Jews, their faith, declining
Rabbi Marc Gellman
Question: What’s the big deal about marrying “in the faith” with Jews? Furthermore, why does being born into a particular faith impose a dut y to preserve the faith and traditions of the religion in which a person is raised? I was raised as a Methodist but feel no obligation to advance the mythologies on which Methodism is based. I’ve known Jews I could love without caring about their religion or ethnicit y
eing from the South, “interracial” marriage to me brings to mind unions between members of the Caucasian and black races. Are my perceptions incorrect? Within the Jewish community, is there not a sort of rejection of everyone who’s not Jewish that runs perfectly in tandem with the demand that Jews themselves not be rejected? I don’t get it. — F., Beaufort, N.C.
Answer: Intermarriage is, indeed, a huge deal in the Jewish community, but not for the reasons that irritate you. Judaism accepts all other religions and, in fact, rabbinic teachings from the last t wo millennia teach that “The righteous of all peoples will inherit the World To Come (Heb: olam habah).” (Maimonides Chapter 8 of the Laws of Kings).
The Talmud, in tractate Sanhedrin 59a, shows: “A gentile who studies Torah is akin to a High Priest.”
The concern about intermarriage is sociological, not theological. The issue of intermarriage is really the most visible manifestation of the concern that the Jewish people might not continue to exist.
There were roughly 18 million Jews alive on planet Earth in 1933, when the world’s population was about 2 billion. In 1945, there were only about 12 million Jews still left alive. Today, there are still only about 12 mil- lion Jews, but the world’s population is 7 billion!
So, not only has the Jewish population not increased by even a single Jewish soul in the last 70 years, but the percentage of Jews in the world has dropped precipitously to under 1 percent as the world population has almost tripled since WWII. By contrast, one out of every three people here on earth is Christian.
The intermarriage statistics are also concerning. Well over half the marriages in America involving one Jewish person are marriages to a non-Jewish person. Only about a third of the children of such intermarriages are raised as Jews, and less than 10 percent of the grandchildren of intermarriages are raised as Jews.
The tragic irony does not escape me that a 4,000-year-old religion and people that survived exile and persecution might not be able to survive tolerance and freedom.