Can 'good Jews' marry out?

I've gotten a bit fed up with a lot of the rhetoric in the Judeosphere about intermarriage, even the rhetoric coming from the people who are officially nice to use. I guess my real problem is that no matter how accurate the model may be for the majority of interfaith families, it really doesn't fit the reality of most of the Jews I know in interfaith relationship, including my own.

First of all, anything specifically for interfaith families is classified as 'outreach'. This gives an impression like this:

If anything catering to interfaith families is 'outreach' it implies that all interfaith families must be 'outside' of the group of Jews who are inside the fold of good, involved Jews. This just doesn't match my experience of Jews in interfaith relationships. Obviously there's sampling bias, I know most of my Jewish friends through religious activities so obviously all of my Jewish friends are more likely to be religiously involved, but still, it proves we exist. Does it make sense to talk about outreach to the girl who organised the J-soc ball and ran the J-soc kitchen for a year? I also don't think that my friends are as aberrant as most people think. One of my friends claims that about half the regulars at my shul are in interfaith families. I don't know because you can't tell with most people. In terms of synagogue attendance, there doesn't seem to be much difference between interfaith families and single faith families. One thing I have noticed is that I don't think that the families who are involved in the running of the shul, the people on the important committees, are in interfaith relationships. This could be my imagination and lack of knowledge but I think it's the case.

This would match my feeling about the situation of interfaith families in Jewish communities. It is really easy in non-Orthodox communities to be an ordinary active Jew in an interfaith relationship. There are enough of us that the stigma can't persist at a level which is high enough to keep us out of shul. However, if you want to move on to take any kind of leadership position in the Jewish community, the stigma surrounding having a non-Jewish spouse will start to be enough to be a barrier. Sometimes this barrier is explicit. There are no rabbinic colleges which would accept a student with a non-Jewish partner. You can be as shomer kashrut, as shomer shabbat as you like, but if you're married to a shiksa there's no place for you. I have had conversations with women who want to be shomer niddar but are terrified that they will be found out as having a non-Jewish husband and excluded from the mikvah. This isn't a baseless fear as I've also heard of women actually being excluded from a mikvah because their husband isn't Jewish. I think a more subtle internalized pressure exists in other realms, that if you tried to enter leadership positions in Jewish institutions you'd be getting above your place. I don't know if this is my imagination, but it seems far more of a barrier to Jewish involvement than the inherent difficulties of managing a household which contains more than one faith.

I think that this leads to a sort of circular logic in relationship to interfaith families. Jews in interfaith relationships are seen as not as committed to Judaism and this is proven by looking around the Jewish leadership and seeing the lack of intermarried Jews. This impression can then be used to exclude intermarried Jews from those positions of leadership because marrying a Jew is used as a shibboleth of whether you're a committed Jew. Referring to all worked targeted at interfaith families as 'outreach' only reinforces this exclusionary meme.

So what do I want? I want Jewish institutions to accept the fact that there are good, involved committed Jews who are married to non-Jews and the how the way in which they frame including interfaith families in Jewish communities actually has exclusionary effects upon these Jews. I want the dialogue of how to live as interfaith families to move on from just 'the December Dilemma' and conversion. Jews are living rich authentic observant lives in interfaith families and the rest of the Jewish community isn't providing what they need because it isn't talking about hot to practice family purity when one partner isn't Jewish, it isn't talking about how shabbat and Pesach when one person in a family isn't obligated, it isn't talking about what mitzvot a non-Jewish father can help his Jewish children to observe, it isn't talking about halachic frameworks for acknowledging interfaith marriages. Ultimately I want not marrying a non-Jew to stop being the ultimate test of whether someone is a good Jew. I'm happy for rabbinic colleges to look favourably upon intramarriage but I want them to treat it the same as other mitzvot, the practice of which aren't an automatic deciding factor. Today, people don't marry out because they aren't committed to Judaism, they marry out because they fall in love with a non-Jew and they don't think that intermarriage is an ultimate taboo and they've seen happy interfaith families, so on the balance of things they go with their heart and try to work out a way in which their love for their spouse and their religion can coexist.

