An “inclusive” Jewish community would accept those who cast their lot with the Jewish people. This includes interfaith families who would otherwise be excluded.

Of course, there must be limits to our openness. And while I personally have a rather liberal notion of what it means to become Jewish, I am mindful of the importance of societal norms and consensus on the process of conversion.

But even if family members don’t “become Jewish,” we should be prepared to welcome them into the Jewish community. Jewish tradition acknowledges a place for those who journey with the Jewish people, calling them “gerei toshav.” I am not sure this term is still appropriate, but it does indicate that a posture of openness permeated even the ancient and rabbinic Jewish communities. And we should remember that those who cast their lot with the Jewish people also demonstrate a great openness.

The rabbis commonly identify Ruth—a convert—as the best example of a non-Jew who joined the Jews. But there was little debate when Moses married a non-Jew (the daughter of Jethro, a priest of Midian) or when Esther’s marriage to Achashverosh saved the Jews of ancient Persia.

If we are speaking of those with interfaith parents, it is more appropriate to refer to them as possessing “multiple identities,” rather than being of a “mixed background.” Nevertheless, in my experience—and this is backed up by demographic studies—most so-called interfaith marriages are really not “interfaith” at all. As Rabbi Harold Schulweis quipped, they are “interfaithless.”

Such families generally practice American civil religion. They might also observe a smattering of residual religious practices, such as putting up a Christmas tree and Hanukkah menorah, or having a Passover seder and an Easter egg hunt.

I may not prefer to see such practices coincide in one family, but I also realize that just as a Hannukah menorah does not a Jewish identity make, neither does a Christmas tree make a Christian—as difficult as it may be for Jews to see beyond it.

In your various examples of those who “want to become Jewish,” I see evidence of the unique way in which Jews have assimilated into American culture. While most peoples lose their identity when they acculturate, the American Jewish community has not. We have held onto much of our minority culture, and we’ve made it attractive to those in the majority. Shall we now embrace these people? Do we “need” them, as you put it?

We do need them, and we should embrace them. There are many reasons to do so, both self-interested and not.

In my first e-mail to you I mentioned my ideological commitment to “Big Tent Judaism.” This is in part because, when I was a rabbinical student, my teacher Jacob Rader Marcus charged me with making up for the catastrophic losses of the Holocaust. This is an impossible task, but I work at it nonetheless.

We are now an aging people that is not reproducing itself. Welcoming interfaith families will not only stop our demographic decline, it will actually help to grow the Jewish community.

There is also a Zionist argument: the survival of the state of Israel is dependent, in part, on the largesse of the United States. The American Jewish community helps secure this largesse, and its influence is in some ways dependent on its size.

There are few American Jewish families that have not been impacted by intermarriage. A self-interested community cannot exclude them. A welcoming and tolerant community would not want to.

Kerry Olitzky

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Kerry,

The striking thing we have in common is that neither of us proceeded along a predictable or linear path. Is this American, Jewish, just typical of religious people today, or what?

It seems a universal norm that those who feel faith most strongly are those who experienced the greatest number of alternatives before affirming it. One could hardly imagine life-changes more dramatic than those experienced by Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. Perhaps it’s when we describe these personal transformations that people of religion best communicate the intensity of our belief to the broader, secular world.

I agree that getting parents to act in the interest of the community is a great challenge. Christians seem to have fewer problems with this concept. Muslims are divided because radicals define community interests in a destructive and dangerous way.

I certainly support dialogue between the Jewish community and interfaith families—after all, I am a product of such a family. I’ll note, however, that few Muslims of my acquaintance take comfort in the prevalence of Jewish intermarriage, as so many seculars and Christians do. Traditional and moderate Muslims more or less expect Jews to hold to their covenant and to remain conservative on such matters. They’re often dismayed when they learn how deeply religious “liberalism” has penetrated the Jewish community.

The venomous Judeophobia seen today in Islam is a recent import from Christian cultures, and most Muslims seem to desire for Jews to remain as Jewish and as religious as possible, since this conforms to mainstream Muslim theology. One must keep in mind also that the Jews of Arab countries were generally outside the liberal and radical political culture that overtook Jews in the Christian West. For the Arab Muslim, the Jew he or she knew before 1948 was pious, family-oriented, and dedicated to hard work.

On the other hand, Jewish-Muslim intermarriage is one of the great unknown topics of Jewish historiography. The Quran specifically gives permission for Muslim men to marry the women of the People of the Book and to provide the wives with economic rights. There seem to have been many more marriages of this kind in Islamic history than Westerners might imagine. Of course, the offspring of a Muslim father and Jewish mother remains Jewish although embracing Islam. There are stories to be told there.

All of today’s American religious communities must first sort out issues of identity before tackling matters of belief. American Catholics need to decide if their church will continue on the path created by the long domination of Irish and Anglo-Saxon clerics, or will open up to the Spa
nish, Filipinos, Vietnamese and others whose level of involvement and spirituality is much higher but who remain a somewhat marginal element in society. Muslims need to get away from the perception of Islam as an “Arab” religion.

