Choosing His Religion
I'm Catholic. My husband's Jewish. What does that make our son?
by Erin K. Blakeley
April 23, 2007
As the months ticked by and my stomach grew larger, our decision came to resemble a pig-pile; everyone from family members and friends to co-workers and acquaintances heaped their own layer of meaning on top of us. My husband's parents and grandparents bombarded him with phone calls, trying to convince him that he was more religious than he realized. The implication was that he was suffering from some sort of amnesia. "Don't you remember your Bar Mitzvah?" his mother asked. "Don't you remember how much that meant to you?"
On my side, a family friend claimed that my mother, who died when I was twenty, would object to her grandchildren being raised anything but Catholic. "This isn't what I believe, mind you," she insisted, rather unconvincingly. "I just thought you should know."
There have been others. I have been approached by co-workers who have lectured me about the importance of honoring all the Jews who have died throughout history. Some friends have reminded me of the church's commitment to social justice and their admirable anti-war stance; others have taken care to point out the recent sex abuse scandal. And a number of people in our lives have expressed outrage that we would raise our child to believe in any sort of God at all.
Needless to say, none of these conversations proved particularly useful. So we ruled out the Holocaust, my mother's death, my in-laws' agita, the allusions toNeither of us felt swayed by a current calling, but we were affected by happy memories of a family culture. pedophile priests, and everyone's politics. We stuck to a single guiding principle: decisions made from guilt don't feel good in the moment you make them, and they don't feel good later.
Still, we were nowhere. We often wished out loud that one of us was a devout adherent to a faith, a factor that would surely tip the balance in one direction. But what we were, really, was adherents to ourselves. Neither of us felt swayed by a current calling, but we were affected by happy memories of a family culture that we hoped to recreate for our own children.
So we began to talk about our decision in the context of our marriage. After all, at its core, marriage is a balance of tiny bargains we strike because we love each other; one person puts aside a way of doing things to allow for the other person's quirks. Luckily, the great majority of these compromises are idiosyncratic in nature — sleeping with the television on, listening to bad '80s pop music, not wearing shoes in the house.
But we also deal in the larger issues, the traditions that defined our families of origin, as we establish a set of habits that become emblematic of our new family. As a child, I assumed that big Sunday dinners, fresh-cut Christmas trees and vacations at the beach were customs that both of my parents carried on from their childhoods, but of course they weren't. They were a patchwork of traditions that one or the other of them carried into the family they created together.
©2007 Erin K. Blakeley and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Erin Blakeley is a freelance writer and journalist whose work has appeared in the Star Ledger, NYC24, and Tiempo, among other publications. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and son.
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