A few weeks ago, Shelter Rock hosted a conference sponsored by our Men's Club that was devoted to the question of how best to serve families in our midst who have been touched by intermarriage. It is a thorny, difficult question, and one I was hesitant to open up for public debate. And yet...I have had certain experiences in the course of these last five years--I am now concluding, by the way, my fifth year in this pulpit and, no, I can't quite believe it either--I have had certain experiences which have convinced me that looking away and doing nothing is not the right choice, not if we want to fulfill our mandate to serve our congregants' best interests, and their families'.

I meet kids all the time who are fully, unambiguously, Jewish, but who have received no Jewish education at all. Some are not even entirely clear on their own status, uncertain if having a Jewish mother makes them fully or only partially Jewish. Mostly, I've met these young people through my own children, but I've met a lot of them now, more or less all teenagers...and the question of what to do for kids way too old for Hebrew School, but nowhere near old enough simply to join the synagogue as adult members, continues to occupy me. And I have to assume that the younger versions of these kids--children who still could theoretically come to our Hebrew School--are out there too, just less visibly. So that's the one reason I want to pursue this: we have taken upon ourselves the mandate of looking after the Jewish education of our own children, but we have an ancillary mandate--a profound ancillary mandate--to care about all the Jewish children in our community...and we cannot do that effectively, or even at all, unless we meet these children and their parents, and make the latter feel welcome in our home. Non-Jewish spouses especially need to be made to feel comfortable here too...because it simply is not rational to imagine we can turn our backs on the parents of the children we are trying to engage and not simultaneously be cutting off contact with their children as well. In the end, every child has to be precious to us!

There's another aspect to this whole initiative, called the Keiruv Project, as well. (The Hebrew word, keiruv, means "bringing close" or "drawing in.") Other than divorce, the only real solution to the problem of intermarriage is the conversion of non-Jewish spouses. Obviously, Jewish people whose spouses aren't Jewish are welcome here, just as all Jewish people should always be made to feel welcome in this place without them having to earn the right to be treated nicely by hewing to some specific ritual regimen. But the real solution, the long-term one that offers the most hope for children (and also for the possibility of allowing the currently Jewish spouse to live a rich, Jewish life) is for the non-Jewish spouse personally to embrace Judaism. That won't happen in every case, of course...or even, I suppose, in most of them. But it could happen in some specific cases, maybe even in a lot of them. Our job, therefore, is to set aside judgmentalism and prior prejudice, and simply to say that any who wish to learn about Judaism, or to experience the grandeur of Jewish worship, or to hear me preach, or to come to any of the classes in the classics of Jewish spiritual literature I teach or others teach here--that anyone at all who wants to learn about our faith is welcome in this place. To expect people seriously to consider conversion, when it is we ourselves who have failed to create the context in which a reasonable person would be drawn to consider that option seems, to say the very least, like a self-defeating concept. In the end, nobody buys a car without test-driving it first. And no one embraces a faith to join a congregation that makes them feel unwelcome. It's almost that simple....

Anyway, I know many in the community feel uncertain about the wisdom of moving in this direction. I have my own worries about the messages we might inadvertently be transmitting, especially to our young people. But I also believe that the appropriate response to a dire situation is to never to turn away and hope things improve on their own, but to work together to solve the problem as it already exists...and to prevent it from becoming even more widespread. In situations like this, not making a decision is its own decision...and I believe such a decision would be a profound error of judgment. There will be, at any rate, way more to talk about in this regard. I look forward to hearing what you all think, and I encourage you also to become involved and to join the effort to create an inclusive community devoted to the highest Jewish ideals.

Sincerely,

Rabbi Martin S. Cohen