Arthur Blecher and The New American Judaism

DID YOU KNOW?...

• The American Jewish community is in imminent danger of extinction?
• Judaism, as it is practiced today, is a religious faith tradition that extends back 4,000 years?
• The shtetl of Old World Europe was an idyllic Jewish utopia of shared faith practices, community values and ethnic pride?
• The Jewish people and Judaism as a faith tradition have never entertained any supernatural notions such as angels, demons, Heaven and Hell the way that Christians and others do.
• American Jewish denominations are authoritative forms of Judaism?
• Rabbis are the official leaders of Jewish congregations, as they have been throughout Jewish history?

If you know or otherwise believe these statements, it is likely that you are an American Jew, and even more likely that you are an observant American Jew who is a member in good standing of an Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or Reconstructionist synagogue. If you know or otherwise believe these statements, it is less likely, but still possible, that you are a non-Jew who is still familiar with these statements and accept them as fact. Both of you have one thing in common: you have been on the receiving end of an intensive campaign conceived of and executed by the mainstream Jewish denominations to motivate American Jews to strictly adhere to traditional Jewish practices. Oh, and you have one other thing in common: you're both wrong to believe that any of these six statements is a truthful representation of fact.

This is the central premise of Rabbi Arthur Blecher's new book, The New American Judaism: The Way Forward on Challenging Issues from Intermarriage to Jewish Identity. His book is an revolutionary thunderbolt, issued as a direct challenge to the authority of American denominational Judaism, for it strives to expand the ways in which Jewish identity can be expressed and seeks to bestow full Jewish status upon intermarried and other apostate Jews.

As a rabbi and psychotherapist, Rabbi Blecher (aka, "The Unorthodox Rabbi") has had the opportunity to interact with and counsel many interfaith couples in Washington, DC over the past twenty-five years. Because the choice to marry a non-Jew is actively discouraged by denominational Judaism, Rabbi Blecher has also been called upon to provide counsel to Jewish parents whose children had chosen a non-Jewish spouse and for which they were experience intense emotions of conflict and guilt. He relates one such interaction with distraught parents whose rabbi had recently delivered a sermon excoriating the choice to intermarry:

"There is nothing unusual about a rabbi using guilt and fear to promote attendance at services and classes. Clerics do this sort of thing all the time, and so have I. But when a rabbi invokes the Holocaust- that is pulling out the heavy artillery. Here in my office was the same pattern I have seen in almost everything I have read in English about the Jewish religion. We were talking about Judaism in terms of continuity, authenticity and survival. As I looked at the faces and postures of this couple, as I listened to the intonations of their voices, I instinctively knew that something is amiss with how my colleagues and I go about our jobs as religious leaders. How can a community thrive based upon a discourse of anxiety and guilt and on members who feel defeated and hopeless?"

This insight sparked Rabbi Blecher's journey to re-examine what he himself had once considered to be true about American Judaism and to re-evaluate these beliefs in light of the fact that the American Jewish population is far more diverse than the mainstream denominations are willing to allow or even acknowledge. Blecher sees an American Jewish community that has organized itself around principles that applied to the trauma of displacement experienced by Jewish immigrant communities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but which no longer have any utility for modern American Jews. The organizing principles of Authenticity, Continuity and Survival became the cornerstones of American Judaism, and have remained firmly entrenched within the community's organizational bedrock, unchallenged by anyone in a position of leadership.

Until now. Rabbi Blecher's empathy for intermarried Jews and the anguish they experience has spurred him to examine and directly challenge what he labels as the one Great Myth of American Judaism: "intermarriage is an enemy destroying the Jewish people." The Great Myth of the Evil of Intermarriage has grown out of six separate myths, which he meticulously deconstructs. A cursory synopsis of this deconstruction is provided below:

Myth #1: American Judaism is Teetering On Extinction
"The myth that Judaism and Jewish identity are endangered in America was born from the trauma of cultural dislocation a century ago. The myth lives on in part because Jewish institutions believe they are essential to the preservation of Judaism in America; and the greater the peril, the more important their role."

