Topics in this digest:
Chaye Sarah 5766
Genesis 23:1 – 25:18
By Rabbi Dr. Barry Leff
Congregation B’nai Israel
Toledo, OH
Every Jew who is dedicated to his heritage is concerned about who his
children will marry. The first Jew to worry about who his son was going to
marry was the first Jew: Abraham.
In this week’s Torah portion, Chaye Sarah, Abraham gives his servant Eliezer
explicit instructions. He tells Eliezer to put his hand under his thigh
(apparently an ancient way of swearing), and says “swear by the Lord, the
God of heaven, and the God of the earth, that you will not take a wife for
my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I live.”
Abraham further instructs Eliezer “go to my country, and to my family, and
take a wife for my son Isaac.” Eliezer retorts, “maybe the woman won’t want
to come with me; should I bring your son back to the land you came from?”
Abraham, aghast, says “Take care that you do NOT bring my son there again.”
And of course what happens in this story is that Abraham’s son Isaac
intermarries. Rebecca may be “kin,” but she’s not Jewish.
There is a lot we can learn about how to deal with intermarriage from
studying this passage in the Torah. But before we try to tease out those
lessons, I want to put intermarriage today into perspective.
I’ve been regularly preaching from one pulpit or another since my second
year in rabbinical school. This is my 7th year of giving sermons. Yet in all
that time, in the hundreds of talks and sermons I’ve given, I have never,
not once, given a sermon specifically about the topic of intermarriage. I’ve
made the occasional reference, but I’ve never really talked about it as the
central topic of a sermon. I had to ask myself, why not?
Well, it’s a topic that makes people uncomfortable. But anyone who has heard
me speak more than once knows that I don’t shy away from making people
uncomfortable. I think the reason is a little more basic. The topic makes ME
uncomfortable! So I guess that means I’m more comfortable making other
people uncomfortable than being uncomfortable myself! So, perhaps today is
our turn to all be uncomfortable together.
Why are we so uncomfortable with the topic? It’s divisive, it seems somehow
“unwelcoming.” To speak of the benefits and rationale for endogamy
(in-marriage, marrying other Jews) seems somehow exclusivist, elitist, and
against American ideals of everyone being created equal. A recent survey
found that 50% of American Jews – of the JEWS – felt opposition to
intermarriage was racist. Our discomfort may also come from tensions in our
families because of intermarriage, and as parents we might be worried about
whether our kids will intermarry.
And I’ve got another reason for feeling personally uncomfortable with the
topic. My family motto could be “intermarriage is us.” My father
intermarried—my brother, my sister, and I were converted as children and
raised as Jews. I intermarried, my brother intermarried, my sister
intermarried. I have aunts, uncles, cousins, and two-half sisters who are
Jewish and married Jews, but the non-Jews in my family circle significantly
outnumber the Jews.
Despite all that intermarriage in my family—despite the fact that I myself
intermarried, more than once—I am adamantly opposed to intermarriage, and
would be mortified if one of my kids married a Gentile. So how can I
preach a message on the topic without sounding like a hypocrite?
I hope that rather than making me a hypocrite, my personal and family
experience qualifies to me to speak on the topic with authority.
Intermarriage is a huge issue for the Jewish community. As someone said,
“the problem Jews have today isn’t that Christians want to kill us: it’s
that they want to marry us!”
Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald, Founder of the National Jewish Outreach Program said
"Our grandparents prayed for a melting pot. What they got instead was a
meltdown!" 60% of all Jews live in households that are not identified as
Jewish. 54% of all American Jewish kids are raised either with no religion
or a religion other than Judaism. Alan Dershowitz in his book “The Vanishing
American Jew” predicts that in a few generations the only Jews left in
America will be the ultra-Orthodox. He predicts liberal Judaism will
intermarry itself out of existence.
We’re all familiar with the statistic that 52% of Jews intermarry. There are
things that make that statistic not as bad as it sounds, and things that
make it worse. On the one hand, the intermarriage rate is much higher for
second and third marriages than it is for first marriages. The later
marriages are less likely to have children, so this ameliorates the impact
of the intermarriage statistic to a degree.
On the other hand, to put it in a scarier context, a 50% intermarriage rate
means that two out of every three weddings involving a Jew is an
intermarriage. Out of four Jews, two (50%) marry each other, and the other
two each marry a non-Jew. No wonder our demographic decline is forecast to
be so precipitous.
