Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

1993

by Harold M. Schulweis

Jeffrey sees no one but non-Jewish women. When you ask him why he gives a dozen excuses:  "It's just a date.  It means nothing," or , "After all, we Jews are not bigots," or "I'm not the religious type.”

One day Jeff comes to his parents to announce "I've found her.” They ask "What's her name?" He answers "Lucy Cohen.” Their hearts leap with expectation. They ask "How do you spell her name?" He answers "L-u-c-y.” "No" they say, "I mean the last name." "C-o-h-e-n. She's a wonderful girl. You will love her. We met at a Chanukah dance."

In the rabbi's study, we talk of many things, including the forthcoming wedding ceremony. Lucy says, "By the way, my mother is not Jewish." From my silence, she detects my concern. She continues, "I want you to know that I was very active at Temple Emanuel. I was the president of NIFTY. I went to Reform Hebrew High and I was confirmed with honors."

"Well" I say to her calmly, "you understand that according to halachah, Jewish law, you have to convert to Judaism." She says "Who me? Convert to Judaism? Rabbi, my name is Lucy Cohen. I have an extensive Jewish education. I experienced a great deal of anti-Semitism on the campus right here at UCLA." I explained that in accordance with the Jewish tradition, the religious status of the child is determined matrilineally.

She asks me, "What if my mother were Jewish and my father was not Jewish? What if my name was Lucy McPherson? What if my parents were not members of the synagogue, didn't send me to a religious school? What if my Jewish mother couldn't care less about Judaism, didn't belong to the synagogue and had a deep animus toward rabbis in general?"

"That wouldn't make a difference," I say to her. "If your mother were Jewish you would be Jewish."

Lucy is disappointed. "That's not fair. That's not Jewish."

I explain that all she has to do is convert, pass an examination with a Beth Din and go to the mikvah. Lucy is angry. "I feel terribly humiliated. I feel that my whole life has been fraudulent." And then I try to explain that this is the position of the Conservative Movement and of the Orthodox Movement and of halachah. "Rabbi, you're no better than the Orthodox. They don't recognize a Jew by choice when you convert them; and you don't recognize my Jewishness though my Reform Movement does." Lucy left, slamming the door in my face.

This is not an apocryphal story. There are mounting numbers of children and adults who have Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers, who are de jure read out of Jewish identity. In contrast, children of Jewish mothers without an article of faith or any Jewish practice are de jure automatically accepted as Jews. Is the law fair? is the law wise? Is Lucy right?

Ten years ago, on March 15, 1983, the Reform Central Conference of American Rabbis issued a resolution which equated matrilineal and patrilineal descent. A child of a mixed marriage is to be regarded as Jewish:  whether the father is Jewish or the mother is Jewish, the presumption is that the child is Jewish. That Reform resolution went on to state that this presumption of the Jewishness of the child is to be "established through appropriate and timely public and formal acts of identification with the Jewish faith and the Jewish people."

Translated, it means that through naming, circumcision, attendance at Hebrew School, Bar Mitzvah or Bat Mitzvah, or confirmation, the ways in which public and formal acts establish the Jewishness of the child.

The Orthodox and Conservative Movements strongly rejected this patrilineal proposal. In the case of the Conservative Committee of Jewish Law and Standards, to accept patrilineal principle is to be regarded as a violation of the halachah of Conservative Judaism. Directing this to the Conservative rabbis their resolution stated, "They shall henceforth be violations of a standard of rabbinic practices and be inconsistent with membership in the Rabbinical Assembly." That means, in effect, that if you disagree with this decision and act on it recognizing patrilineally descended Jews, you may jeopardize your membership in the Rabbinical Assembly.

What impelled the Reform Movement to make such a break with an 1,800-year tradition? and why now? There was a sign on JFK's desk in the Oval Office which read, "Whatever is not necessary to change it is necessary not to change.” Why then the change? why not stick to the traditional decision which is based upon matrilineal descent?

The Talmud states that "the child of a Jewish mother and non-Jewish father is Jewish; the child of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother is not Jewish.” That is the tradition. But that decision was made in the time of the Mishna and the Talmud and was itself quite innovative. Certainly the matrilineal principle appears to be a departure from the Bible itself, in which the bias favors patrilineality.

Consider some of the heroes of the Bible and the genealogy of Jews as recorded in the Bible:  Joseph was married to the daughter of Potiphera, a woman by the name of Osnath whose father was an Egyptian priest of On. She bore Joseph two sons, Manassah and Ephraim. Both sons became heads of two of the twelve tribes of Israel, even though they were the progeny of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother. Until this day we bless our own male children with the blessing "May God make you as Ephraim and Manassah.”

