Tevya, Torah, and Jewish Identity (Part I)

GUEST POST BY THE CANDYMAN

"Behold, I am sending to you Elijah the prophet... and he will return fathers' hearts to their children, and childrens' hearts to their fathers, lest I come and destroy the entire world." (Malachi 3:23-24)

My family is a big part of my life. I was raised an Orthodox Jew, and this is a big part of my family's identity. I rejected Orthodoxy for many reasons, but I did it quietly. I always tried to spare my family from the pain I was feeling, and from all of the things that bugged me about the religion. I never sent a big e-mail, saying, Hey, I'm not Orthodox anymore. Nevertheless, my family sensed that something had changed. As time went by, we occasionally argued about stuff, which maybe we should not have done, but we still got along pretty well. Even today, despite all of our differences, we all still love each other.

As everyone who reads this blog probably knows, my girlfriend (let's call her "H") is not Jewish. My family's reaction to my seriously dating her has been mixed. No one is thrilled. My father took it the hardest. When I first told him, he totally flipped out. "This is like a cancer," he said. "If you continue in this way, I will have to cut you off to protect the rest of the family." True to form, I haven't received an unsolicited phone call from my father for more than a year.

Nevertheless, my father and I get along when I do call him, every month or two. (In fact, I owe him a call.) And I am still welcome to visit my parents' house, and when I do my father and I get along as if nothing had happened. I live across the country, so unfortunately that opportunity doesn't arise very often.

My mother and siblings range in their feelings from "perpetually sad" (my Mom) to "concerned but rational" (my brother). Overall, it is not exactly the supportive reaction I would have liked to see, or even expected. Nevertheless, for a group to whom Orthodoxy is basically everything, they have shown some flexibility. A year and a half later, my mother--who is deeply grieved about the whole thing--occasionally asks me about my relationship. I have had some decent discussions with my brother about the possibility of a halakhic conversion. My sister even 'met' H on a videocall. Remember, these are Orthodox Jews -- I know that for them this takes a lot of effort, and I am thankful for that.

Right now my girlfriend and I are long-distance, and we are not engaged. There's no sense of urgency, which is probably a good thing. However, I worry about the time in the not-so-distant future when our lives will overlap more with my family's. My father has made clear that he wants nothing to do with my girlfriend, which will make it difficult to visit my parents. The rest of my family is caught between me and my dad.

(Abandoning Eden is currently dealing with a similar crisis. Her parents refuse to have anything to do with her fiancee, B. Since she and B are joined at the hip, Eden's parents have effectively cut her off. She's not pleased about the situation, but she's done a wonderful job coping with her father's ultimatums.)

The one bright spot in all this is that it's helped me understand much better my family's ideas and positions. In arguments with my parents (which I had a lot of in the first year of the relationship, but thankfully not anymore), I began to understand that my rejection of Orthodoxy did not go unnoticed. Indeed, it caused a tremendous amount of pain to my parents, as well as my family. From this standpoint, interreligious dating was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. So when I started dating H, a lot of crap we should have worked through years ago rose to the surface. Unfortunately, after years of bottling it up on both sides, it didn't work out very well.

Still, I understand my parents a lot better now. Orthodox Judaism, especially their own local community, lies at the very heart of their identities. To them, the idea of an intermarriage is a big slap in the face. There is a tremendous amount of shame they feel -- like they failed. This sense of shame is compounded by being in a very enmeshed community. It's all a little like Fiddler on the Roof. And like Tevya, my father feels that the proper response to an intermarried child is to sit shiva -- the traditional seven days of mourning for a loved one.

But is that the proper response? After all, Tevya was not an educated man. To what extent should we base our actions on Fiddler on the Roof?

My father has never consulted with a rabbi about my actions, although I have suggested it many times. I imagine the same is true of AE's parents. Certainly, this makes for great drama. But is it halakha?

Both my family and I have strong Jewish identities, but those identities have different roots. My own Jewish identity was forged in a crucible of influences. Some of these, such as the Bible and Mishna, are shared between me and my family. Others go much deeper -- an offhand comment that stuck in my mind for years, a good friend who showed me how to lighten up. I suspect, in a Hume-ian fashion, that our morality, our political, religious, and ethical views, stem largely from our sense of identity. In a nutshell, your neighborhood has a tremendous impact on how you think and what you find acceptable. And identities are fluid. Change your neighborhood, change your identity.

What we call our Judaism is, in fact, a picking and choosing -- whether you are Orthodox or Reform, Humanist or a gastronomic Jew. What happens is, we gain a sense of identity, and use that as our lens through which we understand our "tradition." My family has one neighborhood, and I have another one. They don't get my Judaism, and to be honest with you, I don't get theirs. But our identities are also enmeshed with each other, because we're family.

Over the next few posts, I'll be telling my story. Sharing some of my own influences. Giving you a tour of my neighborhood. I'm not going to argue right or wrong here, I'm just going to share my POV. I'll go deep into some of those influences I talked about, and how they affect my own Jewish lens.

I know there are skeptics out there -- skeptics! -- who still don't feel comfortable with the idea of a Jewish/Christian intermarriage. Who still get a reflex twitch. And perhaps there are a few Orthos who read the blog and who are thinking to themselves, "Well, I'd never intermarry but it doesn't seem like such a terrible sin to me." I'm addressing you folks. I'm going to share my ideas with you, my Torah, and I hope you'll share yours back with me, as well as the personal experiences that shaped your own version of Judaism, your own Jewish identity.

Ultimately, will Judaism tear my family apart? I don't know. What I do know is that what changes our ideas, what changes our minds, is when we step outside our comfort zone and into the head and heart of another person, even for just a few seconds. When we travel. When we share with each other. When we open our hearts. And it's a two-way street. I hope we can get a little of that going in this discussion. Sometimes when the books close, the learning begins.