The result, he adds, is that in America, "there's a rapidly eroding sense of Jewish commitment, a complete collapsing of Jewish literacy, and a thinning of Jewish identity". So Israelis are petrified, says Rabbi Dr Donniel Hartman, head of the Shalom Hartman Institute of Jewish studies, because since intermarriage is so rare there, when an Israeli marries a non-Jew they view it as if he is leaving Judaism.
We are 14 million Jews in the world, that's it," he explains. This is a new phenomenon in Judaism, and Hartman says Jews must rise to the challenge.
We are a people who are intermarried - the issue is not how to stop it, but how to reach out to non-Jewish spouses and welcome them into our community," he says. Things are changing, I don't know if it's for the worse or not, that will depend on what we do. But the world is evolving, and we have to evolve with it. Image source, AFP. Benjamin Netanyahu with sons Yair left and Avner. Jewish painters like Picasso and Modigliani are clever but never great.
Jews in the theatre—well, you have seen what they have done to Hollywood. The moving pictures are full of sex and sensuality, and cater solely to the Jews' god, money. Has there ever been a Jew who could approach Beethoven or Raphael? It must not be inferred that Mother, because of her German background, was particularly anti-Semitic.
I have heard the same things from the lips of plenty of one-hundred-per-cent Americans,. Mother looked at me a little sadly. She wasn't licked, but she was for the moment out of arguments.
What Ben's mother said to him I can only conjecture, for he has never told me. The old persecutions are rising again throughout the world. We have need, as never before, to stick to our own people and traditions. But, loving Ben above the rest of her children, she probably also said, 'Well, then, if you love her and are sure that she is the one woman for you, you have my blessing.
Above everything I want you to be happy. Our mothers met, embraced, and promptly forgot their differences in purely feminine discussions of wedding plans we were to be married by a civil judge to eliminate difficulties , motherly landings of their respective offspring, and the honeymoon. Once marriage loomed up as a certainty, not another word against Ben's race or religion escaped my mother's lips.
She could have maintained this negative attitude and still have preserved the family peace. But gradually, as she learned to know Ben better and saw how fine he was, and how good to her daughter, there came shy words of affection and admiration. Naturally, to our friends, the most interesting aspect of our marriage is its interracial side, I know that even now many of them, aware of my pro-German leanings, still chuckle behind our backs; 'Well, well, our little Nazi Gertrude had to go and marry a Jew, of all people.
Is he very Jewish? Do you ever discuss the differences between you? It was this that finally propelled me to our typewriter—to tell the world how it really is between a Jew and a Christian, since the world is evidently so intensely interested.
I wish I could say that, because Ben and I have worked through to complete happiness, there is no reason why Jews and Gentiles everywhere cannot live peaceably and happily side by side. But I am afraid that this harmonious relationship can come about only when Gentiles stop being one-hundred-per-cent Gentiles and Jews one-hundred-per-cent Jews—when both sides drop their false pride of race, their hidebound, worn-out, traditions, and meet each other halfway. Yes, we discuss our differences. Our discussions are not frequent because I seldom think of Ben as being Jewish, and he seldom thinks of me as a Gentile.
We are just Ben and Gertrude to each other. It is that way when you love. But when we do have discussions we fire away freely. I know that in many Christian-Jewish alliances it is thought wiser and more conducive to marital harmony to treat these differences as nonexistent, to shroud them in a veil of silence.
Ben and I have always looked upon this as an unhealthy practice. To throttle a subject and make it forbidden, we think, leads to distortion and often to explosion. However, in our discussions, it is always I who must choose the more tactful way, for Ben, poor darling, still has the Jewish hypersensitivity toward all criticism of his race, for which he and his people are not to be blamed.
In the beginning he couldn't take it at all, though he loudly proclaimed that he invited argument, that he wanted to learn the Christian point of view in order to understand more clearly the century-old friction between the two groups. All right, we would have at it. He would start by saying there was this and that about the Christians that he never could stomach. I would agree with him or condone the matter as the case might be, then point out a few Jewish traits that have irritated Gentiles.
The moment I did that, he began to look like a crushed and visual embodiment of the 'Eli, Eli. But then up shot another one. Every criticism of Jewry was a vaunting of Christian superiority. And I had to comfort him: 'Ben, if I say the English are too smug, the Germans too clumsy and pig-headed, the French too material, does that mean that I see no good in them at all, that I call them "dirty English" or "dirty French" or "dirty Germans"?
Of course we argue about religion. I have been to synagogue with him on the day when he goes, Rosh Hashana. I have found the singing, the music, and the preaching fine, and not so different from Catholic or Episcopal services.
I find little difference between Catholic saints and Jewish angels, between the miracles encountered by Moses and Elijah and those by Jesus. I have admitted that I found strange, and a little comical, the presence of men in black derbies at the altar, the squeaky notes of the Shofar, or ram's horn, the continuous giggling and gossiping throughout the long services Ben has told me you cannot expect people to keep quiet for six hours at a stretch , the absence of that reverent hush that makes the Catholic or Episcopal service inspiring.
For his part, Ben finds genuflections, incense, the intricacies of the Mass, choir boys, processions, holy statues, holy water, and prayers to Christ as a divinity, equally strange, he does not understand how anybody can believe in the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth of Jesus.
That sounds funny to us. My personal belief, which really has no place here, is that these are symbolical rather than literal truths.
