Shabbat Goy: The love that dare not speak its name

Intermarriage isn't assimilation - or at least it need not be. Take me for example.

By AKIN AYAJI
Intermarriage cartoon 311 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Intermarriage cartoon 311
(photo credit: Courtesy)
OK, so I exaggerate a little. But only a little. If I had a shekel for each time the issue of marriage between Jews and non-Jews – and I’ll return to this distinction in a bit – has been described as a threat, I’d be... well, not quite a Rothschild, but someone with a fair bit of loose change rattling about in his pockets.
Marriage, a threat? How peculiar. But so it seems.
Years ago, I visited the Old City of Jerusalem for the first time on a Shabbat evening with my then girlfriend. It was a lovely autumn twilight; we strolled around the Western Wall plaza and its environs hand in hand, drinking in the atmosphere.
A small child ran up to us and offered us delicious baklava from a tray; people nodded and smiled in a friendly way. Given that this was at the height of the second intifada, the experience contradicted everything that I had been led to expect about Israel up until that time.
Then we met her. Clad in crushed velvet, she was standing on one of the staircases that overlook the Kotel. I don’t remember how we started to converse, but the relationship between my girlfriend and myself soon came up.
Yes, we were a couple. No, we hadn’t yet set a date for our wedding (one learns quickly to accept impertinent questions like this in good faith) but it was a possibility, why not? “Your parents must be sitting shiva for you,” the woman commented matter-of-factly to my girlfriend, who is now my wife. Then, without breaking stride, she went on to talk about other things. Apparently she’d met a Nigerian prince once, a student in England. She wondered if I knew him....
Of course, a less-than-welcoming attitude to intermarriage isn’t an exclusively Jewish issue; Catholics, for example, are inclined to make a big song and dance about the matter as well. But the issue doesn’t raise the hackles in quite the same way as a union between a Jew and a non-Jew.
Admittedly we – and I use the word “we” loosely, in the sense that the Catholic Church hasn’t yet gotten around to excommunicating me – have the benefit of numbers to ease any existential angst. Also – for good or for bad – the religious identity of a Catholic isn’t inextricably entangled with the concept of nationhood.
But we’re not talking about Catholics here. As far as Judaism is concerned, one could crudely liken it to a numbers game: Given that the Jewish faith is not prone to proselytization, one might argue that allowed to continue unfettered, intermarriage will soon cause the Jewish people to procreate itself out of existence.
One understands this fear, but only up to a point. To my mind, it reduces the uniqueness of the Jewish faith to a crude notion of obligation and duty: It is one’s absolute duty to marry another Jew.
In any case, intermarriage isn’t assimilation; or at least, it need not be.
Take me, for example. (Actually, I’m a pretty bad example of anything. But I’m short of alternatives, so we’ll have to make do.) Because I am married to someone who identifies as a Jew, I have developed more than a passing interest in the history and structure and practice of Judaism. This is despite – or, perhaps, because of – the fact that my wife is non-observant.
This interest in Judaism is infinitely more than it was before I met her. And because of this, I think I have a clearer appreciation of – even a sympathy toward – the challenges faced by the modern Hebrew in today’s world.
But this column isn’t just about me.
When the Knesset’s Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs Committee met to discuss the issue of assimilation a couple of weeks ago, an expert warned that it was almost too late to intervene and bring Jews on the verge of drifting away from the faith back into the fold. And it is perhaps from this that the fear of intermarriage – and it is a fear, more than anything else – stems.
What could be more terrifying than the thought of the rich philosophy and cultural traditions of Judaism ebbing away, withering into obsolescence and fading into the fallacious instrument of human memory? Of course it must be protected; humanity is enriched by its continued existence.
But this stands in stark contradistinction to the official consideration of the Conservative and Reform strands of Jewish observance. As the rather sad narrative of the daughter of a convert revealed in a piece in this newspaper last weekend by Rebecca Anne Stoil headlined “Broken dreams,” it is not enough to identify as a Jew; it is being recognized as one by the religious-political infrastructure that matters.
I HAVE nothing to add to the age-old debate about the relationship between religious Judaism and the State of Israel, and about the control of so-called life events by the Orthodox Rabbinate. That’s the way it is; and since Israel is putatively a democracy, one imagines that when people are fed up with this situation, they’ll vote it out of existence.
However, one point does need to be made: It is one thing to worry that the defining characteristics of the Jewish people are being eroded by assimilation, but another to insist that the only way to combat this is by drawing the curtains even more hermetically shut against those who are interested in being numbered among that people, but do not meet the strictest definition of Who is a Jew.
There’s an old legal maxim: “Equity looks to the substance rather than to the form.” In order to ensure that Judaism remains relevant to the lives of the Jewish people and the wider world – you know, goyim like me – I think the gatekeepers must be more inclusive, more equitable, more fair.
Openness creates interest, appreciation, engagement. Closing the doors by arguing against intermarriage does no one any favors in the end.
But then, I would say that, wouldn’t I?