In this one sentence, Blecher takes direct aim at scare-mongering as a self-serving tactic used on a daily basis by denominational Judaism. It is a tactic that does not hold up under close scrutiny. Using select statistics, as represented by the National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS), denominational leaders can certainly give the impression that Jewish numbers are declining in America. The 2000-2001 NJPS Report put the American Jewish population at 5.2 million, a decline from its 1990 finding of 5.5 million.

Myth-Buster: Rabbi Blecher counters that the NJPS under-counts Jewish Americans by relying exclusively upon denominational affiliation and a rigid definition of who "counts" as Jewish. As Blecher states, "Jewishness is happening in new places that do not fit the old categories." These include partial Jews raised in interfaith households, people who still claim a Jewish identity even if the American Jewish denominations will not claim them. It also includes virtual online Jewish communities and information centers such as:

• Ladino Komunita

• The Jewish Encyclopedia

• A Torah Infertility Medium of Exchange (ATIME.org)

Myth #2: Judaism is a 4,000 Year-Old Religion
American Rabbis worked to reassure immigrant Jews that the forms and practices of American Judaism are grounded in those stretching back to the dawn of Jewish civilization. Such reassurances enabled and enables the American rabbinate to offer a liturgical product that provides both Continuity and Authenticity, the cornerstones of the Jewish fortress of Survival.

Myth-Buster: Not quite, says Rabbi Blecher. Throughout its history, Judaism and its practice has gone through important transformations from within, oftentimes in response to influences from outside the Jewish community. For starters, he is able to delineate the epochal events that would transform the Judaism that followed each of these:

• The first Kingdom until the Babylonian conquest of Judea in 586 BCE: practices such as shabbat dinner and lighting candles came into existence during the exile period.
• The return from exile and the second kingdom through the year 70 of the Common Era.
• The era of rabbinic academies (rabbinic Judaism), which lasted until the Middle Ages.
• Diaspora Judaism, which was centered primarily in Eastern Europe, and which lasted until the era of Denominational Judaism, which commenced in the twentieth century United States.
  

Jewish civilization has seen many different iterations of itself throughout its 4,000 year history. The Judaism that is practiced today is not the Judaism of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and the Hebrew Prophets. And that's OK.

Myth #3: The Shtetl = Jewish Paradise Lost
Twentieth century America Jewish leaders have mythologized the Old World village known affectionately as the shtetl. At least it is known affectionately by those who have never had to live in a shtetl. The word shtetl is innocuous enough: it means "town" in Yiddish. As a word, though, it carries a great deal of symbolic and nostalgic weight among Jews who idealize what it represents. In the popular literature on the subject, the shtetl is held up as an idyllic, timeless community of Jews who live in perfect harmony, each knowing his or her role in the community, all bonded by their adherence to Orthodox Jewish rituals and practices. Blecher quotes from The Earth is the Lord's: The Inner World of the Jew in Eastern Europe, written in 1949 by theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel:

But the Jews all sang: the student over the Talmud, the tailor while sewing a pair of trousers, the cobbler while mending tattered shoes, and the preacher while delivering a sermon... The stomachs were empty, the houses were barren, but the minds were crammed with the riches of Torah... Mothers at the cradle crooned: "My little child, close your eyes; if God will, you'll be a rabbi"... (p. 77).

Tevye sings "Tradition" (Fiddler on the Roof)


Myth-Buster: "Writers who idealize the shtetl are highly selective in what they talk about. Their descriptions of the devout husbands and their devoted, long-suffering wives are amplified by intense nostalgia, in contrast to their silence about the other Jews who lived in the shtetl (p. 83)." These "other Jews" included adults who did not marry, married adults without children or who had divorced, homosexual members of the community, and others who lives did not conform with the rigid expectations of Orthodoxy in an enclosed community (which, by the way, was not always so enclosed or even small). The propagation of this myth causes American Jews to idealize and pine for a community that did not actually exist. This in turn gives rise to the unreasonable expectation that such a community could and should exist here in the United States.

