Jews::Intermarriage as Babies::Bathwater

For the third week running the Shabbat lunch I attended ended up focusing on Noah Feldman’s Orthodox Paradox article from the Times magazine. Besides the fact that this is getting old, I’m pretty frustrated that no one really seems to be engaging with the issue at hand, i.e. that the Jewish community treats people who are intermarried like crap, no matter their interest in staying in the community. Let’s just skip over the part where people actually get intermarried, okay? They’re going to do it, you’re going to be mad, blah blah blah, move on. I’m not saying it’s okay or good, I’m just saying, it’s going to happen. At that point, once those people have made the choice, ignoring, insulting or generally treating them poorly is a really bad idea. It merely propagates the assimilation problem. If we tell people that one choice is enough to excommunicate them, then can we blame them for not sending their kids to Hebrew school, having regular Shabbat dinners, or even joining a JCC?

I’m not a fan of intermarriage, but I don’t see it as the end of the world, perhaps because I know so many people who are the products of intermarriages, and who subsequently decided they were interested and invested in Judaism, and wanted to be involved in the community. Sadly, many of them faced conflict in their families because their parents didn’t want them going back to a community that had rejected the interfaith marriage. And can you blame the parents for being so angry? Would you want your kids embracing a community that had made it well known they wanted you to scram? This is especially frustrating because I can’t leave the house these days without hearing someone else bemoaning the assimilation of the Jewish community, or whining about how young Jews aren’t affiliating and how can we reel them back in? I think the reason synagogues and federations aren’t seeing lots of young Jews who want to be involved is because children of interfaith couples feel out of place at lots of synagogues, and they’re more comfortable being irreverent and ironic. That sentiment is much better served by the places like Jewcy and Heeb, and I think it’s because we engage with everyone, not just the middle class families from solidly eastern European backgrounds. I don’t know how to solve the intermarriage problem, and I would concede that it’s pretty problematic. But I just can’t sit around and say, “Well, intermarriage is a boundary our community has set, and we just can’t condone that kind of behavior so these people can’t be offended when we don’t include them.” You can’t tell people when they can’t be offended. It doesn’t work that way, and it never has. We can set boundaries all we want, but at some point we have to recognize that we’re pushing people away. And in these times of serious discussion about what the future of Judaism will look like, do we want to exclude thousands of couple who have shown by the nature of their decision to be together, that they’re willing to make compromises? I don’t, and I won’t.