Moses married Zippora, a Midianite daughter of a non-Jewish priest of Midian called Jethro. She bore Moses two sons, Gershom and Eleazer. They are Jewish according to patrilineal descent.

Solomon married foreign wives who were not Jewish. One of them recorded in the first book of Kings is called Naamah, who gave birth to Rehoboam, who succeeded Solomon on the throne of Israel.

The genealogy of the children of Israel as recorded in the book of Numbers is clearly patrilineal. We read, "Take ye the sons of all the congregation of the children of Israel by their families, by their fathers' houses according to the number of names every male by their heads.” As the Talmud in Baba Bathra 109b puts it, "The family of the father is considered to be the family. But the family of the mother is not considered to be the family.” So patrilineality has biblical roots. Whether your son is a Kohen or Levi is determined by the father's status exclusively. If the father is good enough to bequeath priestly status, why is he not good enough to bequeath the status of the child's Jewishness?

Moreover, it is the father who is obligated to see that the child is circumcised or that the child is redeemed through Pidyon Ha-Ben on the 31st day after his birth. So when the rabbis introduced matrilineal lineage, they were advocating a radical change. What was their rationale? Since there is virtually nothing in the Talmudic text that explains the motivation for this change to matrilineal, we are free to speculate.

One theory is that the mother was chosen over the father as the person determining the religious status of the child because of the principle, "mater certa, pater incerta.” The identity of the mother is always known, but the identity of the father is uncertain. Hence, the prevalent matrilineal principle.

It is further argued that the rabbis chose the mother over the father because she was more intimate with the child and had greater influence on the identity and education of the child. Therefore, the status of the child was determined by the mother.

Another theory explains that the matrilineal principle was introduced in order to protect the integrity and purity of the priesthood. The priesthood is transmitted by the fathers. In a mixed marriage between a Jewish priest and a non-Jewish woman, the child would be a priest. Enter the matrilineal principle, and the child of a Jewish priest and a non-Jewish woman is declared non-Jewish, preventing the priesthood from being bequeathed to the son of such a union.

There is speculation that the change from patrilineal to matrilineal came about in the Mishnaic period, which was coincident with the Roman occupation of Israel during the wars of 67 BCE, and later 132 CE, when Jewish woman were raped by Roman soldiers. To save the children of those raped women for Judaism, to insure their Jewishness, the children were legally allowed to assume the religion of the mothers at birth.

This latter speculation seems particularly plausible. For if the rabbis wanted to prevent mixed marriage and to use the status of a child as a deterrent of mixed marriage, they should have said that for the child to be Jewish both parents must be Jewish. That bi-parental criterion would not be far-fetched reasoning. When Ezra comes to break up mixed marriage, he bases his argument on the biblical verse in Deuteronomy 23, "You shall not enter into marriage with them; you shalt not give your daughter to his son nor take his daughter for your son." But the rabbis were apparently quite liberal in their interpretation. What they concluded, as formulated in Maimonides' Mishna Torah was, "If a non-Jew should have relations with a Jewish woman the offspring is legitimate and is to be reckoned as the offspring of the mother without any regard to the religious status of the non-Jew.” They could have been stricter, insisting that both father and mother be Jewish. But to do so would be to lose the children of those women violated by the Romans.

There are good reasons and real reasons. There are debates going on, arguing both sides of the patrilineal issue. They all offer good reasons. But it seems evident that the real reason for this concern in our times is that we are living in perilous times. We are not arguing juridical issues independent of the existential condition that befalls us. We are engaged in a struggle for survival, and in that struggle we are not doing too well.

The publicized statistics are outrageous when you consider that virtually one of every two of our children chooses a non-Jew as a life mate; when you consider that the rate of intermarriage has soared from 12% in 1960 to 30% in 1970, to 50% in 1990; when you consider that the conversion rate to Judaism is down; when you consider that only 6% of those who intermarry convert their spouses to Judaism; when you consider that the majority of second marriages are also intermarriages; when you consider that nearly 600,000 Jews raised as Jews when asked their religion answered none; when you consider the mammoth study conducted by the City University of New York that found that 210,000 Jews have converted to another religion; when you consider that in 1960 there were 600,000 Jewish children who went to Jewish supplementary and day schools, and that today that number is reduced to 390,000; that from 1960 to 1980 the total enrollment of our children declined by nearly 35,000; when you consider that we have the lowest birthrate of all ethnic and religious groups in American society; when you consider that according to the National Jewish Population study only 4.3 million Americans identify themselves by religion, and that is 1.5 million less than has normally been assumed; when you consider that in 1930 we were more than 3.5% of the United States population, and today we are less than 2%  …  you have to agonizingly re-examine the entire issue of patrilineal and matrilineal descent. We are deeply concerned with the tremendous hemorrhaging of our people, and we can understand the motivation of Rabbi Alex Schindler who initiated the proposal that presumed a child to be Jewish whether either of his parents is Jewish. This intent was to spread the Jewish net wider. To recognize the child of a Jewish father as it would the child of a Jewish mother is to enable the Jewish community to place a claim on the child.

