Easter: A Brief Ecumenical Contemplation on Religion, Spirituality, and Interfaith Marriage

Honoring A Partner’s Roots/Making Peace with the Past

“It’s Easter,” I say to my partner.  Ours is an “interfaith” marriage.  “Let’s take a walk to Saint-Sulpice. You can light a candle.“  

My partner has a checkered relationship with the religion of her youth.  But this is a holiday, and Saint-Sulpice is the second largest Catholic church in Paris, a 35-minute walk away.  I am Jewish, more by tradition than practice.  She is from a mostly non-Jewish Central American country. I am American.  

Isolated in Paris this year and therefore unable to “have Passover” with our large extended and blended family, last week she offered to sit through a Seder-for-two. I thought it was generous and sweet.  It never happened, but that’s on me.  I miss family, not bitter herbs.  

Now it’s Easter. Not “my” holiday, but Jesus was a good guy, a right thinker, and a righteous man.  And let’s not forget, he was one of us.  “They” tried to kill him, too.  It’s like that old joke:

“What is Jewish History?”

“They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.”

That punchline, Jewish scholar Henry Abramson maintains, condenses…

the massive scope of Jewish history into a single pithy statement. From Pharaoh to Haman, from Hadrian to Hitler, this vision of Jewish history describes a pattern of persecution by vicious, even pathological enemies, followed by miraculous salvation and a brief respite before the cycle begins again.

Admittedly, I had a dual motive for suggesting the walk to Saint-Sulpice. I was ready to leave the 7th arrondissement after months of confinement.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the 7th, as they might say on Seinfeld.  It has everything I need and want–food, clothing, shoes. Most important, it has my — everyone’s–favorite structure, the Eiffel Tower.  The place I call our “dog park”–the Champs de Mars–surrounds it and is steps from my door. 

Though I never have to leave the 7th, I like to peek into different windows every now and then.

The walk to Saint-Sulpice is a win-win. The sun is shining. The cathedral is beautiful, majestic.  Whether or not a visitor is Catholic, you can’t help but feel the holiness.

My Partner’s Catholic Past

The experience is undoubtedly different for my partner – in ways I can’t imagine. She recognizes some of the saints. She knows the rules.

I know nothing of “catechism” — except that certain kids in my elementary school were let out early on Wednesdays to study it. After Googling it, though, I wonder if my partner, who went to the American School in her country, also studied the “Baltimore” version.

In the United States the most famous of these Q&A catechisms is the Baltimore Catechism. Issued by the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884 and used until at least 1962, its 421 questions and answers became ingrained in the minds of millions of U.S. Catholic grammar school students who grew up before the council.

My partner makes her own spiritual choices these days. I see her as a non-practicing Catholic who has a guru. She is also Jewish, the descendant of “conversos,” Jews in the 15th century Spain who became Catholic to avoid persecution.  She was in her twenties when her great-grandfather’s will was discovered in the synagogue. 

It the eyes of the 21st century Spanish government, my partner is Jewish. In 2015, as a form of restitution, Parliament decreed that anyone providing documentation of her Jewish heritage could apply for citizenship. Her search yielded a 32-page report.  Apparently, she has multiple Jewish roots.

This made me happy.  I had a Jewish partner after all.  My dead grandparents and parents would be pleased, too.

My Jewish Past

As a teenager, I didn’t care whether a boy I liked attended a different house of worship. But the adults around me certainly did.  

“Is he shagitz?” one of my Yiddish speaking grandparents would inquire when a boy visited. Referring to a non-Jewish boy as a “shagitz” wasn’t so much an insult as it was a warning: Stay on your side of the fence. 

“You’re not going out with him, are you, Mamelah?”  

“But it’s just a date,” I’d protest.

“Better not to go at all.  God forbid, you should marry him.”

It’s not the same today.  But in the fifties and sixties, whenever I dated boys who weren’t Jewish, I saw what my elders saw: we were different. It was West Side Story, the interfaith version. The Jews and the Gentiles were different gangs. The song said it all: “Stick to your own kind.”

At home, our family discussions were littered with tales of marriages that never had a chance because Uncle Joe’s Catholic wife drank or Mrs. O’Reilly–nee Goldstein–married an Irishman. Of course, now he’s a no-good cheat and she cries her eyes out!  The stories sunk in.

My own experiences confirmed their fears. In the post-World War II Staten Island of my childhood, schools closed on Good Friday and stayed open on the Jewish High Holidays.  In the most remote and conservative of the five boroughs of New York City, Jews were decidedly “other.”  

When I was twelve, my parents enrolled me in a private school. I was the only Jew in a sea of Episcopalians and Catholics.  Visiting a classmate’s home on tony Todt Hill, I overheard my friend’s mother on the phone: “Johnny has the little Jewish girl over.”

In our public high school, it was worse.  I was terrorized by Betty, a tough Italian kid. She wore a silver cross and a leather jacket and slicked her short hair into a “DA” (duck’s ass).  She was what we then called a “hood” (short for hoodlum, not neighborhood), right down to the taps on her shoes.  Whenever Betty passed my friends and me in the hallway, she muttered, “Dirty Jews!”  

When I got to college where 40% of the student body was Jewish, I stopped looking over my shoulder.  But the scar tissue had already formed. 

Indeed, decades later, when my daughter began looking at colleges in the South, I worried. “Not a good place if you’re Jewish.”

My daughter rolled her eyes. “Oh, Mommmm…..”  But her school’s college advisor, a Jewish woman around my age, understood. 

This Is My First Interfaith Marriage  

The man I married in the mid-60s was Jewish. Ironically, he dated mostly dated Gentiles before we met.  He grew up in Scarsdale, so he couldn’t know what it was like to be the only Jew in the room.

His family was more observant than mine.  Maybe he dated non-Jews to rebel–or perhaps it was  internalized anti-Semitism. Either way, his mother was forever grateful when he brought me home. “I never thought he’d marry a Jewish girl.”

And so here I am decades later, divorced from her son and with a non-Jewish life partner of almost 27 years. Part of me hoped that Spain’s acknowledgement of her roots would prompt an aha, I’m Jewish! moment. But it is obvious as I watch my partner in Saint-Sulpice: she feels Catholic, not Jewish

And it’s okay. We aren’t raising children together, only Rocky. We don’t have to debate whether he should study for his Bar Mitzvah. And, really, what difference does it make?  

Today, my partner lights candles in Saint-Sulpice and connects to her spiritual roots. I sit in a pew, inhaling the majesty of the place.

She is smiling when she returns. She seems at peace. I am, too.  This is truly an ecumenical spring.