“What holiday is coming up next?”
This can be a dangerous question in Progressive Jewish spaces. Because inevitably, depending on the season, a kid will raise their hand and say exactly what they did the last time I asked: “Halloween!”
That week, there were as many as four or five Jewish answers that I could have been looking for (I was hoping for Rosh Hashanah, but oh well). Yet, Halloween felt like a bit of a win for me, a rabbi who has come to know that asking a leading question like that runs the risk of inviting a young person to shout out Christmas or Easter. In my experience, though, Halloween is a more coherent answer for many of our families trying to find a meaningful place for Judaism in the rest of their lives.
The Rabbi Emeritus at my congregation was one of the first in the region (and the country) to thoughtfully and enthusiastically perform interfaith marriages. For many of his colleagues in town, this made him highly problematic. But now, two and sometimes three generations later, we are uniquely positioned to be a kind of case study for how interfaith couples can find their way in the Jewish community when they are appropriately welcomed and cherished.
Most of our congregational families enrolled in our religious school involve one Jewish parent and one who does not come from a Jewish background. But even after only a half-decade as a rabbi, I have come to see how impactful it can be when a couple approaches me and asks me to officiate their wedding. In most cases, this means that there is a strong commitment coming from one half of the couple, and a strong sense of love and support for that Judaism coming from the other. In fact, it is not uncommon for the non-Jewish partner to be far more committed to authentic Jewish practice than the one coming from a Jewish household. As someone who has not historically participated at weddings where I would co-officiate with a cleric of another faith, it is so often the case that Judaism is being welcomed into a couple’s life, and we are highly incentivized to figure out how to say yes.
And the proof is in the Sunday School. While there have historically been fears that interfaith marriage would lead to a community that was “diluted” by other faith practices, instead, we are seeing the constant and pervasive growth of secular American society pushing back against Jewish practice. In that sense, the next upcoming holiday makes far more sense for these kids to be Halloween than it does to be Christmas, even as we are actively trying to teach about Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. As more and more Millennials continue to identify as having no faith at all, the question most of our families face is not “WHICH religion should we practice,” but rather “Should we practice any religion at all?”
It has never occurred to me that organized Judaism is losing a battle against paganism and witchcraft. No, the societal focus on Halloween is instead a nod to the Americanized fun of getting dressed up in costume and soliciting candy from neighbors, ideas that are pretty easy to celebrate because of the multitude of simple communal values associated with being together. The reality is that in all the years that members of the Jewish community were living in fear of the way external forces would impact our traditions, we were actually doing work to push away so many of the Jews who were asking for help in finding meaningful ways to welcome Jewish tradition into their lives.
I am deeply proud to belong to a rabbinic tradition that has, for over 40 years, found a way to say yes when so many others were saying no. The current data tells us that we are fighting an uphill battle to offer Judaism to people living in our secular world, at least if we are going to fight the fight to remain relevant, we can do it in the right places and in the right ways.
Austin Zoot is the Rabbi Educator at Valley Temple in Wyoming, Ohio.
