Being the environmentally conscious sort I am, I'm recycling pre-used bytes today.
I wrote the following for someone on one of my lists who asked about intermarriage
and how that worked out for us, and wanted to know if I were Orthodox. Clearly, by
that she meant "observant", and it's a common misunderstanding, hence the lecture-
ette at the end. So with a few minor changes (read: things I left out to avoid
hurting feeling over there) here's my response.
In my experience
interfaith marriages work best when the partners agree on the level of their faith
if not the actual beliefs. I must also include a lecture on Orthodox Judaism,
becuause it's not an accurate synonym for "religious Jew", but I'll put that at
the end to spare you all. Neither Rudder nor I are terribly religious. Neither of
us attend religious services. We do each have our own beliefs, thought over,
defined and satisfactory to ourselves, and those are actually not too far apart.
We each have moral codes to which we hold ourselves. (Some religious types appear
to think you can't have a moral code unless Someone dictates it to you.
Horsefeathers.) We are also both rather scientific in our outlooks; I agree that
there is much wisdom in the
Bible, for example, but entirely flummoxed that
any reasonable person can believe every word literally (especially considering how
in many places it contradicts itself). I'm forced to conclude that quite a lot of
the ones who rant and rave most have never actually read the words they profess to
believe in.
And I am a Jew, after all; I come from a tradition that
has spent two thousand years interpreting and reinterpreting
href="http://dichroic.diaryland.com/literal.html">literally every word of the
Torah, so I know how words can change according to the reading and the
reader.
That's the difference between me and my husband; though I
don't attend a synagogue, I do consider myself a Jew, and my traditions color a
lot of my thinking. He was raised in a middle-of the-road Protestant denomination
and comes from a WASP-ish sort of background, and of course that colors
his
thinking, though I don't think he realizes it as explicitly. So for example, we
don't do a full Passover Seder, but I do like to make traditional foods then, or
light candles during Chanukah, and think and talk and write (mostly here) about
the history of those holidays.
I have also seen examples of
interfaith marriage where both partners are religious, each attending their own
services and sharing in their partner's observations on holidays and special
occasions. Partnerships where the people differ significantly (on anything) do
require a little more work,
but I think interfaith relationships are easiest
when both are at similar levels of belief and observance.
And now the
lecture. (I can see your eyes rolling from here. Maybe I should say, "the rest of
the lecture".)There are three major divisions of Judaism: Orthodox, Conservative,
and Reform. One is not necessarily more "religious" than the other. Basically, the
easiest way to say it is that Orthodox Jews believe in the words of the Torah,
though still modified by interpretation as I said above; an Orthodox would
not
likely be a Creationist, but would be likely to frown on women doing
"men's work" or dressing immodestly, for example. Reform Jews believe in the
spirit of the law, and Conservatives are somewhere in between. An Orthodox Jew
would restrict him or herself to kosher food -- but a Conservative or Reform Jew
might choose to do also. A female Rabbi would not be Orthodox, would be likely to
be Reform, but might be Conservative. If I had a child, she would be considered
Jewish by all three groups. If my brother had one with a non-Jewish woman, the
child would not be considered Jewish by an Orthodox rabbi (unless the mother
converted first or the child did afterward) but might be by a Reform one, if
raised in the Jewish faith.
It's not valid, though, to think of
Orthodox Jews as being like Fundamentalist Christians. For one thing, they don't
want to convert everyone else. (Other Jews, maybe.) A rabbi doing a conversion is
required to try three times to talk the person out of it. Orthodox Jews
have
a tradition of scholarship and a respect for those who
study that
I don't see built in to Fundamentalist Christianity. (Before everyone jumps on
this, let me say I do know there are plenty of individual Fundamentalist
Christians who do share this attitude. I don't don't think it's mandated.) And the
whole relationship among the Jewish groups is complicated and is much closer than
that between, say, Episcopalians and Baptists -- maybe like Southern Methodists
and Baptists, without the rivalry, or like the Presbyterians and Methodists in
L.M. Montgomery's books. (As viewed by everyone except Miss Cornelia, naturally).
I've heard people refer to different Christian denominations as different
religions or speak of "Christians" in a way that made it clear they only meant
Protestants. We don't have that level of differentiation, maybe because we have a
tradition argument and disagreement among even the greatests Talmudic scholars.
Which is not to say that some of us aren't sometimes judgemental -- the bad as
well as the good things about humans transcend religious lines.
As a
concrete example, you'd probably consider Chasidic Jews to be extreme Orthodox,
and they'd probably consider themselves so -- long beards, black robes, heads
always covered, lots of restrictions on women. Yet their beliefs about taking joy
in the spirit rather than the letter of the Law are the beginning or the Reform
movement, and stem directly from Hillel, one of the greatest theologians and
philosopher whose teachings have become mainstream Judaism. (He was the one who
said, "Do not do unto others and you would not have done unto you. That is the
whole of the Law. The rest is only commentary. Now, go and study the
commentary!")