Somerville, Mass. — When Julia Spiegelman and Erina Donnelly, two teachers who met as undergraduates at Bryn Mawr, became engaged, they were looking forward to planning a wedding that included elements from both of their religions.
Ms. Spiegelman grew up attending a Reform synagogue in Andover, Mass., and Ms. Donnelly was raised a Roman Catholic.
The two women attend Jewish and Catholic services together, and they had hoped to find marriage officiants from both religions, which they did not think would be difficult. Most non-Orthodox rabbis officiate same-sex weddings, and while they could not expect to find a Catholic priest to officiate, they planned to ask a layperson from Dignity/Boston, a community of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Catholics, to take part.
So one Sabbath morning, they approached the rabbi at their Boston-area synagogue, a liberal congregation unaffiliated with any particular branch of Judaism.
“We were really confident it was going to be this rabbi,” Ms. Spiegelman, 29, said, sitting in the condominium that she and her fiancée recently bought.
But the rabbi told them that she could not perform the wedding. The problem was not that Ms. Spiegelman wanted to marry a woman — it was that she wanted to marry a non-Jewish woman.
“In retrospect, I can’t believe we were so naïve and trusting,” Ms. Spiegelman said. “We were so excited to tell her we were engaged and wanted her to do our wedding, and she was like, ‘I don’t do that.’ ”
“That was a real blow to us,” she said as their cat, Laurie (named for the “Little Women” character), moved about the cozy living room. “We’d understood that she perceived our relationship as legitimate and would see our marriage as legitimate. And it really hurt us to be rejected for that reason.”
To many, the rabbi’s refusal seems paradoxical. If clergy can embrace same-sex marriage, why can’t they marry a Jew to a non-Jew? But for Jews, troubled by declining levels of affiliation, the concern about interfaith marriage is strong. A majority of Jews now marry outside the faith, and, according to the major 2013 Pew survey of Jewish identification, millennials with one Jewish parent are far less likely to consider themselves Jewish than those with two Jewish parents.
So while other American religious groups, like the Episcopal Church, are tearing themselves apart over same-sex marriage, that front is relatively calm for Jews — who are, by contrast, exercised about intermarriage. For rabbis in particular, being pro-gay but unwilling to perform interfaith marriages is common.
Among Jews, the movement to sanctify same-sex relationships has moved quickly. In the Reconstructionist and Reform branches of American Judaism, it is now difficult to find a rabbi who will not do a same-sex wedding. In the centrist Conservative branch, there is no reliable count, but a growing number of rabbis perform such weddings. Only in Modern Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox communities, about 10 percent of all American Jews, do rabbis routinely refuse to do such ceremonies.
Although many Reform rabbis perform interfaith weddings, and the Reconstructionist seminary outside Philadelphia is considering lifting its ban on students’ being in relationships with non-Jews, many liberal rabbis will still not marry a Jew to a non-Jew. And the Rabbinical Assembly, the Conservative group, does not allow its members to perform such weddings. Which means that some rabbis who support gay rights must say no to gay or lesbian congregants’ weddings, if a non-Jew is involved.
“The comfort that I have working with L.G.B.T. families has predated the Conservative movement’s shift on the topic,” said Menachem Creditor, the rabbi of Netivot Shalom, in Berkeley, Calif., referring to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender families. He said he had “a very hard time saying no to interfaith couples because the celebration of love is as holy as it gets.”
Interfaith couples often create richly Jewish homes and lives. But he feels bound by the constraints of the Conservative movement. “I believe in the process of gradual change that Conservative Judaism has always embraced,” Rabbi Creditor said.
He does try to recognize interfaith couples who attend his synagogue. Unlike many rabbis, he will invite them to come forward for an “aufruf,” the ceremony of blessing the Torah on the Sabbath before a wedding.
And while some congregations will not announce a member’s pending interfaith wedding in the monthly bulletin, Rabbi Creditor proclaims interfaith couples’ milestones, including anniversaries, “with the same language” used for couples who are both Jews.
Sharon Brous, the founding rabbi of Ikar, in Los Angeles, said, “I have officiated at gay weddings and preached about and fought for marriage equality for 10 years, since we started the community, and would happily do more.” She added, “And I work extensively with interfaith couples but do not officiate at interfaith weddings.”
Rabbi Brous, who was also ordained by the Conservative movement, said that the conversation in which she turns down an interfaith couple asking her to officiate at their wedding can be “a painful one.” But she said that she always affirmed a couple’s love, even if she could not perform their ceremony.
“The first thing I say to engaged couples is, ‘Mazel tov,’ ” Rabbi Brous said. “When two people find each other and they can open their hearts to each other and lovingly give and receive what each other need — that is nothing short of a miracle. And that’s true whether it’s a Jew-Christian marriage, Jew-Buddhist, Christian-Buddhist.”
But, she said, while it was clear to her that Jewish tradition had to evolve to permit “a religious expression of love” between gay men or lesbians, the same logic may not apply to interfaith weddings, performed by Jewish clergy.
“With gay marriage, there was an ethical obligation for the law to change in order to make space for people to have the most core and foundational human experience — to have love that is affirmed and honored by their tradition,” Rabbi Brous said. “The question is, for intermarriage, what is the driving value that is challenging a tradition of several thousand years, and is that value significant enough to force an override of a law that’s been fairly consistently upheld?
“Is there another way to respond to challenges other than saying, ‘We will allow intermarriage?’ ”
As Ms. Spiegelman and her future wife search for a new Jewish congregation, they are discovering their own, eccentric fusion of Christianity and Judaism. For example, they both take Communion at Dignity/Boston — but they also both keep kosher for Passover. Last year, Easter fell during Passover, as it often does, which presented a problem.
“I mentioned something about not being able to take Communion because it is leavened, and they consecrated matzo for us,” Ms. Spiegelman said. “They had two little pieces in the pillbox so it didn’t touch any of the wheat, any of the leaven.”
If the Catholics have been accepting in the extreme, Jewish acceptance has been more elusive. “The Jewish end of this has been harder,” Ms. Spiegelman acknowledged.
But whatever the clergy think, the future brides believe that their two religions can be integrated. “We both feel,” she said, “our religions are expressing the same values through different stories.”