A "Critical Mass" of Judaism May Prevent Intermarriage
SINGER, SUZANNE F.
PERSPECTIVE A "Critical Mass" of Judaism May Prevent Intermarriage Something dramatic has happened in the American Jewish world. We are no longer surprised when our child— grown in a family that...
...Even if that child attended synagogue on the major holidays, participated at family Passover seders and experienced Jewish education leading to becoming a bar or bat mitzvah, the child's marriage to a gentile spouse is now an everyday event...
...Our grandparents, struggling to be accepted in their new land, would envy us today, as well they should...
...Not anymore...
...How could it be from a family like that, so Jewish, so identified...
...Just 25 years ago, only approximately 10 percent of marrying Jews chose non-Jewish partners...
...It is much more the product of the extraordinary success that American Jews have experienced in assimilating into America's economy and society than of the inadequacies of Jewish parenting...
...Jewish camps are effective reinforcers...
...Egon Mayer, in this issue (p...
...She then asked what the Jewish community and individual rabbis could do to help draw interfaith married couples into the Jewish community so their children will be raised as Jews...
...The mix can vary, but it must start at home, communicating what we value and living the cycle of the Jewish week and the Jewish year...
...The modern Orthodox—I am speaking of Jews fully integrated into the American workplace world—do not intermarry in significant numbers...
...Where we come out in level of observance is less important than that—by the choices we make—we show our children what we value, that we learn with and alongside them, that we bring Judaism into our homes, that we educate them Jewishly and that together we experience Shabbat and the festivals in the cycle of the Jewish year—the framework on which is hung the more than 3,000-year-old history of our people...
...28), observes an upsurge in conversions to Judaism, largely fueled by gentile spouses choosing the Judaism of their partners...
...We feel that knot in the stomach—another Jew lost...
...Perhaps all this sounds like a program available only to those already immersed in Judaism or maybe it sounds like I'm saying become Orthodox to inoculate your children against interfaith marriage...
...Only a few years ago, when we heard that so-and-so's child was marrying "out," we would say, "What a surprise...
...I am not saying either of these things...
...What it comes down to for parents is to ask ourselves how much we care...
...We must make choices for ourselves and our children that express our bond to Judaism and its centrality in our lives...
...If we do not, it is increasingly likely that our children will not care enough to marry Jews and that our grandchildren will not be Jewish...
...The 1990 National Jewish Population Study reports that since 1985 slighdy more than half of all Jews who marry choose a spouse who was neither born nor raised Jewish...
...In fact, even casual interfaith dating doesn't work well...
...If your week builds to a Shabbat that is different from all other days of the week, if kashrut (Jewish dietary laws) sets limits on what you eat, if in the fall you build a sukhah (booth) and share it with friends who join you for meals and song, if Jewish study—formal and informal—is part of what you do with your life, if these things play an important part in your vision of how you and the family you create will live, then a gentile spouse becomes almost impossible...
...It's not easy to create a critical mass of Jewish life for our children...
...Cowan and Mayer look ahead to the time after marriage...
...Recent statistics reinforce our gut intuition...
...It's not as easy as the old strategy—creating a home with Jewish warmth and Yiddishkeit...
...for them, Judaism could be reflexive...
...Rachel Cowan observed in her December 1990 MOMENT column that "interfaith marriage is here to stay...
...Full-time Jewish education during some or all of the years at home may be an essential part of the mix, and learning Hebrew is an important part of that education...
...The reason young adults living an observant Jewish life engaged in the modern world don't intermarry is that their Judaism has reached a "critical mass" that requires a Jewish spouse (or a serious convert to Judaism) to share it...
...But the old ways aren't working any more, not if our measure is to see our children marry Jews and raise Jewish children to contribute to the continuity of Judaism...
...Several times a year we receive an invitation to the wedding of Lieberman and Kennedy, Goldberg and Maclntyre...
...We are no longer surprised when our child— grown in a family that has always kept its Judaism up front—marries a gentile...
...If we care very much, our challenge is to try to build a critical mass of Judaism in our children's lives...
...And we often ask, will our child be next...
...I would like to look back to the early years of parenthood and to draw a metaphor from physics that occurs to me as I observe life in modern Orthodox communities...
...Nor to know how much mass it takes to be critical for a particular child...
...But now we have to be conscious Jews...
...Visiting Israel as a child and then later going there to work, study or live for a while can clearly be part of the critical mass...
Vol. 16 • October 1991 • No. 5
