Yesterday, while enjoying a very pleasant Shabbat lunch with neighbors, the subject of becoming religious, conversion, and intermarriage came up. My neighbor told me about a family she knew where a grown child married someone very religious, came to live in Israel, and hasn’t seen her parents since. But not because she herself is too frum for her parents; it’s because her parents are still too resentful, decades after her marriage, to see her again. As a result, they didn’t attend her wedding and have never been to Israel or met their grandchildren. I remember hearing about the bad ol’ days when Jewish families would sit shiva for children who married non-Jews, but to carry on as though their daughter is dead because she’s TOO JEWISH? How messed up is that?
My neighbor then made a similarly astute observation about children who grow up and intermarry, and it got me thinking. I don’t advocate or encourage intermarriage; it is accompanied by complications and frequent lapses in communication between marriage partners, and often results in identity-confused children. But I also do not believe intermarried children should be shunned by their families. Many years ago, the Cap’n and I attended a reunion of our respective (affiliated) yeshivot, during which the rabbis held an open question-and-answer session on any topic the attendees chose to discuss. One young man stood up and said that his brother was planning to marry a non-Jewish woman, and what should he do? The head of the yeshiva immediately seized on the question and told the young man that he should cut off his brother immediately: not speak to him, not attend his wedding, not engage in any further communication. I began to prickle with sweat, and could feel myself reddening with rage. After a moment, though, the yeshiva head changed tack, and said, “Well, maybe you should still keep up contact. After all, she might convert some day.”
At the time I couldn’t focus on anything more than what I perceived as the bigotry and hypocrisy of this rabbi. His first recommendation was straight out of a Polish shtetl. His second was only slightly better. The fact is, this yeshiva’s programs were designed for ba’alei teshuvah who, by definition, grew up with weak Jewish backgrounds. Did no one stop to think that perhaps the young man’s brother had had as weak a Jewish upbringing as he himself had? And that his brother may have been part of that large percentage of Jews with weak backgrounds who don’t see the point of marrying Jewish, and that what was done was done? Do those from weak Jewish backgrounds who “get religion” have the right to act like sanctimonious asses to their siblings?
But there is a third, very remote, possibility no one brought up in that conversation. That is, think about the good that can come of 1) living as a Jew should, i.e. treating others with kindness, understanding, and forgiveness, and 2) letting the non-Jewish spouse AND CHILDREN see that. My father’s Jewish family wasn’t pleased when he chose to marry my non-Jewish mother, but because they accepted that this was reality, they were warm, loving, and attentive to my mother and us children the whole time I was growing up. (Much more so than my mother’s family, as it happened.) That feeling of belonging with my Jewish family was one of several factors that I believe contributed to my decision to choose Judaism for myself when I grew up.
Intermarriage, while not ideal, is not necessarily a permanent state with inevitable consequences. I occasionally hear of non-Jewish spouses who, after decades of marriage to a Jew, finally decide to convert. It is no less possible for the halachically non-Jewish children (or even grandchildren) of those marriages to convert. The statistics are not high for this, but it should be obvious that the more included those parents and children are in their extended Jewish family, the more likely they are to see themselves as belonging to the Jewish people, and the more natural it would be for them, if they desire the stamp of halachah on their Jewish identity, to convert.
Everyone’s life is “their turn.” Our parents had their turn to choose how they would identify themselves, whom they would marry, how they would run their household, how many children they would have, and how they would chart their upbringing. We have our turn, and our children will have theirs. None of us has the right to judge the previous generation for their choices, and they do not have the right to impose on us for ours. While we can influence the next generation through education and modeling of our own choices, the decision to be religious (a la us), haredi, secular, or intermarry is theirs to make.
Shimshonit 
> But I also do not believe intermarried children should be
> shunned by their families.
A good rule of thumb: if the person knows enough about Shabbat that he would deserve to be stoned for being brazen enough to violate Shabbat (i.e. he’s b’meizid and not b’shogeg), then you can ostracize him for intermariage as well.
I don’t think very many qualify for this today. Rav Kook said that today’s cultural environment is such that secularism is far more pervasive and influential than ever before in Jewish history, and that therefore, no one is truly blameworthy for their sins as they were in days of yore.
Similarly, the Hazon Ish held that nowadays, because we don’t have open miracles and blatant ruah ha-kodesh like we (supposedly!!) did in the Talmudic and Medieval eras, therefore no sinners today are as blameworthy today as sinners once where. Moreover, one of my rabbis – a moderate black-hat type – cited the Hazon Ish as saying something to the effect that not only would religious coercion not work, but that even if it did, you wouldn’t want to use it.
(For my own personal purposes, I’d tweak the Hazon Ish. I don’t think miracles were ever so common, but we could nevertheless say that sociologically and culturally, it was the sort of environment that was k’ilu, hypothetically as-if, full of miracles. Most importantly, everyone was religious; to violate Shabbat was to be a renegade and violating the basic fabric of society, tantamount to a public proclamation that you didn’t believe in G-d, the belief in Whom was assumed to be the only basis for social morality.
(See also the very last section of Professor Haym Soloveitchik’s Rupture and Reconstruction. Basically, he says that the same way we believe in gravity, Medieval people believed in G-d’s causing events on earth. It’s not that everyone was necessarily so religious or observant, but rather, spirituality was just the explanation that was taken for granted. Stones fall to earth and fire rises because like attracts like, and G-d sends lightning to kill sinners. It’s just the way things were. Today, even if you sincerely believe in G-d, you’ve superimposed Him over a prior causality of materialistic science, and this Maimonidean intellectual faith simply doesn’t have the same feeling of immanence as traditional spirituality.)
So back in the day, intermarriage was comparable to your child marrying a proud member of the KKK, or marrying one of those people who throws acid on women who dress immodestly. But today, unfortunately, intmarriage doesn’t have the same stigma, so you cannot be so incensed anymore.
I don’t know if you have ever visited Hadassah’s blog – In the Pink. Last friday, she hosted a post by a woman who had intermarried and gone religious years later. this post sparked off a series of comments. You can click here for the link.