Sacrifice
When the rabbi of our synagogue decided to give a blessing to non-Jewish spouses on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, it represented a major shift. You could call Rabbi Zemel an early adopter of interfaith practices; he started the tradition on Yom Kippur almost a decade ago, well before Beth and I joined his synagogue. Obviously, we weren’t the first interfaith couple to walk through his door.
Only 39 percent of American Jews belong to a synagogue, according to the Pew Research Center, and the number attending regular Saturday services is significantly smaller—more like 10 percent. Outside of the Orthodox Jewish community, weekly synagogue has not been integrated successfully into American life. Most Jews who attend do so only twice a year, on Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah.
“Saturday may be our worship day, but it is also Little League day in America” is how Rabbi Zemel describes the conundrum. He says it is such an institutional problem that there’s a whole category of Jewish jokes dedicated to it: about rabbis inflating the number of worshippers who attend on Shabbat, and comparing how many of their congregants fall asleep during Shabbat services.
Because Temple Micah is not a large enough space to accommodate all the congregants, Rabbi Zemel decided to do the natural thing in multicultural America and mark the holiest of Jewish days in a Christian church. This had the strange effect of giving Beth an opportunity to visit a Methodist church twice a year for Jewish services. I can’t say she is thrilled about this irony, but it seems somehow appropriate for our family, and it says something interesting about modern-day religious life in America.
The Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist Church is a somber, formal Gothic revival church. The sanctuary is dark in spite of the soaring ceiling—the gray stone seems to soak up what little light the long stained glass windows let in. On the Jewish High Holidays, the rabbis cover the crucifixes in the side chapels with linen and replace the gold cross above the altar with a Torah.
Yom Kippur services are long, beginning the night before the holiday and then running through most of the following day. Toward the end of the morning service, Rabbi Zemel invites the non-Jewish members of the congregation to come up into the chancel and stand at the monumental stone altar. During the Yom Kippur service, there were more than thirty non-Jewish spouses up there, including Beth. Then Rabbi Zemel reads these words: “You are an embodiment of the grace and beauty of this country where a Jew is actually someone that a person wants to marry and not some ‘other’ to be shunned. Many of you have made the historic and unprecedented decision to raise Jewish children. We will vow never to take this for granted. You come to services, even when it feels strange and confusing at first. You hum along to the Hebrew prayers, and some of you learn to read our ancient language. We know that some of you have paid a personal price for the generous decision you made to raise Jewish children, and giving up the joy of sharing your own spiritual beliefs and passing your own religious traditions down to your kids. Your presence here honors us. Your presence here makes us stronger and wiser.”
He asks the congregation to rise so he can say a short ancient blessing from the Torah, and the Hebrew echoes through the cathedral. In spite of the formality of the church and the number of people in the pews—there are usually several hundred attendees at Yom Kippur services—the congregation always gets emotional at this moment. Beth cries every time she receives the blessing.
“This year I was thinking that the rabbis really understand the sacrifice we spouses have made,” she told me after this year’s service. “They know just how hard it is, because they are people of great faith themselves. Perhaps it would be even more difficult for them to make the same sacrifice and leave their religion because of what’s happened to Jews over the centuries. But it means a great deal to me that they seem to know how I feel about the religion I grew up in.”
• • •
It took Beth many years to acknowledge how much of a sacrifice it has been for her to give up raising our kids Christian. Having agreed early on to raise them Jewish, she never wanted to go back on her promise, because she thought that would be unfair and hurtful. As a result, the decision is not something she likes to examine over and over. It’s a choice she made.
Beth believes Judaism brings many great values and rituals into our life, and she knows how important it was to me to pass it on to my own children. My Judaism was a cornerstone of my identity, and she was willing to accept it as our family identity, in spite of the obvious drawback for her—that she does not get to share her religious beliefs and traditions with her kids.
I’m happy to have a Christmas tree each year; I grew up having one. But Beth hasn’t taken the kids to church on Christmas or Easter, because we thought it might confuse them to be exposed to both religions, at least when they were young. More recently, we’ve talked about changing that, which would be something of a compromise for me. In my own religious search, I’ve tried to focus more on the spiritual element than on the strictly ethnic part of my Jewish identity, since I knew it would be easier for her to come along with me.
But that doesn’t mean it is all settled. Not by any stretch. In the writing and reporting of this book, we’ve both been forced to examine our faith lives more deeply, and to acknowledge that ours is a complicated picture. In the days following the Yom Kippur service, I asked Beth what it felt like this year to receive the blessing from Rabbi Zemel. We were outside on our patio, enjoying a strong late-October sun. I was in a wicker deck chair in my shirtsleeves, finishing a salad. Beth had been working from home that morning but was getting ready to leave for a meeting, so she had her handbag beside her, and she pulled out her sunglasses against the bright sun.