To me the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth mean that the Christ consciousness can be born only in the heart that is immaculate and pure, even as 'Israel' means any and all who live in the ways of God. Ben says there may be something in that, but he does not really believe it because he is not at all sure there is a God. Again, I must tread softly when we talk about religion because, while Ben thinks it perfectly enlightened and proper to ridicule the various aspects of Christian religions, his lips clamp shut when I venture to suggest that Judaism is at least as dogmatic as Catholicism and as jealous of its own, that the Jewish church plays politics quite as much as Rome, wields an international influence equally strong, and, to an avowed agnostic like himself, should present at least as much ritual balderdash—the prohibiting of milk or butter at a meal where meat is eaten, the wearing of prayer shawls and hats by men worshipers at services, the tearful wailing of the cantor, the swaying back and forth of the worshipers at synagogue prayer.
No, Ben is not a churchgoer, but instinct says that the Jewish church is of his people and as such should not be ridiculed or criticized. Like most Gentiles, I read both the Old and the New Testament of the Bible, but neither Ben nor any of his Jewish friends have, so far as I can ascertain, ever honored the New Testament with so much as a glance.
I find much in the Old Testament to make me understand the Hebrew character, and I believe a Jew could find much in the New Testament to help him understand the Christian character, though he does not believe in the divinity of Christ, and though he may not believe that Christ ever trod this earth. Ben will often excoriate a member of his race—and he disagrees with those who hold that the Jews represent a religion rather than a race. One of the main reasons, Riley finds, is that the older people get, the more likely they are to intermarry — and Jews tend to marry older than Americans generally, according to the National Jewish Population Survey.
By the same token, Mormons, who encourage early nuptials, are the least likely faith to outmarry. Another factor behind the comparatively high Jewish intermarriage rate is, simply, that Americans like Jews. Riley says intermarriage is both a cause and effect of this phenomenon. She says assimilation has been a good and bad thing for American Jews. The children of interfaith couples also tend to grow up to be less religious than inmarried couples.
Still, he had the goal of being a preacher, like his grandfathers before him. After his freshman year at the fundamentalist Moody Bible Institute, Sweeney spent the summer doing missionary work in the Philippines.
Sitting in these Filipino-Catholic houses, trying to de-Catholicize the inhabitants, Sweeney was intrigued by iconography all around him. But in terms of becoming a Catholic, it was not in the cards, not just yet.
Briefly, he thought about becoming a Catholic monk, then dropped the idea. But he left before ordination to get married, at age He said he knew right away he had made the wrong decision. Sweeney and his first wife separated in and divorced two years later. Meanwhile, he had developed a career in religious publishing, including a stint, from to , at Jewish Lights Publishing, which brought him to Vermont. It was a strange time for him to become a Catholic, he is the first to note, because he was received into the church four days after becoming engaged to Woll, a local rabbi in Vermont whom he had met through mutual friends.
She was away in Chicago when he became a Catholic. It was uncomfortable anyway. Like her husband, Woll has a long history crossing denominational lines, albeit within Judaism.
She grew up attending a Reform temple, but did not attend Hebrew school. Then at 12, she requested a bat mitzvah ceremony. Her parents said yes, and she had a lot of catching up to do. Years later, after Northwestern and then graduate school at M. At the local congregation she attended, Woll encountered Jewish Renewal, a left-leaning, hippie-ish strand of Judaism that emphasizes personal piety and mystical experience.
When she left Delaware for a physical therapy career in Flagstaff, Ariz. In her spare-time hobbies became her full-time vocation, and she started at Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, outside Philadelphia. In she moved to Vermont to work at her first congregation, where she met Jon Sweeney. As a Reconstructionist, Woll belongs to the stream of Judaism most comfortable with intermarriage; as a rabbi, she has never had a problem performing marriages between Jews and non-Jews.
But it is still unusual for a rabbi to share her life, and the responsibilities of parenting, with a Catholic husband. When I asked if there have been any religious tensions, Woll mentioned the day she realized she could no longer attend church with Sweeney, which she had done on occasion.
She had hoped, early in their marriage, that she could share an experience that was so meaningful to him, if not as a worshiper then as a kind of fellow traveler. One day she just walked out. Sweeney listened, and nodded at this shared memory. Sweeney admires that Woll takes religion seriously enough to have been uncomfortable.
But one also gets the sense that he admires her for the ways in which she is like him. That is, they get each other. Both are seekers, who have found their way, circuitously, to a tradition that gives them meaning.
He took down the crosses. They have agreed to raise their daughter, Sima, now 6, as a Jew, which he said felt natural to him, both because he had deep experience with Judaism and because his theology had predisposed him to a sympathy with the Jewish story. You guys came first, you know. After all, she moved to Arizona, whereas he always aspired to a kind of Jewish urbanity. Woll is the rabbi, Sweeney is the religious-books editor, who now works for Ave Maria Press, a Catholic publisher.
But their religion is, in each case, more experiential, and mystical, than theological. This presents its own problems, but saves them others.
Rusty and Juliana Reno are a different kind of interfaith couple: believers in a conventional God, they are both intensely theological, in love with abstruse argumentation, less mystics than big old nerds. Reno, known as Rusty, is now editor of First Things, the conservative Christian political journal; for many years he taught Christian ethics at Creighton University in Nebraska. He met Juliana when he was a graduate student at Yale, teaching a discussion section of a lecture class in Christian ethics.
The two Renos have never agreed on religious or political truth, but they agree on certain fundamentals, like what sorts of things matter.
For example, they both wanted a religious wedding, one that obeyed the precepts of one tradition or the other. When they could not find a rabbi to marry them, they went to his Episcopal church and used the service in the Book of Common Prayer—although they added the traditional Jewish Seven Blessings at the end, which his priest agreed did not invalidate the Christian ceremony.
He agreed in principle, but with a caveat.
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