Jewish Marriage and Intermarriage: A Pastoral Perspective
Aaron Brusso
Credit: ChatGPT
Aaron Brusso is Senior Rabbi at Bet Torah in Mount Kisco, New York.
Growing up in the late 20th century, I went to high school and college with kids of all backgrounds with whom I could, from my Jewish community’s perspective, do anything except date and marry. The teachers, youth directors, and camp counselors who taught me were all clear that we could socialize but not partner with non-Jewish kids, or we would be contributing to the disappearance of a people who had already endured unthinkable losses. Their heavy admonitions were constantly in the background as I ran track, shared mixtapes, and repeated lines from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off with peers whose families were members of the local churches. By the time I was in college, I understood well the enormous stake the Jewish community had in dating decisions I made. But when I got into a late-night conversation with a friend in my dorm and she asked, “Isn’t it discriminatory for Jews to only date Jews?,” I didn't have a great answer. After fumbling a bit, I gave a heady demographic answer about how there aren’t a lot of Jews in the world, and we hadn’t even recovered to our pre-Holocaust numbers. “But what does that have to do with the person you choose to love?” she asked. Good question. I knew how older adults in my life felt, but their arguments didn’t come from my own heart.
As chair of a Rabbinical Assembly (RA) working group convened in 2022 to evaluate the professional organization’s fifty-year policy prohibiting member rabbis from officiating at intermarriages, I dug into the archives and found statements that read like training for lifeguards preparing to staff the cultural waters in which I swam when I was growing up. In RA documents from the ’60s to the ’80s, rabbinic leaders sought to stave off communal fears of assimilation by instructing peers to respond to intermarriage with messages that ranged from not “giving approval,” attempting to “dissuade,” actively “discouraging,” to even applying social “sanction” towards Jews dating and marrying people of other backgrounds.
Rabbinic authority was amplified by a policy prohibiting officiation. A 1973 document instructed that a rabbi “may not grace by his presence either during or immediately before, or immediately after, the ceremony or reception or any celebration of a marriage in which a partner is non Jewish without any type of conversion.” (In 2017 the policy was redefined to permit attendance but no other rabbinic participation at an interfaith wedding.)
The RA is the professional organization for Conservative rabbis, and over time, its policy against rabbinic officiation of intermarriages was explained in different ways, many of them linked to the anxieties of my youth. The policy was defended as an important bulwark against the threat of the American melting pot, a key to Jewish continuity, a boundary distinguishing the Conservative movement from the Reform movement, proof that halakhah is a priority for the movement, and in a context of increasing individualism, a statement that rabbinic authority still matters.
As a rabbinical student, I was taught why I should not officiate at interfaith weddings. I attended conferences where sociologists and demographers highlighted the diminishing percentage of Jewish-identifying children and grandchildren of intermarried couples . But policies and statistics were not helpful in making sense of the messy humanity I encountered as a rabbi. I found I was unprepared to really talk with families whose children were marrying partners of different backgrounds. When I gave predetermined answers, it caused people to feel unseen and misunderstood.
Early on in my career, I was in a pastoral counseling session with a Jewish father whose child was engaged to someone of a non-Jewish background. He talked a bit about how he felt about it and about conversations he had had with his child, but what he really wanted to know was why I couldn’t do anything to acknowledge his child’s partnership. At one point he looked at me and, consciously echoing Esau’s words to Isaac, asked, “Have you no blessing for us?”
Asking “did you know their children have a 29% chance of seeing themselves as Jewish? And their grandchildren even less?” felt like a response from my head but not from my heart to this congregant’s question. Telling an interfaith couple that I couldn’t officiate their wedding because it would encourage other people to make similar choices—or instructing teens that in the future, when they go on the third date with someone they met on a dating app, they should raise the topic of rabbinic wedding officiation, along with some key data from Pew Research Center studies—felt equally abstract.
Rather than shunning interfaith couples and their families, I began asking them to meet with me. I chose to hear their stories of being misunderstood, and to absorb their feelings of rejection. I wanted to figure out how to shift away from the well-meaning but problematic late-20th century program of social engineering and towards a role that would allow me to be a better rabbi.
I realized that the communal conversation about intermarriage, which began as a public project around Jewish continuity, was predicated on an old hierarchical conception of authority and power, common at the time. If we rabbis withheld wishes of mazel tov from the bimah and in bulletins, this thinking went, we could influence people’s most personal choices.
As I met with more people, I began to understand that rabbinic authority today is not based on position and proclamation but on relationship. Only when people feel known and seen will they invite me into their lives to weigh in on their beliefs and choices. And when they invite me in, they don’t want me to just tell them what they want to hear; they want to be challenged, and they want to know how they can take responsibility for things.