Myth #4: Jews Have Always Been a Reasonable, Rational People, Traits That Have Always Been Reflected in Judaism
Modern Judaism does not teach the belief in Heaven or Hell, or in supernatural beings such as angels and demons, or even a Devil. However, modern Jews are led to believe that it was ever thus, as this notion of historic Judaism was in keeping with the rationalist bent of the founders of denominational Judaism. In order for rationality and reason to be accepted as contributing to Continuity and Authenticity, it became necessary to whitewash certain supernatural elements from Jewish history.

Myth-Buster: The need to "protect" American Jews from the fact that their forebears held supernatural beliefs does not exist now, if it ever did. Rabbi Blecher proposes a four-step plan to shed this habit and set the record straight by simply explaining that:

• Jews used to believe in Heaven and Hell, but they no longer do.
• Jews used to believe in Satan, but they no longer do.
• Jews used to believe in magic and divination, but they no longer do.
• American Judaism prefers to understand the world rationally and scientifically. (p. 117)
  

Myth #5: American Jewish Denominations are Authoritative Forms of Judaism
The four American Jewish denominations- Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist- are the authoritative versions of Jewish practice. Smaller, independent communities and fellowships such as minyans, havurot, the Society for Humanistic Judaism and others are merely offshoots of the main four branches.

Myth-Buster: While it is in the best interests of the four principal denominations to be seen and thought of as Judaism's authoritative forms, the fact is that all four of these do not meet the needs of partial/duel-identity Jews and intermarried Jews. For starters, none of the denominations will acknowledge the Jewish identity of any such congregant (and will simultaneously decry the "shrinking" Jewish population). Congregants who are partial/duel-identity Jews and those who are married to a non-Jewish spouse are provided with limited services and status at best. The "purity" model of denominational Judaism does not work in a world where more and more Jews are marrying non-Jews and/or pursuing an interest in other faith traditions in addition to his or her original Jewish heritage. It is not realistic. And those who need Judaic forms that are realistic are looking elsewhere.

Myth #6: Rabbis are the Official Leaders of Jewish Congregations
"Today every Jewish denomination assumes that each of its member congregations is led by one of the denomination's rabbis, and conversely, Americans assume that every rabbi has a congregation. Thus denominational congregations are 'rabbi-centric.'" (p. 149)

Myth-Buster: "This is a radical departure from Old World Jewish practice where the rabbi was not necessarily associated with a congregation, and not every synagogue had a rabbi. The functions of the synagogue and the duties of the rabbi were independent of each other; communities had their rabbis, and communities had their synagogues." (p. 149)

Again, each denominational organization controls their member synagogues to the extent that each rabbi who is considered for a position must be capable of demonstrating fealty to all of the teachings of the denomination- he or she is not an independent actor, as had been the case for rabbis during the centuries leading up to denominational Judaism. This, Blecher contends, is harmful to Jewish congregants, and thus harmful to Judaism itself:

"The harm is that when rabbis- whether by intention or by instinct- make inaccurate claims about the historical facts of Jewish civilization, we undermine our own position in the community. Our ability to serve new generations of American Jews requires us to give up our claims to ancient authority and to accept the fact that our professional role is a modern American creation." (pp. 160-161)

Having exhaustively researched and deconstructed these myths, Blecher's work sets its sights upon building a new American Judaism. Intermarriage is the one important issue at the heart of this goal, as Blecher sees Judaism's response to this phenomenon as critical to the success of any such endeavor. Currently, in order for an intermarried couple to be recognized by their denomination, the non-Jewish partner must at least agree to help raise the couple's children in an exclusively Jewish home, if not convert to Judaism outright. But Blecher cites data that show that at least 30 percent of intermarried couples do in fact raise their children exclusively as Jews, sometimes regardless of whether the non-Jewish spouse convert to Judaism or not.

