//features//
Fall 2018
Intermarriage and Conservative Judaism:
A Debate on the Sanctity of Jewish Marriages
Alan Imar
FRANKFURT: When Zecharias Frankel withdrew from the Rabbinical Conference of 1845, it was in response to Reform rabbis challenging the relevance of the Hebrew language in prayer. They believed that the Barekhu (the traditional call to worship) and the Shema should be recited Hebrew, but the rest of the service could be conducted in German.
This dispute had been part of a larger debate at the time over the role of halakha (Jewish religious law) in 19th century Europe. To the Reform rabbis, the strict rabbinic courts and more observant Jewish communities were ignoring the large number of European Jews who were abandoning Jewish practice in favor of a new lifestyle. The Reform rabbis thus met in three consecutive rabbinic conferences to deter- mine which principles were to be upheld and emphasized, and which principles were to be abandoned. Rabbi Samuel Holdheim, a leading Reform figure of the time, believed rabbinic halakha to be futile and disavowed Talmudic Judaism.
According to the protocol of the 1844 Brunswick conference, Holdheim said, “Science has decided that the Talmud has no authority dogmatically or practically.”
Frankel was alarmed by the Reformers’ ignorance of Jewish law. Before withdrawing from the conference, he advocated a “positive-historical Judaism,” believing that both halakha and contemporary life- styles should guide religious life. Frankel’s philosophy would go on to be the basis of the Conservative Movement.
NEW YORK: Today, the Conservative Movement continues its observance of Frankel’s positive-historical Judaism, recognizing that Judaism has been shaped by its survival of certain sociopolitical conditions. The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism (USCJ), The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), and the movement’s association of rabbis, the Rabbinical Assembly (RA), are in a constant struggle to reconcile biblical and rabbinic literature with contemporary trends.
One of those modern trends is the increasing rate at which American Jews are marrying gentiles.
A 2013 Pew Research Center study entitled “A Portrait of Jewish Americans” has many Conservative leaders nervous. The report showed a drastic rise in the marriage rate between Jews and non-Jews; most alarmingly, more than half of Jews married between 2005 and 2013, married a non-Jewish partner. The aggregated data indicated that 44 percent of married American Jews have a non-Jewish spouse.
The Conservative Movement’s legal body, the Committee on Jewish Laws and Standards (CJLS), has long debated the issue of intermarriage. In the early 1970s, the Reform Movement lifted the ban on intermarriage, essentially allowing its rabbis to officiate freely. RA’s 1972 response to the Reform movement was to officially ban Conservative rabbis from officiating, as well as attending, interfaith weddings. Past President of the RA, Rabbi Judah Nadich, composed a memo in February of that year to clarify the CJLS’ position on intermarriage in response to the Reform Movement’s failure to reaffirm a ban on interfaith unions.
“Neither a Rabbi nor a Cantor can divest himself from his role as representative of the Jewish faith and claim to perform such a marriage in a civil capacity,” Nadich wrote. “There is no other way to interpret the presence of a Rabbi or a Cantor at a marriage other than as a form of approval.”
Since then, the standard has been clear: a member of the RA can neither attend nor officiate a marriage between a Jew and non-Jew in a civil or religious capacity.
In March of 2017, however, the RA established the “Blue Ribbon Commission” to investigate its Standards of Rabbinic Practice, which are four binding standards all Conservative rabbis must abide by. One of those is a ban on intermarriage. The committee, which consisted of notable Conservative figures—including Rabbi Elliot Dorff, Professor of Philosophy at American Jewish University and head of the CJLS, Past President of the RA Rabbi Alan Silverstein, and Dean of the JTS Rabbinical School Rabbi Daniel Nevins—was interested in tracing where both the ban on officiating and the ban on attendance emerged from.
Nevins explains that the ban on both attendance and officiating interfaith ceremonies dates back to a paper presented to the CJLS by Rabbi Aaron Blumenthal that expressed similar sentiments to the Nadich memo. In order for Blumenthal’s paper to become binding on Conservative rabbis, it had to be passed at two consecutive meetings of the Law Committee. Rabbi Daniel Z. Stein argued in an article published in Zeramim: An Online Journal of Applied Jewish Thought that, “The standard barring interfaith marriage never cleared such procedural hurdles within the Rabbinical Assembly.” Thus, the question was raised: did the committee vote twice to ban Conservative rabbis from attending intermarriage ceremonies?