And demographics are really what the intermarriage issue is all about.
That was the issue for Abraham—he wanted to increase the number of Jews—and
it’s the issue for us. A few weeks ago we read parshat Lech Lecha, in which
God promises to make Abraham’s descendants as numerous as the grains of sand
on the earth. That’s not going to happen if we can’t keep our descendants
Jewish.
Judaism is not a proselytizing religion. We don’t go from door to door
handing out leaflets encouraging people to convert. It’s not because we
don’t want people to join us—it’s because we don’t have the same theological
motivation that many Christians have. Christians believe if they convert
you, they are saving your soul from eternal damnation. Jews believe that if
we convert you, we are raising the bar for you, making your life
tougher—it’s actually harder in some ways for a Jew to get into heaven than
a non-Jew. All a non-Jew has to do is follow the 7 Noachide laws, which
means basically to be an ethical monotheist. A Jew, on the other hand, has
613 mitzvot to obey—a much greater level of responsibility.
We believe it’s worthwhile to be a Jew, that it enriches our lives and the
world around us, but we don’t have the same theological drive to try and
convert the whole world. So the number of “fresh adherents,” people joining
from the outside, has always been rather small. Therefore, when it comes to
growing the Jewish population, we have historically done it by marrying
other Jews and having lots of kids.
So given the low rate of conversion, we can see that at least outside of
Israel, intermarriage is a real threat to Jewish survival.
OK, fine, intermarriage is a threat to Jewish survival. But we have to ask
ourselves “why does it matter?”
If Jews are just a tribe, a collection of people with a common heritage, it
really does NOT matter. Lots of tribes have disappeared. All the ancient
civilizations other than Judaism are basically gone, at least as far as
continuity with their culture goes. There are still people called Egyptians,
but they don’t build pyramids, worship Isis, or make mummies.
For a totally secular Jew—someone who does not believe Judaism has an
important message for the world, who does not practice Judaism at home—to be
concerned about intermarriage frankly would smack of racism.
But if you believe Judaism has an important message to share with the world,
if you believe God made a covenant with Abraham so that the Jews would be a
blessing to the world, or as Isaiah put it, to be a light to the
nations—then it is vitally important that Judaism continue and that the Jews
continue to exist as people.
And that is why, despite my personal experience with intermarriage, I am now
opposed to it. I realize that I am something of a fluke: it’s pretty rare
that someone intermarries, and the end result is he ends up becoming a
rabbi. I thank God that I somehow married someone with a Jewish neshamah
whose journey to Judaism inspired me to really explore my own Jewish
heritage for the first time as an adult. But I know we can’t count on such
fortuitous circumstances every time.
A couple of years ago, I got a call from an Israeli couple. They were very
upset because their teenage son was dating a non-Jew. They wanted to know if
I had any ideas on what they should do.
I asked them if they did anything Jewish at home. They told me no, they were
secular.
My reaction was they were coming to talk to me way too late. Being a secular
Jew is a long-term option in Israel. In a place where everyone is Jewish,
you can be totally secular, and still be reasonably sure your grandchildren
will be Jewish. But if you live in the Diaspora, that is no longer true. If
your kid is the only Jew in his classes in high school, and Judaism is not
important to him—if he doesn’t do something to observe Shabbat and holidays
for example, does not participate in Jewish youth groups like the great USY
group we had here last weekend—of course he will marry a non-Jew. There’s no
reason not to.
So what do we do about intermarriage? How do we prevent it, and how do we
deal with it when it happens?
We can get some advice from this week’s Torah portion. First of all, Abraham
is concerned that his son marry the right person. Do we communicate to our
kids that we care who they marry? If you don’t express an opinion about whom
your kids date, it’s tough to express an opinion about whom they marry.
Secondly, why was Abraham so adamant about Eliezer finding a bride for Isaac
from far away—not from the local Canaanite girls? Why does he further insist
that Isaac NOT go to live in Babylonia among his own family? The Kli Yakar,
a 16th century rabbi, explains it this way:
"Abraham said to himself; If my son marries a girl from Canaan, since we
live amongst them, my son will frequent their homes and will learn from
their (idolatrous) ways. Furthermore if my son marries of the daughters of
Laban and Betuel (Abraham’s relatives) and will go to live with them, there
is also a probability that he will be influenced by their actions. By
marrying a woman from abroad who will come to live here, there is no worry
at all." So basically, he was worried about his son’s future in-laws.
