Voice of New Americans: A Few Words About Mixed Marriage and the Temple

The strains of Kol Nidre stir us. And there are many tales of persons, even those far removed from their Jewishness, yet somehow the melody, the moment touch parts long forgotten, buried, moments of reflection and connection in an honesty not often permitted.

It is a time for the soul, a true accounting, an inventory of the soul. So it is to such matters I now turn, but not as so often focusing on the individual, rather I propose tonight a bit of an accounting of the, of our Jewish community and its future. And that means, alas, that tonight I venture on dangerous, complex, painful ground. For in the past number of days, I have read about, reflected on, wondered, worried - friends have even told me don't speak about this - and yet obviously I feel compelled to speak frankly and openly on the subject, and one that burdens us all - all in some ways and some in very specific ways.

I speak, therefore, (as some may have surmised) about mixed marriage, and even as I so indicate I'm aware that a whole range of emotions begins to simmer, perhaps even boil over.

For few, if any other matters, so impact, trouble, disturb us all. And I know that at some point - if not already - I might say something or just turn a phrase that may cause an intense, possibly even a strident response. Please know I do not wish to do so. In fact, I understand what President Bush meant when he told interviewer David Frost, "Of course I have principles. I just don't always agree with them."

For I like to be liked, admired and cared about. And you mean - everyone of you - so very much to me. In fact this circumstance brings to mind a paradigm our sages offer about leadership. They contrast the brothers, Moses and Aaron. For Moses, who hears God's voice thundering from the mountaintop. Moses loves the truth and sees it so absolutely that amcha - the people - we more common folk, just can't understand, can't follow him. And Moses is the model par-excellence of the prophetic impulse, for his is the voice of certainty. As for Aaron, lie serves as the model of priest, pastor, even a rabbi. Aaron loves the people so much, cares for their wants, needs, wishes, desires that he'll do just about anything for them - anything at all, including as the Torah makes clear, building a Golden Calf. And I, for good or ill, understand Aaron far better than I identify with Moses.

But enough beating around the bush. To the matter at hand. While I normally don't care much for statistics, you know the bromide, "There are three ways to lie - lies, damnable lies, and statistics." Yet in this election season every news service overwhelms us with polls - Time, CNN, Washington Post, CBS, Gallup, Yankelovich, Roper, Harris. Remarkable, it's only a little more than 50 or so years ago that scientific polling was coming into its own. And those first surveys provide dramatic evidence of a very different America than the one to which we have become accustomed.

In fact, in one of its first national surveys, Roper inquired: "What kinds of people do you object to?" Wouldn't you know, Jews were at the top, mentioned by thirty-five percent of respondents. The next "type" was "noisy, cheap, boisterous people" (twenty-seven percent) followed by "uncultured, unrefined, dumb people" (fourteen percent).

The next year, the Roper organization got its big break. Fortune magazine hired them for a massive nationwide survey. The sample size, 5,236 persons, was unprecedented. The survey included four statements to which, of course, respondents indicated what came closest to their personal attitudes about Jews.

1. "In the United States the Jews have the same standing as any other people, and they should be treated like all other Americans." Thirty-five percent in agreement.

2. "Jews are in some way distinct from other Americans, but they make useful and respected citizens as long as they do not try to mingle socially where they are not wanted." Eleven per cent agreement.

3. "Jews have somewhat different business methods and therefore measures should be taken to prevent Jews from getting too much power in the business world." Thirty-two per cent agreement.

4. "We should make it a policy to deport Jews from this country to some new homeland as fast as it can be done without inhumanity." Ten per cent agreement.

But fear not, that was all before the war. Nonetheless in a 1946 Gallup survey, seventy-two percent of Americans said they "oppose allowing more Jewish refugees in the U.S." Well, by 1984 a dramatic shift. Seventy-nine percent of the country felt that "Jews from the Soviet Union should be admitted." While in 1945, even in the shadow of' the Holocaust, sixty-four percent or Americans felt that "Jews have too much power and influence." By 1987 only twenty-one percent registered that opinion. In 1937 only forty-seven percent "would vote for a Jew for President." By 1987, eighty-two percent. No doubt a shift - a substantial and generally favorable one - in the country's attitude toward us.

In fact, within the lifetime of so many here far more has happened - my God, in only a few more years than I've been alive, where once we cursed the barriers against us, now walls have come "a tumbling down," including most barriers to that most intimate of moments, marriage.

"How dare they exclude us" lias become in relatively few years the front page of the New York Times society section announcing "Laura Delano Roosevelt was married yesterday to ... Charles Henry Silberstain. The bride is the granddaughter of the late President Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt." So, too, a Kennedy child marries one of us; Governor Cuomo's daughter similarly. My God, Mary Tyler Moore married to a Jewish cardiologist.

And the recent National Jewish Population study clearly suggests how far we've come. Since 1985, fifty-two percent of all marriages involving Jews have been interfaith. In some cities that is considerably higher. For instance, Denver, the figure is believed to be some seventy percent. In I964, the number was at most nine percent, which was why in their book Beyond the Melting Point, Dr. Nathan Glazer and then Harvard professor, now Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, concluded that Judaism would continue to thrive because it "successfully opposed intermarriage."

And the new study presents some special concerns, which suggest that fully 3/4 of the children of interfaith marriages are being raised either as Christians or with no religion at all. So the matter before us has become without doubt - as one - colleague describes it - "the most crucial and complex challenge facing Jewish life today." And while once families sat shiva, mourning the death of any child who married a gentile - and some Orthodox still do - a shift in attitude has occurred. As Dr. Charles Silberman writes in his best seller about American Jewish life, A Certain People, "Once people married to get out of Judaism. Now they marry in order to get married." Or as one Jewish woman who at age 30 married a non-Jew remembers, "My mother's only reaction was, "Thank God she's getting married." Albeit she adds, "It didn't hurt that I married a doctor."

Or this true story. A young man tells his Mom and Dad that his girlfriend's parents object to their daughter's relationship with him because he's Jewish. "How dare those lousy anti-Semites say you're not good enough for their daughter?" When the son says that, nevertheless, he and the young woman plan to be married, his parents shout: "Intermarry? Over our dead bodies!"

And we are anxious, ambivalent. We want our children (or it may be ourselves) to be happy, and we want some continuity. A Jewish future matters to us. We don't want to be Jews to stop being Jews. For instinctively, intuitively, we know the world would be even more dangerous, more like a jungle were we not in it. We don't want Hitler to win his long war for our annihilation. Or as a parent so eloquently summarized: "We don't want to lose our religion, but we don't want to lose our children or our grandchildren either."

And in a pamphlet just published by the American Jewish Committee, the sociologist and a recent visitor to Kansas City, Dr. Steve Bayme writes:

"Jewish parents need not feel powerless... The chances of one's children intermarrying are considerable, but it is by no means... inevitable... Certain sectors of the community are marrying out at astronomical rates. In other sectors - particularly among affiliated Jews - the occurrence of intermarriage is a possibility but by no means a probability. To be sure, in the open society of America, intermarriage, in fact, is encouraged. The media prominently and routinely feature successfully intermarried couples. Polls suggest that gentile resistance to interfaith marriages to Jews has collapsed. Jews have, indeed, arrived in American society - it is now fashionable to have Jewish in-laws."

But he continues:

"The single most effective response to the possibility of mixed marriage is to create a Jewish community and home life so attractive that children will perceive it as worth maintaining and transmitting."

(To be Continued)

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