Rabbinical School and Interfaith Marriage, Part 3

A new article in Tablet, Big Tent Country by Marissa Brostoff, sheds some light on the issue of rabbinical schools accepting and ordaining intermarried rabbis.

We blogged about this issue three months ago, when New Voices published an important article, The Coming of the Intermarried Rabbi. At the time, I wrote that “there could be no better role model for interfaith couples than an interfaith partner who is so Jewishly engaged that he or she is a rabbi,” and that “Intermarried rabbis would be particularly inspiring to the interfaith couples who they served — and there is no reason they could not be inspiring to in-married couples as well.”

The Tablet article tells about Ed Stafman, a former attorney who intermarried, became active in a Reform synagogue, and eventually was ordained by the Renewal-affiliated Aleph Rabbinic Program, the only seminary that does not reject intermarried students outright. Rabbi Stafman will be installed next week as rabbi at Beth Shalom, a Reform synagogue in Bozeman, Montana.

What’s most interesting to me in the article are the comments by the members of Beth Shalom, which support the notion of an intermarried rabbi as a role model and inspiration for interfaith couples. Beth Shalom is by all descriptions a heavily intermarried congregation. One person in the hiring process said that Stafman’s being intermarried “might be a great asset because we’re so intermarried here that you might have a better understanding of the congregation.” Another said, “I think it will be very beneficial to those interfaith families in the community, and that they will really feel they have a home at Beth Shalom.”

This post originally appeared on www.interfaithfamily.com and is reprinted with permission.