I am a Jewish man interested in marrying a Jewish woman. I often ask women why they want to be with someone Jewish and they tell me it would be "easier" or it would make their mothers happy. These to me don't seem like good enough reasons. My reasons are strongly tied to character traits, mainly accountability, that I associate with Jews. What I wondered was what do you consider the biggest and most tangible problems with interfaith marriages?

Thanks so much for your question.  Intermarriage is certainly a hot topic within the Jewish community, and can be difficult to discuss in the heat of the moment.  The fact you are thinking about it now indicates you will make thoughtful decisions.

 

It doesn’t seem entirely relevant to me why someone would want to marry a person in a general category.  Perhaps it would make life “easier” as you indicated, or make some Jewish mothers happy.  I am not confident that judging a person’s motives will get you to a good place.  People choose to marry within their tradition or religious identity for a number of reasons.  For a person who values ease of raising children and thinks that is a primary value, then perhaps “easier” might be a good reason for that particular person.  I would argue that your reasons are no more or less valid than any other person’s.  

 

Coming from a liberal Jewish perspective, in general I think that the challenges of interfaith marriage are far outweighed by the benefits of raising a generation of Jewish children in loving families - about half of which include a non-Jewish partner.  Are there ways in which intermarried families struggle?  Sure.  But that struggle is just different than families who have two parents of the same religious or cultural tradition.  I officiate at interfaith marriages particularly because I believe that these loving partners deserve to be welcomed in to our communities.  I find it deeply troubling when congregations will accept these members into their community after-the-fact, but will not celebrate their marriage with them.  

 

The biggest challenge I see is not with intermarriage itself but with the next step in the chain – raising children.  My strong encouragement to interfaith couples who come to me as a rabbi is to raise their children in a single-religion home.  That does not mean that their mother must convert, or that they can’t go to Grandma’s house for Easter.  It does mean that families should raise their child with a single identity.  If the child is being raised in a Jewish home, then that child should not be attending Sunday school at the local church as well as at the local synagogue.  Going to Grandma’s house for a holiday is different than observing it in your own home as your own experience.  To mix traditions in this way can be incredibly confusing for young children.

 

Some couples also want to raise their child in both religious traditions and then let that child decide as s/he grows.  I find this also troubling – for many of the same reasons.  Identity and cultural affiliation is something we give to our children.  Although they may make changes to it later, I believe that kids are best served when they live in a single religious community – regardless of what that community is.  

 

Surely this short discussion will not answer all your questions.  But I hope it gives you some brief insight into the kinds of problems that may arise.  My deepest wish is that you will find a person to spend your life with, and that, should you want to raise a family, you are blessed with the opportunity to do that.  From my experience, my role as a parent and a partner is by far the most important thing I will ever do.  

 

I am a Jewish man interested in marrying a Jewish woman. I often ask women why they want to be with someone Jewish and they tell me it would be "easier" or it would make their mothers happy. These to me don't seem like good enough reasons. My reasons are strongly tied to character traits, mainly accountability, that I associate with Jews. What I wondered was what do you consider the biggest and most tangible problems with interfaith marriages?

 

Full chapters have been written by many inspired authors about the reasons that Jews should marry Jews, while other authors have devoted full books to the subject.  There is so much to write and to say on this subject, and this Forum necessarily cannot accommodate all of it because of space practicalities.  But you have asked such an important question that deserves to be addressed and explained in every conceivable Forum frequented by Jews who care about being Jewish.  So I will do my best within the necessary logistical limitations of this online Forum.

 

Many of us typically are attracted to people based on their external features: their faces, their figures, their teeth, their wallets, their financial prospects.  Some are attracted to people who simply make us feel good about ourselves — they admire us, compliment us, seem interested in what we have to say, laugh at our jokes.  As in the old Shania Twain song — “Any Man of Mine” — when she burns her guy’s dinner, she wants him to say:  “Mmmm, I like it like that.”

 

Some of us are attracted to people who share our values or our pursuits.  I ski, and she skis, too.  I work at homeless shelters, and she does, too.  I am a Liberal Democrat and she is, too.

 

It is comparatively less frequent that people who marry make their decisions with a highlighted focus on what the future will look like, say five or ten years down the pike.  For most younger couples, though, their entire lives will be redefined five or ten years down the pike. 

 

They will have a child or more.

 

Children will interfere with, if not utterly end, a couple’s spontaneity.  No more “Hey, I have nothing on calendar tonight, so let’s catch a play . . . or a movie . . . or eat out.”  There will be Baby to consider.  Baby will predominate.  All of life will be focused on Baby.  Vacations will be delayed or canceled because of Baby.  The types of vacations will be redefined.  Weekends will be changed to doing what Baby wants.  As Baby grows, the venues and nunaces may change — now adapting to Child — but the highlighted focus will remain the same. 

 

Children take over our lives.  We intuit that, having brought them into the world, we owe it to them to give them a fair chance at having a good life.  We start putting money aside for their futures.  We save for their college educations.  We start paying monthly premiums on life insurance.  We expend money on their health care, their preschool, their private schools or their after-school activities in public school.  We spend on their summer vacations, perhaps on camps, perhaps on Disney and Great Adventures theme parks. 

