The Marriage Question

Feeling cranky about Conservative Judaism is so normal and established, it’s a default setting. God knows you’ve heard it often enough from me.

It doesn’t mean that there aren’t signs of life. According to the news, there are a few more students preparing for life in the Conservative rabbinate. Whether they serve in the pulpit is anybody’s guess. The same for the question of whether there will be pulpits to serve in. The new chancellor of my seminary seems like a nice enough guy, but it is once again too early to tell. He has the difficult job of heading a small college and somehow leading a life-saving surge. Hybrid positions are typically plagued with contradictions.

But the real problems go deeper than that. Take the matter of our new White Paper on Intermarriage. Wherever you stand, the conflict is plain: a laity that wants its rabbis to officiate, and a clergy (or at least a substantial percentage) opposed to flouting the traditional standards.

That means if you find your heart’s desire and that heart’s desire returns your love, no Conservative rabbi will conduct the ceremony. The risk is being kicked to the curb, with all the wounds of professional exile. Very few rabbis have taken this route, a fact which has contributed mightily to movement shrinkage. Rabbis are simply not aligned with rank-and-file Jews.

I understand the roots of this situation. After a period of healthy fluidity in the Bible, the law hardened in the rabbinic literature. Ancestry (or conversion) came to be an essential element in judging the appropriateness of a partner in marriage. Not only that, but an uncredentialed match came to be understood as an act of self-erasure: the Jewish partner cut his or her ties to the community because he/she no longer wanted to stand inside the circle.

That is not, of course, the current reality. American Jewish life is an open proposition. The level of intermixing is very high, in public schools, at college, and in the whole of life. People fall in love as they always have with potential partners they find irresistible. I have tried to celebrate that elemental fact. It’s a challenge to find someone to love and it’s a miracle when they love you back. Nothing is more powerful, persuasive, and determinative than the elemental fact of romantic love. Falling in love is not religious self-erasure. On the most basic level it is simply falling in love.

But you wouldn’t know that from the new Conservative White Paper. It piddles around with edge issues and side-bars as if they were the heart of the matter. For decades synagogues have announced weddings of all kinds, whether or not they conformed to Jewish law. That includes marriages between Gentiles and Jews. But we are now—officially!—permitted to do so. The Movement is now encouraging us to do the things we have been doing for years: being nice, communicating respect, avoiding disapproval, contempt, and denigration. Nobody in power seems to have noticed that the train left the station a century ago, or that whatever we do, it will draw fire from the Right. Jewish Orthodoxy abominates Conservativism, seeing us as an imposter sect. We lost that fight a long time ago.

That, in itself, should be a source of liberation. We are free to treat intermarriage as a challenge to creativity, to make a place in our world for the mixed multitude of our people, taking care to treat love with sensitivity and respect. Isn’t there a way to bring people before the ark of the Torah and say yes to their love with genuine affection, even if the ceremony does not exactly conform? I believe there is, but you wouldn’t know it from our White Paper, which pretends that the big issue doesn’t exist.