“You know, when I was up there at the altar this year,” she said, “I was thinking, Why did I really do this? Because it’s by far the biggest sacrifice I’ve ever made in my life.” Beth had to stop here to wipe away her tears, but she quickly composed herself. She was determined to make her point. “And you know, it does not get easier. Like when Max is struggling with his Hebrew lessons—I can be supportive, but I can’t actually help him. If I ask him to read the Hebrew to me, he’ll say, ‘But you don’t even know what it means.’ And he’s right.”
There have been signs along the way that deciding to be a Jewish family was difficult for Beth. Some years ago, I was standing with her at the counter of a department store on the Sunday before Christmas. She noticed a couple walking through the store with their children, all four of them dressed nicely, the little girl in a hat and dress shoes. They had clearly come from church. Beth turned to me and said, “The kids dress like that because they know that it is expected of them on Sundays. They comply because church is a regular part of their lives.”
Her observation irritated me, and when we got back in the car, I told her so. It felt like a judgment on our life as a Jewish family, since we do not go to weekly synagogue services, and since we sometimes bemoan the fact that our kids complain whenever they have to wear something other than sweatpants. That’s not how she meant it, though. Once I got over my annoyance and we were able to talk it through, I realized that what Beth was expressing was a generalized longing for the customs she associates with her own family and upbringing, particularly during the Christmas season.
As she stared ahead at the road, Beth told me for perhaps the first time that she had not understood how hard it would be to give up her faith for me. I was startled and somewhat alarmed to hear her say this. Of course, deep down I probably knew that it was difficult for her, but she didn’t let on, and I didn’t want to acknowledge it to myself. Thinking about what she had sacrificed made me feel guilty and responsible—not easy emotions to feel—so for the most part during our marriage, neither of us brought up her Christian faith. That has changed in recent years, as my faith journey has become a bigger part of my life.
Sitting on the patio that October day, Beth acknowledged something she hadn’t told me before. “You know, I really did it for you, not for our children,” she said. “I thought you needed a spiritual life. My own faith gives me strength and focus, and I wanted the person I love the most to have that, too.”
Beth pushed her sunglasses up onto her head so she could dab her eyes. I was squinting hard against the sun, trying to read her face, and I saw a mixture of conflicting emotions there. Watching her, I felt loved and gratified but also burdened by the weight of what she has sacrificed.
Beth chuckled as she said she was aware that many Christians might not agree she is doing “the Christian thing” by giving up raising her children Christian: a great irony. But that is not the part that really bothers her.
“I think I was naive about this decision,” she admitted. “I thought, This will be okay because I have my own faith. I’m not going to convert. This won’t change who I am. But over time, I’ve come to feel it more, not sharing my religion with our kids. I don’t get to show them how the church looks in the different seasons. I love how it is hung with different ornaments, the hymns we sing for each holiday—I used to be able to sing probably a hundred hymns just by memory. So . . . yes, it has come to feel like a loss.”
I think that being a Jewish family is harder for Beth now that the kids are old enough to understand what it means and to see the difference between her and me. The first time Ava said to her, “But Mom, you’re not even Jewish!,” there was no mistaking how hurtful it was for Beth. I could tell from her expression that she was shocked and saddened to hear it so starkly. She has told me that she sometimes feels a pang of sadness to hear me describe the emotions I feel when I watch our kids lighting Shabbat candles and realize that this is our shared story. She loves that I share my religion with them, but it bothers her that she does not.
Though I should have seen it earlier, I allowed myself to look past her sadness because Beth didn’t want to make a big deal about it. When I sensed it, I reminded myself that Beth still had her faith and could go to church whenever she wanted to. Now I understand that this approach oversimplified her sacrifice. We don’t need to talk about it every week or even every month, but it’s only fair to acknowledge it for what it is.
Some might say, “Well, if she really wanted to share the experience with our children, Beth could learn Hebrew; she could convert.” But that’s not fair. What I’ve been discovering on this journey is how intensely personal faith is.
Just as I feel an almost primal connection to my Jewish identity, so Beth feels linked to the Methodist church she grew up in. She doesn’t attend church often anymore, because she wants to spend her weekends with me and the kids. But she talks about what she loves: the sound of the church bells before the service, which evokes her childhood. The hush of the room once everyone has settled into the pews, which marks it as a time for quiet and reflection. The music of the hymns, which inspires her. Perhaps most important is the welcoming demeanor of the ushers and pastors, which reminds Beth that this is her community. She once compared church on Sunday to a child clutching a security blanket: It gives an almost indescribable sensation of home.
For many of us, community is inseparable from religion. At Temple Micah, because there are many interfaith couples and it is such a spiritual place, I have increasingly felt the warmth of connecting with a Jewish community.
