The Rabbi Formerly Known as Half-Jewish

Not much time to blog today, but I need to mention these two great articles from The Jewish Week that are now a few days old:

Rabbi Beth Nichols, the daughter of a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father, writes about her experience as an interfaith child in the rabbinical seminary. On Christmas day 2001, she was in Jerusalem at Hebrew Union College, attending a class on intermarriage:

I found it both ironic and disconcerting to be discussing intermarriage on Christmas Day. That morning I approached my professor to express my apprehension for the day’s class: “I know we’re talking about intermarriage, and, well, this is my first Christmas away from home.” Registering his look of surprise, I explained, “My Dad’s not Jewish, and Christmas was a really important time in his childhood, so it became an important time in my family. I’m Jewish, obviously, but Christmas has a lot of wonderful family memories attached to it.”

Standing there, I did not know whether I could handle having classmates share their opinions about intermarriage on a day when I, a woman confident in her Jewish identity, wanted nothing more than to be sitting in my pajamas around a 12-foot tree covered in ornaments.

Now, as assistant rabbi at Temple Israel of New Rochelle, N.Y., she has ambivalent feelings about how to interact with interfaith families at her synagogue. Responding to the question of "How can we be sensitive to the unique needs of children of interfaith families being raised as Jews in our synagogues?" she says:

I have learned from years of working with religious-school teachers that the most common answer to this question is that to help children of interfaith families one should assume that the child’s religious identity is confused and that they do nothing Jewish at home. Mentions of non-Jewish family celebrations should be ignored or giggled past, and low attendance or lack of attention should be forgiven due to their “family background.”

Ten years ago I would have fought tooth and nail against this assumption. But I have lost some of my innocence. My colleagues and I have taught students whose custody arrangements leave them believing in Jesus every other week, students whose parents naively let them choose mom or dad’s religion and students whose religious-school tuition is paid for by their grandparents because their parents don’t want to make a decision about religion. I now know that even in the interfaith families who become active in Jewish life, religious identity is a challenge for both parents and kids.

In the same issue, Julie Wiener writes about attending church for the funeral of her Catholic mother-in-law. It's a poignant piece, and touches on the complex ways that people perceive others' religiosity. She says, of her husband's family:

Plus, while Joe’s family certainly never seemed Jewish to me, I didn’t see a lot of their Catholic side. A wooden crucifix hung over Margaret’s bed, but most of the objects in her home were more secular: framed family photos, pewter knickknacks, the stuffed bears she collected. I knew she attended church every week, but I rarely heard about it — I did not meet her priest or see the inside of the gray stone church until the funeral.

Perhaps she downplayed her Catholicism around me out of a desire to make me feel welcome. She never seemed to object to the fact that I was Jewish, or that mine and Joe’s children are. I used to joke that it was because Joe was her youngest, that by the time he got married she figured she already had plenty of Catholic grandkids and could thus donate a few to the Jews.

At the funeral, the Margaret the priest described — “a woman of faith,” he said, emphasizing her belief in Jesus — was different than the woman I remembered, who always seemed far more buoyed by her gardening and her grandchildren than by spirituality or dogma.

The "Communal Welcome Mat"

Adam Bronfman, managing director of the Samuel Bronfman Foundation (one of our funders), has written an important essay for The Forward titled "Let's Put Out a Communal Welcome Mat."

Adam, grandson of Samuel, founder of the Seagram's liquor conglomerate, considers himself both an "insider" and an "outsider" in the Jewish world:

My Jewish education was limited as a child. I did not participate in communal or institutional Jewish life. The concept that I would need to marry-in to be accepted was never discussed.

I married the non-Jewish woman I fell in love with as a teenager, and we have raised four wonderful children. We have enjoyed an exclusively Jewish home for the better part of the last 18 years.

If not for my status as a “Bronfman,” my connection to the Jewish world would be much more tenuous. Where do I fit in? What is my place in the Jewish world and in my Jewish community?

Of course, as a member of a family that has given many millions to Jewish causes, his place in the Jewish world is secure. But there are hundreds of thousands like him, without his family's money, who are not feted wherever they go. In some synagogues and Jewish organizations, they are readily embraced; in others, they are met with suspicion. As Adam points out:

Many of the institutions that feel the warmest to those already on the inside are the chilliest to newcomers, without the insiders ever realizing. Yet each of those insiders has friends and relatives that are not connecting to the Jewish community.

