When I met Christian, it was love at first sight. He was absolutely gorgeous, smart, and could always make me laugh. He loved me and we were compatible in every way. The two of us dated for only 8 months before he got down on one knee and asked me to marry him. I was overjoyed and immediately said yes, but the problem was: we hadn’t discussed the issue of religion. Christian is…well, Christian, and I am Jewish. The two of us never talked about the issue. Did I need to convert for me? Did he need to convert me? What about the children that we agreed we wanted to have. How did we never think about this?? What would his parents think of this? What would my parents think of this? So many questions followed that were so much more difficult than the simple “Will you marry me?”. I didn’t know what I wanted so how could he?
We decided to sit down with both his parents and mine and ask what they thought. It turns out that both parents were open to the interfaith couple, but each set wanted the children to be raised in their faith. My parents cried and said that the number of Jews was constantly decreasing and his parents believed too strongly in their religion to allow Jewish children at their Easter dinner. So how did we settle this problem with no clear solution? Neither one of us converted, but we decided to raise the children without a specific faith, but educating them in both. This allowed them to be tolerant to everyone. We didn’t teach them to love Jesus, only that some people did. We did not choose one testament over the other, but rather told them stories for both. Our children are grown now and have been able to develop their own religious opinions. Our oldest daughter is a Catholic, our son is a Rabbi, and our little girl is a Buddhist. And yet when we have family dinners, we do not fight over our differences, but rather come together over our similarities. We are accepting of all faiths and now I am very glad that my husband and I made the decision that we did.