Mixed Marriages: Breeding Grounds for Religious Indifferentism?

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the premiere of Jerome Robbins’s hit musical Fiddler on the Roof. The play, initially shelved for being “too Jewish,” began its run in Detroit before moving to Broadway, where it stayed for years, underwent revivals, and was adapted into a movie in 1971 (with famed Israeli actor Chaim Topol in the lead role of Tevye in place of Zero Mostel, who starred in the play). It is the story of an impoverished dairyman and his family who live around the turn of the 20th century in the Pale of Settlement, that (progressively shrunken) zone on the peripheries of the Russian Empire into which Jews were steadily driven as the result of pogroms. Fiddler’s songs are as memorable as its characters: Tevye, the poor dairyman who wishes he were a rich man and who argues with a God to whom he is ultimately obedient; his wife, Golda; and three of their daughters, Tzeitel, Hodel, and Chava. I suspect that when most people think of Fiddler, they see images from the film version.

Much of the action in the film centers around the three daughters and their marriages. Tevye and Golda usher their girls into adulthood, fully assuming they will have arranged marriages — perhaps brokered by the village matchmaker — and hoping they will be good ones, considering their dowries would be poor. The young women, however, have other ideas. Though Tzeitel might have been matched with a much older widower, the village butcher, she loves Motel, a poor-as-a-synagogue-mouse tailor. Hodel, meanwhile, is attracted to Perchik, a revolutionary Jew who happened to visit Anatevka, their shtetl, or village. He is eventually arrested for his revolutionary activity and sent to Siberia, where Hodel — in a haunting song to her father — says, “I must go. I must go.” Chava comes to marry Fyedka, a young man of the village who happens to be Russian Orthodox.

Each “match” is a trial for Tevye. Tzeitel, the oldest, breaks the pattern of the parentally arranged and approved unions common — and expected — among their kinfolk. When Tzeitel and Motel announce that they have “made a pledge” to marry, Tev­ye’s first musical reaction is “unheard of! Absurd!” But, in the end, he relents and thereby introduces a comedic subplot of how to break off the arranged engagement with the butcher.

At least Motel is a known commodity, the little boy at play — and in synagogue — in Anatevka. He shares Tevye’s family’s life and values. Yes, Perchik is a Jew, too, but he is a secular Jew, a revolutionary, maybe even an atheist. He comes from outside the shtetl. Still, in the film version of Tzeitel’s wedding scene, Perchik and Hodel look at each other, Hodel singing as she reflects on her sister’s marriage, “Is there a canopy” — a Jewish marriage beneath a chuppah — “in store for me?”

When Perchik leaves and gets into trouble with the Imperial Russian regime, Hodel decides to follow him to Siberia. As she sits on the bench with her father, waiting for the train that will likely separate them forever, Tevye asks in disbelief whether Perchik “asks you to leave your father and mother and join him in that frozen wasteland and marry him there?” Hodel replies, “No, Papa. He did not ask me to go. I want to go.” Tevye consoles himself with the thought that there’s probably a rabbi, too, who has been exiled to Siberia.

Finally, despite Tevye’s efforts to break them up, Chava clings to Fyedka. While Motel and Perchik might fall somewhere along the Jewish spectrum, this clearly is untrue of Fyedka. As a Russian Orthodox, there is no other possible marriage for him except in the Orthodox Church. So, Chava runs away — to the local Orthodox priest, who marries the young couple.

It is Chava who, fait accompli in hand, comes to talk to her father on the road. Tevye is clearly divided: This is his daughter, but she has left her faith and her people. In the Jewish tradition and Orthodox Jewish practice of the time, she is dead to them. But here she is. Does Tevye turn away from his daughter or from his God? In the movie, he drives his horse and wagon away from her. They are estranged, not exchanging a word until near the end of the film, when, as the Jews of Anatevka depart under a Russian eviction notice, Chava and Fyedka stop to see her parents and tell them that they, too, will leave because of the edict. It occasions the last farewell between father and daughter.

The film version of Fiddler on the Roof portrays a father seemingly hidebound to “tradition! Tradition!” and struggling to accommodate change. He bends for Tzeitel and Motel. He arches his back for Hodel and Perchik. But, as he observes with Chava and Fyedka, “if I bend that far, I’ll break.” Only against the backdrop of another daughter never again to be seen does he offer at least some gesture toward her and Fyedka. If you watch the film, you’ll see a Tevye struggling with, and moderately successful in, accommodating the new times and ways and “accompanying” his daughters.

