My son didn’t walk away from Judaism. I walked away from him

JTA – The trouble, if that’s the word, began with a text from Havana: “I met someone!”

My son, Ben, was 26 and on his third trip to Cuba. He was there for the music and the adventure and to practice his ever-improving Spanish. The someone was Tatiana, a Cuban woman he met at a bar the night before New Year’s Eve, 2015. She was a few years younger than Ben and felt lucky to be talking to an American so interested in everyday Cuban life. I could tell from Ben’s voice when we finally talked that he was in deep.

The situation was going somewhere fast, but I was stuck on a single thought: Although Tatiana followed a religious practice, it was not Judaism. It was Afro-Cuban Yoruba, I later learned, brought to the island from West Africa.

Instead of greeting the news of my son’s happiness with joy, I flinched, perhaps because I’m a practicing Jew and the son of a Holocaust survivor. Over the years, I had drifted toward a Modern Orthodox shul, attending Shabbat and holiday services regularly as well as the occasional weekday minyan. I’ve mostly been alone on that journey, but as I saw it, one of my duties in this life was to keep the chain of our family’s Jewish ancestry from breaking. Never mind that more than 60 percent of American Jews who have married since 2010 have wed someone who isn’t Jewish. The traditionalist in me felt that those statistics didn’t apply in my case. My father had lost so much of his family during World War II.

The trouble was that I didn’t voice my protest to my son, fearful that such honesty might lead to estrangement.

Ben first met Tatiana after a few beers at a bar in Havana. He was there with two travel buddies from college. She had just said goodbye to a group of friends, who were moving on, when Ben decided to strike up a conversation with her. Outside the bar, away from the air-conditioning and the music, Ben thought she was pretty. Mostly, though, he saw the encounter as an opportunity to practice his Spanish and get another glimpse into Cuban life.

They spent the rest of the night talking into the early morning. By the time his flight home departed some five days later, the two had spent parts of every day together. He had even met her parents at a neighborhood pork roast on New Year’s Day.

“It felt like a real connection,” Ben later told me.

But still, they were nearly 2,000 miles apart. How would it work? They reconnected using a cheap international phone app while Tatiana waited three months for her U.S. tourist-visa application to be approved. It was denied. Ben found a long weekend to return. But still. He couldn’t afford to keep flying down. That’s when they hatched an alternative, if arduous, plan to get Tatiana to the U.S. legally. It took nearly six months, as she traveled halfway across the world in order to cross the Texas border, where she was processed, claiming asylum. Ben arrived shortly after in a rental car, a year to the day after they met. Some three years later, they married.

As a journalist, I saw a great romance story, full of suspense and world politics. As a father, I felt emotionally wounded, defeated.

The first time my wife and I flew out to meet the new couple, after Tatiana had made it to America, I sat through dinner at a restaurant barely saying a word, sullen as a teenager. As I stood to pay the check, Tatiana leaned over to Ben and asked him in Spanish why his father wasn’t talking. She assumed I couldn’t follow. I followed enough. I was being a jerk and couldn’t control it. I said nothing about that either. By then, saying nothing was what I did best.

For me, the question was how to respond when one of your loved ones makes a central life decision that goes against the core of who you are. Or think you are.

Though I was pulled toward the rituals of my religion, I also felt at home in the secular world, and Ben saw me as someone open to other cultures and people across the globe.

So I might have welcomed his relationship with Tatiana as an opportunity for personal growth. Sure, I prayed he would find someone Jewish to marry, but I understood the consequences of living in a multicultural world. Like his two siblings, Ben went to Hebrew school, had a bar mitzvah and knew his family’s history. He also went to public school and made friends with kids from a variety of backgrounds.

Instead of embracing my son’s romantic decision, I turned into an ethnocentric tribalist, a Jewish Archie Bunker. Yet I harbored that identity in silence, preferring to stew in my heart and mind, playing the victim, feeling betrayed, even insulted.

From a tribal perspective, I felt like one of my own had walked away from the campfire, our circle, the family, my people. Stuck in my gut was a sense of abandonment combined with guilt that I had “lost” one of my own, and I would hear the voices of my ancestors, my parents, aunts and uncles, judging me for letting someone in my family “stray” outside the fold.

I didn’t speak my truth to my son because, though estrangement was a possibility, I mostly feared that such a conversation would be awkward and upsetting to both of us. And I’d learned at an early age in a home where the rule was not to upset my father, the Holocaust survivor, to avoid conflict.

