Responsa

[vettecat]

Several people have forwarded links and responses to the article, so I felt I should respond. (Briefly for the as-yet unbothered: a former classmate of mine wrote a NYT article complaining at length about the fact that the school newsletter hasn't published announcements about his marriage to a non-Jewish woman, and the births of their non-Jewish children. He acknowledges that everyone has been civil to him, but seems to feel that having his news in the bulletin is a sacred right. So to speak.)

Briefly, I think he's being illogical - which is odd coming from someone so intelligent.* (Though intelligent people aren't always socially acute.) He has rejected Orthodoxy and everything it stands for. But he wants the Orthodox community to embrace him and cheer his choices. This is the equivalent of slapping someone in the face, insulting them, and then expecting them to hug you and tell you you're wonderful - and being upset when they don't. You can't have it both ways. If you don't want to follow our laws, fine. That's your right, do as you like. But you can't expect us to celebrate you for it.

That's as cogent as I can be at this hour coming off a 25-hour fast... discussion is welcome, attacks will not be answered.

* Both his parents were Harvard professors (as he now is); the prediction for him in the class yearbook was "Harvard's entire faculty." I do wonder how his parents feel about his current actions... it must be very hard for them.

Comments

[lucretia-borgia.livejournal.com]

Pretending that he doesn't exist seems like a distortion of reality.

Does your h.s. newsletter report unhappy or shameful events? Like, George Smith, '88, recently graduated from a detox program? Or Elisa Jones, '75, was reported to Anytown Correctional Facility to begin her 10-year-sentence for motor vehicle homicide? Does it announce divorces, or just the re-marriages?

Marrying out is a serious infraction of Jewish law and Jewish social norms, at least from an Orthodox perspective, and for an institution whose purpose is the perpetuation of Jewish tradition, it's a horrendous failure that one of its students married a non-Jew.

I'm a convert, and when I applied for my oldest child to attend kindergarten there just this year, I was told that my being known in the community for over ten years isn't sufficient: I needed to produce the documentation given me by the rabbinical court (bet din) that oversaw my conversion. Whatever you think of the premises behind the policies, they are at least being consistent in their insistence on, if you'll pardon the bald expression, racial purity.

[bug-mama.livejournal.com]

Then the result is that yes, in fact that you wish to distort reality as a culture. Even if someone is physically at an event, this culture can and will allow the removal of that person from the record of the event. That's fine, its your choice, since lines need to be drawn in order to differentiate between groups. Whether it's color of skin, marrying outside of religion or what color your favorite baseball team is wearing ALL people draw distinctions between "them" and "us". It's the nature of humans to subdivide into groups.

The reason this article was interesting though, is that you have to understand that from an outsider's perspective getting married, having children and a nice career would make it into a newsletter about alumni. Its the gut reaction against, for want of the correct term, apostasy, that I do not understand as someone not part of your group. These events hardly equal addiction or homicide to me.

[lucretia-borgia.livejournal.com]

It's not so much a wish to distort reality, as it is to make a blunt statement: this person has done something so bad that we do not want him in our reality. (Airbrushing them out was just rude: he should have been told upfront that he wasn't welcome in the picture. However, I can understand how it came about that they chose the sneaky route: they didn't know he was dating a non-Jew til he showed up, so disinviting him wasn't an option. Once he was there, no one had the balls to tell him off to his face. Likewise, it is spineless of the school to ignore his submissions rather than to send him a note explaining policy.) But as to the basic attitude that out-marrying is a terrible enough thing that it's appropriate to treat the person as though they were dead (traditionally, the parents of an intermarrying Jew have sat shiva), I don't see what's wrong with that.

I used the addiction analogy because while it's something someone arguably can't help (like is often said regarding whom one "falls in love" with), it's generally viewed as something shameful. I use the homicide analogy because in outmarrying, he does a deliberate act of cutting any children he produces off from the Jewish people (while Reform accept patrilineal descent, this is not the tradition, and neither I nor any other Orthodox Jew would consider them Jewish) -- depriving the Jewish world of them and all their descendents just as surely as if he had killed them.

It's hard for someone outside the group to grok this: when you have an abiding religious worldview that entails the idea of a God who commands Man to (do stuff, don't do other stuff) it means that certain rules are absolute. And when you have a small, historically put-upon group like the Jews, those who do things that tend to break the social cohesion are punished with exclusion. And reasonably so. I don't understand why you don't understand the "gut reaction against apostasy." We say to the intermarried man: you broke the rules. While individuals may remain friends with you, you are out of the club. If one believes that the rules of the club are important, then one will feel offended when someone breaks them.

[bug-mama.livejournal.com]

I do have an understanding of the logic behind why Judaism has rules in place about marrying outside the faith. Personal experience. My husbands mother converted upon marrying his father. However, this happened at the end of several generations of cultural dilution so almost certainly you would not consider him a jew even with his mother's conversion. Anyway, his family has definitely dwindled in their cultural judaism over time, much less the religious component. There was no heart break over his marrying me. So I understand clearly how not following the rules = not having a cohesive cultural group. The rules define your culture. Fine, we can agree up to that point.

I know that his great great grandparents probably would have felt much as you do about marrying outside the faith. And maybe they would have sat shiva had they been around. From my ousider's perspective though I look at my children and I see how real and concrete they are (cute too!) His ancestors disapproval is not very real to me. So I see how if you do not stand by your rules then someday your descendants could feel the same way about your dissaproval. Of course they could also be fine people who would think less of you for your thinking less of them.

The part that is different about the individual we were originally discussing is that instead of a dilution this person jumped ship from what I assume you feel is the true heart of Judaism. This is definitely more abrupt and takes a more active choice on the part of the intermarried individual. But what is the difference between his children and mine?

