I agree that the focus in Judaism is on experience (especially the experience of tradition, prayer, and ritual, that is, the social factors that distinguish Jews from gentiles), and not so much on theology (ideology). You’re writing as if that emphasis entails theism. On the contrary, the extreme case of empiricism leads to skepticism about theoretical entities, and to humility that feeds the secular humanism that Jews ended up espousing in the modern period.

I’m also incorporating Jack Miles’s reading of the Hebrew scriptures, in God: A Biography. He uncovers the implicit evolution in the relationship between God, the protagonist of the scriptures, and the Jewish people. The relationship evolves from God’s presence to his absence, which means the subtext in Judaism is about God’s disappearance as the Jews grew up, became more existential (thanks to their troubled history), and no longer needed their naïve faith. Some stops along the way from the confused monotheism that worships a personal deity despite being opposed to all idols, to the implicit atheism of secular humanism are the books of Job and Ecclesiastes.

There’s a big difference between realizing explicitly that mystical monotheism entails atheism (in relation to personal deities, and thus idols), and adopting a pragmatic lifestyle that’s effectively atheistic. I’d say the same about the millions of fake Christians in the US. Their rhetoric is theistic, but as consumers, rational progressives, or right-wing zealots, their behaviour has nothing to do with religion. They’re confused about what they really think.

So, are they Christians or something else? They’ll say they’re Christians, just as Jews will say they’re monotheists. But self-knowledge is hard to come by since we easily fool ourselves, and we needn’t take someone’s word about his or her deepest beliefs at face value. We need to see whether the person is evidently a massive hypocrite. Deeds speak, too, and it’s possible to be superficially X but functionally Y.

Maybe Jews avoid theological speculation for a reason, to avoid idolatry (concocting mere images of “God”), and thus the anthropocentric shallowness of theism itself. But it took centuries for Jews to wrestle with and to come to terms with the implications of their stance against idols.