However, his larger point is that it is completely good and valid to acknowledge the Jewish identity of any Jewish child being raised under different circumstances, in homes that are not exclusively Jewish. American Jewish denominations are completely closing the door on couples and their children for choices that are made today, thus forever forfeiting the benefits they might have accrued from decisions made later in life- for a duel-identity Jew to fully identify as Jewish, for a non-Jewish spouse to convert. The current denominational modus operandi denigrates the choices made by people with mixed-Jewish ancestry. To the extent that they choose to identify as Jewish, Blecher contends that the denominations should encourage this decision rather than cast someone out of the community for being less than 100 percent Jewish.

I have written on the topic of interfaith and duel identity issues here, here and here. In one of the posts I wrote, "It is no irreverence or betrayal to participate fully in the rituals and sacraments of faith traditions different than one's own. Quite to the contrary, Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh sees this as a means to deepening and strengthening one's own spirituality. Exploring the truths taught by many faiths and partaking of the rituals and teachings of other faith traditions s a way of honoring the best values of one's own faith tradition." As such, I truly value Rabbi Blecher's message of expanding the meaning of identity and appreciate the courage it took for him to publish a book that directly challenges the foundational assumptions of the majority of his Jewish contemporaries. The New American Judaism is a rich resource for both the Jewish and the interfaith community, and reverberates with a message of hope and optimism for interfaith couples and other non-traditional Jews.

His work will likely be received with hostility and suspicion by American Jews who remain deeply invested in the perpetuation of the myths he outlines in his book. For those with an open mind, though, The New American Judaism could and should be viewed as a work of creative destruction, an opportunity for American Jews to re-examine those beliefs they hold to be near and true as a means to enriching and strengthening Jewish civilization, to expanding the meaning of identity and community:

"Disassembling myths removes their power to generate apprehension and despair. At the same time, myths endow life with meaning. I believe that recognizing myths for what they are does not diminish their power to capture the imagination or enliven the soul; rather, it provides a way forward. I have written this book with the firm conviction that clearing away myths will reveal a new American Jewish religion whose vitality and diversity far exceed the ability of any institution to contain or any rabbi to define. I offer these pages in the hope they will serve as the beginning of a conversation." So, let's talk. Shalom.

- Doug L.

FOR FURTHER REFERENCE:

Question What You Know about Judaism


The New American Judaism (Amazon.com)

Intermarry and be merry, by Rabbi Arthur Blecher (The Baltimore Sun, December 12, 2007)

"Noah More!" by Ed Case (InterfaithFamily.com, August 9, 2007)

A Positive Response to Intermarriage (Rabbi Mark Goldsmith, Liberal Judaism.org, October 2004)

Jewcy.com

The Half-Jewish Network

Am I a Person or Am I a Jew? (Jewish Atheist blog, July 30, 2007)

Jew vs. Jew (SamuelFreedman.com)

"The Social Disability of the Jew," by Edwin J. Kuh (The Atlantic Monthly, April 1908, TheAtlantic.com)

I-Heart-Shiksas t-shirt (BustedTees.com)

Intermarriage: Charting New Directions

"You can't be both!" The rabbi from the neighborhood shul sternly upbraided me after I had finished describing how my wife and I will one day raise our children in both the Jewish and Christian faith traditions. I felt the blood rise to my cheeks and the back of my neck became very hot. I never like being told what I can or can't do, especially when it has to do with something as personal as how my wife and I choose to raise our children. I was further upset because the premise for the gathering at the shul was held under the pretense of "interfaith dialogue". Instead, the evening was about the rabbi's desire to affirm non-Jewish matrimonial partners who had agreed with their Jewish spouses to raise their children in an exclusively Jewish household. Not my idea of interfaith.

