Intermarried rabbis?

The latest issue of New Voices has a big story on efforts to end the ban against intermarried Jews becoming rabbis (yes, even the Reform and Reconstructionist seminaries draw the line at rabbis marrying out):

David Curiel didn’t intend to cause any controversy when he decided to become a rabbi in the summer of 2008. At 35, he was happy to have finally picked a career.

It was a surprising choice for the soft-spoken son of a Jewish mother and a Catholic father who split his youth between Caracas, Venezuela and the suburbs of Detroit. Curiel always had a strong sense of spirituality, but he ascribed it to his itinerant upbringing rather than to his occasional appearances at synagogue or his five-year stint at Hebrew school. A bona fide wandering Jew, Curiel couldn’t help feeling that Judaism offered, at best, a very windy route to spiritual fulfillment.

His path to rabbinical school was roundabout indeed. It started in 2003, when he met Amberly Polidor, who grew up worlds apart from Curiel in a conservative Christian family. Polidor had left the church, and soon after they started dating, the couple began attending services regularly at Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Beyt Tikkun, a synagogue in Berkeley, California. It was there, Curiel says, that he “found God.” He began taking classes with Lerner and other local rabbis. Shortly after he and Polidor were married in 2005, Curiel felt that he’d finally found his calling.

So he was shocked when Hebrew College (HC), the non-denominational, Boston-based rabbinical school that appealed to him because it seemed “progressive and forward-thinking,” told him he would not be welcome at its seminary because his wife was not Jewish.

Neither Curiel’s situation nor HC’s policy is unique. The Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College (HUC) and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) all refuse to admit or ordain students in relationships with non-Jews. “Because we believe in the importance of Jewish family modeling,” reads the policy at HUC, the network of seminaries for America’s largest Jewish denomination, “applicants who are married to or in committed relationships with non-Jews will not be considered for acceptance to this program.”

If the policies affect only a small number of potential rabbis, they channel strong ideological currents. Rabbinical leaders contend that the policies are not only consistent with halacha, but actually embody core notions of Jewishness. “Jewishness has not historically been understood as a matter of individual faith or choice,” explains Jonathan Boyarin, a professor of modern Jewish thought at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “but as entitlement and obligation based ultimately on descent.” With this notion of Jewish collectivity already threatened by high intermarriage rates in America, the schools see rabbis as the last remaining bulwark in the fight to keep liberal Judaism Jewish; if the levees break and the policies are washed away, they worry, Jewishness as we know it could disappear.

That’s exactly what some policy opponents want: to expand the boundaries of Jewishness with the goal of ultimately redefining what it means to be a Jew. “At stake in this debate,” explains Rabbi Shirley Idelson, dean of HUC’s New York campus, “are competing visions of our people’s future—if and how we will survive, what we will look like, and the role that rabbis and cantors will play in shaping our people’s future.”

Click here to read the full story.