We are witnessing the erosion of the critical mass essential to the viability of the Jewish people. Jewish law has always been responsive to the life of the people. The matrilineal innovation by the rabbis in the time of the Talmud was most likely concerned with the same matter –  to save the Jewish children. The State of Israel is similarly confronted with the great challenge of re-definition. In 1956 and 1957, there was a considerable immigration of Jews from India to Israel. The Orthodox chief rabbinate did not accept them as Jews, arguing that their status was flawed matrilineally, that is to say the Jews of India were using Torah models of patrilineality. The same thing applied to Ethiopian Jews who accepted a patrilineal principle. Representatives of Lubavitch in Israel blocked Ethiopian Jews from going to the wall in Jerusalem to worship, and denied Ethiopian youth entry to their schools. Russian Jews are coming to the State of Israel with children most of whose mothers are not Jewish, and many of whom do not wish to be converted, and many of their Jewish Russian husbands who are not interested in having them converted. What should be the status of their children? Is it to our Jewish interest to risk losing them because of the exclusivistic matrilineal principle?

Regretfully some of the mixed marriages end in divorce.  Should the Jewish father retain the right to determine the Jewishness of the child? But most divorce courts tend to base their custody decisions on the traditional definition that the Jewish mother can determine the religious identity of the child. Consequently, not a few children raised as Jews during the marriage are raised as Christians after the divorce. According to an important article in the New York Times, August 31, 1993, the increase of single fathers who act as parents instead of visitors on the weekend is on the upsurge:  The number of unmarried fathers living with children more than doubled from 1980 to 1992. Fathers now head 14% of single parent households, 14% up from 10%.

Some argue that if Lucy Cohen were to be told that the rabbinic community would accept her future children as Jewish by virtue of their birth and their acts of Jewish identification, Lucy would lose her incentive to convert to Judaism. But is this the case? If Lucy were told that her child is regarded as presumptuously Jewish by the religious community, would this not serve as a further incentive for her to convert? It is an empirical question that deserves study. Oddly enough, few people argue that the matrilineal position functions as a disincentive for the non-Jewish father to convert.

There are no villains in this debate. The worldwide rise of mixed marriage has created new challenges which have to be answered. Consider the case of two recent burials in Israel of Russian Jews, which is likely to estrange many new immigrants whose halachic Jewish credentials may be deemed lacking. Lev Pesahov, a 20 year old soldier whose father, but not mother, is Jewish was slain defending the Jewish state as a member of the Israeli Defense Force. Refused burial in the military cemetery by religious authorities, the family was told that he could be buried on the edge of the military cemetery. He was to be buried in a place among the cemetery fence reserved for suicides, apostates, notorious sinners, and people whose Jewishness was doubtful. Following the halachah, Rabbi Avraham Ravitz of the Knesset, from the United Torah Party, argued that to treat someone with honor does not mean converting the soldier after his death and burying him in a Jewish cemetery. Rabbi Lau, the chief Ashkenazic rabbi, and Rabbi Aaron, the chief Sephardic rabbi, stand behind the current burial policy. Having a non-Jewish mother there was no way to consider him a Jew, regardless of his bravery or his service to the Jewish state. Only Rabbi Shlomo Goren, the former Orthodox chief rabbi of Israel, took a different position, in which he claimed that "every Gentile who died defending the Jewish state must be buried as a Jew.” He rebuked the ultra Orthodox and said caustically, "Not only do the Orthodox not join the army, but they want to decide for us who is buried in a military cemetery." Dilemmas aside, the issue of patrilineality is not going to go away.

There are tens of thousands of Jews whose fathers are Jewish and whose mothers are not, who have identified themselves with the Jewish community. Many of them are members of the Reform temples. What are we to do when they come to us to marry our sons or daughters? If we do not recognize their Jewishness, are we not aiding the fragmentation of our people's unity?

It is easier to look into a text than to look into the eyes of Lucy Cohen. It is easier to adhere to a status quo ante position…  but is it good for the Jewish people and the strengthening of Judaism?

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