Sleeping With The Enemy

Reprinted from the New York Jewish Week with permission of the author. Visit www.thejewishweek.com .

A new project, "The Jewish In-Marriage Initiative," has recently been created to encourage Jews to marry within the tribe. Apparently the effort will run workshops emphasizing the advantages--both personal happiness and the preservation of the Jewish people--of marrying Jewish.

Coming from the swelling ranks of the intermarried, I think that whom Jews marry is exactly the wrong thing for the Jewish community to be focusing on.

Now, before you call for my resignation from the Jewish media (I would argue that, with the intermarried comprising half the American Jewish population my perspective is badly needed in the industry), hear me out. Yes, I am familiar with the statistics--I know that Jews married to gentiles are far less likely to be members of synagogues and raise their children as Jews than are those who share their bed with a member of the tribe.

However, these troubling statistics have led to a somewhat bizarre obsession with intermarriage. Worthy Jewish endeavors--like education, trips to Israel, summer camps, revitalized synagogues etc.--are often touted not on their own merits, but as ways of preventing Jews from marrying out of the faith. Whether they are promoting youth groups or Jewish day schools, it is not uncommon for Jewish leaders to refer to intermarriage as an epidemic or disease best prevented with a generous dose of their program.

Above all, the message seems to be, your obligation is to marry a Jew so you can raise Jewish children who will marry Jews and so on. Rarely does anyone discuss why it is important to be Jewish in the first place.

If we want our children to be generous or hard working, do we teach them that the most important thing for them to do is marry someone who is generous and hard working? No, we emphasize why generosity and hard work are important and assume that if we nurture a genuine passion for them in our children that they will ultimately marry someone who, if not embodying those values exactly will at least be supportive of our child pursuing them and passing them onto the next generation.

And yes, non-Jewish husbands and wives are often quite supportive of their partner's Jewish passions--sometimes even more so than Jewish spouses are. My husband Joe has for years been nagging me to have an adult Bat Mitzvah. Our baby daughter, Arielle, will have a Jewish naming ceremony this spring and since she was born we have lit Shabbat, Sabbath, candles almost every week and joined a synagogue (one that makes a point of welcoming interfaith families).

So then why doesn't Joe convert? In part because being a lapsed Catholic is part of his identity, just like being an agnostic but interested Jew is part of mine. In addition, he feels that a less than heartfelt conversion is disrespectful to Judaism.

I don't claim that we're the poster family for Jewish involvement or that all intermarriages are as easy as ours. Joe is not interested in practicing his own religion, doesn't like Christmas trees, and we are blessed on both sides with families who were supportive of our marriage. If anything, Joe's church-going mother (who gave us a menorah last year at Christmastime) is far more enthusiastic about our Jewish involvement than my own parents, who get rather squeamish at the mention of God and tend to see ritual observance as something akin to obsessive-compulsive disorder.

But I suspect most intermarried households share our distaste for the American Jewish hysteria about whom you marry. Even though proponents of the new effort say they're being positive by focusing on promoting in-marriage rather than discouraging intermarriage, it's all semantics: making a big fuss about in-marriage is the same thing as making a big fuss about intermarriage.

I suspect that few liberal-minded Jews who are on the fence about whether to make Judaism a part of their lives want to be part of a group that judges who they will marry and that subtly implies that their gentile boyfriends and husbands (or fathers) pose a threat to the Jewish people. Indeed, I think aggressively fighting intermarriage poses a demographic problem of its own: it alienates people who might otherwise be interested in the Jewish community.

I'm not saying the Jewish community has to promote intermarriage. But Judaism is not about being an exclusive club in which everyone marries people like themselves. And historically, Judaism--like all healthy cultures that evolve and do not stagnate--has always mixed with the surrounding culture, integrating new ideas--and people--from it.

Is Judaism a glorified matchmaking service, the purpose of which is to pair Jews with other Jews? Or is it a source of community, meaning, ethics and wisdom that enriches the world? I'm hoping for the latter, and that's what I plan to teach my daughter--whether she marries a Jew or not.