Saving Your Date From Hell

I'm always fascinated by the approach of other religions and cultures to interfaith and intercultural marriage. A few have similar concerns to the Jewish community; Zoroastrians, for example, share the same sense of anxiety over dwindling numbers. Others, however, have radically different perspectives on interdating.

Take Evangelicals, for example. Unlike Jews, a shrinking or static population is not a concern. Also unlike Jews, culture has nothing to do with their connection to each other. Belief--in God, in Jesus, in the need to embrace Jesus to go to heaven--is everything.

But like Jews, the evangelical community has its own Hindu widows:

For evangelicals who want to pair up with others of the same faith but don't manage to do so in their early 20s, trouble lies ahead, particularly for women. Evangelical churches now typically have a 60-40 split between women and men, which means that there are many more single evangelical women out there than their male counterparts. As Ms. Cockrel explains, "I have friends who wanted to marry a Christian guy, are still single, and are more and more open to dating non-Christians as they get older. They're tired of waiting."

In a near reversal of typical Jewish behavior, however, it is not parents who disapprove of such relationships as often as it is Evangelical friends:

Camerin Courtney, a columnist at ChristianSinglesToday.com, tells me that most Christian parents are just concerned that "their children find someone they love and who loves them back."

Interfaith dating among Evangelicals has another twist totally foreign to Jews: the concept of "missionary dating." If an Evangelical loves another person, then their faith obligates them to proselytize to the person. If you don't save your closest relations from eternal damnation in Hell, who will you save?

But there is little sociological evidence that "conjugal evangelism" works. Says Brad Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, "Evangelicals who marry nonevangelicals are typically less likely to remain as or become as devout as those who marry within the fold."

The Associated Press and Officiation

Associated Press religion writer Rachel Zoll recently wrote an article about
the difficulties interfaith couples can face trying to find a rabbi to
officiate at their wedding. She gives examples of rabbis whose status as
rabbis is questionable, who do not respect Jewish tradition in the weddings
they conduct, and who charge unreasonable fees for their services.

Rabbi Lev Baesh and I were interviewed and photographed for the article. We
told her that there is a trend for more and more legitimate and respected
rabbis who do respect Jewish tradition to officiate at intermarriages
without charging unreasonable fees.

In a sidebar to the main article, Zoll wrote the following Tips for Interfaith Couples:

Jewish groups are trying to help interfaith couples avoid the anxiety and potential risks of searching on the Web to find someone who will marry them.

Interfaithfamily.com, an advocacy and education group based in Newton, Mass., has hired Reform Rabbi Lev Baesh to start a free referral service for mixed-faith couples planning their weddings. Baesh also checks up on couples six months after they marry to see how they're faring.

Unfortunately, very few publications picked up and ran the Tips, and worse, some publications ran the photograph of Rabbi Baesh and me with the article and without the Tips, leaving readers to assume that we are associated with the unscrupulous rabbis described in the article itself.

InterfaithFamily.com would like interfaith couples and their relatives and friends who read Zoll's article to know that there are respected rabbis who officiate, and that our Jewish Clergy Officiation Referral Service is a way to find them.

Rosh Hashanah Round-Up

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins this evening. The High Holidays can be a challenging time for interfaith families; Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are probably the two most inaccessible major holidays on the Jewish calendar. Fasting, spending all day in synagogue, paying hundreds of dollars to pray, listening to the powerful but atonal blasts of an instrument fashioned from a ram's horn--it's all quite strange and sometimes off-putting for the non-Jewish members of an interfaith family. But the message of the holidays--reviewing your misdeeds and making amends for them, and considering how you will change your life in the future--is potent and necessary.

Accroding to a recent National Rabbinic Leadership Survey conducted by STAR (Synagogues: Transformation And Renewal), 92% of rabbis are concerned with the need for their synagogues to reach out more to interfaith families, gays and lesbians, single parents and singles. A plurality of these rabbis (45%) say their High Holiday sermons will focus on the need to participate in Jewish life beyond the High Holidays. Last year, this topic didn't even make the top three of the most popular planned sermon topics. (Granted, the High Holidays did follow on the heels of the Israel-Lebanon war.)