This means separating my role as pastor from my role as preacher. I do think it's my job to promote a life of religious observance. And yet, when an engaged couple once asked me whether I thought they should keep a kosher home, I recognized it as a pastoral moment. So, instead of answering “yes,” I asked: “What do you both think?” I learned that this was an issue of contention representing the different ways they had grown up Jewishly, and what they were asking for was help resolving that conflict. Had I weighed in from the beginning with the outcome I preferred, I would have ceded my pastoral role as a trusted mediator. When the observant partner asked if we could study the topic together, which is like music to my ears, I turned to the other partner to get their buy-in. Ultimately the work is theirs to do, not mine.
I learned about the importance of distinguishing my roles as preacher and pastor from the writings of Edwin Friedman, who used family systems theory to train clergy in how to model and promote self-differentiation. A family systems perspective teaches that when I counsel individuals, couples, and families, if I am to be helpful, I have to differentiate my needs from their needs and avoid triangles in which they try to transfer the difficult work they must do to me. When this happens, I must gently guide the work back to them. In my work, I found that when it came to intermarriage it became easy for families to make the question of whether I could officiate at the wedding the topic of conversation. Doing so, however, allowed them to avoid the deeper, more complicated conversations parents needed to have with their kids about their feelings and that partners had to have with each other—conversations about how to navigate their individual identities as they engage in projects of mutuality like wedding ceremonies, raising kids, and establishing traditions in their home.
Once I knew where I needed to be pastorally, I still wasn’t sure how best to represent Jewish tradition in these conversations. What is the torah, the teaching, of these moments? The policy against officiation was a fence around the Torah, which taught that choosing a Jewish partner was the quintessential way to express that Judaism was important. But when I looked out at my community, I saw interfaith couples raising Jewish kids and non-Jewish parents playing active roles in supporting these kids, while some Jewish parents expressed ambivalence or outright resistance. I saw a Christian father cry with joy at his kids’ b’nei mitzvah and a Jewish father roll his eyes when his wife suggested he join the family in coming to synagogue. I also met rabbinic colleagues who were raised by parents of different backgrounds, only one of them Jewish—something my rabbinic predecessors could not imagine.
The fence surrounding the Torah on intermarriage was a piece of prescriptive hardware built on assumptions that can no longer run the sophisticated new software of identity. The aggadot, the narratives, I was encountering required that I rethink not only my pastoral role but the very torah that these conversations demanded.
A psychologist once met with me, explained that his father was Jewish and his mother was not, and then wanted to know what that meant for his place in my community. Here was a person who, for professional reasons, had been through more analysis than most people I know, and I was supposed to tell him who he was? There may have been a time when people allowed the community to tell them who they were. In my experience, it’s more likely today that people determine their identities and present them to the community. I knew I needed more relational hardware; I needed to listen better to figure out what the torah was for these moments. I never expected that it would come from a member of my community who wasn’t Jewish.
Years ago, I was meeting with seventh-grade parents to talk about their children’s upcoming b’nei mitzvah. We were discussing the honors and how friends and family could participate in the service. A father raised his hand and said, “We have members of our family who are not Jewish, and we want to include them. Why can’t they have an aliyah?” He was referring to the blessings we say before and after the Torah reading, the second of which blesses God asher natan lanu torat emet vechayei olam nata betokheinu, “for giving us the Torah of truth through which eternal life is planted in our midst.” Before I could answer, another father whose child was going to be bat mitzvahed that year raised his hand and said, “Thank you, but as a Christian I have to say, that’s not my prayer, it's your prayer. You should take it seriously.”
Those of us in the room who were Jewish were so habituated to the rituals of Jewish life that we forgot how foreign they might sound to someone who identifies themselves differently. We had been so focused on including others that we forgot to ask them if they wanted to be included. The faith statement in an aliyah about eternal life through Torah is parallel to the Christian statement of faith that eternal life is through Christ. They are powerful words with a distinctive and significant meaning that we should take seriously.
This father’s words were also a reminder to all of us that inclusion cannot be our only value. Though it may sometimes stand in tension with inclusion, particularity is at the core of what we do and who we are as Jews. Very specifically Jewish narratives, rituals, symbols, and faith statements have the power to give meaning to our lives as Jews. And the particularity of other traditions does the same for others.
When I was in college, I once spoke with a friend’s mom about religion. My friend’s mom was a committed Christian, and she was explaining to me what was so meaningful about Christianity for her. At one point she closed her eyes, held out her hand, and started to rub her thumb and forefinger together. “There are times,” she said in this meditative pose, “that I can feel Jesus’s tunic between my fingers.” And she began to cry.
The description of what it feels like to touch the garment of a first-century rabbi who died for the world’s sins was a construct that was (and remains) wholly inaccessible to me. But I could see the way the specificity of that image pierced right through to her heart. Her deep spiritual connection to it was undeniable.