By the way, I have enjoyed our discussion. I have had to think much more deeply about this subject instead of just seeing it while surfing. It took me a while to realize the small parallel between this subject and my own family.

[sethg]

I do have an understanding of the logic behind why Judaism has rules in place about marrying outside the faith. Personal experience. My husbands mother converted upon marrying his father. However, this happened at the end of several generations of cultural dilution so almost certainly you would not consider him a jew even with his mother's conversion.

A marriage between a Jew-from-birth and a convert is not an intermarriage. A Jew is a Jew--in the sense of being a "member of the club", as lucretia_borgia said above--regardless of how much "cultural dilution" occurred. Conversely, an intermarried couple is still intermarried even if the non-Jewish partner agrees to keep Christmas trees out of the house, eats only ethnically Jewish food, loves Woody Allen movies, and learns to speak Yiddish like a native.

Note the difference between a "culture"--an agglomeration of humans whose boundary can be extremely vague and subjective--and a "club"--a corporate entity with rules defining who's in and who's out.

[bug-mama.livejournal.com]

See, this is exactly why I don't get why you're so mad at this guy but you would consider my husband Jewish. You are offended by that individual but define my husband by "a Jew is a Jew." My husband's family does not seem to meet the definition of the "club" but they would meet the cultural definition that you laid out above. Believe me, subjective and vague definitely describe their Jewishness now that the older generations are gone. They are the only Jewish family that I have spent much time with but I can compare them with Vettecat and her husband who are the example of those who are in the club because they work very hard at honoring the rules. Do you find cultural Jews offensive or is it this guy, and others like him, because he jumped ship? Would you feel the same about someone like my husband? What invisible watermark would make him different than me? We have a lot more in common that you two would. We even both hate Woody Allen movies :) Seriously though, is I was from a similarly lax Jewish family and we never really taught our kids about it when would the watermark disappear?

I can see why one of the other commentors wanted to avoid the conversation about what exactly is a Jew. At what point do you through up your hands and say "just let God sort them out?"

[sethg]

First off, I'm not mad at Noah Feldman (the author of the essay that we're all talking about). I do, however, think he's being a putz.

And I don't think he's being a putz for intermarrying. The ban on intermarriage is one of hundreds if not thousands of traditional religious strictures that millions of Jews worldwide violate for all sorts of reasons, and I have better things to do with my time than pronounce judgement on all of them.

No, he's being a putz for two reasons:

(1) He not only wants to violate a rule of Orthodox Judaism (i.e., the rule against intermarriage), he wants his alma mater, an institution devoted to the advancement of Orthodox Judaism, to treat that violation as if it were OK by them. If a Maimonides alumnus became the head chef at a non-kosher restaurant, or was ordained as a Catholic priest, or made millions as a professional gambler, I hope the alumni magazine wouldn't announce those achievements, either. Grow the fuck up, man! You can walk "off the road" of Orthodox Judaism if you so choose, but don't expect the rest of us to send a team of highway engineers paving a new road behind you.

(2) In response to the way Maimonides treated him, he took advantage of his status as a contributing writer for the New York Times, and his background as a Maimonides alumnus, to write a screed against Orthodox Judaism. He cherry-picked some reactionary statements and deeds from the Orthodox world, used them to paint Orthodox Judaism as a gang of nut-jobs[*], and then, to rub salt in the wound, portrayed the Modern Orthodox community--which is to say, the Maimonides community and my own community--as a gang of nut-jobs disguised as normal people. (See my own blog for more on this.)

As for your husband--if his mother's conversion is valid[**] then he is Jewish in a "member of the club" sense no matter what he does. Likewise, if your mother is Jewish in that sense then so are you and so are your children, no matter what you do. If the two of you are Jewish in that sense, then I would be pleased to hear that y'all were deciding to follow the laws of Orthodox Judaism,[***] but in the meantime, I'm not going to shake my finger at you and demand that you repent. As I said above, I have better things to do with my time.

[*] For instance, he highlights Baruch Goldstein's murder of Arabs, but doesn't mention the large number of Orthodox rabbinic leaders, across the spectrum, who condemned the murder in no uncertain terms.

[**] This is a technical question that I'm not qualified to answer, but if your husband or his mother ever cared about finding out, they could consult a rabbi. Of course, the rules determining the validity of a conversion are subject to interpretation and different rabbis will interpret them in different ways, etc., etc., but the boundary between valid and invalid conversion is still better-defined than the boundary of "cultural Judaism".

[***] Unless you followed one of the Jewish factions that thinks killing and dispossessing Arabs is fine and dandy, or that worships a deceased Chassidic rebbe as the messiah.

[bug-mama.livejournal.com]

(1&2) I think that I have a clearer understanding of the issue now. Thank you for your time and the well written discussion.

* I can see your point. I will try to get a moment to read your blog.

** Then I think he is and to the best of my knowledge I am not. So that takes care of ***, including all factions and jews for jesus.

Enjoy your no finger shaking free time!

[sethg]

PS: rereading this thread I noticed that lucretia_borgia and I are using "club" in different senses. I'm using it to refer to the set of people who, according to Orthodox Jewish standards, are supposed to be following Orthodox Jewish standards in their lives. I wouldn't say that Feldman is "out of the club", because in the sense I'm using the term, you can never leave. But he certainly can't consider himself a member of the club in good standing.

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Just to clarify, it wasn't airbrushed; they happened to be standing at one edge of the group, and when the picture was published that edge was cropped off. (I do remember the incident.)

[bug-mama.livejournal.com]

This makes sense since that is what I would do at a predominantly Jewish function. Again, thank you for the clarification.