One Saturday morning in 2011, my friend Jeff and I decided to go to services at Temple Micah, apropos of nothing. Jeff is in my Bible study group, a loose collection of ten or twelve of us, all Jewish men, mostly journalists. We meet every few months, and I do not think any of us attends weekly synagogue services. To our surprise, we caught sight of our friend Steve, another journalist who studies with us, lingering in the lobby area before the services. He told us that his mother had died the night before. He was alone because his wife and kids were out of town, and he knew his mother would have wanted him to go to synagogue that day. He looked shell-shocked, in deep grief and need.
The three of us sat together during the service, and I put my hand on Steve’s shoulder during some of the prayers, when it looked like he was struggling not to weep. Later, Steve told me that it felt like “a gift from somewhere” to run into us there. Jeff’s phrase was “divine intervention.”
To be there for someone who has just experienced a loss and feels a longing to connect was a real moment of grace for me. Jeff and I are not the kind of friends Steve would have called after the death of his mother, but he did not need to. We found him—and not in a coffee shop but in a synagogue, where we sat and prayed together.
The experience reminded me of the lesson in the Bible when God calls out to Abraham and Abraham says, “Hineni,” which is translated as “Behold, here I am.” But it conveys a deeper meaning: I am here with all my being, physically and spiritually. I am truly present. You can count on me.
It can be so awkward to talk to someone who has experienced the death of a loved one. But on this day, the most important thing we could communicate was that we were there for Steve.
The Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore once told me that his “church family” is so important to him that he keeps a framed shard of glass on his desk from a window that shattered in his childhood church in Biloxi, Mississippi. “The Bible makes it very clear that we’re not isolated,” he told me. “We’re part of a household of brothers and sisters, and we’re all weak in some points and strong in some points, and we ‘bear each other up,’ to use the language that the Bible uses.”
He referred to Paul’s letter in I Corinthians 12, in which Paul uses a metaphor of the parts of the body to describe the relationship between members of a congregation and the church as a whole: “There are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the hand to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’ . . . If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.”
• • •
My family and I continue to struggle to find a religious community that works for us. It took us many years to choose a Jewish institution. The first synagogue we joined back in 1998 seemed to tick all the right boxes: A sign outside welcomes new members. It is Reform. It holds “Tot Shabbats,” Friday-night services and meals for young kids. It is open to non-Jewish spouses.
But Beth didn’t feel welcome there. She couldn’t forget an experience she had one day when she stopped into the synagogue with Max to drop off food supplies for a hunger drive. Some staff members and congregants were filling bags with supplies in one of the rooms, and they barely acknowledged her when she came in. When they did, they just grunted and gestured at a corner for her to drop the stuff.
“I didn’t want a big hurrah,” Beth told me later. “It wasn’t about thanking us for the canned food we brought. But how about a hello? I mean, that’s our community. Are we crazy to expect them to talk to us?”
I had to agree. It felt cold and unwelcoming. We set about looking for a new place to pray. In a way, Beth and I were “shul shopping.” The shopping metaphor was apt, because I needed to see what was out there. We wanted a synagogue that was progressive enough to accept non-Jewish spouses who did not intend to convert. I was also hoping to find a spiritual Jewish leadership whom I could engage with. I wanted a synagogue where High Holiday services felt thoughtful and religious, about more than just the cultural identity.
We were also looking for a place where the kids could learn about their Jewishness. Beth and I had decided to send them to Hebrew school, to help them prepare for their bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies. It follows the model of Christian Sunday school, which means it does not conflict with kids’ Saturday activities. However, there is no sense of partnership with the parents in terms of the lived religious life. Christian Sunday school works because when the parents go to the sanctuary for the sermon, the children go to the classroom for an age-appropriate version of the same lesson. But when Jewish kids don’t see their parents attending regular services, they can feel as though they are getting dropped off for a weekly inoculation.
One of the things I liked about Rabbi Danny Zemel was that he was forthright about this and other problems with modern-day American Reform Judaism. He didn’t try to paper over the difficult issues, and he wasn’t put off by my direct questions when I met him over coffee to talk about joining Temple Micah. He also made it clear that he didn’t have the answers to all my questions. He calls Temple Micah “a smart, messy place with a soul,” because, as he puts it, everything that is hard is messy.
“We’re the heirs to an incredibly open-minded, liberal tradition,” he says. “Judaism demands us to be idol smashers. And any given practice easily becomes an idol.” Rabbi Zemel urges the Jewish community to come up with a new language of spirituality and meaning and a new theology that takes contemporary America into account.
Not long ago, we had a chance to see our rabbi smashing idols. At a parent meeting for Max’s bar mitzvah class, Rabbi Zemel mentioned that the non-Jewish parents of the child couldn’t recite the blessing; only the child’s Jewish relatives could stand up on the bimah. I raised my hand and said, “Okay, rabbi, so are you going to tell Beth she can’t speak at her son’s bar mitzvah, or am I?” Everyone laughed, but it upset me to imagine that Max, who identifies as Jewish, would have very few of his relatives beside him at his coming-of-age ceremony.