 

When we are tired, we still are compelled or coerced into listening to them, and they make sure we do.  We meet with their teachers if they are doing poorly, or we meet with the teachers to assure that they are succeeding.  We buy the kids school supplies, video games, DVDs, iPhones.  They literally come to dominate our lives, and we instinctively need to give them our best shot at their best shot.

 

In this mix, no matter how little we personally focus on religion in our personal lives, we eventually have to give our kids answers about religion, understandings about religion, a guide to spirituality.  We can dilly, and we can dally.  But eventually we have to tell the children whether Jesus is the Savior of humanity who died for their sins.  This may be one of the most important messages and contributions we ever will give this child: explaining what life is all about, why we are here, what our purpose is.  “Did Jesus die for my sins, Mom and Dad?”

 

If Dad meanders, and Mom says “yes” . . . or if Dad does Chanukah but Mom does Christmas . . . or if Mom does Jewish and Dad does not care but one set of grandparents does Yom Kippur while the other does Easter, that Child whom we have endeavored so carefully to love and to give the best of everything is being denied clarity on the most important issue she ever will face: Who in the world am I?  What am I?  What do we believe in, in this family?  What do I believe in?

 

When a Jew marries a Jew, in this society that has seen such a drastic level of assimilation smite the Jews of America that our demographic numbers are perilously falling, there is yet a fighting chance that the kid may come out Jewish.  When both parents do Jewish, when they both celebrate Passover and Rosh Hashanah, while neither celebrates Christmas or Easter, there is a fighting chance that the child will emerge with an idea of what her life is about as a Jew.  Otherwise, her chances for Judaic clarity and for Jewish continuity are gravely reduced if not all-but-terminated.

 

It is a myth that a Jewish man who marries a non-Jewish woman can easily implement an agreement to rear the child as a Jew.  Hard numbers, hard data from professionally administered census efforts repeatedly show that the children of religious intermarriages in the United States come out non-Jewish.

 

The NJPS [National Jewish Population Survey] 1990 found that mixed married households contained 770,000 children less than 18 years of age. According to the NJPS 1990, only 28% of these children were being raised as Jews; 41% were being raised in another religion; and 31% were being raised with no religion at all.   Moreover, while 28% of children of intermarriage are being raised as Jews, only between 10% to 15% of this entire group ultimately marries Jews themselves. Thus, it is clear that nearly all the children of intermarriage are lost to the Jewish people.

 

With respect to mixed marriage households, the NJPS 2000 appears to be consistent with the findings of NJPS 1990.

 

http://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/WillYourGrandchildrenBeJews/

 

On that level, then, a decision to marry a non-Jewish spouse is tantamount to ending one’s family lineage and unbroken connection with the Jewish people.  She may be sexy and hot, a great skier, a fellow Republican or Democrat, incredibly funny and an amazing cook — but she inadvertently will all-but-certainly end your family’s multi-thousand-year unbroken chain with the Jewish people.  Not today.  Not tomorrow.  Not on purpose.  But she will.

 

Beyond the consideration of how intermarriage impacts children, the decision to marry a non-Jew virtually assures your own severely restricted continuation and life progression as a richly engaged Jew.  Unless she opts to convert to Judaism in an authentic, real, and meaningful way -- not just the far-more-predominant modus of perfunctory conversion -- your Sabbath will never be in your lifetime what it might have been.  Your synagogue experiences will never be what they might have been.  She will not share your passion and caring about the Judaism of your parents and theirs, just as my wife does not share my passion about baseball.  On Super Bowl Sunday, my wife does not share my interest.  During the World Series, she does not share my interest.  So I cheer alone or with friends outside my nuclear family core.  The people I most love and cherish consign me to a state of alone-ness during the most important sports events of the year, the ones that capture my imagination.  But the core of my nuclear family are with me in my Jewishness and my Judaism.  They get that — big-time.  And in the end of the day, that is what matters.

 

What if she shares baseball and ice hockey with you, but not a passion for singing “Avinu Malkeinu” or “Adon Olam” or hearing “Kol Nidre”?  If she does not share a love of the Jewish People and of the G-d of Israel, of the sereneness of the Shabbat, you never will have the chance to grow in that direction as you age.  You will never be able to change course, unless you want to start dividing your family, your kids, your possessions, and start with alimony payments.  As a rabbi of thirty years, I have seen it a hundred times — and more.  Men in their 50s and 60s who wish they could get their non-Jewish wives to join them when invited as guests to the Rabbi’s Shabbat dinner table.  Men who wish their non-Jewish wives would come to Shul with them and hear them recite the Haftorah they recited sixty years earlier — and appreciate what that means.  Men who wish their wives would do more to make a more-kosher home for Passover.  Men who see their wives bored out of their gourds during the Seder and unable to connect emotionally with Yom HaShoah or even with Menorah lighting.

