Back in 1978 when intermarriage was becoming a reality, I suggested a radical shift in the Jewish communal mindset. I urged that instead of spurning intermarried couples, we reach out to embrace them.
The idea of doing missionary work instead of mourning caught on, initially within the Reform movement but subsequently among the others streams of Judaism in North America.
During the past 20 years, tens of thousands of converts have added new branches to the limbs of the Jewish tree. Non-Jewish spouses, as well as the children of interfaith families, have been cloaked within its shade.
Outreach programs were neither designed or expected to stem the tide of intermarriage. But they were meant to mitigate its most damaging effects: the alienation of Jews, stressed marriages, spiritual rootlessness of children and torment of grandparents.
Outreach has brought healing by demonstrating that intermarriage need not mean rejection by the Jewish community.
What’s more, such efforts have infused new vigor into many congregations and their programs. Far from watering down Judaism, as feared by early critics, they have enriched it greatly.
Everywhere I go, I find Jews-by-choice in professional and lay leadership positions in synagogues and Jewish organizations. The vast majority are individuals of great inner strength and deep conviction. Often, they have helped overcome the spiritual lethargy of their Jewish-born spouses.
Usually, it is these newcomers to Judaism who are the ones pressing for an expansion of Jewish literacy and spirituality, for a new sense of discipline in performing the mitzvot, for a renewed appreciation of the Jewish calendar, and for a greater interest in Judaism’s classical texts.
The Jewish community initially disparaged the concept of outreach. But ultimately, it received the flattery of wide emulation. Everybody’s doing it now.
Even Rabbi J. D. Soloveitchik, one of our generation’s most respected Jewish authorities on mainline Orthodoxy, said this some years before his death: “Regarding the plague of intermarriage, from which the Orthodox have not been spared, it is necessary to do what the reformers are doing — within, of course, an Orthodox context.”
Today, Conservative, Reconstructionist and even liberal Orthodox movements, as well as communal groups and federations, undertake outreach activities, each in its own way.
The pioneering spirit that gave birth to outreach has subsequently manifested itself in the principle of patrilineal descent, whereby the children of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother would be considered Jewish if they were raised as Jews.
The policy was adopted by the Reform movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis in the early 1980s. Like outreach, it was savagely attacked at first, even by many in the Reform movement itself.
Significantly, studies have shown that 85 percent of the American Jews across all denominational lines now accept the patrilineal concept.
Unfortunately, nationwide studies have also shown that relatively few intermarried couples and Americans know about outreach programs and remain convinced that Judaism has rejected them. The fact is that a communication gulf exists between the Jewish community and the very Jews who are alienated and unaffiliated.
The latter do not read synagogue bulletins — to receive them you have to pay dues — nor do they subscribe to the Jewish media or make the necessary contribution to Jewish federations that would bring them copies of local Jewish newspapers.
It is important that we respond to this problem through widespread publicity and broad exposure in the general media. Thus there is a pressing need for adequate funding and a creative effort to get the word out.
Furthermore, we must undertake the research among the alienated and unaffiliated so we can tailor messages to their interests and concerns.
Related to outreach and the patrilineal principle is the need for a proactive effort to reach out to the “unchurched” — non-Jews who are not connected to Judaism either by birth or intermarriage and are also disconnected from the religion of their birth.
This concept, too, is sharply criticized by many rabbis who erroneously argue that Judaism is not, and never has been, a missionary faith. This is strange, considering that few object to an all-out effort to persuade the non-Jewish partner in an intermarriage to opt for Judaism — often even before the wedding ceremony itself. Why flinch from the missionary label by declining to extend our proselytizing reach beyond the family circle?
Let us open our communal homes on four sides, like Abraham’s tent, and welcome all passing strangers, Jews and non-Jews alike, giving them spiritual shelter and sustenance and binding them to us as part of our worldwide Jewish family.
We should do so not only in the spirit of lovingkindness but in keeping with the mitzvah of self-preservation, which exceeds all others in its consequences for us as a people.