In my last year as a rabbinical student, I applied for a job with a congregation. Among the questions that came up: What’s your view of intermarriage? One of the reasons they didn’t hire me is that I candidly described how, as a college student years before, I had been briefly engaged to a non-Jewish woman. I was ambivalent on the question, and only after many years into my rabbinic career did I agree to officiate at a marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew who had no desire to become Jewish. My conditions were that the couple would have a Jewish household and, if it had children, raise them as Jews. Well before that decision, I was already doubting whether the intermarriage taboo – reflecting centuries of Jewish suspicion and hostility toward non-Jews – makes sense.
The fact that a religion can reflect and project or even promote biases of the culture from which it arose has always bedeviled Judaism. Standing in tension with Judaism’s universalistic, pluralistic strain – reflecting a prophetic or perhaps utopian ethos – stands an ethnocentric, particularistic tendency, inward-looking, cautious, wary of friendly overtures or gestures of inclusion from outside. A strong hint of friction between those two perpetually feuding attitudes surfaces in this week’s parashah / Torah portion, Chayey Sarah, and is instructive for us as we wrestle with Jewish identities and sympathies.
We can turn to many examples of how cultural bias affects (some say “corrupts”) Jewish experience, an obvious case being misogyny, a perennial blight on religion, politics and society as a whole throughout history – Jewish history being no exception. Fear of and contempt for women surfaces throughout the Torah. A subtextual element of anti-woman prejudice the parashah betrays is, ironically, bound up with a possibly accurate assessment of women’s essential role as culture-bearers; the authors of the Torah plausibly felt that children depend on their mothers as much as, or even more than, on their fathers for guidance in maturation and socialization; thus, in the hands-on transmission of values from generation to generation.
That, in the broad scope of family experience, maternal influence on children matters greatly was not lost on those writers. In accordance with such an awareness, Abraham (see Genesis 24) instructs his servant to travel from Canaan, in which Abraham has settled, to Haran in Aram, the home turf of Abraham and his family after they migrated from Ur in Chaldea. The servant’s mission is to find a wife for Abraham’s son Isaac.
Abraham forbids a marriage between Isaac and any local, Canaanite woman and insists that instead the servant find a wife for Isaac from Abraham’s own kin in Haran. At the same time, Abraham insists Isaac’s bride be brought to Canaan to marry him there and forbids letting him set up a household in Haran. The preference for marriage within one’s own group (endogamy) and prohibition against intermarriage (exogamy) with Canaanite women echoes a theme that runs throughout Hebrew Scripture: Women steeped in idolatrous customs will corrupt the morals of Israelite/Jewish men.
But if the local social milieu’s corrosive influence is so strong to begin with, why live in Canaan, a setting that conjures up the ever-present lure of idolatry in the form of tempting, seductive women who will lead Abraham’s descendants into worship of false gods? What’s the actual appeal of Canaan as an environment in which to establish a future for the offspring of Abraham?
Canaan is, nonetheless, where God says their destiny must play out. Instead of cloistering themselves in an ancestral safe zone (shtetl, ghetto), Jews must go out to meet the world, grapple with its risks, face its trials, many of them unpleasant or uncomfortable or unpredictable, interact with people in it, and help shape its development. It is that place where God wants Israel to go, survive, strive and somehow thrive. Canaan represents the possibility of Jewish engagement with the real (i.e., tumultuous, complicated, difficult) world. With all the difficulties and conflicts it presents, Canaan is still a land flowing with milk and honey (Exodus 3:8) – the prophets’ vision of a place where “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb (Isaiah 11:6): the embodiment of messianic hope.
That hope is achievable in our own real, flawed, contradictory existence. Abraham’s two-fold requirement is that Isaac marry someone who shares his values and that the couple live in a culturally and religiously heterogeneous (diverse) land. The double expectation means, in practical terms, seeking to maintain our cultural integrity without putting up walls to block out people and behaviors we find problematic. Our biases may inform but needn’t straitjacket our decisions.
I see in Abraham’s expectation for Isaac a challenge for us as well: how to stand up for the best that Jewish tradition has to offer while not losing sight of the benefits of interaction and communication with the life around us. At that job interview so long ago, I might’ve given a slicker response to the question from that rabbi search committee, but I’m not ashamed of having told the truth about myself. Does a Jewish man’s marrying a non-Jewish woman spell doom for the Jewish future?
In the big picture, one’s religious background matters less than one’s spiritual intention and commitment. Mine are (and I hope Abraham, if he had lived so long, would agree!) to bring Jewish tradition to bear upon challenges facing us in the real world.