In a way, though, it was hard to stay angry with him. After all, his job is to grow and sustain the Jewish community that worships at his shul. Encouraging his congregants to go out and baptize their children in the name of Jesus Christ is not the traditional way for rabbis to accomplish this. And his opinion is scarcely isolated within the world of religious Judaism. In many, if not most cases, the reaction to the growing intermarriage phenomenon by Jewish scholars, religious leaders and lay people is highly critical and denunciatory. My encounter with the neighborhood rabbi and the following comments posted by a rabbi on BeliefNet.com provide a good example of the types of fierce resistance that Jewish men and women encounter in response to the notion of marrying a non-Jew:

"I often ask Jewish men to think of the many Jewish women who need Jewish husbands. With so few Jewish men available to Jewish women anyway—Jewish men marry outside the faith at twice the rate of Jewish women—every time a Jewish man dates or marries a non-Jewish woman, it leaves another Jewish woman who will never find a Jewish husband.

"So you may ask, to paraphrase the Beatles, 'all those lonely (Jewish) people, where do they all come?' Well, a lot of them come from the paucity of Jewish spouses left because of high incidents of intermarriage."

It is a rare thing in life to hear an ordained member of the clergy invoke the Beatles as a means to laying down a serious guilt trip, so savor the memory of this moment. At any rate, this rabbi takes the kugel for chutzpah in my book. Nowhere in his column do his comments reflect any consideration for what it is the young man wants for himself. Marriage is seen mainly, primarily as a vessel through which the continuation of the Jewish people is ensured. The love between two human beings appears to be of secondary consideration.

Now, the purpose of this column is not to pick on Jewish rabbis, and the Catholic faith that I come from can be every bit as unbending in its insistence on orthodoxy of belief and practice. This includes choosing a marriage partner who at the very least will not impede one's ability to raise children in the Catholic faith. (Again, that theme: marriage as the primary vehicle for expanding and perpetuating an institution. Where's the love?). Now, on the one hand, I do have to say that the diocese where I live was very accommodating when I requested a dispensation to be married to a non-Catholic. I tip my hat to the priests who worked with me and my wife to secure Church permission to conduct a non-traditional marriage ceremony with the assistance of a Catholic priest. On the other hand, there are loads of über-Catholic Catholics who shudder to think that (a) there are people in the world who are not Catholic, and (b) worse yet, there are Catholics in the world who would (shudder) choose to marry a non-Catholic. You can read a sample of what I'm talking about by clicking here.

OK- then there is the subject of something that is referred to as the "Silent Holocaust". This term is used in reference to a handful of social and political topics, but the usage I'm referring to is when devout Jews ascribe this term to the high incidence of interfaith marriage. The contention is that Jews who would and should otherwise be marrying other Jews are thinning the overall worldwide Jewish population by marrying non-Jews. Thus, the contention is made that what Hitler and his evil legion of murderers and rapists could not achieve through violent acts of killing, interfaith couples are achieving quietly one wedding at a time.

I think I'll need to devote an entire other blog post to this particularly odious topic, as I've already said a great deal and this phrase stirs up very strong feelings inside of me. For now, suffice it to say that I am beyond offended that anyone would stoop so low as to even casually associate me and anyone else in an interfaith marriage to the vile and nefarious participants in Hitler's campaign of brutality and death. This association is beneath contempt. It maliciously slanders each person of good faith and character who is in an interfaith marriage, while at the same time carelessly cheapening the memory of those who perished under such mournful circumstances.

OK. 'Nuff said about that for now. As for decisions that are inevitably forced upon the members of any given interfaith marriage, I see the issue as breaking along the lines of the false choice of all or none. Judaism, Catholicism, and other organized religions teach that you're either "X" or you're not. In response to this I posit that our children will learn that they are Jewish and Irish, Greek and Czech. They will learn about the cultural and historical aspects of all of the heritage that they will inherit. They can be believers in Jesus Christ without following the path prescribed by the Catholic Church or any other, if that is what they choose. They'll learn that it is possible to be X, Y and Z. In an earlier post I quoted Buddhist monk Thich Naht Hahn on this very topict: "In Christianity, you have to believe in the resurrection or you are not considered a Christian. I am afraid this criterion may discourage some people from looking into the life of Jesus. This is a pity, because we can appreciate Jesus Christ as both an historical door and an ultimate door." Indeed.