Abraham was afraid if Isaac married a local girl, he would be absorbed into
her culture—the dominant local culture—and he would lose his identity as a
Jew. If he lived among the idol worshipers in either place, there was a good
chance he would assimilate. He needed a strong Jewish identity, he needed to
establish a Jewish home.
We need to implant a strong Jewish identity in our children. How do we do
that? What we do at home is much more important than sending kids to a
Jewish Day School. If you light candles every Shabbat and make every Friday
night dinner an occasion to look forward to with a special meal, with
friends and family, with words of Torah, you’ll make Shabbat something your
child won’t want to give up—it will be something he or she will want to have
as part of his/her life, something to share with a spouse. If you send your
kids to Day School, but hardly ever do anything Jewish at home, what’s the
message you send your kids? They learn about keeping kosher and how
important Shabbat is, but if they don’t do it at home, they get the message
it’s not really important – it’s just school work, not real life
But no matter how strong a Jewish identity we implant in our young people,
intermarriage will still happen. Jews are only about 2% of the population in
America. Even committed Jews meet and fall in love with Gentiles.
What then?
Trying to stop them with a guilt trip is a non-starter. Love is very
powerful. More powerful than guilt. Telling them “it’s giving Hitler a
posthumous victory” or “you’re breaking a 3,000 year old chain of your
ancestors going back to Mt. Sinai” is simply not going to carry much weight
in the face of love. Reminding them that it is a commandment in the Torah
not to intermarry is probably not going to help much either. We have to do
something different.
In this week’s Torah reading, After Eliezer brings Rebecca back to the land
of Israel, the Torah tells us “And Isaac brought her to his mother Sarah’s
tent, and took Rebekah, and she became his wife; and he loved her; and Isaac
was comforted after his mother’s death.”
The first step was Isaac took Rebecca into his mother’s tent—he brought her
into HIS home, into HIS culture. Only after that did he marry her.
If our kids fall in love with a Gentile, we should encourage the Gentile to
convert to Judaism. This can be a very positive thing for the Jewish people.
The story is told of a young Jewish man who fell in love with a Gentile.
His father was very upset, and told him “don’t marry a shiksa, you’ll regret
it!” The young woman saw how important Judaism was to her fiance’s family,
she started learning about Judaism and liked what she saw, so she studied
with the rabbi and converted. The first week after the couple returns from
the honeymoon, the son is back at work in the family business. Friday
afternoon Dad tells the son, “see you tomorrow morning, we’ll go over the
books,” and the son replies, “sorry Dad, can’t come, tomorrow is Shabbat, so
we’ll be at shul ” Dad says, “I told you not to marry a shiksa!”
We may laugh, but it’s true that very often converts become some of the most
knowledgeable and dedicated members of our congregations. They not only
enrich us spiritually, they help strengthen our gene pool—too much
in-breeding leads to a concentration of genetic diseases like Tay-Sachs.
Of course Jews have brought in converts everywhere we have lived. Polish
Jews look like Poles and Iranian Jews look like Iranians. Welcoming others
into our tent is nothing new. Moses married a non-Jew, Tzipora, the daughter
of a Midianite priest. King David is descended from Ruth, a convert, whose
story we read every year on Shavuot.
But not every Gentile who marries a Jew will want to convert. Some are
committed to their own religions, and if someone believes Jesus is the only
path to salvation they are not really a candidate for conversion to Judaism.
But even then, we can encourage the family to raise their children as Jews.
Non-Jews are often sympathetic to the demographic plight that the Jewish
people face, and if the Jewish partner says it’s important to him or her
they will often agree to raise the children as Jews.
But for that to happen, it is incumbent upon us as a Jewish community to be
as welcoming to intermarried couples as we can. Rejecting intermarried
couples because we don’t approve of intermarriage is the surest way to see
the next generation grow up Christian or nothing.
Two out of every three weddings a Jew in America participates in is an
intermarriage. If Judaism is to remain vibrant in America, it will only
happen if we are successful in encouraging non-Jews to embrace Judaism.
So we must remember the commandment v’ahavta l’ra’echa k’mocha, love your
neighbor as yourself. If we welcome these non-Jews and prospective Jews in
our midst with love we will draw them close. We can’t afford to turn our
backs on them. The future of the Jewish people depends on it.