Jewish Autumn, Christian Winter…

Growing up, my family often went apple-picking after Rosh Hashanah services. My Jewish New Year memories are intertwined with the cidery scent of apples rotting in the grass, the sound of bees buzzing, the long angle of late New England sun, and the brisk air that meant the excitement of new school clothes.

In autumn, our interfaith community celebrates Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), and the harvest festival of Sukkot. It may, in fact, appear that we are giving Christianity short shrift, because the “must do” Jewish holidays are stacked up front. When prospective members come to check us out in the fall, the Jewish partner in the couple tends to feel perfectly comfortable. If I can, I give those Jewish partners a heads up that as winter approaches, they will need to reckon with Christianity.

After a transition through the mostly secular Thanksgiving period, we shift into what I think of as our Christian season, with Advent and Christmas. We celebrate Hannukah of course. But since Hannukah is not actually among the top five Jewish holidays in terms of importance, we don’t attempt to give Hannukah and Christmas equal weight. “Being both” is not about distorting either religion to create false equivalencies. We do not have a Hannukah bush, or menorahs on our Christmas tree. Instead, we celebrate Advent and Christmas with as much historical integrity and spiritual depth as we can muster, to offset the commercial Christmas so prevalent in American culture. Jewish partners learn to accept, or not, seeing their children light Advent candles, sing carols, and talk about the birth of Jesus, that nice Jewish boy.

In spring, “being both” comes to a head with the twin week-long celebrations of Passover and Holy Week. Most interfaith families know this as the season of true “interfaith dilemma.” Jews are forced to confront the idea of resurrection. Christians are forced to confront the historical anti-Semitism associated with Easter. Everyone in the family must negotiate the “chosen people” language embedded in the Passover Seder, and the horror of the drowning of the Egyptians. And we must be nimble diplomats to avoid making a mishigas of meals with extended family featuring Easter buns, matzoh balls, ham and brisket.

With the end of the school year, our interfaith community goes into sleep mode, as do many religious communities. For some strange and convenient reason, there are no major holidays in either Judaism or Christianity during the summer. Instead, many of us use this time to reflect on whether or not we will recommit ourselves to the communities we have chosen—especially those of us who are wandering Jews, wandering Christians, or both.

 

Susan Katz Miller is the author of Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family, from Beacon Press. She works as an interfaith families consultant, speaker, and coach. Follow her on twitter @beingboth.

Rosh Hashanah, Interfaith Style

Yesterday, our interfaith community celebrated the Jewish New Year. Yes, we are early by a week. We want our members to be able to go to synagogues next weekend with their extended Jewish families, with parents and grandparents.

As it happens, my own parents were visiting yesterday and came to our early Rosh Hashanah. They stood up as I introduced them to our community as interfaith pioneers. At ages 85 and 79, they are celebrating 50 years of interfaith marriage this year, proof that it can be done, and done with incredible depth and style.

The presence of my own personal wise elders was fortuitous. Our Rabbi, Harold White, reflected on Jewish respect for old age as a thread that runs through the Jewish New Year. We read about Abraham and Sarah, delighted in old age by the birth of their son Isaac. The rabbi pointed out that we celebrate the New Year, not in spring as one might expect, but at the end of the agricultural cycle, in fall. The autumn of our years, he explained, is just as important to Jews, just as much an integral part of life, as birth.

Yesterday, my Jewish father got to sit next to his grandchildren while singing “Oseh Shalom” and “Adon Olam” hearing the call of the shofar, reciting the Shehecheyanu, and the Reader’s Kaddish.

And my Christian mother got to sit next to her grandchildren as they recited the Lord’s Prayer. Why the Lord’s Prayer at a Rosh Hashanah celebration? The Rabbi pointed out that this Christian prayer appears to be based on the Kaddish. And that the Kaddish is written in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke in the streets of Jerusalem.

My Jewish father recited the Lord’s Prayer along with us—it happens to be lodged deep in his memory. In small town Pennsylvania in the 1930s, children recited the prayer each day in his public schools. There is no mention of Jesus in the prayer. Dad says, “I didn’t know it was a Christian prayer until about ten years ago.”

Celebrating the New Year a week early may seem like a dress rehearsal for the real thing. But an interfaith celebration, while it may be devoted to a particular Jewish or Christian holiday, has unique flavor because it inevitably touches on the historical reality of the interplay between the two religions. And it creates a way to celebrate these connections—whether we are interfaith children, interfaith parents, or interfaith grandparents.

“But Do You Actually Worship Together?”

