Patrilineal Descent and Me

Since I’ve been talking of late about Reform Judaism I thought I would tell the story of the minute in my life when I had an infinitesimal chance of preventing the Reform rule concerning patrilineal descent.

I was invited to this cocktail party that was given by my friend and his wife. My friend calls up and says he would love for me to come. I will know many of the invited guests, and he also invited his rabbi. By the way, he can’t handle them all. Would I do him a favor and talk to the rabbi? I agree. I come to the party. It’s a ritzy affair. There’s the rabbi. We talk, nice enough guy; and before long he tells me the following: “You know, I am very busy these days. I am the principle author of the proposed legislation on patrilineal descent at the forthcoming Reform Rabbinical Convention.” I say, “Come again?” And he says, “Yes, I am writing the legislation. I have to consult with my colleagues, but it looks to me it’s finally going to happen.”

At the time, the issue had already been discussed at some length in the Jewish newspapers and I had formed a very strong and almost violent opinion against patrilineal descent. The issues are well known and I don’t have to go over them at this point. So, when he tells me this, in my mind I start shouting, “Yes! Yes!” and I am beside myself with excitement. OTOH-OTOH. Part of me wants to take this guy into the bedroom and strangle him, thus postponing the issue of patrilineal descent for at least a year. I hear the voice of my parents, “We didn’t raise you to go around murdering Reform rabbis. We are baalabatish people. Just think how this will look to the community.” I see the headlines in the newspaper---‘’RABBI MURDERED IN LAKESHORE CONDO…PATRILINEAL DESCENT SUSPECTED MOTIVE.” The more rational part of me realizes I have to speak nicely to this rabbi if I am to have any hope of influencing him even in the slightest way. I have less than 15 seconds to decide what I am going to do.

I begin to panic and out comes this totally stupid sentence. I say to the man, “It’s an honor to meet somebody like you. After all you’re going to go down in history as the man responsible for splitting the Jewish people into two. What can I say? I am so very excited to meet you. It’s almost as good as meeting Cher.” In those days, Sonny and Cher were very big. The moment I said that, I realized I had said something really dumb. It came out this way because I was rowing as fast as I could to reconcile two competing impulses. The rabbi pulls back, shocked that anyone would tell him something as dumb as my remark. I work hard to try to make up for it, I get the conversation back on track, but I had blown my chance of having any influence however small.

Nevertheless, he was eager to talk and he told me a story which I remember until today. He said, “When I was a rabbi in rural Michigan, 80% of my congregants had one parent that wasn’t Jewish, Almost no one in my temple lost any relatives in the Holocaust or had any family involvement in European Jewish history. They have no clue what the word yiddishkeit means. How was I supposed to be an effective rabbi? Should I have told a third of my congregation to leave because they didn’t have the right parent that was Jewish? And in any event, if I had converted all those whose father was Jewish but not their mother, what difference would it have made? Nobody recognizes my conversions anyway. The Orthodox and the Conservatives think of me as the enemy, and the State of Israel is in their pocket.” The rabbi had a point.

I believe today, so many years after this historical legislation, despite all the pessimistic forecasts, not too much has happened. It is true that by allowing for patrilineal descent the Reform eliminated a barrier to intermarriage. When a non-Jewish woman doesn’t want to convert and the man or his parents want his children to be Jews, patrilineal descent is a useful doctrine. The same doctrine can be used in a positive way to keep the family inside Reform Judaism. Otherwise there is no small danger of the entire family winding up in a church. In order to say something definitive there is a need for some serious statistical studies. I am ignorant of the social science literature on this topic. If any reader knows of any studies that attempt to measure the total consequences of patrilineal descent please write a comment.

A major practical change that has already occurred is that the Israeli Chief Rabbinate now assumes a Reform Jew is of patrilineal descent and will not perform as matter of course a marriage ceremony. I do not know whether such a presumption can be defeated, and if the testimony of the applicant’s Reform rabbi would make any difference.

Orthodox and Conservatives do not recognize the child of a Reform woman convert as a Jew. A child of a gentile mother and a Jewish father is also not considered a Jew. As the number of children of converts and of patrilineal descent grows we are quickly becoming a people with two distinct subgroups that can not easily intermarry. I would expect eventually a Reform Jewish person of matrilineal descent who wants to marry in an Orthodox ceremony without any proof of lineage even in the US will be required to undergo the same rituals as a convert. Because so many Reform Jews will be converts or of patrilineal descent, the Orthodox rabbis will fear the worst and feel forced to assume the person in question is Jewish via patrilineal descent.

The status of Jews of patrilineal descent with respect to the Law of Return was and remains a problem. There are new developments in the works and the Israeli Supreme Court is expected to issue some new rulings. Details can be found here. Symbolically the ‘’Who is a Jew’’ issue means a great deal to Reform community and their fight to keep intermarried families inside Jewish life. In practice the number of people involved is small.

What remains important for me in what the rabbi told me those many years ago is this: the rabbi’s congregation in rural Michigan is still out there, thinking of themselves as Jews and, in many instances, raising children who are looking to marry other Jews, including Jews of matrilineal descent. These children who will go on to marry Jews of matrilineal descent will create a new generation of Jews of matrilineal descent and a new generation of Jews of patrilineal descent roughly in equal numbers. They need and want rabbis and temples to provide pastoral care, moral inspiration, and assistance in celebrating life cycle events. Their numbers are huge and growing.

I remain undecided how to think about the many non-Jews who have married Jews and the offspring of such unions. There are a variety of cases each with a particular halachic configuration combined with different degrees of Jewish identification. Is there a principled way of deciding how efforts to maintain Jewish continuity be understood? Should it be a triage approach where resources are channeled to the most marginal of Jews or should our efforts be confined only to core Jews and traditional Jewish life, especially when resources are so limited? My gut feeling is that it is always a mistake to walk away from any person who self identifies as a Jew irrespective of halachic status. The difficulty is that intuitions are often poor guidelines for public policy.