Some months later, Rabbi Zemel wrote me to say that after giving it some thought, he had decided to write a new blessing that non-Jewish relatives could read at bar and bat mitzvahs. He had labored over the language—both the Hebrew and the English—so that it would read as beautifully as the traditional one does, while honoring the integrity of the Jewish tradition.
It reads: “Blessed are you, Adonai, our God, ruler of the universe, who has made it possible for us to draw our son or daughter near to the Torah. Blessed are you, Adonai, who gives the Torah.”
• • •
In the 1980s, my friend Rachel Cowan, who converted to Judaism as an adult, cowrote a book about interfaith marriage with her husband called Mixed Blessings: Overcoming the Stumbling Blocks in an Interfaith Marriage. Rachel was raised in a New England Unitarian church, and her husband, Paul, had a strong Jewish identity, although he was not from an especially religious household. In fact, Paul’s family was so proud of having fully assimilated that they celebrated Christmas and Easter and not Hanukkah or Passover.
Paul wrote that when he first met Rachel, the two of them “would have bridled at the suggestion—which is a theme of this book—that differences in ethnic and religious backgrounds can become ‘time bombs’ in relationships, especially after children are born.” However, they started to question their decision to raise their two children in what he described as a “religiously neutral household.” Paul related a couple of anecdotes that made them change their mind about celebrating Christian and Jewish holidays with equal weight. They took the kids to a puppet show dramatizing the story of Purim, and when one of the characters threatened to murder all Jews, their young son threw himself into Rachel’s arms, pleading, “He won’t get me, will he? I’m only half Jewish!” Then their daughter asked Rachel, “Mom, would it hurt your feelings if I said I was Jewish?,” an experience that our daughter almost eerily echoed when she asked it of Beth almost thirty years later.
Those two events were enough to convince the Cowans that they needed to pick a single religious identity for their children. When Rachel and Paul began speaking to other families, they found they were not alone in their complicated experience of interfaith marriage. Many had realized they had stronger feelings about their heritage than they’d thought. It’s “the December dilemma,” they wrote: the decision about whether to celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, or both.
The issues that Paul and Rachel Cowan were grappling with in the 1980s have become locked in to mainstream American culture. In the last decade, 45 percent of all marriages in the U.S. were between people of different faiths. Rates of interfaith marriage among Jews have seen an especially dramatic rise. Among Jews who married in 2000 or later, 58 percent had a non-Jewish spouse in 2013.
Because of these numbers, Rabbi Danny Zemel wrote a letter to the Temple Micah community in 2009, announcing “one of the greatest personal and religious decisions I have made in my career as a rabbi”: to conduct interfaith marriage ceremonies. He said he would do it for the same reason that many Jews are against interfaith marriage: because he wanted to help Judaism to flourish in America.
Some Jewish communities have decided the best way for Judaism to thrive is by becoming more purist and separatist. Rabbi Zemel takes the opposite view: that Jews need to “integrate, integrate, integrate.” Sitting in his book-lined office at Temple Micah one summer afternoon, he told me that he had decided integration was his best chance of having “a vibrant voice, both as a Jew and as part of American culture. Otherwise, we Jews will just be an oddity footnote in history.” In his 2009 letter, he put it this way: that the new American Judaism “will have to be as open and attractive a community as it possibly can be.”
Rabbi Zemel’s dedication to include non-Jews is invigorating to me. His efforts to reach across the aisle validate my own path. Interfaith families like ours may make Jewish life more complicated, but Rabbi Zemel is saying that my family is welcome—and what’s more, that he sees us as thriving members of a dynamically shifting community.
Interfaith marriage in America stretches well beyond the Jewish community, of course. Along the path of my religious journey, I’ve talked about it with faith leaders of all stripes. When I sat down with Ginger Gaines-Cirelli, the senior pastor at Beth’s church, Foundry United Methodist in downtown D.C., she said she hears about interfaith issues all the time from her congregation. Pastor Ginger and I spent several hours talking in her comfortable visiting room, decorated with her collection of religious objects from all over the world.
“I often have folks coming to me who are really trying to find a middle ground,” she told me. “And I think that’s one of the big opportunities and challenges, is to find a spiritual practice that doesn’t feel you’ve just gone and picked the things that worked for you. To ground it in something that’s larger than just your own preferences, in other words. To find a spiritual practice that doesn’t end up in a gray, not very grounded place. There’s so much richness and depth to the traditions themselves.”
• • •
All those years ago, Beth hoped that by urging me to explore my faith, she would draw us closer together. There is no doubt that has been true. I have come to see the many values and ideas that unite Jews and Christians: everything from “Love thy neighbor” to an emphasis on knowing and celebrating God and to trying to live up to God’s expectations by thinking of others. Judaism is the lens through which I see this path, but not in an exclusive way, because I take inspiration from the teachings of Jesus and the Christian Scriptures all the time.
