Jewish Marriage and Intermarriage: An Interfaith Family Perspective

As co-chair of the Conservative movement’s Intermarriage Working Group, Rabbi Aaron Brusso is a key leader in the movement’s efforts to address interfaith marriage. Recently after a Conservative synagogue announced that its clergy would participate in weddings of interfaith couples – not officiate, and under very strict conditions – eJewishPhilanthropy reported that the United Synagogue had asked its member congregations not to take individual action, but to await the collective process still underway – a process that Rabbi Brusso leads.

The Hartman Institute’s Sources journal has just published an essay by Rabbi Brusso, “Jewish Marriage and Intermarriage: A Pastoral Perspective”. The essay is beautifully written, and I’m sure heartfelt, but completely antithetical to helping interfaith couples and partners from different faith backgrounds feel that they belong in Jewish settings. If Rabbi Brusso’s views are reflected in the IWG’s recommendations reportedly coming this fall, I predict, sadly, that the movement’s efforts to be inclusive will fail, and interfaith families and their relatives will continue to leave.

Rabbi Brusso knows that people want to feel known and seen. He knows that interfaith couples and their families have felt rejection. He knows that interfaith couples raise Jewish children and that parents from different faith backgrounds play active roles in supporting those children. He says all of these things in his essay.

How are those people – Jewishly engaged or potentially Jewishly engaged interfaith couples and partners from different faith backgrounds – supposed to feel when Rabbi Brusso says that “Jewish narratives, rituals, symbols and faith statements have the power to give meaning to our lives as Jews.” (emphasis added) That that “world of meaning” is not for them because they are not Jews?

How are they supposed to feel when he says “absolutely” that “religious traditions and ideas are exclusive, available to some people and not others” – and indeed that that particularity is “one of the main functions of religious traditions like Judaism.” That Jewish traditions and ideas are not available to them?

Rabbi Brusso says that the purpose of a Jewish education is, for example, so that the melodies of kabbalat shabbat will resonate with them, so they will know what to do at a shiva minyan, that they’ll see a sukkah as a symbol of their people’s wandering. Are Jewishly engaged partners from different faith backgrounds supposed to understand that they can’t feel the same way?

Rabbi Brusso doesn’t appear to see the possibility of partners from different faith backgrounds being Jewishly engaged. When he describes how he talks to teens, he tells them “they may meet and fall in love with someone who did not grow up Jewish who is interested in becoming Jewish and partnering to build that kind of [Jewish] home.” (emphasis added) So someone who did not grow up Jewish can’t be interested in partnering to build a Jewish home, short of conversion?

The clear message here is that Jewish traditions are only for Jews. If partners from different faith backgrounds want to participate, they can convert. Otherwise, The “particularistic meaning system of the tradition” is not for them.

Why would interfaith couples want to engage in Jewish life in a system that says its traditions are only for the Jewish partner? The movement’s decline shows that most wouldn’t and won’t.

With respect to wedding officiation, Rabbi Brusso says that couples asking him to officiate are avoiding doing the work of having deeper conversations about how to navigate their individual identities as they engage in mutual projects like wedding ceremonies, raising kids, and establishing traditions in their home. (A throwaway line suggests he thinks it’s not couples who want him to officiate: “I can help them individuate their needs from what their parents want.”)

But many couples have had those conversations and made decisions, or tentative decisions, that they will or may raise future children with Judaism, that they do or may want Jewish traditions in their home – and that they want a Jewish wedding ceremony, which to them means one led by Jewish clergy.  For those couples, asking the rabbi to officiate is not avoiding work they should do – it’s a question only the rabbi can answer.

Rabbi Brusso says that he meets with couples and shares the texts of the wedding ceremony. He asks them, “When we say asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav, ‘who sanctifies us with commandments,’ do you feel that Jewish rituals, in whatever form you practice them, add holiness to your life? When we say mekadesh amo yisrael, ‘who sanctifies the people of Israel,’ do you feel a connection to Jews around the world?” Many partners from different faith backgrounds could genuinely answer those questions affirmatively or say that they can’t quite say yes at this point but are interested and open to getting to yes in the future.

Rabbi Brusso doesn’t appear to see that possibility. He says the conversations help the couples figure out who they are, what role they want Judaism to play in their wedding ceremony and their lives. But the only outcomes of these sessions that he lists are that the couple leaves more thoughtful, or sometimes want to study more, or sometimes start a pathway to conversion.

It strains credulity to think that none of the couples ever say, we still want Judaism to play a role in our lives, and in our wedding ceremony, and we’d like you to officiate. Perhaps they go and find another rabbi who will. Or perhaps they are discouraged and just have a civil ceremony and live with a lasting feeling of rejection. Is that what we want to happen?

Banning Conservative rabbis from officiating at weddings of interfaith couples is an albatross around the neck of the movement’s efforts to engage interfaith couples. As Arnold Eisen said, “if you can’t have a Conservative rabbi [officiate] your wedding and you’re intermarried or the child of an intermarriage, you’re not going to say, ‘I’m a Conservative Jew.’”

If the movement cannot evolve halakhah, as it has in the case of women, and gay and lesbian Jews, in ways that validate interfaith marriage and permit officiation, more and more people are going to say, “I’m not a Conservative Jew.” But Rabbi Brusso’s theory of the “particularistic meaning system of the tradition” to the point that it is not available to unconverted partners from different faith backgrounds, is more damaging. If people are told that Jewish traditions are not for them unless they convert, they will feel the opposite of belonging, and as a result will not engage. That is a loss that Jewish communities cannot afford.