Shalom from Las Vegas, where I am spending the week learning from and with hundreds of my colleagues at the annual Rabbinical Assembly convention. I look forward to sharing some of my experiences with you this coming Shabbat, and will post some reflections about the conference in next week’s Monday Morning Message.
In the meantime, as we have been building our Torat El community, one of the things I have been considering is how we can strive to be more welcoming to intermarried families who want to make Judaism a serious part of their lives. As I am sure many of you know, the Conservative movement has undergone a shift related to this issue over the past decade, and has begun to prioritize proactively welcoming intermarried families into our midst. While we have certain limitations when it comes to ritual practice and rabbinic officiation at interfaith weddings, we as Conservative Jews can and must do all that we can to build a space in our community for intermarried couples who wish to live Jewish lives and raise Jewish families.
When I first became a rabbi, I was privileged to attend a conference focused on a book entitled: A Place in the Tent: Intermarriage and Conservative Judaism. This conference explored how the Conservative Jewish community could work to be more welcoming to this increasingly large segment of our community. Over the past seven years, I have also been involved with the Jewish Outreach Institute, an organization committed to inclusivity and outreach ( www.joi.org). These experiences coupled with my personal interactions with many intermarried families (including many in our CTE community) require me to ask whether we are doing enough to be supportive of them, and what more we might be able to do to attract unaffiliated intermarried families who are seeking a connection to the Jewish community. We could also be doing more to reach out to parents and grandparents in our community who have intermarried children and grandchildren and who are dealing with the challenges and opportunities that come along with these family dynamics.
The question for all of us to consider is how might we begin to be more proactive about this topic?
One idea can be found in this video, promoting the idea of a Keruv (outreach) group for intermarried families in our synagogue. The video is found on the website of the Federation of Jewish Men’s club, an organization that has been involved in outreach to intermarried families for a few decades. http://www.fjmc.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=62&Itemid=84
The second idea concerns two support groups that are run through JOI. The first is a “Mother’s Circle” group, which serves as a resource and support for non-Jewish mothers raising Jewish children ( http://themotherscircle.org/) and the second is a “Grandparents’ Circle” which serves to educate and support Jewish grandparents whose adult children have intermarried ( http://joi.org/grandparents/).
All of these programs are useful, and there are a number of ways that CTE could grow when it comes to this topic. The question is: Where should we start? What do you think? As always, I am looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this topic as we continue to explore ways in which we might strive to build an inclusive and welcoming community.