We did not get here right away. Before I could embrace the more universal lessons of faith, I first needed to delve deeply into the specifics of Judaism. For a while, I found it easier to see the differences than the similarities between our religions. I also spent time trying to understand my place in the story of the Jewish people, which sometimes created a wedge between Beth and me.
“If you stop eating lobster, I’ll kill you!” Beth said these words to me while we were having dinner together one night, early in my Bible study with Erica, when I was experimenting with a deeper level of religious observance. Beth was making light of it, but her words hit home. I had recently decided to stop eating pork as a nod to my faith and the kosher dietary rules. After a lifetime of not understanding why some Jews keep kosher, I had come to appreciate the idea that even eating should feel holy. The kosher rules are spelled out in Leviticus and are designed to elevate the life of the Jew at all times of the day.
Beth was letting me know that I was starting down a path that made her feel left out. If I started keeping kosher now, I would deny us a secular ritual that we shared as a family. Unlike Jews who might be tempted to experiment with different versions of their faith at various times in their life, I was married to a Christian. For me to go full kosher was a step too far. Eating lobster when we are in New England is an important ritual—some would argue that it is a spiritual experience unto itself.
There were other ways I experimented with Jewish ritual. In 2008 or so, I went through a stage of laying tefillin on my arms and forehead to pray, the way some Orthodox Jews do. The practice comes from Deuteronomy, Chapter 11, which says: “You shall love the LORD your God, therefore, and keep his charge, his decrees, his ordinances, and his commandments always. You shall put these words of mine in your heart and soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and fix them as an emblem on your forehead.”
I made a trip out to the suburbs of Washington to meet with an Orthodox rabbi, who explained that rabbis had invented tefillin so that Jews could literally fulfill the commandment. Tefillin are small boxes containing tiny parchment scrolls of biblical verses, with attached leather bindings for the arms and the fingers. The rabbi analogized it to picking up something for your wife for dinner because you love her. “In the same way, if God asks you to fulfill this commandment, you do it because you love God.”
As practical as that advice seemed, it felt somewhat otherworldly when I went home, placed the box on my forehead, wrapped the leather straps around my forearm, and recited Hebrew prayers. I didn’t exactly hide it from my family, but I did think it was better to do it in the bedroom when Beth was not at home, out of sight of the rest of my family. One day, though, my son opened the door and found me standing, staring out the window, and praying with the black tefillin box on my head. He looked horrified and blurted out, “Daddy, what are you doing?” If the ritual was supposed to draw me closer to God, it also had the effect of making me look strange. I’d never intended to start doing it all the time. I think Beth thought it was a bit odd, but she knew not to be alarmed about it. She could tell that I was delving into Judaism with the intensity that I tend to apply to subjects that deeply interest me.
Another of our challenges is around the subject of Jewish identity. In Mixed Blessings, Paul and Rachel Cowan wrote, “Time and again, we have seen that an irreducible core of Jewishness is lodged inside most Jews at the junction of ethnicity and religion. But it is often hard for them to describe it and for their gentile lovers to understand it.”
That was certainly our experience. I went through a stage of wanting to explore how I fit into the great tableau of Jewish life. This led to strain with Beth, though. She thought that the focus on my identity seemed like another form of self-absorption—something that she has tried to help me overcome. She told me that this part of my Jewish study seemed to be less about getting outside of myself and becoming a better person and more about me discovering me, the Jew. It was hard to hear that. But I tried to take it on and start to ask myself bigger questions about what I believe.
Honestly, Beth sometimes feels excluded by Judaism. After all, Jews believe they are “God’s chosen people” who have a privileged relationship with God. If you weren’t born a Jew, you cannot belong unless you convert, and according to the Orthodox and Conservative branches of Judaism, you belong only if your mother is Jewish.
Around this time, Danny Zemel suggested that I meet his mentor and teacher, Larry Hoffman, a leading thinker on interfaith matters who teaches at the Hebrew Union College in New York and has authored dozens of books on Judaism. Rabbi Hoffman was kind enough to meet me at the Rock Center Café in the NBC building one morning when I was up in New York to fill in on the Today show.
I began by explaining where I was on my religious path. I told him I’d been studying the Bible and that I’d practiced laying tefillin. We had not been talking longer than ten minutes before Rabbi Hoffman interrupted me. “Let me give you some advice. You’re going down a path that is not for you. You are meeting and studying with Orthodox people and going down a halakhic path,” he said, using the Hebrew term for the corpus of Jewish law. “That is not you, and it is not your family.”