But some people have already decided that traditional High Holiday services aren't for them. As reported in The (New York) Jewish Week, they're attending services at Chinese restaurants, in museums, at rented churches and on hikes through the Colorado wilderness. But as Rabbi Niles Goldstein, author of Gonzo Judaism and leader of non-traditional High Holiday services, says, "It's very important to separate substance from shtick... The real challenge is to figure out what the right balance is."

Michelle Citrin, an up-and-coming songstress, for one, is excited about the upcoming High Holidays... or at least that's what she claims in her amusing video "I Gotta Love You Rosh Hashanah," a Jewish take-off on the YouTube hit "I Got a Crush... on Obama."

Lastly, let's settle one High Holidays non-debate once and for all. Contrary to what is reported in this silly JTA article, there is no mystery over whether Milwaukee Brewers third baseman Ryan Braun will play on Yom Kippur. Despite his pride in his Jewish background, this child of an Israeli father and non-Jewish mother is not religious. Not to mention the fact that the Brewers have a razor-thin lead in the National League Central and are fighting for the playoff lives, and one game off from the team's second best player could be the difference between making the postseason or not. The only mystery surrounding the end of Braun's regular season is whether his election as the first Jewish Rookie of the Year will be unanimous or not.

The Link Sink

I've been meaning to give a shout-out to our friends at Jew-ish.com for a while, but better late than never. Since February, they've had a blog on interfaith marriage called Half-Torah (clever title). It was originally written by a gay man named Brian who was converting to Judaism; since May, it's been written by a Jewish woman named Becca married to a non-Jewish "Jew-ish" man. I haven't read every post, but I believe "Jew-ish" means that he doesn't have any Jewish roots, but he's so involved in Jewish life that he's essentially an honorary MOT. Check it out. Becca puts up new posts more frequently than I do, and she's not even paid for it.

Here's the latest update on the polls we've conducted since July 10, the last time I updated you on our polls. Our July 10 poll asked "Can a person be half-Jewish?" and respondents were almost evenly split: 53% said "Yes, of course" and 47% said "No, you're either Jewish or you're not." The July 31 question also saw a fairly even split. In response to the question "Is divorce harder for an interfaith couple than an all-Jewish couple?", 55% said for an interfaith couple, 45% said for an inmarried couple. However, in response to our Aug. 14 question--"Is making your partner happy a sufficient reason to convert to Judaism?"--nearly all of the respondents (90%) said No. And most of you (60%) thought that children should not be allowed to decide their religion for themselves, according to our Aug. 28 poll.

In Broward County, Fla., a large Jewish cemetery, the 52-acre Star of David Cemetery and Funeral Home, is adding 31 acres and 10,000 plots for intermarried Jews and their families.

Adam Goldberg, son of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, says he is tired of being typecast as a neurotic Jew.

Interfaith, Interracial, International

In a continuation of its series on religion in black America, NPR interviewed Dara and Oded Pinchas, a black-Jewish couple who are expecting twins. Dara is an African-American Baptist while Oded is an Israeli Jew affiliated with the Secular Humanistic Movement.

They avoided the officiation issue by getting married on a beach in Hawaii. Dara says her family embraced Oded, while for his family, "It's been a growing process... over time we've come to accept each other." His parents, basing their definition of Jewishness on the widely accepted Israeli standard of Jewish maternity, are concerned that his children won't be Jewish.

Interestingly, while their physical difference is more pronounced, Dara says that the interfaith issues were more difficult to overcome than the interracial ones. Part of that, she says, has to do with living in New York, where she often sees interracial couples.

When it comes to children, they're a bit naive. They currently take part in workshops through Interfaith Community, an interfaith group with several chapters around the country that allows couples to fully explore both their religious backgrounds. The problem comes in when children are involved. Dara says, "My responsibility is to expose them to what I believe and Oded feels the same way." It may not be immediately apparent to them, but this is a recipe for confusion and potentially, religious competition. Children have a hard time understanding one theological system, let alone two. And how will they reconcile Daddy's atheism with Mom's belief in God? As if to enforce their naivety on the issue, Oded says, "As long as we have the general agreement that we will embrace both identities, I don't see any problems."

I wish Dara and Oded the best of luck, but I think the road ahead will be bumpier than they foresee.