Jews have a special responsibility—not for the first time—to demonstrate that diversity and free opinion do not dilute essential principles. The firmness of the Jews is an inspiration to believing Catholics and, to the extent they understand it, will be a positive model for Muslims. After all, when France banned religious symbols in public schools, the first to protest alongside the Muslims were the French Jewish leaders. And Israel maintains sharia courts as well as Jewish and Christian religious courts, a system completely unknown in the U.S., where so much propaganda against sharia is disseminated.

As the holy prophet Muhammad aleyhisalem said in a sound hadith, “the history of my community will resemble that of the House of Israel as one shoe resembles another in a pair.” The Jewish experience remains significant. I hope it will also remain fruitful and instructive for all monotheists and for society as a whole.

Stephen

From: Kerry Olitzky To: Stephen Schwartz Subject: Why should I raise a Jewish child?

Stephen,

The Jewish community is engaged in a dialogue over how extensive its embrace of interfaith families should be. But we are still focused on why the Jewish community has to be inclusive. The focus should be on the families not the communities. We need to be able to answer the question of the parent: “Why should I raise a Jewish child? What is in it for him/her/me?” This is instead of the usual, “why should the Jewish community reach out to those who have married someone of a different faith?”

Judaism has always been in a dynamic relationship with the communities in which it has found itself, even if this dynamic is sometimes in tension. The leaders of the Jewish community attempt to determine an appropriate amount of—literally—give and take. While some would like us to believe that the Jewish community has always been isolationist, it just isn’t true. Nonetheless, as the community absorbs the norms of the surrounding culture and processes it, what comes out of the process becomes decidedly Jewish and then is passed on as such.

There may be an increase in anti-Muslim sentiment, particularly following September 11^th and as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict. And while intermarriage among Christians and Jews continues to challenge the Jewish community, intermarriage between Muslims and Jews, albeit a small yet increasing number, will have to be confronted as well. The real test will therefore be, can an inclusive Jewish community include Muslims as it does Christians?

Kerry

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My background is not quite as exotic as yours, Stephen, but I’ll share it with you nonetheless. I was born in Pittsburgh, in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood, which remains one of the core Jewish neighborhoods in North America. However, I soon moved to St. Petersburg, Florida where, at the time, racial segregation was the norm.

My high school—with the name Dixie, complemented by the school’s Confederate flag, team name as Rebels and school song of (you guessed it) Dixie—provided a rather challenging context for me. It wasn’t desegregated until after I graduated. I was one of two Jews in a graduating class of 1000 that showed little other ethnic variety.

Although my parents’ traditional Conservative Judaism of Pittsburgh quickly gave way to more of a laissez faire Reform affiliation, I clung to my Jewish roots as best I could. And it was that that provided me a lens through which to view the racially tense goings on around me.

Jewish ethics motivated me to join the Mayor's Youth Advisory Council and become an early leader in the Walk for [Hu]Mankind, which was just making its way on the local philanthropic scene. But it was a clarion call of unknown origin that drew me to the rabbinate while I was still 16. To test the strength of this call, I went to Israel. If I were to commit myself to the Jewish people, I wanted first to spend time in their midst, since Florida did not provide much of a Jewish context.

In Israel I learned many things but perhaps the most instructive experience was my climb up Mt. Sinai. While the debate remains as to Sinai’s precise location, the one held as authentic by local tradition was enough for me. And so I climbed with a group leader (really more of a madrich ruchani, or spiritual advisor). When we came close to the apex, we stopped short. He then told me “You aren’t ready to finish the climb” and we walked down the mountain silently for the next several hours, while I contemplated how to prepare myself to finish the climb in the future.

I finished school (studying philosophy and ethics) and gained an advanced degree in social gerontology. I was trying to find the right vehicle to apply what I had learned before entering rabbinical school—that even in a liberal environment there are ethical approaches that are unique, that do divide us.

I continued through rabbinical school and a doctoral program, then moved on to a major pulpit in the northeast before returning to the faculty of the school that trained me. That took me next to a premier learning program—Wexner—before taking on the challenge for which I had unknowingly been preparing myself throughout my entire career.

So I here I sit, leading an organization—and perhaps a movement—to make the Jewish community more inclusive, one that can embrace those who have intermarried and their children—the coming majority. And
all this emanates from one principle grounded in Jewish ethical tradition and repeated more frequently in the Torah than any other principle: “The stranger that lives with you shall be to you like the native, and you shall love him [or her] as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I am the Lrd your Gd” (Leviticus 19:34). This is the principle that guides my daily work.

I encourage Jewish families and communities to open themselves up, to shape a “big tent Judaism.” But there is another step we must take. Even as we develop more inclusive Jewish communities, we have to be in a position to share with those who have intermarried an answer to the question, “Why bother? Why should you raise Jewish children?” After all, parents make decisions about their children based on what is good for the family rather than what is good for the community. So why would it be better for your child to be raised in the Jewish community, as a Jew?

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