When I mentioned my tension with Beth over Judaism’s ethnic identity, Hoffman told me that he understood how the idea of Jews as the chosen people could be alienating for non-Jews. Some years ago he decided to use a different version of the prayer that traditionally reads, “God has chosen me from among the nations of the earth.” Instead, he says something which is “less harmful” to all those who might hear it, he said.
He added that I should focus on creating shalom bayit, which is the Hebrew phrase that means “peace in the home.” “You can affirm your Jewish identity without taking on ritual aspects that are not the essence of Judaism,” Rabbi Hoffman said.
Some years later, when I met Rabbi Hoffman again, I asked whether he recalled that first conversation in the Rock Center Café. He did, and explained that he’d immediately recognized my behavior. It was not uncommon for someone like me, trying to reconnect with faith, to identify with “the more visual aspects of Jewish ritual behavior,” as he put it. But those practices are not universal among Jews, and he wanted to drive home the point that they can be alienating. Judaism is meant to strengthen the family, not create gaps within it, he said.
This subject is close to Rachel Cowan’s heart. When I met her in her New York apartment on a hot July day for one of our semi-regular chats about faith, she told me that she often sees religion create gaps in the home. It is a special concern among interfaith couples, she said, though it can happen between two people of the same faith if one of them is, for instance, more interested in investigating religion or a relationship with God.
She told me about a dear friend of hers, named Larry, who announced to some of his friends, “Hey, I’ve come out as a seeker.” He was being self-deprecating with the phrase, aware that his wasn’t as large a decision as the other kind of coming out. But it was hard for him to admit it and to apply the word “seeker” to himself. Rachel said she could understand that feeling. “Saying you are a seeker is going out on a limb for something you can’t prove. And sometimes it is hard for your family and friends to deal with it.”
Larry was having trouble praying, Rachel said, and he wanted to get better at it, so a teacher of his suggested trying out different things. “So he’s sitting in bed one night, and his wife came in and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And he told her, ‘I’m writing a letter to God.’ And she was like, ‘Oh no!’ She was thinking, What’s happening to Larry? He’s getting so weird . . . where’s he going to go next?” Even though Larry and his wife were both Jewish, his wife found his religious exploration destabilizing because she could not share in it.
I am lucky that Beth does think about God and her belief. Larry Hoffman nailed our experience on the head: “You decided to follow the Jewish map along your spiritual path. Beth may have had some concern that this map would take you on a different path altogether, and it turns out it doesn’t. It turns out that it actually takes you deeper into the path that she’s already on.”
There’s no doubt that these concerns were hard on our marriage. She never expressed any interest in studying with me, and that saddened me for a time. I know the kids can sense when we aren’t on the same page about religion, and I have often wished it were otherwise.
When it came to building ritual for the family and some of the actual Jewish practice, I felt alone at times. For the most part, religious ritual is something Beth neither is inclined to do nor has time for right now. It’s also not something that she feels she needs to do; she is not a seeker, like me. She grew up grounded in her faith, and that is part of who she is now.
Beth was more invested in some of the rituals than others. Our weekly Shabbat dinner was one that she wanted to apply herself to. On Fridays, Beth lights the candles; she breaks the bread and says the prayers. Our Shabbat ritual feels as much hers as mine, a melding of her Sunday Sabbath with my Jewishness. She likes to make sure that non-Jews attend our Shabbat dinners, and she emphasizes the similarity of this ritual to the Christian Sunday Sabbath she grew up with.
Beth is stalwart about steering our religious observance toward a universal language of faith, and she is a steadying force in our religious lives. She makes sure the kids go to Sunday school. She has taken the lead in organizing Max’s bar mitzvah. Even if Beth is not on the same journey that I am, she is proud of having been the guiding hand in my decision to deepen my faith, and she welcomes my efforts to do so.
• • •
Beth and I have learned a great deal about our religious lives in recent years. I can’t say that always feels like a blessing, but when I stand back to get perspective, I do believe it is. That October day we sat out on the patio together, I asked her a question I’d never asked her outright: “When you think about the influence that you have, and are having, on my and the kids’ spiritual lives, does it feel like it is worth it to have given up raising them Christian?”
Her answer was yes at first, but she quickly tempered it. “I think it’s worth it for you and the kids . . . I mean, we may never know. I don’t know whether they would have felt a deeper connection to Christianity if they had been raised in the church rather than as Jews. I just don’t know.”
Because the kids have not especially taken to Hebrew school, Beth recently initiated the question of whether Christianity might be easier for kids to access. When Beth sees them struggling with Hebrew, she wonders whether the language presents too much of a barrier.
I have to agree that the Jewish education system is flawed, and the problem extends beyond the day-of-the-week issue. Judaism doesn’t have a single textbook. Using the Torah to teach ethics would be like trying to teach people about America by having them read the Constitution when they’ve never gone to a baseball game, as Rabbi Zemel puts it.
