Love and Marriage

What Happens Next?

You’re not marrying two people. You’re officiating their marriage!

That was a pet peeve of a teacher in rabbinical school when all of us baby rabbis started officiating weddings. She would lovingly admonish us when we used that former turn of phrase, which despite being a bit pedantic, was accurate. After all, we were up there as spiritual curators of an emotional and legal covenant being sealed.

Thankfully since then I have had the great privilege to stand with many couples under the chuppah. It really is a privilege. There is something ethereal when two people come together in that moment. The Jewish rituals surrounding a wedding only serve to enhance that.

All those couples with whom I have worked so far have been made up of two Jewish individuals. Part of that is because of my own ideological belief system and the other is because one of the few things forbidden to rabbis that are part of the Rabbinical Assembly (for all intents and purposes, the union for Conservative rabbis) was to officiate at an interfaith wedding.

This has long been a calling card of the Conservative movement. As it has battled the tension between an obedience to the Jewish legal tradition and modernity, it has grappled strongly with this growing trend. For a long time, Rabbis were forbidden to even attend such weddings but then those rules were relaxed. And now, the question has been raised again by a colleague and synagogue in Minnesota.

Once that news hit, you can imagine the kerfuffle it raised within the various platforms of Conservative Rabbis. Admittedly, it is a hot button topic and you’d expect clergy to engage in a manner befitting of the title but alas, Rabbis are humans too and many have fallen prey to their worse angels as they’ve resorted to name calling and disparaging remarks.

Now I should tell you I have yet to officiate an interfaith wedding, but I did leave the Rabbinical Assembly last year for a number of ideological differences. While I am not totally clear on where I stand, I do know I am more open to officiating at such a wedding and I felt inauthentic and lacking integrity to remain a part of that body.

That first clause is key for me. I really don’t know the best course of action to chart. Much of the dialogue around this decision feels akin to the rearranging of deck chairs of the Titanic.

Surely, this will be the death knell of the Conservative movement,

many argue. But I look around and wonder, is it really?

If we really are halakhic, how we can we support such a decision?

Well, I guess that depends on what you mean by halakhic, I think to myself. After all, most laity in the movement pick and choose and *whispers* so do the clergy.

How could I give my imprimatur to such a union?

Do we really think couples are thinking back to the authority of their rabbi for the decisions they do or don’t make religiously?

If the numbers of intermarriages continue to rise and the movement of the Conservative movement continues to dwindle, a real decision will need to be made by each individual rabbi depending on what the movement declares. But I am not writing this for them; this is my own internal dialogue.

The truth is, there is a whole lot of flexibility within the Jewish legal structure when it comes to weddings. We’ve seen this over the years with egalitarian driven creativity, ring ceremony procedurals, and vows declarations that would’ve made the rabbis of yore flip their lids.

Jewish weddings, known as Kiddushin, only work through a legal mechanism that applies to two Jewish people. In other words, Kiddushin doesn’t work for someone who isn’t Jewish, but other frameworks would. Rituals would need to be created, language altered, and structures recalibrated to make it work for one Jewish and one not Jewish individual, but I can’t help but wonder about that old adage,

if there’s a halakhic will, there’s a halakhic way.

To be clear, when we’re playing in the sandbox of laws explicit in the Torah (which marrying outside the faith is), the weight of reinterpreting them is a bit heavy, and yet I still find myself at this crossroads.

So where we go, I don’t quite know nor do I know where I go. That uncertainty has me rethinking my whole approach to this because people are continuing to love and marry and I find the role I can play in that powerful and meaningful. As I sort through all of this, I am reminded of an ancient teaching of Maimonides. He was grappling with what we he perceived as the outdated practice of sacrifice which is a very clear part of our Torah and yet he found ethically problematic. So why does the Torah require it and why do we do it?

For a sudden transition from one opposite to another is impossible. And therefore man, according to his nature, is not capable of abandoning suddenly all to which he was accustomed….Therefore God, may God be exalted, suffered the above-mentioned kinds of worship to remain, but transferred them from created or imaginary and unreal things to God’s own name…commanding us to practice them with regard to the Divine.¹

In other words, sacrifice was problematic. But for humans to go from being fully consumed with it and surrounded by it in larger culture, they needed to slowly wean themselves off it via a set of strictures that would ultimately lead them to abrogate the whole system. The cases aren’t directly comparable but the spirit behind the thinking is convincing. There are creative ways to think about every matter of the legal tradition. I strongly believe that this is not different.

Back when I was “marrying people” before my teacher helped me reframe, I felt pretty strongly about endogamy. Now, as I think of myself as an officiant and a steward, I feel pretty differently about this. Maybe that’s my own transformation, maybe that’s the larger cultural trends, or maybe it’s all the chuppahs I have stood under and wondered what if?

The ground is shifting beneath our feet. Having said no to enough couples and seeing where reality is headed, I am left curious. As Maimonides noted, a sudden transition is impossible. But if we can take little steps, thinking creatively, and acting boldly, maybe now is time to protect the whole and give folks the access to the vast array of creative Jewish rituals out there.

Shabbat Shalom and Happy Weekend!

1. Guide to the Perplexed 2:3:32