The problem is that this aspect of the story is the scriptwriter’s. It’s not Sholem Aleichem’s, the author of Tevye the Dairyman, the book on which Fiddler is based.

Obviously, as a work of fiction, Fiddler takes liberties with history. By 1964 many Americans — including many American Jews — nursed a sentimental nostalgia for the vanished world of the Eastern European shtetl. Almost 20 years separated them from the brutal acts of the German Holocaust of Jews that decimated the Anatevkas of Europe. At the time, the sites of those Jewish shtetls — today’s Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Slovakia — were “safely” cut off behind an Iron Curtain, where further communist barbarism against Christians and whatever Jews were left would go largely unnoticed by Westerners. Against that background, the imagination could run wild.

The truth is that the Americans — including the Jewish Americans — who waxed sentimental in 1964 about Tevye and Golda almost certainly did not extend open arms when their kind showed up as refugees in Brooklyn and Chicago in 1905. The ideal then was that of the assimilated Jews of Western Europe — the cultured Reformed (or at least Conservative) Jews from, say, Aachen and Utrecht (celloist Frieda Belinfante or jeans maker Levi Strauss come to mind) — not the poor Orthodox dairymen of Anatevka and other shtetls. Still, in the wake of the memory of the Holocaust, the revisionist vision of Fiddler had its place.

I mention playing fast and loose with history because I think a similar phenomenon can be found in the film’s treatment of marriage compared to the book’s. In recent months I’ve been reading conservative Jewish thought, including conservative Jewish social commentary, and come upon authors who note that the Tevye of Fiddler is not the Tevye of Aleichem. The latter’s Tevye “is the very incarnation of the traditional culture of the shtetl,” writes Hillel Halkin, an American-born Israeli literary critic. Aleichem’s Tevye does not seek to accompany the Zeitgeist. He wants to be a faithful Jew, committed not just to his “tradition” but to his faith. That’s nowhere more apparent than in how Aleichem’s Tevye speaks of Chava’s marriage.

Tevye is divided; any father would be. But, unlike the Tevye of Fiddler, Aleichem’s Tevye is clear: He cannot square this circle; therefore, he has to choose. And there can be but one choice for an Orthodox Jew such as Tevye: his God. That’s why it is much clearer in the book than in the film that when a child marries outside of Israel, one should observe shiva, a time of mourning for one’s dearest relatives, because this child is dead to Israel.

Fiddler tries to paint a gradually accommodating and assimilating Tevye who overcomes the narrow religious ghetto of “tradition” when it comes to marriage. Such an assimilationist impulse would have resonated in the secularizing American Jewish community of the mid-1960s, which was still struggling with the remnants of anti-Semitism as barriers to full social acceptance. How better to integrate than to intermarry? So, why not overcome these tribal prejudices against intermarriage? After all, as we’re assured, “love is love.”

Something similar was happening at the time in Catholicism. The Church, like Judaism, was also traditionally opposed to religiously mixed marriages. Yes, marriage as an integration tool was already afoot among American Catholics, albeit ethnically rather than religiously. The various Catholic immigrant groups of the 19th and early 20th centuries, initially segregated in their national parishes, began in the second generation to intermarry: Kowalski and Faggioli, O’Brien and Toth, and so on. Perhaps a similar phenomenon occurred among American Jews, albeit on a less apparent “ethnic” scale. In The New York Times’ obituary marking singer and actor Steve Lawrence’s death (March 7), his Jewish wife and costar, Eydie Gormé, is quoted as saying her mother-in-law always had problems with her. “To the day his mother died,” Gormé recounts, “she said I wasn’t Jewish but Spanish.” Gormé’s parents were Sephardic Jews, descendants of the population of the diaspora that settled on the Iberian Peninsula.

However, in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council (which ended a year after Fiddler hit Broadway), Catholic breakdowns of religious barriers began to follow the breakdowns of ethnic ones. While the Church officially maintained her opposition to “mixed marriages,” whether inter-Christian (Catholics with Protestants or Orthodox) or interreligious (e.g., Catholics with Jews), in practice, ecclesiastical discipline became much more lenient. Permission for mixed marriage or dispensation from disparity of cult are, to this day, much more freely given.