Beth thinks that it will be a hard road for the kids to find a spiritual center in Judaism. She may be right. They are comfortable enough in our rituals, but they aren’t especially engaged. Of course, that may be their ages, but Beth worries that they engage even less because she does not share their religion. For instance, she doesn’t feel comfortable playing an active role in our synagogue, whereas if we attended church every week as a family, she would want to be a church usher. She imagines that she would talk to the kids about the sermon after church, as her mom did with her.
Also, Judaism is more abstract and intangible than Christianity. When you walk into a church, the primary worship symbol of the cross is right there on the wall. In Catholic and Anglican churches, you partake of God’s body and blood through the wafer and the wine. There is nothing like that direct interaction in Jewish practice. During services, the rabbi will ceremoniously remove the Torah from the ark and walk through the congregation holding this symbol of the Jewish faith. Sometimes worshippers will kiss the Torah as the rabbi passes by. But even this symbol is more abstract than the body of Christ, since the Torah represents the word of God.
I find it deeply fulfilling to consider the words of God. But my children do not, and perhaps they never will. I have to acknowledge that it is possible they will not share what I love about Judaism and Jewish identity. I am trying to come to terms with the fact that by making the choice we did, Beth and I may have made it harder for our kids to develop a robust spiritual life. I do believe our kids are lucky to have two parents with a deep faith. I can only hope that something of this will filter down.
Once, after I gave a speech to a Jewish federation, someone asked me how to talk to your children about the importance of being a Jew. My answer was “Say nothing. Do something.” As Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, wrote in his book A Letter in the Scroll: “You cannot command that your children be Jews. You can only lead a beautiful life and hope they see it as beautiful too.”
• • •
The bells were ringing all up and down Sixteenth Street in Washington, D.C. It was a sunny fall Sunday morning in 2014, one of those days when the weather has just started to sharpen and the air feels fresh. All up and down the wide thoroughfare, the doors of different churches were open, and there was nowhere to park for many blocks around.
Beth and I had decided to come to Foundry United Methodist Church, her church home in Washington. She feels she doesn’t attend services often enough, and I had recently resolved to start going to church with her more frequently—once a month, perhaps—because I knew she would enjoy it more with me than alone. The kids were at our synagogue for Hebrew school, as they often are on Sunday morning.
I decided to wear a suit, which was not strictly necessary, but it gives Beth pleasure to dress up for church. She was wearing a lovely peach-colored dress, and I could tell she was happy: The sun was shining brightly, and here I was at church with her for the first time in years.
We got there a little early so that Beth could enjoy the church bells. She teared up the moment she heard them, and I sat beside her in the pew, holding her hand. Several church volunteers approached us before the service began, including the church’s executive pastor. We were struck by that friendly and welcoming gesture, a marked difference from some of the synagogues we have attended together.
Foundry has high ceilings, but its dome is painted white, giving it a bright, open, and modern feel, appropriate for its mission. Foundry describes itself as both “historic” and “progressive.” The service we attended relied heavily on the organ and a traditional red-and-white-robed choir to lead us through the hymns from the Methodist hymnal. But the clergy is racially diverse, and its senior pastor is one of a minority of female pastors in the Methodist Church.
At the beginning of the service, one of the church leaders called a group of children to stand in front of the choir. A leader asked them to answer the question “What is love?,” and they started throwing out answers. “Passion,” said one. “Dedication” and “Friends and family,” came the responses. What a great way to begin a religious service, I thought, with a callout to love.
As we drove to pick up the kids from Hebrew school, Beth and I talked about Pastor Ginger’s sermon, which was called “Loving Matters.” In it, she made the point that Jesus interprets the law through love: “Jesus’ love is the key that sets us free, that opens the door to life in God’s Kingdom.” Now, Beth and I may think of Jesus differently, but we both responded to that message.
We also liked how Pastor Ginger spoke of “being and becoming who God created me to be.” Beth said that it made her think about the idea that we are all always in transition. Some of us may be in a more obvious transition—as I am, on my faith journey—but Beth, too, is constantly shifting. She talked about how, when she makes church part of the rhythm of her week, it helps her assess and reflect on her life in a way she has trouble doing otherwise. “Being and becoming” also speaks to how often I feel I am falling short of my spiritual goal to become the person God expects me to be.
I told her that if she wanted to bring the kids to church sometimes, she should do that. We had been worried about confusing them, but they were older now—anyway, I said, it was worth it, if for no other reason than to have them support their mom. She smiled gratefully.
Perhaps Christians and Jews are on the same path, just with different maps. We find ourselves side by side with our maps, circling each other. We are, as Larry Hoffman put it, “a double helix. The two sides never collapse into one another.” I love that image: a double helix spiraling around, sometimes mirroring each other but never touching.
