Against My Best Advice, I Married A Non-Jewish Man
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By Janine Stein June 15, 2017
Editor’s Note: On June 9, the Forward’s editor-in-chief Jane Eisner wrote a piece entitled, “Why This Renegade Rabbi Says He Can Marry Jews —- And The Jew-ish,” which discussed the controversy of intermarriage within the Conservative Jewish community. In the coming days and weeks, we will be publishing several responses to her story. The following is one of them.
I am Jewish Litvak descended from a hundred generations. My ancestors were not famous rabbis or illustrious Talmud scholars, but they all stayed alive long enough to procreate and pass on their values, memories and traditions to their children. My people were ordinary Jews on a long journey from Sinai to Israel to Babylon to Ashkenaz to Lithuania to South Africa, where my parents were born, got married and raised four Jewish children. Although my parents never told me explicitly to marry a Jewish man, I believed I was supposed to keep the received tradition going. But I ignored that unspoken expectation and married a German man descended from a long line of Protestants. While my ancestors were married under a chuppah, with prayers in Hebrew and a Ketubah (marriage contract) in Aramaic, I was married in a registry office in Frankfurt in a 20 minute service that was conducted in German and where a clerk in a short-sleeved shirt quoted Thomas Mann poetry. It was recorded in our official marriage certificate that I was Jewish and he was No Religion. It was completely baffling to me linguistically and culturally; I’m still trying to figure out what it means.
If you asked me why I married him, I would have said he was handsome, kind, hard-working and intelligent. If you asked him why he married me, he would say it’s because I was a mystery to him. He was certainly mysterious to me. Compared to my emotional and loud family, he was quiet and had good boundaries. He could also ski, fix cars and was very good with details. I couldn’t do any of those things. I hoped he would convert to Judaism after we married, but while he was fully respectful of my traditions, he made it clear they weren’t for him. As my daughter once said when she was tiny: ‘My Mom’s Jewish and my Dad’s workish’.
That was the problem really.
What I wished someone had told me was that I wasn’t just getting married; I was also starting a family. Before my first child was born, I didn’t understand the day-in and day-out effort it takes to raise children and to pass on Jewish values, memories and traditions as you go. On Yom Kippur, my kids saw their father going to work and their mother going to shul synagogue. On Shabbat, I cooked, lit the candles, said Kiddush and blessed them. On Pesach, I cooked the food, set the table and led the Seder. At my son’s bris, I was the one obligated by the guests’ response: “‘just as you brought him into the covenant, so too should you bring him in to Torah, to chuppah, and to good deeds.” It was an exhausting job to do alone and I was often angry that he was so absent. He worked long days and relaxed by cycling on the weekends. I started studying Talmud and volunteering for my shul. While studying Masechet Gittin (the tractate of the Talmud dealing with Jewish divorce), I began divorce proceedings.
I tell my children: never marry out. They tell me I’m being hypocritical. I say: learn from my experience. My children are now grown up and have mostly left home. I have a new boyfriend. Everyone wants him to be Jewish, but he isn’t. Turns out I didn’t learn from my experience, either. It doesn’t look like I will be married under a chuppah in this lifetime. I hope my children do better than me. I hope they find value in our tradition and that they have the strength and good luck to pass it on to their children. But as Ben Sira says, quoted in Yevamot 63b: “Don’t worry about tomorrow’s trouble, because you don’t know what the day may beget. Tomorrow may come and you will be no more and so you have worried about a world which is not yours.”
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