MICHAEL DOUGLAS’ FAITH-FUL WISDOM
WHEN Hollywood stars give sermons, the results are rarely anything to write home about. (End fracking! Save the whales! Check your privilege!) So it was nice to read about Michael Douglas’ speech last Wednesday at Temple Shaaray Tefila in Bedford, NY.
At the request of Rabbi David Greenberg, Douglas spoke to the congregants gathered for Yom Kippur about his recent reconnection to Judaism. But his message is pretty universal.
Douglas’ father, Kirk, was Jewish, but his mother Diana wasn’t. And while his wife, actress Catherine ZetaJones, isn’t Jewish, they’re raising their son in the tradition. When the boy started studying for his bar mitzvah, Douglas started studying, too.
“He does love the faith and the culture, and he thinks the number of Jews is declining because so many are assimilating and marrying nonJews, him included,” one of Douglas’ representatives told The Post. “If you turn your back on these people because your mother was not Jewish, you’re going to lose people . . . He’s passionate about inclusion.”
This year, Douglas won the Genesis Prize for his commitment to Jewish values and the Jewish people. He put the $1 million gift and another $1 million of his own money toward a pot for inclusiveness programs for intermarried families.
Douglas is absolutely right that Jews can’t turn their backs on families where the mother’s not Jewish. In fact, no religious group can ignore the issue of interfaith marriage today.
Before the 1960s, about 20 percent of US married couples were in interfaith unions; of couples married between 2000 and 2010, it was 45 percent. So the question is more urgent than ever: How can religious groups reach out to families that include nonmembers while still maintaining their own laws and customs?
Judaism classically accepts matrilineal descent as the only legitimate way to pass down the faith, though Reform rabbis accept either a mother’s or father’s Jewish identity as proof of the child’s. But even Jewish leaders who stick to the traditional standards should consider ways to encourage nonJewish women who’ve agreed to raise their children Jewish.
Because the truth is this: Women in America run religion. They’re more likely to attend religious services (and take children to them). They’re more likely to volunteer to serve on committees and organize events for religious institutions.
And they’re more likely to create religious rituals in the home and to take children to and from religious education classes.
A survey I conducted in 2010 found that children in interfaith marriages are more than twice as likely to adopt the mother’s faith as the father’s. In other words, if Mom’s not on board, the children won’t grow up in Dad’s religious community.
In this sense, patrilineal descent is in some ways more of a problem. Islam, for instance, lets men “marry out” but not women — a tradition that’s running headlong into the reality of religion, in America, where the statistics don’t bear out the presumption that the husband’s faith will determine the religious character of the household.
What does all this mean for people who want to raise their children in a particular faith? For one thing, you’re best off talking out how to raise kids when you’re just dating. More than half of people in interfaith couples got married before even talking about how they want to raise kids; it’s quite a shock for some women to find out that their husbands actually have a strong preference.
What would it mean for the Jewish community to take Douglas’ advice to be more “inclusive” and not turn their backs on families with nonJewish mothers?
Well, there’s the (very smart) program Mother’s Circle, which offers education and support for nonJewish mothers who’ve agreed to raise kids Jewish. What mother is going to lead her kids in rituals or bring them to a school or accompany them to services that she doesn’t, on some fundamental level, understand?
Plus, religious institutions typically have a lot of volunteer roles that people who aren’t technically members of the faith can be easily involved in. Many synagogues have tried in recent years to distinguish between roles that are religiously prescribed and ones that are more organizational. Running the auction for the Jewish nursery school PTA; serving meals at the local soup kitchen — such things bring nonJewish mothers deeper into the fabric of the community.
Finally, we shouldn’t be shy about asking people who’ve become part of the community if they’d like to become Jewish. Yes, proselytizing is pretty foreign to Jews — and for good theological and historical reasons. But both Conservative and Reform leaders have endorsed it in recent years.
Americans more and more see religion as a kind of marketplace. Why shouldn’t people of every faith try to sell us on theirs? Indeed, my survey found that a quarter of people who were married to people of the same faith actually started out in different faiths.
In other words, spouses can have a huge impact on our religious beliefs and affiliation. Who knows — maybe Catherine Zeta-Jones will be next.