On Sunday, our interfaith community met in the shade of an ancient oak tree. We spread blankets under the leafy canopy—new parents with babies, engaged couples, empty nesters. We stood, and chanted the Shema, and the Lord’s Prayer, and sang an Irish blessing. Those struggling with illness or sadness got up to place pebbles in a bowl, to share their burden with the community. Our minister reflected on the story of Jacob and Esau. Then, we sang the Hamotzi over our potluck feast. I crossed the lawn to greet our rabbi, a chaplain at Georgetown, who was decked out in a jaunty T-shirt reading “Georgetown” in Hebrew.

Our community encompasses Catholics, Protestants, Quakers, Buddhists, Jews of every stripe, agnostics and atheists. We come together in spite of our diverse and divergent theologies. But for many interfaith families, we are the only spiritual home, the only place they feel comfortable. I don’t call what we do together worship, because for me, theology is not the point. Rather, the community itself, and the primal experience of singing together and sharing our joys and concerns, creates the neurological response that humans label spirituality. It has little to do with belief, and much to do with making art together and providing support for each other in times of trouble.

In our community, we call this a Gathering rather than a worship service. Each Gathering begins with this responsive reading written by Oscar Rosenbloom, a founding member of the Interfaith Community of Palo Alto:

Reader: We gather here as an Interfaith Community

To share and celebrate the gift of life together

All: Some of us gather as the Children of Israel

Some of us gather in the name of Jesus of Nazareth

Some of us gather influenced by each

Reader: However we come, and whoever we are

May we be moved, In our time together

To experience that sense of Divine presence in each of us

Evoked by our worship together

All: And to know in the wisdom of our hearts

That deeper unity in which all are one.

Ten years into our journey with this interfaith community, my chidren have memorized the Shema, the Hamotzi, the Lord’s Prayer. They also recite by heart that interfaith responsive reading. They can articulate their sense of connection to this community, and the songs and readings stir their souls. Our community is an immense tree with branches growing in all directions, representing Jewish, Christian and other beliefs. No matter how much it irks some religious institutions, we insist on standing together to create a motley but massive trunk for this tree, a strong support for our children to climb and explore.

 

Susan Katz Miller is an interfaith families speaker, consultant, and coach, and author of Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family (2015), and a workbook, The Interfaith Family Journal (2019).

Back to School: Dual-Faith Religious Education

Tomorrow our community of over 100 interfaith families will picnic together for the kickoff of the school year. In our Sunday School, children learn about both Judaism and Christianity. It is a radical concept, but one that is spreading to new cities each year as more and more interfaith families choose to educate their children about both religions.

My children have attended this program since kindergarten, and they are now 15 and 12. When my daughter graduated from Sunday School at the end of 8^th grade, she chose to keep coming with us on Sundays and became a teacher’s helper in the kindergarten class.

Many adults grew up hating Sunday School. Our community strives to make the experience as interactive and multi-sensory as possible, using storytelling, music, art and field trips. My daughter helps the kindergartners learn songs they will encounter in synagogues and churches—the roving music teacher comes into the class with a guitar to sing “It’s a Tree of Life” as well as “This Little Light of Mine.”

My daughter helps the children with craft projects: maybe constructing a tzedakah (charity) box to put coins in. Or decorating a cloth matzoh or challah cover with fabric markers. Or making “stained glass” with translucent gels on plexiglass. In fourth grade, after learning about the Christian story of the loaves and the fishes, her class used real fish to make Japanese fishprints on T-shirts.

My son, at 12, is just entering the two-year Coming of Age program. Last year, his classes included Hebrew literacy as well as a historical and theological survey of the Jewish and Christian denominations. They went on field trips to a local Reform Shabbat service, a Jewish museum, a Quaker meeting, and a Catholic mass. Each student presented reports on different denominations. My son chose to study the Mennonites, one of the religions in his complex personal ancestry. He also thrilled his classmates in his presentation on Chasidic Judaism by showing a youtube video of rapper Matisyahu and analyzing some of his lyrics.

As my son enters the two-year Coming of Age process, we will help him to decide how he wants to mark his passage into adulthood. We know he will participate in our group Coming of Age ceremony at the end of those two years. He could also have an individual ceremony, as his sister did. Will it be labeled a Bar Mitzvah? Will he read from the Torah? Does he want a Christian confirmation? Or will it be an integrated Jewish and Christian ceremony? Does he have to choose now, at the brink of 13? Does he have to choose later? Does he have to choose? To follow the story, follow the blog!

A Rabbi and a Minister…

My rabbi often expounds on “radical amazement,” a concept that his teacher, philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel, used to describe our response to creation. Me, personally, I am radically amazed that I have a rabbi. And I am equally, if not even more radically amazed that I have a pastor. We are living in strange and wondrous times, when a person, an interfaith person, can have both.

