I am 18 years old and turning 19 in August, I will be going to college in August also. I am financially dependent on my parents as well as my boyfriend who will be attending the same college as me. My bf and I have been dating all through high school and we love each other very much.
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My parents have not approved of our relationship since day one. My parents are very religious Jews. My bf is Christian. My mother and step father who take care of me have threatened to not pay for college if I continue my relationship. They have also told me that I will have to choose him or my family. My mother has told me that I will ruin myself by losing my virginity to him and that I will be a waste and not be pure for a Jewish man.
Interfaith marriage in Judaism - Wikipedia
My mother is making me feel so depressed all the time. She says she is only making me decide because she loves me. People sometimes confuse those two things. If this were about Christian parents threatening to defund and disown their daughter because she was dating a Jewish boy, what your parents are doing would be just as hatefully bigoted.
This is a clash of values often seen between generations: You and your parents do have love for each other, but because that is pushed to the side, this is going to be painful. The very first thing you should do is to sit down with your Christian boyfriend and together make a careful, thorough, and honest assessment of how he feels about your views on religion, and how you feel about his. You love each other very much, but that does not necessarily mean that you both have fully and deeply thought out all the implications. I strongly recommend that the two of you see a relationship counselor such as a Marriage and Family Therapist or a Licensed Clinical Social Worker.
One place to start looking is The Secular Therapist Project. The last thing you would want to happen would be to endure the tension and indignity of hiding your relationship with your boyfriend during college, or to suffer the heartbreak of being disowned and shunned by your family, only to later have you or him make similar my-way-or-the-highway demands over his religion. Mixed couples, where one is religious and one is not, often find ways to reconcile their differences as they escalate their relationship from talking, through dating, into a sexual relationship, and even to the prospect of marriage and the can-of-worms of a mixed-belief wedding ceremony.
Ask Richard: Caught Between Jewish Parents and a Christian Boyfriend: Painful Choices Ahead
Raise my kid with your beliefs or views? Find out before you get to that point. If it is possibly an issue, it could double all the complexity of this whole problem. At eighteen going on nineteen, I understand that that can be in flux, an ongoing process that could go in any direction. So in order to know as clearly as you can where you and your boyfriend stand, you need to know as clearly as you can where you stand on Judaism and Christianity.
Until that is clear and stabilized for you, you should keep all of your plans with him tentative and not irreversible. This whole experience with your parents is probably going to leave you with quite a lot of resentment, guilt, and hurt.
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So beyond using a counselor to help to clarify things with your boyfriend, a secular oriented counselor for yourself can help you to sort all that out so that it does not fester and grow worse in you. I can only recommend the first one either by itself or maybe in some kind of combination with one of the other three:.
You can continue to negotiate with them, appealing to reason, to tolerance, and to the importance of keeping a respectful love rather than a controlling love central in your relationship with them. From your brief letter, I have no idea if that will have any traction at all. You have more information and insight on this than anyone else, but you still might not be able to predict that accurately.
Different movements in Judaism have different views on who is a Jew , and thus on what constitutes an interfaith marriage. Unlike Reform Judaism, the Orthodox and Conservative streams do not accept as Jewish a person whose mother is not Jewish, nor a convert whose conversion was not performed according to classical Jewish law.
Occasionally, a Jew marries a non-Jew who believes in God as understood by Judaism, and who rejects non-Jewish theologies; Jews sometimes call such people ethical monotheists. Steven Greenberg , an Orthodox Rabbi, has made the controversial proposal that, in these cases, the non-Jewish partner be considered a resident alien — the biblical description of someone who is not Jewish, but who lives within the Jewish community; according to Jewish tradition, such resident aliens share many of the same responsibilities and privileges as the Jewish community in which they reside.
In the early 19th century, in some less modernised regions of the world, exogamy was extremely rare—less than 0. For this reason, as early as the mid 19th century, some senior Jewish leaders denounced intermarriage as a danger to the continued existence of Judaism. In the United States of America, other causes, such as more people marrying later in life, have combined with intermarriage to cause the Jewish community to decrease dramatically; for every 20 adult Jews, there are now only 17 Jewish children.
Some religious conservatives now even speak metaphorically of intermarriage as a silent holocaust. On the other hand, more tolerant and liberal Jews embrace interfaith marriage as an enriching contribution to a multicultural society.
The Jewish fear of intermarriage
Regardless of attitudes to intermarriage, there is now an increasing effort to reach out to descendants of intermarried parents, each Jewish denomination focusing on those it defines as Jewish ; [39] secular and non-denominational Jewish organisations have sprung up to bring the descendants of intermarried parents back into the Jewish fold. In some cases, children of a Jewish parent were raised in the non-Jewish parent's religion while maintaining a sense of Jewish ethnicity and identity.
In Christian—Jewish relations, interfaith marriage and the associated phenomenon of Jewish assimilation are a matter of concern for both Jewish and Christian leaders. A number of Progressive Christian denominations have publicly declared that they will no longer convert Jews. They have made use of dual-covenant theology.
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Many Israeli Jews oppose mixed relationships, [49] particularly relationships between Jewish women and non-Jewish Arab men. A opinion survey found that more than half of Israeli Jews believed intermarriage is equivalent to "national treason". A group of 35 Jewish men, known as " Fire for Judaism ", in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Pisgat Ze'ev started patrolling the neighborhood in an effort to stop Jewish women from dating Arab men. The municipality of Petah Tikva has also announced an initiative to prevent interfaith relationships, providing a telephone hotline for friends and family to "inform" on Jewish girls who date Arab men as well as psychologists to provide counselling.
The city of Kiryat Gat launched a school programme in schools to warn Jewish girls against dating local Bedouin men. In February Maariv has reported that the Tel Aviv municipality had instituted an official, government-sponsored counseling program to discourage Jewish girls from dating and marrying Arab boys. According to supporters of the program, the girls are often ostracized for being Jewish, and some fall into drugs and alcohol or are prevented from leaving their Arab boyfriends. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The New York Times. Singer, Isidore ; et al. All Quiet on the Religious Front? Retrieved 17 March What is Wrong with Intermarriage?
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