Per the research of the Blue Ribbon Commission into the meeting minutes of the early 1970s, a ban on officiating and attending intermarriages was in fact voted affirmatively on at two consecutive meetings. But, the debate about whether or not attendance constituted a violation of the ban had already called into question the Rabbinical Assembly’s stance on interfaith ceremonies. Thus, the Commission was tasked with clarifying the position. Then-RA President Rabbi Philip Scheim also asked the committee to clarify whether a Conservative rabbi could conduct another kind of ceremony for a mixed-faith couple instead of the traditional kiddushin ceremony.
Perhaps one of the strongest calls for clarification, however, came from within the Rabbinical Assembly’s own ranks. There were a number of rabbis distraught after not attending a family member’s marriage in order to abide by what they thought were the standards; some were even more furious after missing the wedding of a loved one and then discovering that the unwritten custom amongst Conservative rabbis had been to actually attend the interfaith marriage of a close friend or relative!
Whereas the RA has enforced the ban on officiation—in a recent case, the RA expelled one of its members, Rabbi Seymour Rosenbloom, after he refused to stop performing intermarriages—it has never received a complaint for attendance.
“Were we throwing people out for attending a sister’s wedding or a parent’s wedding?” Nevins said. “We sometimes have obligations that may be in tension with our professional lives.”
If the Assembly did not enforce its understood standard against attending interfaith ceremonies, was it worth having the ban at all?
In its report, the Blue Ribbon Commission found that the standard against interfaith marriages is understood as a ban against participating in a marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew that is, or could be seen as, the rabbi serving as an officiant or co-officiant of the union. Thus, following the commission’s recommendation, the CJLS ruled that attendance was exempt from the standard—in other words, Conservative rabbis were free to attend interfaith weddings, but not participate in the ceremony in any capacity.
“Clergy of the Conservative/Masorti movement may officiate at weddings only if both parties are Jewish. Officiation means signing documents or verbal participation of any kind,” the RA’s press release said. “Attendance as a guest at a wedding where only one party is Jewish is not included in this Standard of Religious Practice.”
But for some rabbis, the announcement came too late.
Rabbi Rolando Matalon, the senior rabbi at B’nai Jeshurun on the Upper West Side, announced in June of 2017 that he would begin to officiate certain interfaith marriages, or “multi-heritage” unions as the rabbis at BJ call it. Following this news, Nevins, along with other Conservative leaders, speculated as to whether other rabbis would follow. Matalon says that he had not announced his intentions to influence other rabbis, but rather for the wellbeing of his congregation. Should other Conservative rabbis had followed, it would have surely caused a schismatic rift for the movement, one unseen since its inception.
While Matalon, who received his ordination from the JTS Rabbinical School in 1986, once re- fused to conduct intermarriages, he recently became more progressive. The paradigm shift emerged from young members returning to BJ and asking him to marry them and their non-Jewish spouses. They had gone to college or on to work, fallen in love with someone who wasn’t Jewish, and for some reason did not see conversion as an option.
“These people wanted their rabbis, with whom they grew up—who know them, who know their families—to be able to bless their marriage. Of course for many years we said we can’t do it. And at some point it became obvious that this is an increasing trend in America,” he said.
Matalon, along with other rabbis, decided to study the Judaic views on intermarriages in partnership with the Shalom Hartman Institute, a study that lasted two years. The first year was more intimate, limited to the clergy. In the second year, Matalon opened the discussion to the community at large. During the course of the study, he says he came to the realization that Jewish identity was not always binary—it wasn’t you are either in or out.
“Maybe we have to rethink Jewish identity and see people along a continuum. Maybe there’s someone who’s not Jewish, but who lives with Jews, who’s part of a Jewish family by marriage, becomes a part of the Jewish community, and lives in a Jewish home. Is that person Jewish?” Matalon said. “Well, you know, halachically, maybe that person is not Jewish and we don’t say that person is Jewish, but that person is connected to Jewish family and community and is living in a Jewish home.”
He came to the conclusion that B’nai Jeshurun would conduct a ceremony—not kiddushin— for a couple that committed to establishing a Jewish home and who were ready to raise Jewish children. In the case of children born to a non-Jewish mother, the couple had to bring them to the mikvah (Jewish ritual bath) for conversion. Without making these commitments, Matalon would not marry the couple. Rather than make interfaith couples feel ostracized and risk them raising children in a non-Jewish home, he believes it is imperative to welcome them. Thus, BJ established the Jewish Home Project to give the couple guidance, resources, and workshops to create a strong Jewish home and raise a Jewish family.
Matalon speculates that the commitments these couples make result in a stronger Jewish home than some households of two halachic Jews. The Pew study on American Jewry found otherwise: children of interfaith couples were more likely to identify religiously as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular compared to children of two Jewish parents. But Matalon believes that the survey is not representative of the model implemented at BJ.
