These are the words I shared with B'nai El Congregation on Rosh HaShanah Morning 5770. Please feel free to e-mail me with comments and feedback.
(Explanatory Note: After I delivered this sermon, I recieved feedback that some felt I had denegrated the role of the non-Jewish spouse in the congregation. Please know that this was not my intention in the least. Non-Jews who assent to raising thier children as Jews are truly giving a selfless gift to thier spouses and to the Jewish people. In honor of that they deserve as full of a role in the life of the synagogue as they desire.)
As a Rabbinic student, one of our roles is to serve as Student Rabbis for various small communities that did not have the resources or need for a full time Rabbi. I served in three places, Columbus, MS; Tyler, TX; and Colleyville, TX (not as small as it sounds, it’s a suburb of Fort Worth that at the time had a brand new congregation). I would go up either one or two weekends every month plus the High Holy Days. For the weekend visits I would arrive in the afternoon on Friday and then stay through Religious School on Sundays before returning to Cincinnati.
One week on a Thursday I received a call at my apartment from a woman who was a member in one of the congregations, a relatively regular attendee at services with her children. She wanted to meet with me on Friday afternoon. Of course I agreed and we met in the lobby of my hotel. She was somewhat anxious as she came to me, and after exchanging pleasantries she began to speak about her marriage. She was married to a man who was not Jewish, and even was somewhat active in his own church. I had known the former part of this revelation, but not the latter even though he was regularly with his family at services.
She had recently been to a Bat Mitzvah at a Conservative synagogue out of town where the Rabbi gave a sermon that, in her interpretation, basically said that any Jew who married a non-Jew was contributing to the destruction of the Jewish people. She then asked me point blank, or really told me, that she was feeling guilty because she was contributing to the destruction of the Jewish people. As this point in our conversation she was near tears.
I simply asked her, how she felt her children were as Jews. As she calmed down she said that they were doing well being raised as Jews. While there was some early confusion, they understood that they were Jews, and that even through their father was a practicing Christian, they were no less Jews than any other kids at the congregation. I then asked if she expected them to continue in that way as adult, she said that she hoped so and she thinks she had done, to this point, a good job of instilling a sense of Jewish identity to them (neither were quite to Bar/Bat Mitzvah age).
I said to her, then you have done an excellent job in preserving the Jewish people. All we can do is give our children the best Jewish life that we can, and then as adults they will go their own way, but a proper Jewish upbringing will do a lot to keep them in the Jewish fold, and that can be done in a variety of different ways. I said the rest is up to them.
That particular conversation led me to consider, as I had been for many years the idea of intermarriage, an idea first presented to me at a young age when each of my Father’s brothers married non-Jews and really left the Jewish fold outside of attending important family events that took place in the synagogue (my one Uncle more recently converted to the Lutheran church).
Judaism, through its history, has been generally hostile to the concept of intermarriage. While in the stories of Genesis, Isaac and Jacob each marry women brought up outside of the immediate followers of Abraham, they each marry among the tribe of their mother. Joseph, however marries and Egyptian woman, and his two sons are Ephraim and Manasseh, the individuals whose names are invoked any time a Jewish parent blesses his or her sons. Later midrash, reflecting the hostility toward intermarriage of its time, explains that Joseph actually married the daughter of his half sister Dinah who, for reasons unexplained by the midrash, apparently ended up in Pharaoh’s court as well.
Deuteronomy contains explicit commandments that we are not to marry from among the tribes that inhabit the land of Canaan. In the book of Ezra, Ezra actually goes as far as to expel the foreign born wives of the Israelites returning to Jerusalem. It doesn’t get much better for intermarriage after that. The Rabbis, in a concession to the violence faced by Jewish women at the hands of Roman troops, declared that the definition of a Jew is based on having a Jewish mother, since in such cases paternity could not always be determined.
Even the depiction of intermarriage in Fiddler on the roof, set in late 19th century Russia accurately captures the tone of its time. In that heartbreaking scene, Tevya finally decided that there is no other hand when his third daughter, Chava, desires to marry a Russian peasant. She ultimately converts to Russian Orthodox and at the end of the movie she tells her sisters that she and her husband are leaving Anatevka as well because they do not want to be among people who would do such a thing to others. Even Chava calls her Jewish family others, the alienation is so complete.
The attitudes of pre-modern Jews toward intermarriage can be understood when we take into account the fact that the surrounding non-Jews were often hostile toward Jews, usually less educated and any intermarriage ended up in the Jewish partner converting to the dominant religion (often the penalty was death if the non-Jew sought to convert to Judaism). So of course in that context intermarriage would be seen as destructive to the Jewish people.
