Promoting Intramarriage

Back in May, I talked a bit about a story on the Jerusalem Post website about a woman who couldn't understand how her boyfriend could reject her simply because she wasn't Jewish. In the last week, there has been a big todo over Noah Feldman's article entitled The Orthodox Paradox in the New York Times Magazine last weekend, as well as Rabbi Shmuely Boteach's article in response to it  Stop Ostracizing the Intermarried.

While I am not always in agreement with Rabbi Boteach, I happen to agree with him in this case. In halachic discourse there are two terms that are often used B'Di'Avad and L'chatchila. The former refers to a situation where an action has been performed (lit. "It has been done") and the other it prior to any action (lit. 'To begin with'). And IMHO, the approach to Intermarriage needs to fit the either of those two situations. In the case of the former - where a couple is already intermarried, I agree with Rabbi Boteach. Yes this person has done something to take his or herself away from religious practice, but at the same time, that person is still someone's child, friend, or sibling.  While it hurts on so many levels, at the same time, we need to acknowledge reality.

Whether they acknowledged it or not at the time of their wedding, an intermarried person at some point becomes aware of the sacrifices they made in order to marry outside the faith - why should they have to sacrifice their family and friends too.

But Boteach and Feldman's articles aside, the trick here is not to even get there, to pull the L'chatchila out of the question. For years, parents have been emphasizing the negative - don't marry a shiksa, don't bring me home a goy, etc. without ever accentuating the positive aspects of marrying a Jewish spouse.

How many thousands of secular parents have toed this line and only brought their children to synagogue on a couple of days a year - and even then reluctantly. Or how many of these parents also forced their kids to attend a watered-down Passover seder every year. If you don't show enthusiasm for your Judaism, how do you expect your children too.

The trick here my friends , isn't to prevent Intermarriage, but to promote Intramarriage. To make Judaism special and important to the next generation of kids so that they will not ever dream of marrying anyone who wouldn't want to start a family to carry on those very same meaningful traditions.

That is my goal everyday - to teach my children the beauty of Judaism. In our songs, in our liturgy, in our rituals. I can't teach them how to feel, nor can I make it automatically have meaning in their lives, but if I show them the beauty of our practices, my hope is that when they form their own ideologies and start thinking about their own families, the experiences I have given them in their youth will resonate for years to come.

 

As for the already intermarried, overcome what hurdles you might have and embrace them. It is a difficult situation - one chock full of internal conflict - but at the end of the day, at the very least, they and their non-Jewish spouse might gain some exposure to these traditions, and might fight meaning and substance in them - even after the effect.

Benjamin Netanyahu on the academic boycott

As you would imagine, I am angered by the latest attempts by British Academics to boycott Israel. This is not the first time they have tried this, and this won't be the first time that this will fail. What makes this time different is that Israel hasn't done a damn thing. Yes there are rockets falling on Sderot, and Israel is retaliating, but there is no war here. We aren't in Gaza, we are out of Lebanon, and what good has it done us? They're still firing rockets at us, and still trying to boycott academically. I could talk to it myself, but no one can talk to it as well as Bibi does in this YouTube Video.

British Academics can do what they will, the only ones who will suffer are them. If Britain doesn't want to work with Israel's brain trust (with the highest per capita percentage of College Grads and PhDs of any country in the world!, then Israel will innovate with the Americans, the Indians, the Chinese, and the Singaporeans. And while Israel and her supporters will reap the benefits of advances in Energy, Medicine, Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Telecommunications and Computing, the Brits, will once again, miss the boat.

I guess they can always sip tea.

She wore an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny yellow polka dot ...Yarmulka?

I came across this article in the Jerusalem Post entitled My Story: FakeJewess@hotmail.com. In a story that sounds (as the author admits) like it was a scripted chick flick plot, she dates a Jewish man (she is not Jewish), then when he breaks up with her, she pretends to be Jewish and stalks him out on JDate.

Seemingly the crux of her article (which isn't very clear) is that when she puts on her Jewish Mask, but talks and acts the same, somehow he finds her acceptible. Yet under her normal shiksa face, he has no interest.

What the author doesn't seem to get is that there is a lot more to life than walks on the beach in Haifa. Relationships have many stages and levels. As a relationship progresses from one level to the next one some of the things that don't matter to us in the shorter term, start to matter a lot more when we start to think long term. When I was in college I often got embroiled in the 'Why do you only date Jewish people?' argument.  People called it discriminatory, but I called it being selective. They would argue back and forth with me about it until I used this analogy, or something along with it:

Let's say you love dogs. You have two of your own, you spend as much time with them as possible. Obviously when you are dating, you prefer someone who likes dogs, but that is not your most important requirement. You start dating someone, and the first few dates go well, you decide its time to introduce her to your dogs... Only to find out, she hates dogs (or even worse, she's allergic). She hates them with a passion to the point where she won't go to your apartment without insisting you lock them up. How would that make you feel? How would that change your long-term outlook on the relationship? While you don't mind locking up the dogs now, you know that in your heart of hearts, long term, you can't put the dogs in the bedroom for 40 years, nor are you willing to abandon them completely, or visit them on weekends at your parents house. Clearly, even though you were willing to date her initially, your relationship came to a point where her attitude towards dogs mattered.

 

For some, it wouldn't have even gotten that far, for their love of dogs precluded them from even thinking about dating anyone less than a dog lover. I apply the same thoughts to Religion. If religion matters to you - at any level in life - at some point you will want someone who is compatible with your religion. For me, it was a forethought, for the guy who is the subject of this article, its an afterthought, but nevertheless, it entered his long-term vision. Unfortunately, the author of this article doesn't get that. Maybe in time she will.