I used to teach Catholic educators about Judaism through the Anti-Defamation League’s Bearing Witness program. At some point during each gathering, usually one of the participants would come up to me and ask, “What do Jews think of Jesus? Who was he from your perspective?” I would answer the question with a question: “First let me ask you,” I would say, “what is it like when you light shabbat candles on Friday nights?” When they invariably looked at me with confusion, I would explain, “The reason that question feels strange is because when I lift a religious idea or tradition out of my world of meaning and place it into yours, it doesn’t have the same resonance. That’s how your question feels in my world.”
Does this mean that religious traditions and ideas are exclusive, available to some people and not others? Absolutely. Particularity—the idea that specific, particular things are the keys and keyholes of meaning—is part of what gives meaning to being human, and it is one of the main functions of religious traditions like Judaism. This, I tell families in my community, is the purpose of a Jewish education. The words, stories, melodies, images, and ideas we are teaching are like keys that will give our students access to Jewish meaning as they get old enough to want to be a part of something larger than themselves and when they want to feel like they belong somewhere in the world.
We are educating them so that when they pass Hillel on campus on a Friday night and hear the melodies of kabbalat shabbat, it feels like a call from home. If a grandparent of one of their friends dies, they know how to participate in the minyan at the shiva home. When they see a sukkah on campus they recognize it as a symbol of a people that once wandered in search of a home, and not just any people: their people. Who we are is related to the communal symbols, narratives, and rituals we were taught and to which we now respond, and who we are not is related to the ones to which we don’t respond.
My teacher Neil Gillman, of blessed memory, illustrated this with an advertisement from the 1970s. The ad was a photo of an El Al plane with its blue and white Jewish star on the tail against a blue sky with cotton clouds. Underneath the plane, hanging in the sky, was the printed line, “No other airline can make this statement.” For Jews, the Israeli airplane signified that a people exiled from their home had returned to the place they never stopped dreaming about. For others looking at that ad, it was likely just an airplane and a cryptic line claiming that this hunk of metal and plastic was making some kind of statement.
In Dynamics of Faith, the Christian theologian Paul Tillich writes that symbols “open up levels of reality which are otherwise closed to us” and “unlock dimensions and elements of our soul which correspond to the dimensions and elements of reality.” Midrash Tanchuma teaches us that Jewish rituals are intended to allow us to experience a sense of connection and peoplehood (Shemini, siman 7 to Leviticus 11:1-2).
In his book Stages of Faith, the theologian James Fowler uses the term the “Absoluteness of the Particular” to describe how ultimate meaning comes to our lives through very specific and finite things. As human beings we are most moved not by general concepts and big ideas but by specific, history-stained rituals. That’s why as Jews we surround ourselves with this narrative, that ritual, this symbol, and that faith statement throughout our lives. We never know when one of them will open up an experience of the ultimate for us.
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This is the torah these moments demand. When it comes to identity and boundaries, I no longer tell people what they can or cannot do ritually. I don’t tell people they can’t have the honor because they are not Jewish, although many are deeply schooled in that framing. Instead, I share with them the text of the aliyah blessings and engage them in a conversation about the relationship between their identity and the text. The boundaries surface organically, and it’s in these pastoral conversations that personal identities and communal definitions interact. These conversations are true opportunities to generate more thought and content than the old hardware’s typical permission structure allowed.
And these conversations are not limited to people who don’t identify as Jewish.
Once, two Jews met with me to see if I was the right rabbi to officiate at their wedding. They asked me to go over the wedding ceremony with them, and asked if it could be personalized. I told them I usually have couples write letters to one another that I read under the chuppah. They pressed some more, asking if the ceremony itself could be reconstructed in a more personal way. I explained that the ceremony was meant to put the personal in perspective. It is intended to connect a couple to things larger than themselves. We all agreed I probably wasn’t the right officiant for what they wanted. I represent Jewish particularity, for those for whom that is or could be meaningful.
When I speak with couples who come to me to talk about their wedding, I ask them: Is Rebecca's story of receiving a blessing from her parents before going to meet Isaac your story? Does standing under the chuppah connect you to Abraham’s tent? We go over the words of the blessing of betrothal in the first part of the ceremony and the seven blessings that make up the second part of the ceremony. When we say asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav, “who sanctifies us with commandments,” do you feel that Jewish rituals, in whatever form you practice them, add holiness to your life? When we say mekadesh amo yisrael, “who sanctifies the people of Israel,” do you feel a connection to Jews around the world? When we say k’dat moshe v’yisrael, “in accordance with the laws of Moses and the people Israel,” do you feel claimed by that family and its practices? When we reference the celebration of weddings b’arei yehuda uv’hutzot yerushalayim, “in the cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem,” do these places or the idea of them move you?