Still, with each passing year, I managed to show graciousness on the outside. I saw that they were happy. I welcomed the birth of one grandchild, then another — two boys, both of whom had brises and were given Hebrew names, a process that Ben initiated, but which he and Tatiana chose together after exploring their meaning and finding ways to honor Ben’s grandfathers. To me that looked like steps to becoming part of a Jewish community, but I wanted more. As I saw it, they were small steps, given that they lived in a town without a synagogue, the closest two hours away.

When I thought about them or whenever we visited, a cloud of sadness was never far away. Earlier this year marked a decade since I’d read Ben’s “I met someone” text. That’s a long time to remain disappointed in a reality that continues challenging me to accept my son’s choices. And it was sinking in that the price of staying quiet, of not being honest, had its cost, forgoing a deeper relationship with Ben.

An upcoming visit with his family was on the calendar. I texted him: “Would love to grab a beer with you next week to talk – just you and me.” He texted back a thumbs-up emoji. But with two youngsters, nap schedules and a crammed weekend itinerary, we never found the time. Waiting for our flight back home, I emailed him, proposing we start the talk I wanted anyway, over texts, emails or the phone. I sent him a few questions and I told him how I was struggling.

He emailed me back: “I don’t want to say I regret my marriage in any way. But as I’ve gotten older and probably especially now that I have kids, and post Oct.  7th, this has carried more meaning than in my mid-20s. Should I have married Jewish? Probably. Did I let you (and my grandparents) down? Likely.”

I breathed in and out slowly. A few days later, we talked for at least an hour, as he drove to an appointment nearly two hours from his home. Among the topics was my role as a father.

Avoiding the messiness of life wasn’t working for me. Ben knew the importance I placed on my faith, but even when he was a teenager, I’d failed to speak up the first time he brought home a girlfriend who wasn’t Jewish. Or the one after that, dodging that delicate subject.

“Did I ever make my expectations clear?” I asked.

“Not clearly,” he ultimately said. He’d sensed my expectations primarily from talking with his two older siblings, but during those formative years as a teenager and into his early 20s, he never heard a consistent, clear message from me.

Had I failed as a parent to offer guidance on beliefs I held deeply? It sure seemed that way. “I need to take some responsibility,” I said.

Ben agreed, but he was kind, insisting I couldn’t bear all of it.

“Ultimately, it wasn’t your decision at all,” he said, as he reflected on life in his early twenties. He was coming of age at a time of globalization, where he and many of his friends saw themselves as part of a global society that crossed racial and ethnic barriers, and he said he felt some pride in an interracial, international relationship. The zeitgeist was changing.

“It felt like its own religion,” he said of how he fit in, where being Jewish was less of a force shaping his daily life. I paused when he used the word “religion” to describe the world he lived in. What about our religion? I thought, pondering what I could have done differently as a parent and whether it would have mattered.

We talked some more just before Yom Kippur this year. If I thought he was abandoning his connection to our community, I misunderstood, he said. Did I realize how much thought, effort and wrestling he’d put into his relationship with Judaism?

Especially since having kids, he said, even before Oct. 7, he had been searching for ways to connect them to the roots of that part of their family.

Over the years, a scene in “Fiddler on the Roof” had shown up unannounced at the doorstep of my thoughts. It’s when Tevye disowns the daughter who marries outside the faith, calling her dead to the family. I would assure myself that wasn’t me; that I never disowned anyone.

And yet. As we talked, I wondered whether I’d had the whole picture backward. I had always cast Ben as the one who walked away from the campfire, out of the circle and into the dark. But he had never left. He kept inviting me closer: the brises, the visits, his requests that I chant Kiddush on Friday nights when we were at his home. Each time, I was the one who stepped back from the warmth and called it loyalty to my ancestors, to the tradition.

I won’t pretend the cloud has lifted. It hasn’t, not all the way. The weight is still there. I still struggle with my fears, that I’ve let the chain break. Some mornings it’s the first thought that comes to me, and I expect I’ll always feel the pull of the chain I was raised to protect.

But I’ve come to see, late and at no small cost, that I had been loving the easier of two loves. The dead ask so little of us: to light a yahrzeit candle and say Kaddish a few designated times a year. They never marry someone we wouldn’t have chosen. They never lean across a restaurant table to ask why we won’t speak. The living are far harder. And the living are the ones sitting right in front of us, waiting to be loved back.

I still don’t know how to be a different father. But for the first time in 10 years I want to be one, and I’ve begun to tell Ben so. Not in my heart this time, where I’ve always kept such feelings stored, but out loud. After a decade of silence, it isn’t much. But some days I think it may be the truest thing I have to give him.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.