Shoftim / Intermarriage: What’s legal halachically, what’s desirable

For as far back as I can remember, I have heard rabbis and community leaders utilize such catch phrases in public lectures as “We must stem the tide of assimilation!” and “Intermarriage rates are skyrocketing!”

Most Jews I have met who grew up in the 1920s and ’30s married Jewish and tried to raise Jewish children. Marrying a non-Jew was out of the question — and perhaps in a slightly more bigoted and less-tolerant society the feeling was mutual. Many Jews who grew up in the ’40s and ’50s were fed similar instructions. But perhaps the emergence of Israel as a state created a human, and even admirable face, to the enigma of the Jew, and marrying whomever for love began to become an option.

Nowadays, with intermarriage in the United States being over 50 percent, many Jewish children grow up hearing, “As long as you love your spouse, as long as you are happy, it doesn’t matter to us.” More than likely, a number of parents who don’t inculcate the need for their children to marry Jewish don’t themselves understand why it should be important.

This is not to say any Jewish parents whose child married out did not try very hard to teach their children, nor is it to suggest they are failures. In our society, people choose spouses, often enough without, despite, or deliberately against their parents’ input. More couples than I can count have said to me, “I am not happy about my kid’s choices. But what can I do? I still love him/her.”

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Is intermarriage bad?

Not wishing to be judgmental, or to point fingers, let us just say that it is particularly frowned upon in the Talmud (Yevamot 76a, Kiddushin 68b, Avodah Zara 36b) and its commentaries, and most clearly in the words of Maimonides (Laws of Forbidden Relations chapter 12). The Torah itself says (Devarim 7:3), “Do not marry them, don’t give your daughter to his son, nor take his daughter for your son.”

In fairness, one of the Talmudic debates directly addresses the question of whether this verse applies only to the Seven Nations of Canaan, even if they convert, or to all non-Jewish nations who do not convert. Other than people from a few nations that no longer exist, those who convert are no longer subject to the prohibition of this kind of intermarriage. After all, one who converts is a Jew.