Reflection · 5 min read
Reflections on Interfaith Marriage
Having been married to my Christian Scientist wife Shelley Burtt for almost 43 years, and having raised our four children principally as Jews (all four have been bat or bar mitzvah'd), I have both a lot of thoughts and experience on this topic. And as a newly-ordained post-denominational rabbi, I will also be making rabbinic decisions about when I will be prepared to officiate at interfaith marriages where one of the partners is Jewish and the other is not.
A threshold question for the group is definitional. When speaking of interfaith marriage are we presuming a marriage and family life in which the two faith traditions are blended more or less equally? Are we discussing a marriage where each partner has retained their family-of-origin belief and ritual system while raising their children principally in one of the two faith traditions… or possibly even a third for the sake of compromise? Are we discussing a marriage where one of the partners cares a lot about the faith practices within their marriage and the other partner is more or less indifferent? My point is that the idea of interfaith marriage can and does take on many shapes and sizes so a "one size fits all" perspective for me doesn't allow for the flexibility that the diverse fact patterns requires.
When I was 24 and had become engaged to Shelley, and my parents were very upset that their son was going to marry outside of the Jewish faith, I had a consultation with our family's Conservative Rabbi Norton Shargel (Conservative as in the Conservative Jewish movement which then, and still now, does not allow its rabbis to officiate at interfaith marriages). He could both see how unsettled and how convinced I was that I was making the right decision and he said something that I will never forget. "Do you truly love each other?" "Because if you do, that has to be the right decision for you both." Particularly back then, when very few Jews were marrying non-Jews, and those that were were consciously rejecting their upbringing, Rabbi Shargel's advice was very controversial in the Jewish world. That he affirmed that the foundation of any marriage decision — interfaith or otherwise — should be the love and respect that the couple mutually shares was very comforting to me at the time and remains at the core of how I think about these situations.
In fact, looking back on that inflection point in my life as a young adult, when confronted with the seeming conflict between my family and religion of origin and the lifelong committed love I knew was present between me and Shelley, I made the first rabbinic interpretation of my life: notwithstanding all of the superficial indicators to the contrary, the Judaism that I loved intuitively, and felt was so important to the core of my identity, simply had to prioritize my love for Shelley.
One of the core ideas of the Christian world (as well as significant elements of the Jewish world as well) for two thousand years has been that Judaism prioritizes law over love. That the God of our Torah is a judging and punishing god in contrast to the teachings and life of Jesus which emphasize love and compassion. And yet this view does not integrate the more than a thousand years of rabbinic interpretation that followed the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE…what almost all Jews understand as the remaking of Judaism through the interpretative tradition that we refer to as rabbinic Judaism. This tradition — principally embodied in the compendium called the Talmud — presents a theology where the value of love and compassion is greatly elevated from its seeming place through a literal reading of our Torah. One of the most famous examples of this is the rabbinic interpretation of the lex talionis idea of a justice system based on "an eye for an eye" as one requiring instead monetary damages when harm is caused unintentionally in society. Or the rabbinic multi-hurdle process for capital punishment so that capital punishment was 100 percent rejected in rabbinic Judaism.
That the Jewish world itself has so underscored the centrality of the idea of love in the forty plus years since our marriage is reflected in the fact that Rabbi Shai Held's recent book Judaism is about Love — Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life (2024) has been one of the most popular and read books about Judaism in the past twenty years.
One final thought about Jewish interfaith marriage. To engage thoughtfully about all of the big and little decisions involved in these types of marriages where one of the partners is Jewish, both partners and their families need to understand that Judaism embodies both a religion and a cultural civilization. Joining or just participating in a faith tradition is actually pretty straightforward when compared to doing the same with a peoplehood that defines itself by its complicated and frequently painful 3000 year plus history.