There is more than one way to be, people. The birth of new ways obviously will challenge the old ways. But the challenge is one that encourages growth and understanding, not destruction. Interfaith marriage is not, should not be about squelching one's faith or cultural heritage. Interfaith marriage should stand as an example of inclusiveness and provide a window that offers a glimpse at new directions that faith institutions could be taking. I'll close with a quote from Fr. Walter H. Cuenin, a Catholic priest who penned a guest column on interfaith marriage for the Jewish family Web site InterfaithFamily.com (see the link below). I've never met the good father, but I couldn't agree more with what he has to say:

"It also seems to me that we need to appreciate the good that can come from interfaith marriages. In a strange sort of way these marriages do remind us that God's call for the human family transcends all religious boundaries. There is no religion that has the only path to God. While we find great benefit in our own faith traditions and want to see them passed on to future generations, no one tradition has an exclusive hold on God's attention. When people of radically different yet connected traditions marry, perhaps they are imaging a new way of viewing life. It may seem disconcerting, but could it not also be a call to greater religious harmony?"

- Doug L.

FOR FURTHER REFERENCE:

A Catholic Priest's Perspective on Interfaith Marriage, by Rev. Walter H. Cuenin (InterfaithFamily.com)

Jewish Mother, Catholic Girlfriend, by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach (BeliefNet.com)

"Jews to Intermarriage as Babies to Bathwater," by Tamar Fox (Jewcy.com, August 6, 2007)

Catholic Discussion Board (Greenspun.com)

"Chaplaincy Holds Panel on Interfaith Marriage." The Brandeis Hoot, February 9, 2007.

AmericanCatholic.org

J-Date.com

CatholicMatch.com

Intermarriage (Ohr.edu, September 17, 2005)

Silent Holocaust (Wikipedia.com)

The Interfaith Union

"On Assimilation and Intermarriage...Again." (NewZionist.com, July 7, 2005)

Interfaith Marriage and Families

I'm the Catholic half of an interfaith marriage, and my wife, who is Jewish, is the other half. We are still finding our way down the interfaith/multifaith path, but we are mainly happy to make the journey. Yet neither of us is naive enough to think that everyone else in the world holds the same positive view of marriage arrangements like ours. Parents and religious institutions can and have traditionally taken a negative view of such marriages. The source of any such opposition is pretty predictable. Parents want their children to pass on their family's heritage. Religious institutions don't want their congregations to thin out.

My wife and I are very fortunate in that our respective families are giving us the space we need to evaluate what we want for our children and to make the decisions that work for us. We didn't arrive at this point without some real struggle and confusion. The two of us discovered that love and goodwill would only take us so far down the road. As our relationship became more serious, it became necessary to do some deep soul searching and then open up to each other to share what we'd found. This is an ongoing process, and is by no means over. It has, however, helped us to understand ourselves and each other better, to grow closer and more intimate as we work to create a home that is welcoming to both faith traditions.

For interfaith couples in general, there are any number of possible outcomes that can result from these deeply and intensely personal discussions. Some couples opt for no religion at all in the home, leaving it to their children to forge the religious path of their own choosing. Some couples opt to include only one faith tradition in their home, with the other partner either celebrating his or her own faith separately, or else converting to the household faith, while other couples choose to celebrate both faith traditions. In terms of deciding to celebrate both of our faith traditions, the questions people ask us the most have to do with how we'll raise our kids. We have been outright discouraged by more than one person from going the dual-faith route, and others have merely questioned how such an arrangement can work. In most of these cases, the questioner is primarily concerned as to what type of identity issues this might cause for our children someday.

