Rabbi Lazer Brody posted on his blog back in December about the rate of assimilation in modern Judaism: "Will your grandchildren be Jewish?". The fact of the matter is that we are losing future generations of Jews because Judaism has been allowed to become irrelevant to them (for a plethora of reasons).

During the Austin Jewish Film Festival a few weeks ago, Lindsey and I saw a movie called "Mixed Blessings". It is a documentary about intermarriage between Jews and Christians and the struggles those couples face raising their children. Most often the families choose to go with one religion over the other or to make religion irrelevant to their daily lives. The result is children who are utterly confused about their heritage and their religion, and parents who are unable to share one of the most important aspects of life together. I think it is telling that both in the movie and in the question and answer time afterwards with the local Conservative rabbi and a local Baptist minister the idea of a syntehsis of the religions never came up. Messianic Judaism has a lot to offer the wider Jewish world, and one of the best things we can offer is a place for intermarried families to feel at home. If nothing else, we can offer a place for such families to find some dialogue about the problems they face.

We had a good discussion on the topic of intermarriage at shul on Shabbat. We came to a concensus that Messianic Judaism needs a valid conversion process for intermarried families, but there are apparently two views in the congregation about the idea of Jews and Gentiles marrying. Some believe that intermarriage is about marrying outside of the same faith, while others (myself included) believe that we should keep the distinctions between Jews and Gentiles in regards to marriage. I believe this in part because of the statistics Rabbi Brody provides in his post. Just like children whose parents are only nominally Jewish are very likely to step away from Judaism, children who have one Jewish parent and one non-Jewish parent are much more likely to have identity issues than children whose parents are both one or the other. I do not advocate "higher" or "lower" positions within the community or within wider Israel. I am just aware of the fact that children need structure and stability. They need to know what their parents are and what they are.

One of the other members in the congregation also brought up an important point in the Messianic discussion of intermarriage. Kohanim are requred by Torah law to only marry Jews. We cannot allow the kohanim in our movement to break this command, and that requires us to keep a tight reign on intermarriage. There are other reasons, of course, but I see this as one of the most compelling reasons for discouraging intermarriage and for providing a viable conversion process.

Labels: Judaism