient books of the Maccabees.

But then there is the festival's divine mystery, the story of what happened after the Maccabees, when they went to rededicate Jerusalem's Temple, found a single jar of consecrated oil there. As told in the Talmud, there was enough oil to light the menorah, the candelabrum, for only one day, and yet it burned for eight, until fresh oil could be found.

``Obviously, the traditional view is that this great miracle took place, that it's a God-driven experience,'' said Peter Schweitzer, once a rabbi, now a clinical social worker. Schweitzer went on to say that he did not believe this but that he nonetheless planned to attend services on Sunday afternoon, with people who share his skepticism.

The services will be at the City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism, which meets at the Village Community School on West 10th Street in Manhattan. The congregation will hear a paper on the Maccabees, discuss it and then celebrate by lighting a menorah, joining in song with professional musicians and sharing a potluck dinner, said Myrna Baron, the congregation's president.

While there is nothing unusual about Jews' embracing an overwhelmingly secular identity, it is less common to find secularists, like Baron and Schweitzer, who so value aspects of synagogue life - ritual, study and a sense of community - that they gather themselves into a congregation.

Yet the City Congregation is not unique. It belongs to a small national movement, the Society for Secular Judaism, whose founder, Rabbi Sherwin Wine, is the leader of a synagogue in Birmingham, Mich.

``I think a sense of community is important to most people,'' Bonnie Cousens, the society's executive director, said in a telephone interview. She added that the society's congregations offered Jews a ``nontheistic option.''

Nor is the society alone in its efforts. There is also the Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations, which is also based in Birmingham and includes the Suburban Jewish School in West Orange, N.J.

Shaul Magid, a professor of philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, which trains men and women to be Conservative rabbis, said that for people to seek community by adopting religious forms, but without traditional meanings, seemed a contemporary phenomenon not unique to Jews.

``It's taking the ritual, but not taking that which has gone with it,'' Magid said. He called it ``a complete rewriting of religious ideology.''

In Jewish life, he said, the appearance of secular congregations coincides with a decline in ideologies like secular Zionism, which once offered a broader sense of community to many nonreligious Jews.

Baron, who is president of Baron Co., a Manhattan advertising and public relations agency, said she had grown up in a less-than-fully observant Conservative Jewish home, with Orthodox grandparents. As a young adult, she said, she studied with a Reform rabbi for a bat mitzvah, but stopped after she decided that the process raised far more theological questions than it answered.

Still, she said, she ``wanted to have Jewish culture in the home, without the theistic elements.'' A few years ago, she and her husband attended a lecture by Wine and felt inspired to form the City Congregation, which has since grown to about 50 adults and 20 children.

In its own advertisements, the congregation says, ``We're Very Unorthodox.''

But Baron said members did not consider themselves anti-religious. ``We have members who believe in something,'' she said. ``The common denominator is our members don't believe there's an intervening force that responds to prayer.''

``It's much more important what we do believe,'' she added, ``which is in our heritage, our culture and in our humanism, in people being responsible for themselves and each other, and in doing that to make the world a better place.''

Within the congregation, Schweitzer plays a special role.

He was trained for a Reform rabbinate at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and served for a time in an Indiana congregation. But he considers himself a lay leader within the City Congregation, if more learned about Judaism than most. ``I'm not the rabbi of this,'' he said. ``I think I'm just a valued resource.''

And what does he hope the congregants will gain from their Hanukkah service?

``They will learn something,'' Schweitzer said. ``Some of the learning we're going to do is going to challenge people's preconceptions.''