But who will tell them...

I haven't yet taught my children about the Holocaust. Honestly, I don't think I knew about it before I was 6 or 7, and there is no need for me to rush to educate my 5 and 3 year-old sons about something that they cannot even begin to comprehend.

But, when I was old enough, and when I was able to feel emotions from those very disturbing images, and ready to hear the stories, there were survivors to talk to.

Thankfully, none of my four grandparents were in a camp - My grandmother was the last one to leave Europe and she left right after Crystalnacht - but there were always other survivors. The people with numbers on their arms, the people with the stories to tell. To help personify the atrocities that took place. This wasn't a far-fetched story from years ago, but something that happened to my neighbors, to my relatives, to our friends.

One day, I will talk to my children about the holocaust, but I only hope that there will still be people to tell them first hand, so that they to can personify it, so that they too can see the pain and the suffering in that person's eyes. So that they too can tell the stories to their children. For when my grandchildren come around, I don't think a single survivor will be left.

If you had brothers like these, you'd turn to a stranger halfway around the world too

The Jerusalem Post reported today that senior Israeli and Palestinan officials met with their Japanese counterparts to discuss Japan's plan for Economic growth and development for Israel and the Palestinian territories. (The picture and article are from the AP, l-r Saeb Erekat, Shimon Peres, and Shinzo Abe)

While we tend to approach any of these initiatives with several grains of salt, if you read between the lines a bit, there are some interesting things going on.

1. Israel, already a partner with China and India, is looking to Japan as another avenue of growth.
2. Jordan is at the table too, and at least Jordan and Israel are serious partners with one another
3. Given the fiasco of poverty and unrest since Hamas took power, its quite plausible that the Palestinians would look forward to some economic opportunity.

What bothers me the most is, why is Japan the partner? Why not the Saudis or the Kuwaitis? Think about it for a minute, just from an economic and logical standpoint, there is no reason that the Palestinians can't do for Arabic-speaking customer service what India did for english-speaking customer service. Labor is cheap, which means that a decent living wage for a Palestinian is still probably more cost-effective than hiring a saudi. The bottom line is that Arab nations haven't done a damn thing for the Palestinians economically, short of rewarding the families of suicide bombers. I hope that this Japanese plan works out, and that it becomes the model for future development in the region.

Day Schools and Financial Disclosure

It seems that no matter where I am, whenever I get together with other Jewish parents at some point the conversation gravitates towards the subject of Day School tuition. The thought came to me recently to look up schools on Guidestar (a service that rates charities. Since most Day Schools in the US are registered as tax-exempt organizations, they are listed here), but, it would seem that Day Schools and other religious institutions are not required to file the same IRS form 990 that charities are. Primarily because they are faith-based and don't need to.

It's funny, each year, my kids school sends me a lovely letter to accompany the next years tuition schedule. It seems that the year is the same year in year out. Save for the date and dollar values, there is always the same story about why they are justified in raising tuition.

While I don't doubt their motives or analysis, I find it insulting to my intelligence that they don't provide us with some sort of summary financial data.

To be frank, I am not looking for detailed salaries for every last staff member, but it would be nice to see the breakdown of salaries between administrative, teachers, and managerial staffs. A breakdown of maintenance and other costs would be nice as well.

Truthfully what are schools afraid of? The number should tell a story - a story that justifies tuition increases, and that should be evident from some simple numbers. If it's not, the school has some explaining to do.

As a parent, seeing the numeric justification will enable me to have confidence in the value I am receiving from the school, as well as compel me to potentially give more. It will also empower me as a person to feel as if I have some more disclosure and input as to the direction the school is going in.

It is well played out that parents who ask for scholarships need to bare their lives and finances to school administrators - why should those administrators be forced to share the same data with us?

My little one, now Bigger

My little guy Mikey sure grew up fast. He is now 3! And we just cut his hair. When my wife was pregnant with our first son, I was not totally convinced that I would like the whole Upsherin concept. Truthfully, while my family has very Chasidic roots, my parents never followed suit with any of us. (Although one of my cousins did have an Upsherin with the Bovover Rebbe Z"L and, as my Dad tells it, it is a very humorous story). My wife doesn't have any brothers, so at least in our generation we hadn't really participated in an Upsherin for members of our own family.

Still Faigy insisted, and before I jumped in wholeheartedly, I wanted to study it some more. So I did the research and discovered that the custom has very strong roots in the Kabbalah and is commonly practiced amongst Sefardic and Chasidic Jews. The gist of it is that man is compared to a tree, as it says in the bible -"..Man is like the tree of the field (Deut/Devarim 20:19). In Judaism, trees have very special meaning as well as their own laws and customs. For one, they have their own new year (Tu B'shvat) and when one plants a fruit bearing tree, we cannot derive any benefit for the fruit for the first three years. So too, a little boy is just like that tree. For the first three years of his life we follow his cognitive development (his fruits). When he reaches three, the age of Mitzvah education, his fruits (his mind) are ready for consumption with Torah thought and religious education.

This is such a beautiful custom, and I am glad that I agreed to follow suit. But even more than that their is a much greater psychological effect on the child as well. In his new look, my son now equates himself as a 'Big Boy' and proudly states "I am not a baby!".

As much as I miss my 'Goldilocks', I now have another big boy to bring into the world of Torah and Mitzvot, and I am eternally thankful to G-d for that every day.