Left-wing Christians and antisemitism

I was faffing on the internet and came across this. It struck me as a bit off and you can see my reply to it. The thing I found objectionable wasn't so much their anti-Zionism in itself, although I'm never going to agree with a position that removes the country of many millions of Jews, it was the fact that the 'occupation of Palestine' was the only conflict they mentioned specifically. There are 2 billion Christians in the world. The whole of the EU, the US, Canada, Australia and Russia are all Christian majority, at least culturally speaking. Could they not have found a conflict involving Christian majority powers to have mentioned? It just strikes me as a bit odd and clueless. If you're going to have a group of left wing members of group X, which has huge amounts of privilege compared to group Y, which has been oppressed by group X for hundreds of years, starting off by criticising a large section of group Y for being all nasty and oppressive is probably the wrong way to go. It's a bit like a group of middle-class feminists focussing on domestic violence among the working classes. Stop trying to make yourselves feel better by concentrating on the perceived misdeeds of a group you've othered. It never ends well.

Unrelated to Israel, is the other thing which makes me get twitchy around some left-wing Christians. A tendency toward Marcionism. Angela Tilby gave a lovely sermon about this heresy which is reprinted in Heresies and How to Avoid them. The problem comes that if you are a nice liberal Christian there are lots of bits of the Bible which aren't so nice and liberal and lots of actions of the early church weren't so nice and liberal either. So they have a bit of a problem. So, like Marcion, some of them decide that bits of the Bible are 'inauthentic' and edit those bits out. In the late 1990s the Jesus Seminars colour coded the Gospels to show what was authentic and inauthentic accounts of the words of Jesus. Oddly enough this left wing group came up with a picture of Jesus who was an anti-authoritarian hippy who wasn't big on rules.

According to Angela Tilby, antisemitism is one of the diagnostic tests of slipping into Marcionism. Marcion attributed the bits of Gospel he disagreed with to the Gospel having been corrupted by Jews. Left-wing Christians tend not to go in for that sort of conspiracy theory, but they do sometimes tend to attribute any bits of the Bible they don't like to the patriarchal nastiness of the culture its authors came from, and guess which culture that was. Acknowledging that all writings which have been written so far have been written within and influenced by patriarchy is a perfectly sensible thing to do, but sometimes it turns into externalisation, if one doesn't acknowledge the patriarchy of one's own tradition. There's a strain of left-wing Christianity which portrays Jesus and Christianity as this great liberation from patriarchy, homophobia etc. This works to better effect if you can portray what came before as really really patriarchal and if you shift all of the troubling bits of Christianity to Judaism. So some Christians forget that 'love your neighbour as yourself' appears in that much maligned book, Leviticus (Leviticus also instructs us to love the stranger as ourselves, so we've got everyone covered) and ascribe anything which might seem a bit sexist in Paul to his Jewish side getting the better of him. In its most extreme manifestation German Protestant feminist theologian, Christa Mulack, saw Judaism as analogous to Nazism, obedience to the commandments of G@d as analogous to obedience to the commandments of Hitler. She saw Judaism as the source of patriarchy and therefore responsible for all genocides of Western civilisation, including the Holocaust.

Rhetoric like that is bad enough in the pulpit, but the idea of The Jews as wicked, violent, sexist and militaristic compared to pacifistic feminist Christianity can easier spread from the pulpit into the streets and everyday and political discourse. I suppose this is where it comes full circle. I can understand why Western Christians would be genuinely concerned about the welfare of Palestinians. However, when Christians fixate on the misdeeds of Israel to the exclusion of consideration of any other conflicts, particularly those involving Christian aggressors, one has to worry that the Marcionite habit of externalising all the sins of patriarchy to the Jews has reared its head again.