However, despite the seeming contradictions inherent to this approach, we're not convinced that our decision will confuse our children or result in their having no cultural or faith identity as adults. In the PsychCentral.com article, "The Emotional Challenges of Interfaith Families" (cited below), Dr. Allan Schwartz comments that this is not necessarily cause for concern or otherwise threatening to the healthy development of a child's identity:

"It is less the presence of a single religious identity in the home and more the parental style of discipline and involvement with the children and with each other that produces well-adjusted children. Research shows that children whose parents were firm, consistent, involved and affectionate did best in school and in their relationships later in life. The particular religious affiliation of one or both parents is less important to good adjustment than the fact that the parents love and support their children."

Choosing to marry someone of a different faith tradition than one's own, including no faith tradition at all, is an implicit admission that one has accepted a less-than-orthodox arrangement for marriage and child rearing. In our marriage my wife and I have found that the key to making peace with the sacrifices inherent to any interfaith arrangement is open communication and maintaining a strong sense of trust. The benefits of relating this way are obviously not limited to questions of faith and religion, but for any harmony to exist around such questions these are absolutely necessary. Shalom.

- Doug L.

FOR FURTHER REFERENCE (Links Updated 05/27/07)

The Challenges of Interfaith Marriage, and Half Life: Jewish Tales from Interfaith Homes (Interfaith Radio, May 24, 2007)

"The Emotional Challenges of Interfaith Marriage," by Allan Schwartz. PsychCentral.com, December 12, 2006

Interfaith Marriage Discussion Board (Beliefnet.com)

Interfaith Marriage Stumbling Blocks and Guidance (About.com)

Divorce Rates Among Inter-Faith Marriages (ReligiousTolerance.org)

Welcome to Unkosher Jesus!

Unkosher Jesus is the fruit of my musings as the Catholic half of a Jewish-Catholic marriage. We live in the metropolitan Washington, DC area where the rate of intermarriage among Jews and Christians is apparently much higher than in most other parts of the US. Each interfaith relationship is unique and has its own issues and challenges, but for all interfaith couples there are a special set of challenges that come in addition to the pressures any couple typically endures. There are challenges over different faith traditions, challenges over no faith tradition, challenges having to do with figuring out what faith to raise children (if any). And of course, throughout all of it there is the continuing challenge of dealing with the expectations of parents, other family members and religious institutions that have their own expectations as to how our relationships ought to be run.

Unkosher Jesus has been launched to provide a place where anyone who is a member of an interfaith relationship or is simply interested in the interfaith experience can post their thoughts, concerns, insights, and read those of others as well. It is a place where we can explore our shared religious faith traditions while challenging these to remember what their intended purpose is in first place- to create communities where people can grow closer to God by treating other human beings with mercy, compassion and justice. Unkosher Jesus is a place where we can support and even challenge each other as members of the greater interfaith community. It is also a place to discuss current events as these intersect with matters of faith, religion, family and relationships.

My faith heritage and that of my wife's each share the same monotheistic roots, but as a blog Unkosher Jesus does not restrict itself to that point of view. It will strive to reflect and promote the belief that while the world is home to many different countries and cultures, traditions and religions, we are all members of one human race. Unkosher Jesus readers will have the opportunity to comment on each post. Inappropriate comments will be removed- each reader is welcome to state his or her disagreement with the contents of any particular post, even strongly, but please do so respectfully and in the spirit of advancing, not halting, any given discussion. Also, as religion and faith issues often intersect with issues of politics and culture, Unkosher Jesus will usually have something to say about these as well. I hope you do, too.

For those interested in submitting an entry to be posted on Unkosher Jesus, you are invited to please send your submissions to unkosherjesus@gmail.com. There is no prerequisite that prospective authors/commentators be the member of any particular faith, or any faith at all. Readers are invited to submit posts that speak to any variety of issues and current events as these relate to their own interfaith relationships and experiences, including comments and perspectives reflecting your own specific faith tradition. All posts will be published anonymously, unless the author provides Unkosher Jesus with permission to post his or her name. This will typically include the author's first name and the first initial of his or her last name. No one's contact information will be included with any post.

Again, thank you for logging onto Unkosher Jesus! Without further adieu, let the conversation begin...