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July 2007
It was erev Yom Kippur, and Joe and I were eating Chinese take-out with my father. Since I am breast-feeding 3-month-old Sophie, I had a free pass to guiltlessly chow down on steamed vegetables with garlic sauce. Not being Jewish, Joe had no reason to fast. And I don’t think it has ever occurred to my ultra-secular dad to forego food on Yom Kippur. We were skipping Kol Nidre services, but the plan was to go to shul in the morning, at least to take our daughters to children’s services. “I guess I should try to be more enthusiastic about it, at least for the kids,” said Joe, who loves reading about religion, but has an almost allergic reaction to pews of all kinds, thanks to a childhood of forced Mass attendance. “You feel guilty about not going to synagogue?” my dad asked in disbelief. “But that’s absurd! You’re not even Jewish!” “I think before we got married I made some kind of promise,” Joe said a bit ruefully. Ah, the ill-defined Promise. I remember clearly the day almost 13 years ago that I extracted it, saying, “Before things get serious, I need you to promise that if we ever have kids together we’ll raise them as Jews.” We’d only been dating a few weeks. He was in the seemingly infinite abyss that is doctoral study, I was about to embark on a year in Israel, and the prospect of raising children together seemed rather abstract. Nonetheless, Joe promised, saying he thought it was good for kids to have a religious upbringing, and he had no special loyalty to Catholicism. But just what did Joe commit to with The Promise? Does he have to cheerfully accompany the kids and me to services whenever I request it, or is it OK if he just refrains from hanging crucifixes in the house? (Not that this was his decorating preference anyway.) Making Joe’s vague mandate even vaguer is the fact that I haven’t settled on exactly how Jewish I myself want to be. Joe loves to point out that I’m constantly changing the rules, and his theory is that while I sometimes complain about the fact that he isn’t Jewish, I actually enjoy being our family’s Jewish Boss. One year, I decided to make our apartment chametz-free for Passover, forcing Joe to go to a diner all week for his morning oatmeal. Another year, I ate bread all week. But even if I had my whole Jewish identity figured out, it would not be so easy determining Joe’s role. How exactly does one go about being the family gentile? Michigan dad Jim Keen explores some of these issues in his new book, Inside Intermarriage: A Christian Partner’s Perspective on Raising a Jewish Family. Published by the Union for Reform Judaism Press, the book tells (often humorously) how Keen, a Congregationalist Protestant who attends church regularly, and his Jewish wife, Bonnie, have navigated intermarriage’s sometimes tempestuous waters. The family belongs to a Reform temple (coincidentally their rabbi, Bob Levy, officiated at our wedding), send their two daughters, now 10 and 7, to Hebrew school, have Shabbat dinner every Friday night, and celebrate most Jewish holidays, often inviting his Christian relatives along. When I interviewed Keen on the phone earlier this month, he was preparing to put up the family’s sukkah. Keen, a columnist for the Web magazine InterfaithFamily.com, says that the hardest part of agreeing to raise the girls Jewish while maintaining his Christian identity was the fear that he would somehow be an outsider in their lives. “Now that seems almost silly,” he says. “I connect to them in so many other ways. I’m their dad, I drive them to religious school, I coach their soccer, I sing them to sleep at night.” A few years ago, Keen’s book might have raised some eyebrows even in liberal Jewish circles. But now, with intermarriage less and less of a taboo outside the Orthodox community, the new Jewish year, 5767, may well become The Year of the Gentile Spouse. In his foreword to Keen’s book, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the head of the Reform movement, calls non-Jewish spouses who commit to raising Jewish children “heroes — yes heroes — of Jewish life.” The rhetoric echoes a speech Rabbi Yoffie gave at last year’s Reform biennial. In a similar vein, a growing number of rabbis, mostly Reform, are starting a tradition of publicly thanking gentile spouses from the bima on the High Holy Days. Said one rabbi, quoted in a recent article: “These are our Righteous Gentiles….” This article was excerpted from “In The Mix,” appearing the third week of the month in The Jewish Week. Julie Wiener can be reached at julie.inthemix@gmail.com.
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