In 1965, I married a man who called himself a WASA, a white Anglo-Saxon atheist, and I drifted away from the Jewish community.
I was raised in a nonobservant home, so marrying outside the faith wasn’t much of a leap. A local rabbi said he would perform the ceremony if I agreed to celebrate Jewish holidays and raise my children as Jews. I had no idea how.
In my childhood home, our celebrations, Jewish or otherwise, were mostly about food. I didn’t even know the Motzi, the blessing over bread. So my husband and I chose a Unitarian minister to perform our ceremony. We decided to raise our children Unitarian, which like Judaism encourages questioning. Some call Unitarianism, which does not accept the divinity of Jesus, the “demilitarized zone.” It worked for our family.
I loved my church community, but I kept flirting with a return to Judaism. I even wrote a series on Jewish Renewal as a reporter for the Oakland Tribune. Still, as a woman who married out and hadn’t raised her children as Jews, I feared that I wouldn’t be welcomed. It took the end of my 23-year marriage for me to jump in with both feet.
Fortunately, I was welcomed back, though I occasionally heard murmurs, “How could you have abandoned this?” Once, at a synagogue meeting, an elderly woman lamented the rise of intermarriage. I raised my hand. “As long as we give people who marry out the message that they’re not welcome in our synagogues, they’ll find other settings where they’ll feel at ease,” I said.
Suddenly, the person I was raising as Jewish was me. I studied elementary Hebrew, learned the blessings over the candles (and bread), joined a Jewish singles group and went on Jewish retreats where I experienced Havdalah for the first time. I hosted a Passover seder with the help of an Israeli friend, who also gave me a Jewish name, Nataniela. In 1998, I finally celebrated my bat mitzvah.
But I still had moments of discomfort. A man I was dating told me that if his child went to prison, he would be upset but would still acknowledge him. If his child came out as gay, he would be uncomfortable but wouldn’t abandon him. But if one of his children married a non-Jew, that would end the relationship.
“A parent who cuts off a child in that way cuts himself off from God,” I said, looking him in the eye.
He returned my gaze. “Janet, do you really believe that?”
“Yes, I do,” I replied.
I eventually remarried — a Jewish man, this time — and together we navigate questions of family, faith and tradition.
My husband tells the story of George, a neighbor who, like Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof,” cut off contact with a child who got engaged to someone who wasn’t Jewish. I wonder: Did George ever see his grandchildren?
I hope he softened in his stance. In my family, when my cousin was about to marry a Catholic woman, his parents decided not to attend the wedding. My mother intervened and persuaded them that if they wanted grandchildren in their lives, they needed to be there from the start. Thank God they were.
Times have changed. My synagogue, like many others, includes many intermarried couples who have opted to raise their children Jewish. I also have friends who raised their children as Jews, yet their grandchildren are being raised in another faith. To me, grandchildren of any faith are a blessing. We can show them our values and share our traditions without minimizing theirs.
The other night at dinner, my companions expressed concern about the increase of intermarriage. “What will become of our community?” they worried. My husband and I, who had both previously married non-Jews, replied that intermarriage need not close doors.
Am I sad that my choices a half a century ago mean I don’t have descendants who identify as Jewish? I’m not as sad as I would be if I had no grandchildren or great-grandchildren. Between us, my husband and I are blessed with eight grandchildren and a great-grandson.
At some point, they may wish to explore their heritage, on their own. In the meantime, we will share our holidays, our blessings and our chicken soup.