“Is it just the couple or is it the home in which they live?” Matalon said. “If we help a mixed couple— which, by the way, we don’t have a choice because people are married anyway, they’re not coming to us for permission—to create a Jewish home, wouldn’t that increased the chances that the child would identify as a Jew?”
A similar argument to Matalon’s is presented by Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, who also received his ordination from JTS. Matalon and Lau-Lavie were part of the cohort of rabbis who studied intermarriage in partnership with the Hartman Institute. Lau-Lavie outlined his position in a forty-six page report entitled Joy: A Proposal, in which he makes the argument of revising the ger toshav category in Jewish tradition to fit 21st century America.
Ger toshav, briefly, refers to a non-Jew living in Israel during rabbinic times who accepted the author- ity of the rabbis and the Torah. The argument presented by Lau-Lavie draws from the beliefs of Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, a once-Chabad rabbi who eventually founded the Jewish Renewal Movement. However, Nevins does not find the argument convincing. First, he points out that Reb Zalman’s positions often broke from traditional halakha. Second, Nevins highlights the ambiguity of the ger toshav, saying that scholars nowadays are not completely clear on what the category entailed.
Matalon and Lau-Lavie have both resigned from the Rabbinical Assembly in order to conduct intermarriages.
Despite the efforts of former RA-member rabbis to change policy regarding intermarriage, Nevins says that the Law Committee’s ruling strengthens the ban on officiating interfaith ceremonies. While it allows rabbis to attend them, the new policy clarifies that the rabbi may not have any speaking parts, sign any documents, or participate in any way, making the once-blanket ban more explicit.
Conservative leaders, including Nevins, believe that intermarriage is a divisive issue, one that could have repercussions on the unity of the movement. The resurgence of discussion among a few former Rabbinical Assembly members has blurred the lines between what is and is not halakha vis-à-vis intermarriage. The CJLS and RA’s position remains in staunch opposition to intermarriage on halachic grounds. Although it would be difficult, Nevins does not disregard the possibility of future Conservative leaders lifting the ban on officiating intermarriages.
Until then, however, the ban on intermarriage mimics the Zecharias Frankel-era ideological divide between the Reform and Conservative Movements, prompting leaders to ask themselves whether they leave the conversation in protest of interfaith marriages or make religious concessions to conform to the sociological status quo.
This dispute had been part of a larger debate at the time over the role of halakha (Jewish religious law) in 19th century Europe. To the Reform rabbis, the strict rabbinic courts and more observant Jewish communities were ignoring the large number of European Jews who were abandoning Jewish practice in favor of a new lifestyle. The Reform rabbis thus met in three consecutive rabbinic conferences to deter- mine which principles were to be upheld and emphasized, and which principles were to be abandoned. Rabbi Samuel Holdheim, a leading Reform figure of the time, believed rabbinic halakha to be futile and disavowed Talmudic Judaism.
According to the protocol of the 1844 Brunswick conference, Holdheim said, “Science has decided that the Talmud has no authority dogmatically or practically.”
Frankel was alarmed by the Reformers’ ignorance of Jewish law. Before withdrawing from the conference, he advocated a “positive-historical Judaism,” believing that both halakha and contemporary life- styles should guide religious life. Frankel’s philosophy would go on to be the basis of the Conservative Movement.
NEW YORK: Today, the Conservative Movement continues its observance of Frankel’s positive-historical Judaism, recognizing that Judaism has been shaped by its survival of certain sociopolitical conditions. The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism (USCJ), The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), and the movement’s association of rabbis, the Rabbinical Assembly (RA), are in a constant struggle to reconcile biblical and rabbinic literature with contemporary trends.
One of those modern trends is the increasing rate at which American Jews are marrying gentiles.
A 2013 Pew Research Center study entitled “A Portrait of Jewish Americans” has many Conservative leaders nervous. The report showed a drastic rise in the marriage rate between Jews and non-Jews; most alarmingly, more than half of Jews married between 2005 and 2013, married a non-Jewish partner. The aggregated data indicated that 44 percent of married American Jews have a non-Jewish spouse.
The Conservative Movement’s legal body, the Committee on Jewish Laws and Standards (CJLS), has long debated the issue of intermarriage. In the early 1970s, the Reform Movement lifted the ban on intermarriage, essentially allowing its rabbis to officiate freely. RA’s 1972 response to the Reform movement was to officially ban Conservative rabbis from officiating, as well as attending, interfaith weddings. Past President of the RA, Rabbi Judah Nadich, composed a memo in February of that year to clarify the CJLS’ position on intermarriage in response to the Reform Movement’s failure to reaffirm a ban on interfaith unions.
