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FROM THE CLERGY
Dear Friends,
On the High Holy Days, we spoke about our desire for this congregation to be an especially welcoming place for interfaith families.
How do we do this? We do it by fashioning policies that encourage the non-Jewish members of our Shir Ami family to participate in the life of our congregation. We do it by welcoming these families into all we do, making it clear that we regard them as a special blessing to this holy community.
And there is another way to do this, a way new to our congregation. We do it by allowing interfaith couples to receive a welcoming and positive response when they seek to have their marriage ceremonies performed by their clergy.
We have therefore decided to reach out to our Shir Ami families -- and to their children who may be contemplating marriage -- allowing each member to decide for her/himself whether or not s/he will officiate at the wedding ceremony of a Jew and a non-Jew.
At this time, Cantor Elson, Rabbi Eric Goldberg and Rabbi Paula Goldberg are ready and willing to officiate. Rabbis Strom and Robinson are currently not ready to do so. Of course, we will all continue to wrestle with this issue in the days and months ahead and, recognizing that these are very difficult and personal decisions, are all comfortable and respectful of the choices each of us has made.
Those of our clergy who choose to officiate do so in the belief that they are helping to fashion a Jewish home and family and strengthening the Jewish community and our congregation. That is why this policy is meant exclusively for Shir Ami members and their children. It is also why it requires a commitment by that couple to raise exclusively Jewish children and to create a Jewish home and family, even where one member of the couple chooses not to convert to Judaism. And, because knowledge is necessary to create such a home and family, it will require a commitment from both members of the couple to study in an Introduction to Judaism course. This commitment to help create positive Jewish families who embrace our traditions, means that our clergy will happily perform these weddings as they do all weddings, both on our bimah and in venues beyond the walls of our synagogue. It also means that Shir Ami clergy will not co-officiate with clergy of other faiths.
We have already discussed this issue with our congregation’s lay leadership and now wish to discuss it fully with our congregation over the next months, to listen carefully to your comments, questions, and critiques and, in this way, fine-tune this policy, so that we can institute it in the spring with a minimum of disruption, confusion or unexpected consequences.
For this reason, we invite you to give us your honest feedback by mail, email, telephone and in person in the coming weeks and months. We especially invite you to discuss with Rabbi Strom our congregation’s desire to welcome intermarried families – in this and other ways – at our Synaplex Shabbat on Friday, December 7. Services begin at 6:15 and our discussion begins at 8:15 PM.
We very much hope that you are excited and pleased by this change in our congregation. We believe it represents a ‘sea change’ in the life of Shir Ami and see it as part of our ongoing efforts to be responsive to the real needs of our congregants in a changing world.
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