But in mid to late 20th century America, and to some extent Western Europe through the entire century (excluding the period of the shoah), it became clear that the situation was vastly different than what our ghetto and shtetl ancestors faced. In the years following World War II the intermarriage rates began to rise (as an aside, in 1933 Germany the rate was above 40%). But it was not until the 1970’s that the rate began to climb over 10% and even more among Reform Jews. This rise in the 1970’s continued despite a virtual total exclusion of those who had intermarried from the formal Jewish community (St. Louis was a bit of an exception in this).
Recognizing the fact that by shutting the doors on interfaith couples, we were rejecting not only those who grew up in our congregation, but also the generations of potential Jews that may come from the marriage the Reform movement in 1980 started a program of outreach to better welcome such families into congregations. In 1983 the CCAR, the governing body of Reform Rabbis, made the move to recognize all children of at least one Jewish parent, mother or father, as Jews, assuming that they were raised in an exclusively Jewish way that included appropriate life cycle occasions.
The more traditional branches of Judaism reacted strongly to these moves, suggesting that Reform Judaism was encouraging intermarriage. But the fact was that the old approaches were not working. The changes in our society in the 1960’s and 70’s opened up society not just to African Americans and Women, but to Jews as well, and that included opening up the possibility that it was acceptable within gentile circles to marry a Jew. No dictates, no resolutions, no sermons, no seminars, no classes were going to stop the rise of the intermarriage.
Therefore the Reform Movement did exactly what it needed to do to save a progressive, open view of Judaism. It made the realization that the crux of the matter with intermarriage is not the marriage, but the kids. Therefore through outreach and the passage of the patrilineal descent resolution, the Reform movement (quickly followed by the Reconstructionist movement) moved to make sure that if intermarriage is a fact, then Jewish institutions, in particular synagogues, need to be ready to make sure that the children of these marriages would be Jews.
What is surprising, is that according to a recent study, it has been discovered that in the greater Boston area, more than 50% of intermarried couples are raising their children as Jews, and this is a contributing factor to the increase in Jewish population in greater Boston. It is actually a fact that if over 50% of Jews who intermarry raise their children as Jews, it is ultimately a demographic boon. How is this possible?
Before I go on, I feel that when you come to services, whether for Shabbat, religious school, or even holidays such as today, there is an implicit promise that is made to you, and that promise is: no math. I will now apologize in advance for breaking that promise.
Ok, so imagine we have a group of 12 Jews. If all 12 marry each other and each of the six couples have three kids each, the next generation will have 18 Jews, not too shabby. So now if we have the same 12 Jews, 6 marry each other to form 3 couples and 6 intermarry, and none of them raise children as Jews, at the same 3 children per couple rate, we have 12 Jews becoming 9, that, I think we can all agree that is not good.
But now say 2 of those interfaith couples raise their children as Jews, that’s 1/3, what is estimated to be the current national rate of intermarried couples raising Jewish children. That gives us 6 more Jewish kids, a total of 15, an increase, but less than the all in-marriage group. If three of those couples raise Jewish children, then we are up to 18 Jews, same as if they had all in married. But if we up the ratio to 2/3, meaning 4 of the 6 intermarried couples raise Jewish children, plus the 9 children from Jewish-Jewish couples, we have 21 Jews in the next generation. Once again, we can all agree that 21 is more than 18.
So what happens if we take that out a few generations, assuming 3 children per couple. If we start with 12 Jews and all the generations in-marry, the 12 Jews will have 18 Jewish children, those children will give 27 Jewish children, we add in one Jew to round to 28, the generation of the great grandchildren of the original 12 Jews will have a total of 42 Jews, a 3.5 increase in 4 generations.
Now, lets assume a 50% intermarriage rate among Jews in families with 2 Jewish parents and 75% among Jews in families with one Jewish parent, but 2/3 of intermarried couples raise their children as Jews. As we saw, the 2nd generation is 21 Jews, the 3rd generation has 36 Jews and the 4th generation has 63 Jews, a 5.25 increase in 4 generations.
