Intermarriage, I Do!

A Conservative rabbi takes the plunge

By Adina Lewittes for Tablet Magazine

It was an intimate wedding at our local park where we take the dogs to run and where we throw our crusted sins into the stream each year on Rosh Hashanah. Between the couple, some of their friends and relatives, my wife, and me, we numbered just 10.

I led a niggun and shared a teaching from the Vilna Gaon about love. Blessings were made, vows and rings exchanged. The bride and groom stepped on a glass, triggering shouts of “Mazel tov!” Like many weddings I’ve done in 22 years as a rabbi, this was a beautiful seal placed upon a love that was meant to be. Sort of. For the couple, it was their long-awaited marriage. For me, it was a heart-wrenching divorce. The bride was Jewish; the groom wasn’t. To marry them, I had to leave the Conservative movement.

In 1988, while in rabbinical school at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary, I thought I’d be the Conservative rabbi whose sons wouldn’t be subjected to circumcision and who’d one day rewrite the rules on intermarriage. Who was I to tell a Jew whom they could or couldn’t marry? I was wrong on all counts. My three sons were circumcised (which I endured with copious amounts of Manischewitz at their brises). And while I recently performed my second intermarriage, I had to leave the Conservative movement, which I’d served for 27 years, to do so.


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