ShareThisBy ARTHUR BLECHER
The Providence Journal
Friday, November 30, 2007
December marks the 60th anniversary of the U.N. vote to divide Palestine into three entities, setting in motion the establishment of the modern state of Israel. This historic milestone will be a time for Jews around the world to reflect on the meaning of Jewish identity. In America, many longstanding concepts about the Jewish people and their survival are being challenged by new ideas. The recent observance of Yom Kippur is a perfect example of some of the tensions that grip American Jews today.
On this most solemn of Jewish holy days, Jews are asked to repent for all the bad things we did over the previous year. We are also asked to fast, a custom that results in guilty consciences among those who sneak a nibble. But the sheepish feeling of having snacked on a few crackers is nothing compared with the oppressive guilt that many Jews are made to feel for not doing enough to maintain their heritage.
This is no accident. During the High Holy Days, synagogue attendance is several hundred percent higher than for typical Sabbath services, and many rabbis use the occasion to prophesize the destruction of our ancient people -- not through murderous anti-Semitism, but through slow annihilation from assimilation and intermarriage.
The solution? It's simple, say the rabbis. Join the synagogue and marry another Jew. It's preservation of the long-suffering Jewish race in two easy steps. And as a bonus, it will cure your guilty conscience, if not your hunger pangs.
I know how this works. As a rabbi and a psychotherapist, I'm familiar with the twin emotions of guilt and fear. I've seen my friends and rabbinic colleagues compare marrying outside the faith to another Holocaust. It's as if the millions of thoroughly Americanized Jews whose families made their way across the Atlantic can't quite forgive themselves for not living like a character out of "Fiddler on the Roof."
The guilt-inducing sermons of Yom Kippur rest on two great myths of American Judaism. Myth No. 1 is that Judaism is disappearing. Myth No. 2 is that intermarriage poses a grave threat to the continuing life of the religion. These false notions, almost universally believed and seemingly impervious to any evidence to the contrary, have long and impressive pedigrees.
In the century since the anti-assimilation warning of Solomon Schechter, architect of the American Conservative Jewish Movement, that "traditional Judaism will not survive another generation in this country," the American Jewish population has grown from 1 million to about 6 million. On average, a new synagogue has been erected every few weeks. Jewish summer camps, schools, charities and Web sites form a network of institutions that has no equal in all of Jewish history.
The myth of the disappearing Jew can be traced in large measure to a single, well-publicized study recording 5.2 million Jews in America, down from 5.8 million. But many other counts disagree. The American Jewish Yearbook, which has been keeping track of the number of Jews in America since 1902, has reported the population at a steady 6 million since 2000. A recently released study from Brandeis University found as many as 7.5 million Jews in the United States.
Conventional wisdom places most of the blame for this mythical decline in the American Jewish population on intermarriage. Yet a third of Jewish-gentile couples raise their children exclusively as Jews. Of course, almost all fully Jewish couples raise their children as Jews, but it's important to remember that Jewish couples produce, on average, 1.9 children, which is below the replacement rate. Even if every Jew married another Jew, there would be no population boom.
Meanwhile, two Jews who each marry non-Jews will collectively produce an average of more than four children. Based on the results of my Washington-area study, less than a fifth of these Jewish-gentile couples raise their children exclusively as gentiles. The vast majority of children of mixed couples grow up with either an exclusively Jewish identity or a dual Jewish-gentile identity. The math of intermarriage should give rise to optimism, not comparisons to genocide.
Intermarriage is as old as the Jewish people. Moses, after all, married the daughter of a Midianite priest. Even the insular Jewish communities of Eastern Europe were not immune. Statistics available for several European cities at the end of the 19th century show rates of Jewish intermarriage ranging from 2 percent to as high as 46 percent, with an overall rate of 15 percent.
And yet, most American rabbis penalize Jews who choose to intermarry by denying their services to them. Consider the following irony: The Jewish community has made it a point of honor to memorialize victims of Nazi anti-Semitism, including both fully assimilated and partial Jews. We think of them on Yom Kippur and even have designated a special day to honor their memory. We accept the children and grandchildren of intermarriage among those memorialized as victims of the Holocaust, but we set aside the precedent of inclusion when it comes to the offspring of interfaith couples living here and now. A rabbi who prays for a victim of the Holocaust might refuse to conduct a Jewish funeral if that same individual died in America today.
Rabbis are right to consider Yom Kippur an ideal time to strengthen our communities, but playing on guilt while practicing exclusion are not the right tools for the job.
As the state of Israel moves forward to meet the challenges of a changing world, American Judaism must move forward from viewing some of our member households as illicit, inferior or impaired. Instead, we should rejoice in the marriages of all our people and welcome their children -- the real future of American Judaism -- into our communities as full and respected members.
(Arthur Blecher is the author of "The New American Judaism," rabbi of Beth Chai in Washington, D.C., and a psychotherapist.)