“Neither a Rabbi nor a Cantor can divest himself from his role as representative of the Jewish faith and claim to perform such a marriage in a civil capacity,” Nadich wrote. “There is no other way to interpret the presence of a Rabbi or a Cantor at a marriage other than as a form of approval.”
Since then, the standard has been clear: a member of the RA can neither attend nor officiate a marriage between a Jew and non-Jew in a civil or religious capacity.
In March of 2017, however, the RA established the “Blue Ribbon Commission” to investigate its Standards of Rabbinic Practice, which are four binding standards all Conservative rabbis must abide by. One of those is a ban on intermarriage. The committee, which consisted of notable Conservative figures—including Rabbi Elliot Dorff, Professor of Philosophy at American Jewish University and head of the CJLS, Past President of the RA Rabbi Alan Silverstein, and Dean of the JTS Rabbinical School Rabbi Daniel Nevins—was interested in tracing where both the ban on officiating and the ban on attendance emerged from.
Nevins explains that the ban on both attendance and officiating interfaith ceremonies dates back to a paper presented to the CJLS by Rabbi Aaron Blumenthal that expressed similar sentiments to the Nadich memo. In order for Blumenthal’s paper to become binding on Conservative rabbis, it had to be passed at two consecutive meetings of the Law Committee. Rabbi Daniel Z. Stein argued in an article published in Zeramim: An Online Journal of Applied Jewish Thought that, “The standard barring interfaith marriage never cleared such procedural hurdles within the Rabbinical Assembly.” Thus, the question was raised: did the committee vote twice to ban Conservative rabbis from attending intermarriage ceremonies?
Per the research of the Blue Ribbon Commission into the meeting minutes of the early 1970s, a ban on officiating and attending intermarriages was in fact voted affirmatively on at two consecutive meetings. But, the debate about whether or not attendance constituted a violation of the ban had already called into question the Rabbinical Assembly’s stance on interfaith ceremonies. Thus, the Commission was tasked with clarifying the position. Then-RA President Rabbi Philip Scheim also asked the committee to clarify whether a Conservative rabbi could conduct another kind of ceremony for a mixed-faith couple instead of the traditional kiddushin ceremony.
Perhaps one of the strongest calls for clarification, however, came from within the Rabbinical Assembly’s own ranks. There were a number of rabbis distraught after not attending a family member’s marriage in order to abide by what they thought were the standards; some were even more furious after missing the wedding of a loved one and then discovering that the unwritten custom amongst Conservative rabbis had been to actually attend the interfaith marriage of a close friend or relative!
Whereas the RA has enforced the ban on officiation—in a recent case, the RA expelled one of its members, Rabbi Seymour Rosenbloom, after he refused to stop performing intermarriages—it has never received a complaint for attendance.
“Were we throwing people out for attending a sister’s wedding or a parent’s wedding?” Nevins said. “We sometimes have obligations that may be in tension with our professional lives.”
If the Assembly did not enforce its understood standard against attending interfaith ceremonies, was it worth having the ban at all?
In its report, the Blue Ribbon Commission found that the standard against interfaith marriages is understood as a ban against participating in a marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew that is, or could be seen as, the rabbi serving as an officiant or co-officiant of the union. Thus, following the commission’s recommendation, the CJLS ruled that attendance was exempt from the standard—in other words, Conservative rabbis were free to attend interfaith weddings, but not participate in the ceremony in any capacity.
“Clergy of the Conservative/Masorti movement may officiate at weddings only if both parties are Jewish. Officiation means signing documents or verbal participation of any kind,” the RA’s press release said. “Attendance as a guest at a wedding where only one party is Jewish is not included in this Standard of Religious Practice.”
But for some rabbis, the announcement came too late.
Rabbi Rolando Matalon, the senior rabbi at B’nai Jeshurun on the Upper West Side, announced in June of 2017 that he would begin to officiate certain interfaith marriages, or “multi-heritage” unions as the rabbis at BJ call it. Following this news, Nevins, along with other Conservative leaders, speculated as to whether other rabbis would follow. Matalon says that he had not announced his intentions to influence other rabbis, but rather for the wellbeing of his congregation. Should other Conservative rabbis had followed, it would have surely caused a schismatic rift for the movement, one unseen since its inception.
While Matalon, who received his ordination from the JTS Rabbinical School in 1986, once re- fused to conduct intermarriages, he recently became more progressive. The paradigm shift emerged from young members returning to BJ and asking him to marry them and their non-Jewish spouses. They had gone to college or on to work, fallen in love with someone who wasn’t Jewish, and for some reason did not see conversion as an option.