I have these conversations with engaged couples who are both Jewish as well as couples who come from different faith backgrounds. Using the Jewish wedding ceremony as a text is helpful to me and them as together we figure out who they are, what role they want Judaism to play in their wedding ceremony, and what role they want it to play in their lives.
A wedding ceremony, as I understand it, is not an expression of what is true individually for each partner, but a shared context of meaning that they have chosen to represent what brings them together. And so, when couples or families call to ask if I can do their wedding, I say, “Let’s meet so I can better understand who you are, what you are looking for, and if I’m the right rabbi for you.” This positions me to be helpful to them and to represent the power of the narratives, rituals, symbols, and faith statements of the Jewish wedding ceremony. And, critically, it helps them figure out the answer to the question they are asking: “Given our identities, what is the truest context for us to make a mutual statement of our commitment to each other?”
The American Jewish communal conversations about marriage and intermarriage began by using sociology and demographics to feed a debate on continuity versus inclusion. For my work as a rabbi, that has always been the wrong place to start. Every couple is different. Every conversation is different. Without a pastoral position of radical agnosticism toward the issue a couple is bringing into my office, I won’t be able to see what is in front of me. Once I know who is in front of me, I can then help them individuate their needs from what their parents want, and articulate, based on their identities, the role religion has played for each of them individually. If there are dissonances, I can help them figure out whether and how that comes together in their relationship. And knowing that religion is a powerful expression of meaning and identity, I can help a couple face the intersection of their identities and the particularistic meaning system of the tradition honestly. Sometimes the couple leaves my office more thoughtful about the content of their wedding and relationship. Sometimes they want to study more. And sometimes this becomes a pathway to conversion. But all have appreciated the dignity of self-definition, and they have appreciated the integrity of the tradition.
The goal is not to ensure Jewish continuity or do more weddings. The goal is not to instrumentalize these pastoral moments for the sake of future homes that practice Torah. These moments in and of themselves are a powerful encounter with Torah, with the productive tension that can exist between identity and the tradition.
I have tried up until this point to lay out an approach to working with couples who want to get married that begins with the couple and not with the community. But I realize that the legacy of disapproval is strong, and anything short of an up-front agreement to perform intermarriages will be understood as a sophisticated shell game hiding the real objective of promoting endogamy. In other words, instead of simply saying “no,” isn’t this just a less painful way to let people down?
We have much work to do to dismantle the “name and shame” culture we created if we are to build trust with those who are justifiably skeptical. And as much as I seek to give couples the responsibility of authority over the authentic expression of their identities, I also realize that the culture of rabbinic permission and approval runs deep. So, both because I believe in trusting the pastoral process I described and because I think it’s true, I will say this: endogamy is an unhelpful Jewish communal value.
When I talk to our teens, I don’t tell them, as was said to me and to others in generations past, that they should marry someone who is Jewish, because that would be about me, not them. Instead, I ask the teens to picture their family 25 years from now, and I ask them what they would like to see. Do they want to hold Passover seders, light candles on Friday night, and celebrate Hanukkah in their home? Do they want to belong to a synagogue? Because of how they have been raised in our community, they all typically say they want those things. So I then tell them that they may meet and fall in love with someone who identifies as Jewish but who is not interested in those things. And they may meet and fall in love with someone who did not grow up Jewish who is interested in becoming Jewish and partnering to build that kind of home. But the most important reason for this conversation is that I am not telling them what the Jewish community wants from them. Instead, I am allowing them to express their own appreciation of Jewish particularity, and, whenever the time comes, they will be prepared to speak about these things with a potential partner the same way they will eventually discuss career goals and the geography of where they will live. Instead of playing the lifeguard, I’m teaching them, as the Talmud suggests, how to swim.
A midrash in Avot D’Rabbi Natan explains that the reason Eve was able to be tricked by the snake into eating from the forbidden tree in Genesis was because Adam made a fence around God’s words and told Eve she was not allowed to even touch the tree. The snake touched the tree and exposed the weakness of Adam’s choice to draw a boundary instead of trusting Eve to take responsibility for the truth (1:5). Policies against officiation at intermarriages and communal positions on endogamy present as stringencies, but in reality they are leniencies. They free us from the work we need to do.
We need to help families own conversations freed from our judgment. We need to help couples own the work of discussing the relationship between their identities and the religious particularity of Judaism honestly. And, as a rabbi, my job is not to use authority to predetermine outcomes, but to facilitate a meeting between the people sitting in front of me and the tradition so that their identities can be in direct relationship with the power of the Torah’s particularity.
This is the message I needed when I was younger. More than knowing that the Jewish role models in my life had a plan for me, I needed to know they believed in the power of Torah and that they trusted and believed in me.