Here’s how it works. Rabbi Harold White and minister Julia Jarvis lead the Interfaith Families Project in song, prayer and reflection twice each month. That means sometimes the rabbi will give a reflection about Lent, and the minister will give a reflection on Sukkoth. It sounds meshugenah but this cross-fertilization leads to dazzling insights. And for those of us who are interfaith children, it leads to profound opportunities to feel like an integrated whole, rather than a half-something.

I never thought I would have a rabbi again. I had reconciled myself to a life of exile from organized Judaism, and I assumed that meant exile from the likes of Rabbi White, who combines warmth and crinkly smile lines with deep wisdom and erudition. My exile began, like that of many other intermarried Jews, the day my father went to our family rabbi and asked if he would officiate at my marriage to a lapsed Episcopalian. The answer my father brought back was, “He says he can’t touch it.” Later, I learned that many synagogue Boards forbid their rabbis to perform interfaith marriages as a condition of employment. This may help to explain why I have returned to a rabbi, but not to a synagogue.

I never dreamed I would have a minister, nor did I pine for one, since I never had one growing up as a Reform Jew. But it turns out that everyone can benefit from a minister. Clergy of all stripes actually know this—they often benefit from spiritual direction from different faith traditions. Julia Jarvis is a gifted empath who has given me personal support, and creative dedication to the task of raising healthy interfaith children in our community. She has given me the courage as a Jew to accept the help of a pastor. It may seem radical. But it is also amazing.

Perfect Pitch, or Polyrhythms

A fascinating story in today’s Washington Post describes how some Japanese children develop perfect pitch after their parents train them throughout the day, over a period of years. I admire these parents, just as I admire the parents who work hard to instill Jewish identity in their children through daily practice and sacrifice. I certainly admire my own mother, who schlepped us to Hebrew school, came with us to temple, and even tried studying Hebrew, though she never converted to Judaism.

I regret a bit that I did not work with my children to help them develop perfect pitch. It seems like a magical quality. But at the conclusion of the article, an American music professor states that he’s not sure many Americans would want their children to be so specialized at such a young age. He says, “In our culture…we seem to want our children to be well-rounded, involved in a multitude of activities.”

In choosing dual religious training for my children, I decided I wanted them to be well-rounded, even though I knew I was forgoing the benefits of total immersion in one religion. The musical metaphor for their training might be polyrhythms—the simultaneous playing of more than one independent rhythm.

Is it possible to become a musician without perfect pitch? Of course. I suspect American musicians even have some easy, swinging quality they might not have had with more rigid musical training early in childhood. Is it possible to become a good Jew or a good Christian after a childhood straddling both religions? Those who convert later in life often have a zeal, or flair, which comes from the experience of choosing a religion as an adult.

I made my choices for my children, knowing that there would be benefits and drawbacks. I realize they may never have the ability to name the individual notes in a piece of music, as if hearing in a third dimension. And it will be harder for them to develop fluency in Hebrew or the sense of unquestioned belonging in either religion. But if they decide they want to convert to Judaism, or Christianity, they will have a well-rounded religious training on which to build. I don’t have any expectation that they will choose one religion, or not choose. I do expect them to improvise, to swing, and feel music and spirit in their bones, whatever music it may be.

Dreams of Interfaith Camping

My teenager and pre-teen are off at a sleepaway camp founded by Quakers:  it has a lovely weekly ecumenical reflection time outdoors, called “dell.” I have often thought about sending them to a Jewish summer camp to reinforce their knowledge of things Jewish and give them a stronger sense of the Jewish community. But I can’t quite get over the reality that “sending them to Jewish camp” is an overt part of the institutional strategy to get interfaith kids to identify as Jews. Which in the case of my kids, would require them to convert. Jews are not generally known for their missionary zeal, but in the case of interfaith families, there has been some pretty aggressive recruiting going on, and I have tried to protect my children from being exposed to this, at least until adulthood. They are perfectly happy with their interfaith identities.

Meanwhile, interfaith communities–with religious education programs, community service programs, adult discussion groups, holiday celebrations, and even weekly services of music and reflection—are sprouting up around the country. I would love to see an interfaith camp for children and teens evolve as a next step. Interfaith children from across America could meet each other, understand that they are part of a nationwide movement, and explore their interfaith identities without pressure to choose a particular religion. They could celebrate Shabbat and get a taste of communal kibbutz living with other interfaith kids, but also sing “Peace Like A River” and “Dona Nobis Pacem.”

Our interfaith community is often described as a utopian bubble, someplace apart from the “real world.” Interfaith Camp would be a summertime utopian bubble—a safe place out in the woods somewhere for kids to be who they are, without pressure from an adult world obsessed with binary “either/or” labeling.  I wish I had been to such a camp. I still wish I could go. Maybe if we build it, they will come. We could even have a “Family Week” for all ages.  I’m going to grab my ukulele and my watercolor set, and meet you there.