Faith in love

I grew up in a secular Jewish home in New Haven, Conn., among WASPs and WASP wannabes. Our unique family ritual, established long ago and still enacted with care, is this: We have two martinis before we sit down to the Passover meal. The culture of my upbringing, then, was more college-town than anything else. We didn't belong to a Temple. We didn't have bar or bat mitzvahs. My parents can read the siddur, but we, their three children, can't. No one ever told me I should marry a Jewish man.

That's not totally true. Once, fishing (I understood that some families cared about such things), I asked my grandfather if I should marry a Jew. He, together with my grandmother and my mother, just out of diapers, had fled Europe in the spring of 1940 and arrived safely in New York City a year later. He said, "It would be better, because when the Nazis come again, you want your husband to be on your side." I thought he was crazy and said so.

Every girl, they say, has a "type." Mine was not Jewish. I liked sweet, boyish men often from large Catholic families. And so I married one. Ours was an interfaith ceremony, performed under a chupa by an Episcopalian priest who worked with a rabbi to create a service that included both of our traditions. He knew us, and loved us, and that mattered more to each of us than denomination.

It wasn't until I had a child that I started to care, in a serious way, about being Jewish - beyond the ceremonial preparation of brisket and matzoh balls. My thinking goes like this: I am connected by blood and history and culture to a people who have been telling the same stories to each other for more than three thousand years. My own family story - my grandparents' escape from Europe, their flight, their anxiety, their success - was such a dominant theme in my growing up that I didn't think of it as particularly Jewish. It was who we were. Only in marrying a non-Jew did I become aware of how much of the Jewish story one learns by osmosis. Without two Jewish parents, my child would not absorb these stories automatically. We would have to teach them to her.

And so we joined the Temple. My daughter and I go, every Saturday morning. Together, we're learning the prayers. My husband supports us, though he rarely joins -- partially because he's ambivalent about God, and partially because this is not his tradition and he feels like a foreigner there. During the Shema, Judaism's ancient declaration of monotheism, I always weep. The words are so simple - Hear, Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is One - and in saying them my daughter and I are connected backward and forward in time to the generations and I feel that in my way, I am giving her access to the stories and the history of our people. I am helping her learn the language and questions of the Jewish tradition.

Yet aspects of the tradition trouble me. Ours is a progressive, inclusive congregation: many of the families in the community are, like mine, intermarried. We thank God on Saturday mornings for giving us eyes to see, and air to breathe and legs to stand on. But what does it mean to thank God that he made us Jewish? What about the members of our families who are not Jewish? What about all the people in our lives, whom we love like family, who are not Jewish? The durability of our tradition can be attributed, in part, to our exclusivity - but exclusivity is not, in my opinion, a flag to fly proudly. My husband and I married each other despite our differences, which, in today's world are not very great at all. Where is the place to glorify the love that transcends difference, without demanding allegiance to one tribe or another?

The answer came to me from a friend, a man who has a white mother and a black father, who married a Jew and raised his children Jewish. "This is the new world," he said. "Deal with it." He's right, of course. If my husband and I were of different races rather than different religious backgrounds, our daughter would no more be able to "choose" her identity than she would the color of our skin. So in our house, we celebrate everything. Our Jewish daughter knows about her Jewish heritage and can say the Shema. She also knows that she comes from generations of French and Irish Catholics, and WASPs, and Native Americans on her father's side. She's obsessed with the statue of the Virgin Mary in the garden of the church down the street. She believes in Santa and we celebrate Christmas -- with a tree, and lights, and bright green cookies made of Rice Krispies. She sees now what sophisticated readers of the Bible learn later in life: that the stories of Jesus and Moses are remarkably similar. And if this abandonment of orthodoxy causes her father or me occasional discomfort - and it does - I remind myself I believe in a God whose love extends beyond the tribe.

Lisa Miller is Newsweek's Religion Editor and author of "Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With the Afterlife," coming in April from HarperCollins.

By Lisa Miller  |  November 12, 2009; 12:41 PM ET Save & Share:                 
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