Using those same rates, 3.5 and 5.25 to go to further generations, in the 8th generation following the original 12, if all in-married there would be 147 Jews, with the intermarriage parameter I laid out, there would be 330 Jews, almost more than doubling the in-marriage only count. Furthermore in the 12th generation, the original 12 would produce 514 Jews by in marriage only, while the intermarriage group will have produced 1732 Jews. I spoke with Maryellen McSweeny, a career statistician and member of our congregation, about these figures and she confirmed my methods as sound, if a bit conservative in their estimates. It is also important to note that to achieve these types of numbers, we as the Jewish community will need to invest a large amount of time an resources into making sure that those who intermarry not only will be strong enough in their identity to want to raise their children as Jews, but to also give them the support and resources that they need to make it a reality.
Now some might say that those raised in inter-faith homes are simply half-Jews, or are not as strong as Jews as are Jews raised in single faith homes. To this I say hogwash. I have seen many strong, proud Jews come from all types of Jewish homes and I have seen those raised in even the most fervent of Jewish homes leave the Jewish fold altogether. While I do feel that two Jewish parents have a better chance of raising strong, proud Jewish children than a home with only one Jewish parent, this is far from any type of fact.
Additionally there are those who would suggest that intermarriage thins out the Jewish bloodlines. This, quite frankly is double hogwash (sorry for bringing in all this pork!). The Jewish people is a diverse group of people that have many different ethnic identities, Ashkenazi and Sephardi are just the two broad categories that contain many different identities, and those who are not born as Jews are welcome to join us at any time they desire. The idea of the need to keep some sort of racial purity or blood purity is just as it sounds, racist and repulsive. The Jewish people is held together by our sacred texts, our bonds of community and our shared historical experience, none of which have to do with our genetics.
All that I have discussed goes into why I have taken the position on intermarriage that I have. Ultimately it is not about the couple, it is about their children. This is why I will perform interfaith couples’ weddings on two major conditions. One, that it is a Jewish wedding, as that is the only type of wedding I see myself authorized to do. I could care less about what I am able to do legally under the laws of the state. The law of our state, in fact the constitution of our state, actually bars me from legally performing every wedding I see as fit (but that is a different sermon). Therefore my real authority to perform weddings comes from my ordination as Rabbi, and the trust put into me by the Jewish community. Therefore it is my obligation to assure that the wedding is performed according to Jewish custom and tradition.
The second condition I place on interfaith weddings is that the couple makes a commitment to raising their children as Jews. The reason for this should be clear to you. Intermarriage is not a problem for the Jewish community as long as the children are raised as Jews. Have I had couples that have told me one thing and some years later it has become clear they did not intend to keep that commitment? Yes I have, but to refuse to do a wedding unless I have real good reason to suspect that the couple is not being truthful is to virtually assure that the couple will not raise their children as Jews. So I would rather have done a few wedding that in retrospect I should not have done than to refuse and definitively drive a couple away from Judaism.
Now the demographic data that I gave you, may suggest that I am encouraging intermarriage. I am not. I still see the ideal as Jews marrying one another, even if it would cost us demographically. But I also understand that while there is this ideal, we all work and live in the world of the real. And in the world of what is real, intermarriage of Jews to non-Jews is a fact that is not going away anytime soon. Therefore I choose to conduct myself as a Rabbi in the realities of our society, and I will work hard to make sure that interfaith marriage will ultimately be good for the Jews.
In the Torah portion that we read earlier, God, as a reward to Abraham for being willing to sacrifice his son (or maybe it is a reward for something else entirely, but that is also another sermon, maybe next year), promises to make Abraham’s descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the seashore. God does not tell Abraham how that will occur, but the message to us in our generation is clear. It is our role to keep Judaism not only alive, but also growing in each generation so that this prophecy can be fulfilled.
There has been much written about the supposed threat of intermarriage to the Jewish community, but it is not a threat if we react to it in the right way. If we open the doors of our synagogues, community centers, federations, and other institutions even wider, we can turn the supposed curse into a blessing. If we support those and nurture those inter-faith families that come into our congregation, we can help them grow as a family and help the children grow as Jews. If we honor and appreciate the gift that a non-Jewish spouse has given to his or her partner by assenting to the children being raised as Jews, we show a new generation that as Jews, we can honor and respect those who may worship and believe in a different way without giving up any part of who we are as Jews.
We are indeed fortunate to live in a time and in a place where we, as Jews are accepted as a part of the general society. The challenge of this situation is that we must work harder than ever to pass on our Jewish identity from one generation to the next. With open doors and open hearts we can put out the message that our community is open to all who wish to join us in sincerity. In this way will we move closer to the day that the blessing of Abraham is fulfilled, that we will be as the stars of the sky and the sands of the sea.
