Why This Issue Matters--and Not Just for Patrilineal Jews

The issue of Jewish descent is often treated as a sideline issue witihin the Jewish community, as a minor irritant affecting the lives of a small number of people from time to time.  Needless to say, we at Emunah Avot take a different view of the matter.

We feel that important moral values on which Jewish tradition is predicated--shalom bayit (family harmony), hesed (lovingkindness), emet (truthfulness), and klal Yisrael (the fellow-feeling of all Jewish people), and the pursuit of justice--cannot be maintained as long as the Jewish community continues to decide the status of children of intermarriage in the arbitrary, cookie-cutter way currently imposed in Orthodox and Conservative Jewish circles.  We feel the need to act on this issue because the very moral health of Judaism is now at stake.

First, we feel that the Jewish community cannot afford to teach its young people that shalom bayit only matters in fully Jewish households and families--that it is acceptable for the Jewish community to behave in ways that seek to divide established intermarried families.  The Mesorah (traditional Jewish teaching) tells us that, in the end of days, Elijah the Prophet will come to reconcile parents with their children and children with their parents.

While Emunah Avot does not take any particular theological position regarding the literal truth of this statement, we do take the position that, at the very least, the Jewish community ought not to continue dividing parents from their children--of telling children that God does not recognize their relationship with their own fathers.  Such is the only conclusion that can be reached from an objective reading of the sources in the Torah, in Ezra-Nehamiah, and in the Talmud traditionally used to support matrilineal descent.  Although sensitive rabbis dealing with patrilineal Jews do not typically cite these texts to children, a patrilineal child who maintains a serious relationship with Judaism is bound to encounter them sooner or later.  While we do not advocate taking a black marker to this or any other part of Jewish sacred text, we feel that the texts that have been--and still are--used to exclude patrilineals from the Jewish community need to be read and understood in their proper historical and social context, and not used for the unholy purpose of dividing families or indeed of putting needless stumbling blocks on a child's path to a relationship with God, the Jewish people, or both.

Second, we feel that patrillineal descent is also an issue of hesed--of lovingkindness.  We do not feel it is consistent with the Jewish value of hesed to maintain a law that not infequently causes children to think, and sometimes to be explicitly told, that their very existence is a "mistake".  Just as the Conservative Movement has found ways to ensure that no Jewish child is ever declared a mamzer, and just as Orthodox poskim (halakhic decisors) bend over backwards to avoid declaring a child to be one, because of the tremendous social and emotional consequences of such stigmatization, we not only feel, but know, that declaring a child non-Jewish by dint of arbitrary rules of descent is not the enforcement of a divine decree, but a failure of imagination on the part of the rabbinate.

Third, we feel that patrilineal descent in an issue of emet, of truthfulness.  Current halakhic policy in the Orthodox and Conservative movements denies patrilineal Jews the opportunity to tell the truth about who they are, and to have that truth accepted by the community at large.  Many patrilineal Jews who have been forced into a conversion report a dissonance between how they understand their Jewish identity, and how the community chooses to see them, because they are not seen in the eyes of Jewish law as members of their own families.  Moreover, when the rituals of Jewish conversion are imposed in such an arbitrary manner, they undermine the meaning of conversion for those who, having truly been outsiders to the Jewish community, choose to cast their lot with the Jewish people.

Furthermore, we feel that patrilineality is an issue of emet because current policy creates a yawning gap between the law as it is on the books and the law as it is practiced in the lives of countless Jews and a myriad of Jewish communities.  Every system of law, even one claiming divine authority, sooner or later must adjust itself to facts on the ground if it is to retain its authority and be taken seriously as a guide to individual and communal behavior.  When Jewish communities welcome patrilineal Jews in practice--when they allow children of Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers to attend Hebrew school and receive a Jewish education--but maintain matrilineality "on the books," the authority and integrity of Jewish law and tradition is undermined.

Fourth, we feel that matrilineal descent, as practiced in Orthodox and Conservative circles, does extreme damage to klal Yisrael, the unity of the Jewish people.  While proponents of traditional practice claim that it is the "innovation" of patrilineality that is causing disunity, we feel strongly that disunity is caused by those who wish to exclude, not by those who wish to include.  We also feel strongly that, given the strong lay support that exists for patrilineality among all segments of non-Orthodox Jewry, the maintenance of matrilineal descent by portions of the community serves only to cause needless division among Jews.  The people, in essence, have decided.  Let the leaders take note.

Fifth, we feel that matrilineal descent undermines the Jewish claim to be concerned with the pursuit of justice.  Communities that practice matrilineal descent, while encouraging their young people to fight sex discrimination in society, open themselves up to well-deserved charges of hypocrisy.  Indeed, the maintenance of matrilineal descent at times forces Jewish institutions, such as day schools, to adopt polciies that smack of segregation.  The Conservative Movement, for instance, put out a teshuvah a few years back about the propriety of establishing a joint Conservative-Reform day school.  In this teshuvah, the movement said that patrilineal Jews must be kept out of any positions of leadership and full participation in Conservative parts of such a school, but that, simultaneously, "there must be no segregation."  A proper translation of this teshuvah would be: we should practice segregation, but shouldn't call it that.  Such doublespeak does not bode well for the long-term moral health of halakhic Judaism.