The previous requirement that the non-Catholic party agree that any children born of the union be raised Catholic shifted to the Catholic party’s committing to that obligation. (It has never been clear to me why, since marriage involves two people, the promise is not required of both parents.) Not only have bishops been liberal in granting permission for inter-Christian and interreligious marriages, they have even been permissive in “dispensation of form” (i.e., waiving the obligation to marry according to the rite of and in the Catholic Church). These canonical concessions have been joined to an extension of the general veil of silence that has marked preaching and public teaching in the Church about matters marital and sexual. When was the last time you heard a priest warn against the dangers of mixed marriages? Instead, we have the German bishops’ conference extolling the value of “ecumenical marriage” and demanding a dispensation to admit non-Catholics (while remaining non-Catholics) to full eucharistic communion.

Yes, there are dangers to mixed marriages. Supinely accommodating bishops and flexible theologians might imagine two religiously committed persons remaining loyal to their faiths. If that were true, it still means that the Catholic party, who has nominally assumed the obligation to ensure the raising and educating of the children in the Catholic faith, will be a spiritually single parent. He or she will shoulder that burden alone because even the most “accompanying” non-Catholic spouse can only accompany the other so far when not sharing the same faith.

Though these differences are starker in interreligious marriages (which force one to grapple with the uniqueness and indispensability of Jesus Christ), they are not absent in inter-Christian marriages. Take Baptism: Is it appropriate for a child, as Catholics believe, or must one be a “professing” adult to be baptized, as many Protestant sects teach? Or take Confirmation: Is it a sacrament, just a rite of passage, or none of the above?

Now, these scenarios assume that both parties will remain committed to their religions. No doubt, that sometimes happens. Yet, I would suggest that in the vast majority of cases, it does not happen. Sustaining so dynamic a practice of one’s faith presupposes an active religious life that somehow will overcome the perpetual dissonance, from the first week of marriage through maybe the platinum jubilee, of separate commitments in separate places each and every Sunday morning in inter-Christian marriages (or all weekend long in interreligious ones). It seems more likely that such dissonance eventually leads to (a) one side simply “giving up” and following the other, not out of conviction but because it is easier; (b) some temporary practice of accretion, a little from here, a little from there, intermittently practiced; and/or (c) the most likely outcome, a religious indifference, overcome (for Catholics) perhaps at Christmas, Easter, and some significant life moments.

Given these likely outcomes — permanent religious tension or religious indifference — is the next generation likely to value a “religious” marriage? The Catholic party pays lip service to the “sacramentality” of marriage while the non-Catholic party (particularly if Protestant) will likely see marriage less as a spiritual vocation and more as a “civil estate” that establishes a status in the (primarily temporal) community. Against this religious tension, the child will also face the broader cultural message that marriage is but one of many “love forms” to be chosen at will. If you doubt this, consider that even once staunchly Catholic Ireland recently held a referendum (which happily failed) that would have made real marriage and “durable relationships” (whatever that means) legal equivalents under the nation’s Constitution.

The silence from the Catholic Church about mixed marriages and their consequences is disconcerting. If their outcomes are as positive as lax ecclesiastical discipline and some ecumenical cheerleaders would have us believe, let’s see the numbers. These numbers are concerning if there is a nexus to mixed marriages. Is there a connection between the decrease in Catholic marriages and the overall decrease in numbers of Catholics? And in the rise of Nones, those who disclaim any religious affiliation? Are there links between those numbers and mixed marriages on their parents’ parts? If, as I suspect, mixed marriages are breeding grounds of religious indifferentism, isn’t it time we re-examined our “pastoral” approach?

In the meantime, I suggest we go back and read the chapter “Chava” in Tevye the Dairyman. Unlike Fiddler, it portrays the real, existential struggle of a father who loves his child but who also knows that he himself is a child loved by a Father from whom all paternity in Heaven and on earth derives its name (cf. Eph. 3:15) — a father for whom “tradition” is not just a set of folkloric customs or some historical antecedent invoked only occasionally when useful (for example, when seeking parental tuition dollars) but is the very warp and woof of one’s identity that gives meaning to life. In that light, and the light of both Jewish and Catholic wisdom about religious unity in marriage, we need to examine how we approach mixed marriages — especially if we really believe what our faith teaches.

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