Mixed Dating, Mixed Mating, Mixed Message

...Some reference to my own values may be instructive at this point...

...The oohs and ahs of delight will immediately change to the oys and veys, the yichs and fehs of horror...

...What is lost sight of is what has never really been fully shown human i beings—what is God's nature and what is human nature...

...Carlin's ambivalence is reflected in a routine he does on sexuality...

...Malamud, The Assistant, Signet Books, 1957, p. 64) Ida's antagonism is hardly unique...

...In the meantime I remind myself that according to the mid-rash God took a chance when he created the first Adam and that He took an even greater chance when He threw Free Will in as part of the bargain...

...Then switch on the lights and let the crowd discover who has been doing what to whom...

...There seems to be no lack of mixed messages about mixed dating, mixed mating and mixed marriage...

...On the other hand, I have clearly decided against sending them to a Day School, not because the educational standards of the Day School arouse my skepticism, but because I honestly believe that the process of interaction between my children and American reality is best promoted in the public school and because I believe that this sustained contact with American reality is essential to their development as human beings and as Jews...

...This is a mixed message, but it does grow out of my own belief system and out of a belief system which in the recent past, if not indigenous to, was certainly at home in Judaism...

...If this is not a mixed message, it is certainly not an unequivocal statement of opposition to even the most intimate relations with non-Jews...

...I won't have it any other way, however, because I want my children to associate liberal thoughts and experiential openness with their Jewish parents...

...Put a randomly selected group of people in a totally dark room and permit them to engage in any form of pleasant activity and one is likely to hear the oohs and ahs of pleasure...

...I am not even convinced that, in the ultimate plan, such questions are of ultimate concern...

...I recognize that I may be saying to my children that there are non-traditional, perhaps Jewishly problematic values I place before halachah and Jewish solidarity...

...My gut tells me that I would be happier, less frightened, more satisfied were my children to confine their loving relationships to Jews...

...Norman Mirsky teaches Sociology and Contemporary Jewish Studies at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles...

...The thou-shalt's and thou-shalt-not's of human nature are beyond our grasp...

...Let me now distinguish between the bio-emotional phenomenon we call love and the sociological values we call norms...

...Western notions of tolerance, individuality, democratic governance, and equitable distribution of wealth, goods and services, concepts not overly cherished by anyone in authority regardless of race, creed or religion, were seen by Jewish modernists to belong in an ethical Jewish value system whether they had previously been in the mainstream of classical Jewish thought or not...

...I wish there would be fewer divorces among Jews without 1 branding the Jewish divorced as moral failures and their children as quasi-mamserim...

...Some time ago modern Jews made the decision that it would not only be of material advantage to the Jewish community to engage in interaction with certain non-Jews but that it might be of some spiritual advantage as well...

...Malamud, Dubin's Lives, Farrar Straus Girioux, 1979, p. 69...

...Interaction with aliens in the economic spheres entails the risk that life styles may be exchanged along with stocks and bonds...

...The nature of human nature is still a mystery, a marvelous mystery which only the most unscientific of self-designated scientists would claim to comprehend fully...

...If there are Jews who believe that for Jews to marry non-Jews is abnormal, they can implement various forms of social control to make their wishes come true...

...I assume that mixed dating is perceived as a problem because it leads or is thought to lead with such regularity to mixed mating, which in turn leads or is thought to lead to mixed marriage...

...Our children no longer are endogamous...

...On the one hand, I say to them through my choice of occupation, through ritual practice and through the emphasis I place on their Jewish education, that I believe that being Jewish is a desideratum of very high priority...

...They can, for example, say that the Jew who marries a non-Jew is dead...

...This attitude of mine surely weakens the power of the Jewish group to dictate my children's choices of relationships...

...It is important to sort out the scramble between the natural and the normal, between the hopes of a people which embodies, however partially or fragmentarily, a divine purpose for humanity—and the sometimes self-destructive enterprises this people engages in...

...I also wish some of the other consequences of participation in modernity were less threatening to our so-called "normal" way of life...

...Interaction with aliens in the moral sphere entails an even greater risk—a risk that recognition of universal tolerance for and even appreciation of human differences may actually encourage formerly hostile peoples to find virtue in one another...

...As someone once wrote: "Where the action is, there chance is sure to be," which I will amend to say, where the action is, there Jews are sure to be...

...Dubin said he would take his chances...

...All these ! wishes will have to remain hopes so 1 long as their becoming a guaranteed reality means abandoning the values of education in the liberal arts and sciences, tolerance, aesthetics, notions of equality— human, political and economic...

...Like many a secular Jew, Carlin remains intellectually and emotionally involved with a tradition and a religion he still loves enough to hate...

...In fact, I am far from certain that mixed dating leads to mixed mating, nor do I know that mixed mating ultimately leads to mixed marriage...

...She has her reasons, but finally admits, "pressing her clasped hands to her bosom," that "the most important is I don't want him here on account of [daughter] Helen...

...Suddenly the natural has encountered the normal...

...The same claim to ignorance does not hold for our knowledge of what is sociologically normal...

...I hold it an obligation to pay attention to people in serious discomfort...

...What is normal or abnormal about love is an unknown...

...Still, I hope that each of my children has come to respect my attitude toward Jewish destiny enough to give strong consideration to taking a Jewish marriage partner, or, at the least, trying to persuade the non-Jewish love to embrace Judaism while embracing a Jew...

...The routine goes something like this: Where sexual behavior is concerned, one has to make a distinction between the natural and the normal...

...My actions and my beliefs say to my children that, however important being Jewish is, it is not of sole importance...

...It has been frightening...

...Sociologically, normality results from a group's determination of what it wishes to see happen and from the group's ability to enforce its wishes...

...And that form of social control is not at all putative, for rituals of mourning are not uncommonly performed in such instances, and God is told through prayers, the tearing of garments and outcries of grief that Bernie, who has married Bridget, or Sarah, who has married Christopher, is no more—not simply missing in action, but legally dead...

...In all honesty, however—and perhaps honesty is not of the viscera— I would be guilty of horrendous hypocrisy were I to insist that non-Jews are good to know but wrong to love...

...Therefore I continue to have to take the risk that I may have in-laws who were not born Jewish—that I may have grandchildren who know what the inside of a church looks like...

...I wish things could be different...

...After William had met Kitty, he told his father about her, and the old man said miserably, why do you want to marry a goyish widow with a goyish child that he will someday call you names...

...I wish I could say to my children that you must believe in the God of Israel because He is ; thus and thus and thus...

...I know that I am transmitting a mixed message to my children...

...We have taken the risk...

...I am fully aware that my children may have positive experiences with non-Jews and that I am compartmentalizing their Judaism...

...I wish this were otherwise...

...In short, self-righteousness enshrined in revelation or revered as a Rule of Reason can offer protection to a member valued by the group or impose a nearly insurmountable rejection on a deviant from the values of the group...

...She won't be comfortable with you...

...When Jews engage in self-destructiveness, i it is often with good intent, governed by a conviction that their purpose and God's purpose are clear...

...Comedian George Carlin is a devout lapsed Catholic...

...There is a certain assumption I allow myself about the problem of mixed dating...

...What does seem to be incontestable is that the question of with whom Jews seek to have intimate relationships is a cause of honest discomfort to both Jews and non-Jews...

...I know of course that openness and tolerance are not always at the core of the historical Jewish experiences—but I want tolerance and openness to new ideas to be part of the Jewish experience...

...I don't like the way he looks on her...

...I wish there could be myriads of Jewish infants without banishing Jewish women to the nursery and Jewish men to the petite bourgeois...