Keruv: Conservative Judaism Begins to Welcome Outreach
I don't want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member,” Groucho Marx said, famously and apparently over and over again.
For years, understandably, that was the Jewish world’s approach to outsiders. Go away. Don’t bother me. And when the Jewish community was lucky, it was left alone. When the outside world came pounding on the walls of the ghetto, it was rarely to marry the Jews who lived behind them. More recently, as recently as just a few decades ago, often the Jews who married non-Jews chose to leave the Jewish world behind them, their marriages part of a sometimes unconscious exit strategy.
Things have changed. Now Jews and non- Jews mingle, seamlessly part of the same world. Now when Jews and non-Jews marry it’s not a statement of anything except love.
The organized Jewish community has been slow to respond, slow to reach out to welcome those Jews who married out but still want in and the spouses who are willing to join them, at least in some ways, at least some of the time. Outreach, or keruv, in fact, has rarely been a Jewish community specialty, as single people, gay men and lesbians, and people with disabilities all know.
As the numbers of interfaith families has grown and the numbers of people who do not have anyone intermarried in their extended families has plummeted, the Conservative movement has begun to take a unified approach. Until now, each synagogue or organization has gone it alone, but last year the Leadership Council for Conservative Judaism, which represents 16 groups, commissioned a subcommittee of representatives from four of its members to establish a set of guiding principles that could inform each community’s response.
Starting with a few absolutes – Jewish law, halachah, determines what we can do, although interpretations of halachah can vary, and Conservative rabbis cannot perform intermarriages, or even be present at them – and with a mandate to develop a set of principles that would make clear the movement’s heartfelt desire to be inclusive, the committee began its deliberations.
Rabbi Robert Slosberg of Adath Jeshurun in Louisville, Kentucky, the committee’s co-chair, said, “We’ll never all be exactly on the same page, and I don’t want us to be, but the movement is taking a double-edged approach, both encouraging conversion and welcoming people who are not at all interested in converting but still want to have some connection to the community. Outreach may lead to conversion if that is what the person desires, but even if it doesn’t, the notion of being welcoming and inviting and loving, of making people feel embraced, is to me what the Conservative movement is all about.”
The question of conversion is the hard one, the one that often has functioned as the third rail in the keruv debate. The committee looked for the exact balancing point between the desire to encourage conversion and the desire to welcome with whole and open hearts people who do not yet or who might never want to convert; to value conversion and to value the choice to remain a supportive, committed non-Jew. “On the one hand, we want to foster Jewish marriage and family life, and on the other we are realistic, and know that there are many interfaith couples. We want them to feel welcome. We want them to know that we care about them, that we’re not an elite, closed society. We want to welcome them.”
This is a balance done on razor wire.
Rabbi Slosberg was driven by the need for outreach that he has seen during the more than 20 years he’s been in his pulpit. Toward the beginning of his career, he reported, he had given the sermon that was an accurate description of his beliefs but was so badly misinterpreted that he wished he could have taken it back and tried it again.
“The sermon was a bomb,” he said. “It basically was the most controversial sermon I ever gave. I talked about how the rabbis had struggled with keruv in the Talmud, and I talked about the teaching that you should pull away with your left hand and pull in with your right.”
Because the issue is so heated and so deeply personal, because some people were hurt by it and others were so worried by it, “All people heard was the push away part,” Rabbi Slosberg said. “They didn’t hear the part about the other hand pulling toward you.” He knew then that it was something he had to continue to address.
“I’ve been putting together interfaith ceremonies for couples for about 15 years,” he said. “I work with the couple, I become the rabbi for both of them, and then I get the judge or justice of the peace. I write the talk that will be read there. It’s a spiritual ceremony. I can’t be there – I won’t be there – but I know that people have found these ceremonies to be very meaningful.” Often both newlyweds continue to think of him as their rabbi, and often but not always they will join his shul.
One of the judges who has done these ceremonies is himself the father of an Adath Jeshurun family, “a theist, not Jewish, married to a Jewish woman. He and his wife raised their kids with a deep love of Judaism. At his son’s bar mitzvah he gave one of the most brilliant talks on the Torah portion I have ever heard – ever! – and so I figured he’d be a natural person to work with. He understands the challenges.
“He’s a prime example of how keruv works.”
This creative adaptation is an example of how the committee worked as it came up with the principles, and then with a brochure explaining them. The committee was made of six people representing United Synagogue, Women’s League, FJMC, and the Rabbinical Assembly. Rabbi Slosberg is an RA member, and the other co-chair, Art Spar, is a very active member of FJMC.
The FJMC was first in the field; it began keruv programming about 10 years ago, Mr. Spar pointed out. “It was very clear to me that intermarried families were not welcomed. I was president of my congregation, Temple Israel, in Sharon, Massachusetts. At that time, people who were intermarried were less likely to receive an honor on the high holy days.” The names of the non-Jewish spouses routinely were left off mailings. “An intermarried couple made a very generous donation to the synagogue, and the thank you was addressed only to the Jewish one.” Not, he hastened to add, that Temple Israel was at all unusual; no, it was representative.
In 2008, Women’s League acknowledged that its affiliated sisterhoods could provide the knowledge, skills, and experience necessary to help the non-Jewish women in their congregations create Jewish homes and Jewish families, so it opened its membership to any woman who supported its mission. Women’s League encouraged its sisterhoods to be warm and welcoming gateways to all women, no matter where they are – married to Jews, raising Jewish children, thinking about conversion, or in the process of conversion. The sisterhoods’ goal is to provide those women with all the support and encouragement they need.
“I think that very slowly a sensitivity has developed and synagogue behavior is beginning to change,” Mr. Spar said. “We’re not talking about halachic behavior, but about how people relate to other people. Not to mention demographics, which are not working in favor of endogamy. More and more families are being affected, and we have to reach out with compassion and welcome to those families. This is a cultural change more than it is a legal one. We’re very pleased with the changes that have begun to take place.”
Rabbi Paul Drazen, who is United Synagogue’s chief program development officer and represented United Synagogue on the committee, points out that although interfaith families are the hot-button keruv issue, “interfaith is just one aspect of outreach. Keruv is much broader. We’re also looking for the searching Jew, and the Jew who was raised in a culturally but not religiously Jewish home. Those people also have to feel welcomed. The welcome mat has to be really big.
“There are subtleties in welcoming. We can say ‘We welcome you’ with words, but we have to make sure that the subtleties of action are there, too. For example, we welcome people who are deaf or hard of hearing, but we have to be sure that we have the right kind of assistive hearing devices. And I personally consider a transliteration of the Hebrew in the siddur to be an act of welcoming. It gives people the chance to sing along.”
Keruv, Rabbi Drazen said, is a complex concept, and it’s not just about intermarriage. Rabbi Slosberg agrees. “Keruv represents an experience that can’t be limited by words,” he said. “Keruv is more than principles, and more than just outreach. It’s an experience, it’s an attitude, it’s a sense of embracing, of partnering, of welcoming.”
As the brochure the committee created says, “We invite you to be part of our community.”