“These people wanted their rabbis, with whom they grew up—who know them, who know their families—to be able to bless their marriage. Of course for many years we said we can’t do it. And at some point it became obvious that this is an increasing trend in America,” he said.
Matalon, along with other rabbis, decided to study the Judaic views on intermarriages in partnership with the Shalom Hartman Institute, a study that lasted two years. The first year was more intimate, limited to the clergy. In the second year, Matalon opened the discussion to the community at large. During the course of the study, he says he came to the realization that Jewish identity was not always binary—it wasn’t you are either in or out.
“Maybe we have to rethink Jewish identity and see people along a continuum. Maybe there’s someone who’s not Jewish, but who lives with Jews, who’s part of a Jewish family by marriage, becomes a part of the Jewish community, and lives in a Jewish home. Is that person Jewish?” Matalon said. “Well, you know, halachically, maybe that person is not Jewish and we don’t say that person is Jewish, but that person is connected to Jewish family and community and is living in a Jewish home.”
He came to the conclusion that B’nai Jeshurun would conduct a ceremony—not kiddushin— for a couple that committed to establishing a Jewish home and who were ready to raise Jewish children. In the case of children born to a non-Jewish mother, the couple had to bring them to the mikvah (Jewish ritual bath) for conversion. Without making these commitments, Matalon would not marry the couple. Rather than make interfaith couples feel ostracized and risk them raising children in a non-Jewish home, he believes it is imperative to welcome them. Thus, BJ established the Jewish Home Project to give the couple guidance, resources, and workshops to create a strong Jewish home and raise a Jewish family.
Matalon speculates that the commitments these couples make result in a stronger Jewish home than some households of two halachic Jews. The Pew study on American Jewry found otherwise: children of interfaith couples were more likely to identify religiously as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular compared to children of two Jewish parents. But Matalon believes that the survey is not representative of the model implemented at BJ.
“Is it just the couple or is it the home in which they live?” Matalon said. “If we help a mixed couple— which, by the way, we don’t have a choice because people are married anyway, they’re not coming to us for permission—to create a Jewish home, wouldn’t that increased the chances that the child would identify as a Jew?”
A similar argument to Matalon’s is presented by Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, who also received his ordination from JTS. Matalon and Lau-Lavie were part of the cohort of rabbis who studied intermarriage in partnership with the Hartman Institute. Lau-Lavie outlined his position in a forty-six page report entitled Joy: A Proposal, in which he makes the argument of revising the ger toshav category in Jewish tradition to fit 21st century America.
Ger toshav, briefly, refers to a non-Jew living in Israel during rabbinic times who accepted the author- ity of the rabbis and the Torah. The argument presented by Lau-Lavie draws from the beliefs of Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, a once-Chabad rabbi who eventually founded the Jewish Renewal Movement. However, Nevins does not find the argument convincing. First, he points out that Reb Zalman’s positions often broke from traditional halakha. Second, Nevins highlights the ambiguity of the ger toshav, saying that scholars nowadays are not completely clear on what the category entailed.
Matalon and Lau-Lavie have both resigned from the Rabbinical Assembly in order to conduct intermarriages.
Despite the efforts of former RA-member rabbis to change policy regarding intermarriage, Nevins says that the Law Committee’s ruling strengthens the ban on officiating interfaith ceremonies. While it allows rabbis to attend them, the new policy clarifies that the rabbi may not have any speaking parts, sign any documents, or participate in any way, making the once-blanket ban more explicit.
Conservative leaders, including Nevins, believe that intermarriage is a divisive issue, one that could have repercussions on the unity of the movement. The resurgence of discussion among a few former Rabbinical Assembly members has blurred the lines between what is and is not halakha vis-à-vis intermarriage. The CJLS and RA’s position remains in staunch opposition to intermarriage on halachic grounds. Although it would be difficult, Nevins does not disregard the possibility of future Conservative leaders lifting the ban on officiating intermarriages.
Until then, however, the ban on intermarriage mimics the Zecharias Frankel-era ideological divide between the Reform and Conservative Movements, prompting leaders to ask themselves whether they leave the conversation in protest of interfaith marriages or make religious concessions to conform to the sociological status quo.
//ALAN IMAR is a first-year in The School of General Studies and The Jewish Theological Seminary. He can be reached at [email protected].
Photo courtesy of: https://www.flaticon.com/free-icon/ question-mark-on-a-circular-black-background_25400.
Photo courtesy of: https://www.flaticon.com/free-icon/ question-mark-on-a-circular-black-background_25400.