Passover is a great example of that. I think it is the most accessible and universal of all the stories in the Jewish tradition. Like Easter, it is a springtime renewal. And while it commemorates a very powerful moment of Jewish peoplehood—the exodus of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery—Passover is also a call to broader humanity. Every year, Jews “relive slavery and indignity and then we re-experience the exhilarating gift of divine liberation,” according to the Haggadah, the book that helps explain the seder meal, the main event of Passover.
Though Beth misses sharing the uplifting message of Easter with our kids, she likes Passover more than any other Jewish holiday. Some years ago, I decided to try a family play on Passover in an effort to get the kids excited about the holiday. We act out the story before the meal, and while I would love to make it elaborate, I’ve learned that we are most successful if we keep it short. We start out the night in our front room, lighting the candles and singing songs like the African-American spiritual “Go Down Moses”:
When Israel was in Egypt’s land
Let my people go.
Oppressed so hard they could not stand
Let my people go.
Go down, Moses,
Way down in Egypt’s land,
Tell old Pharaoh,
Let my people go.
I write up a different script for the play each year, some more successful than others. We all don costumes. I play the part of the adult Moses, long white hair, beard, brown robe, and all. The part of Baby Moses has been played by anyone we can fit in a laundry basket: Jed and Ava have each taken on the role, and so has Gus, our dog. For Passover 2014, I wrote a script with a Twitter theme—what better way to keep it short?—which gave Max the opportunity to deliver the memorable line: “#IdontrememberMosesbeingadog.”
The story of Jewish liberation is an essential part of Jewish identity. We are reminded in the Bible to “love the stranger as yourself” because we were once strangers in the land of Egypt. We were once slaves, and then we were freed—that should be a lesson that directs how we live in the world and treat others.
Sometimes I’ll put cards under the dinner plates on Passover with questions like “What is an example of a modern-day slavery or plague?” or “Is it ever justified to kill someone as God kills Pharaoh’s son?” We’ll have a discussion with the kids about the universal truths that Passover reminds us of: We should welcome the stranger and the poor into our home. We should be committed to justice. We should use our experience to be better people in the world.
I’ve changed how I think about my faith as I have progressed in my learning. Initially, I felt a great pull toward the insularity of my Jewishness. But at some point, I got to a place where I was able to separate my ethnic Jewish identity from my spiritual identity. I began to believe that it does not necessarily dilute my religious experience if I focus on the aspects of Judaism that are more universal.
Once I set off to look for commonality with my wife’s beliefs, I realized that I wanted to think about the values and purpose of my religion in a larger way. The same ethics, the same Scripture, the same stories can hold great meaning for all of us. Increasingly, I have found myself experiencing moments of universality within my Judaism. I had a moment of epiphany during the long and solemn Yom Kippur service one recent year, when Rabbi Zemel was reciting “Unetanneh Tokef,” a poem that is part of the liturgy: “This is Your glory: You are slow to anger, ready to forgive. It is not the death of sinners You seek, but that they should turn from their ways and live. Until the last day You wait for them, welcoming them as soon as they turn to You.”
I have heard the poem many times during Yom Kippur services. But it struck me that this moment was really about salvation; that Yom Kippur is a rehearsal of death, and as we take stock of our lives, we acknowledge that we will stand before God, the King, and be judged. I leaned in to Beth, sitting beside me in the pew, and whispered, “Jews may not like to talk about God in general, but this poem is exactly what Christians do. Here, Jews are turning to God and asking to be inscribed in the book of life.”
In the Christian tradition, the worshipper comes before God, penitent. William Sloane Coffin, the progressive Christian thinker who served as the pastor of New York’s Riverside Church for many years, said it this way: “If we are not yet one in life, at least we are one in sin, which is no mean bond because it preludes the possibility of separation through judgment.”
In other words, we humans are united by our sin and by the need for salvation. This very Jewish poem, “Unetanneh Tokef,” has much the same message. We are repenting. We are asking God to save us.
• • •
In recent years, my journey has become less of a Jewish pilgrimage and more that of a religious pilgrim investigating the different faces of God. Nevertheless, I have tried to be specific. I approach many different religious leaders for their counsel, but when it comes to belief and identity, being Jewish is enough for me. I don’t want to become a half Christian or a half Buddhist. I just want to see and understand other ways of believing, in the hope that it will help me forge a greater connection to God and thicken my personal relationships.
I think it is fair to say we are all on a spiritual journey to God—we are born into a tradition, choose a tradition, or choose not to believe. Larry Hoffman likes to say that each faith has a room in what he calls a “museum of the human spirit.” We share a room with our own people, Lutherans or Catholics or Muslims, all of us working away at our life projects, constantly renovating.
From time to time, we wander into other rooms in this faith museum. That doesn’t mean we are turning our back on our room, Hoffman says; but after visiting another room, we can’t help being changed. We might return to our own room and find our practice enlivened and deepened. We might even find ourselves shifting in another direction for a while. But we are all part of the same project—the project of the human spirit.