 

By then it is too late.  There are kids and hockey games and carpool.  Too much accumulated joint property.  So the kids have less connection to thiongs Jewish than do their Dads.  And everyone ends up in some temple that caters to the Intermarried where, left without the core, they “make the best” of a bad situation, bereft of the core, knowing they never will be able to get back to what they suddenly rue having abandoned or having inadvertently given up.

 

One ages gracefully, reaching his 60s and 70s, on the cusp of his 80s.  Suddenly he starts thinking about the greater picture, the life he has made and that he soon will leave behind for Wikipedia to post.  He sees his children barely exuding even hints of real Jewishness and his grandchildren completely lost from Judaism.  Great-grandchildren going to church. He tries reconnecting on an occasional Shabbat with his G-d, but his wife expects him home on Saturday by 2:00 pm.  The most he can get for Pesach is a Seder straight out of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”  For his expensive Yom Kippur ticket, he gets a sermon on Gay Rights — and his wife and grandchildren are not there even for that. Maybe a son joins him, but needs to leave early to opick up the kids from a birthday party.  He looks around him, and he realizes that it was not because marrying a Jew would be “easier” or would “make his Mother happy” after all.  Rather, it was because his soul had the capacity to live forever, and he realized it only too late.

 

-- Rabbi Dov Fischer

First of all, thank you for this question.  This question is so vast and significant, frankly, I am humbled to receive it and be given an opportunity to respond.

Secondly, I want to make it clear that this is a sensitive subject and our inclination should first be to listen and understand, as opposed to prejudge and preach.  Relationships are the stuff of which responsibility, integrity, and conscience are made and we should be reverent to their reality.

There is simply one reason as to why I want Jews to marry Jews – Judaism is important to the world.  Judaism is not a faith, it’s not an idea and it’s not a practice and yet, Judaism is all of those things at once. Judaism is an approach to living a good life that has worked for millions and millions of people over thousands and thousands of years.  As a meaningful, positive, good, hopeful, enjoyable frame within which to live a human life, Judaism absolutely works.

Because, however, Judaism is not a faith nor an idea, but an embodied human encounter with the world, it is carried through human beings.  The Torah and Talmud are wonderful as works of literature, but Judaism cannot be found within them.  Nor does Maimonides’s works contain Judaism, nor in Joseph Karo’s Shulchan Arukh.  Judaism is the spirit woven into their works, yet there is no object Judaism to be found there. Judaism is still evolving and growing within Jewish families and communities.

Thus, Judaism cannot exist without Jews and, although one may not know it in New York City or Los Angeles, Jews comprise just under 3% of the American population.  Prior to 1970 Jews married non-Jews at a rate of 13%.  Today (40 years later) Jews marry non-Jews at a rate of over 50% and the vast majority of those intermarried families – to the tune of app. 75% – do not raise their children as Jews.  Without writing the formula, one can easily deduce that with these rates the percentage of Jews in America is actually diminishing.  We’re not diminishing as a result of pogroms or genocides as in the past, but of our own choosing to let Judaism go through marriage.  Some like to say that through intermarriage, Jews are being “loved to death in America.”

Personally, I love and respect Christianity as a totally valid religious path and I don’t want to see it disappear from America or the planet.  But Christianity is not at risk. Judaism, however, is actually at risk.  The question of which stream and form of Judaism we want to survive is worth discussing, but for now, most Jews agree that some kind of Judaism is worth saving.  Ultimately, Judaism presents a uniquely beautiful facet of the divine worth perpetuating and which has already proven that it traverses the expanses of time and space.

There are those who will say that “love is blind” and we can’t control our emotions.  That’s a fallacy.  Love is not blind at all; lust may be blind, but not love.  In fact, love, true love, illuminates our conscience and guides our values.  True love stands the test of time and, as many long time couples will attest, contributes to the betterment of being and soul.

There are those who will also say that faith and religion is of the heart and that we cannot control what we believe, but rather that it is rendered to transcendence beyond reason.  In other words, they’ll say that like love, faith is blind.  That too is a fallacy.  In fact, it is immature to propose as much.  Faith and spirituality is not imprisoned within the individual human heart.  True faith involves the expression of the entirety of the human experience, including our reason.  True faith, spirituality, religious expression is embodied within the content and tenor of our speech, our behavior, and our attitudes.  True faith and spirituality flow from our passions, interests, and decisions and can, in fact, only be sincerely expressed within the context of relationships.  And relationships gravitate between every component of living including the grand, such as how we should parent a child, and the minute, such as what we should eat for dinner.

Human beings have the exclusive experience of living life while both simultaneously living it and observing ourselves live it.  We live with watching ourselves live life, which, although can be jarring, provides us with the unique opportunity to align our thoughts, emotions, and deeds in the most incredible and awe-inspiring ways.  We can be fulfilled when we make genuine meaning of what we do.

For me, Judaism is the appropriate human response to make such alignments.  I’d even go so far to say that it is the best approach to life for me and my family.  Therefore, I am deeply, deeply pained to learn of Jewish individuals intermarrying when conversion is an easy option and when the spirit of Judaism is so compelling.