Then plainly know my heart's dear love is set
On
the fair daughter of rich Capulet:
As
mine on hers, so hers is set on mine;
And
all combined, save what thou must combine
By
holy marriage: when and where and how
We
met, we woo'd and made exchange of vow,
I'll
tell thee as we pass; but this I pray,
That
thou consent to marry us to-day.
Romeo and
Juliet,
Act 2, Scene
3
After Helen died, I wrote a memoir for our children giving
an account of our lives until we met, our married years, and her death. I started each chapter and sometimes
each section of a chapter with a quotation from the literature. Especially when in deep mourning, I
found those a balm for a sore soul.
(See Writing
and Reading as Balm.) Yet even in more normal times, when I'm
not assuaging raw pain, literature comforts me, letting me know that I'm not
all alone here, that I'm part of a living human fabric which comfortingly
enwraps me.
The chapter on Helen's and my marriage started with the
Shakepearean passage above. Unlike
Romeo and Juliet, we were of course not from long-feuding family clans. Still, our problem was one of
clannishness, for religions are simply very large clans. Substitute "Jewish" for
"Montague" and "Mormon" for "Capulet" and you
have a suggestion of our story in the couplet "… but this I pray/That thou
consent to marry us to-day."
My mother and Helen's father were against our marrying
because of our difference of religion—we were caught in a tribal conflict. Helen was less religious than I was then, so she had no
misgivings when I suggested that we be married by a rabbi, thus possibly
assuaging my mother, if not her father. (Two of her siblings had already married outside Mormonism
and a third was about to, but all to Christians; perhaps I was beyond the
pale.)
Helen doubted that I would be able to find a rabbi who would
agree to marry us. Nevertheless, I
set about trying to find one. It
was a disturbing revelation to my then-naīve self that none I initially asked
would do so, unless Helen converted first.
I finally found a liberal rabbi who said he would require only that
Helen take six weeks of lessons on Judaism and agree to raise our children as
Jews.
Although Helen was willing to meet those requirements, I
couldn’t agree to placing conditions on her as a premise for our marriage, and
told the rabbi so. He responded
that he felt himself bound by his own rather minimal interpretation of his
duties, and reasonably pointed out that a civil marriage was available as an
alternative. I quarreled
that rabbis were constantly decrying the falling away of Jews from the fold
because of intermarriage. Weren’t
they concerned that their rigidity actually accelerated the trend?
The rabbi cited the Book of Ruth: “Remember that Ruth converted,” he said, in defense
of the traditional outlook. I was
stopped short by this argument. My
vague remembrance of Ruth from my
Hebrew-school days was that Ruth, a Moabitess who had married the Jewish
Naomi's son, had declared her conversion—famously saying to Naomi “Thy
people shall be my people, and thy God my God”—not in advance of her marriage,
but only after her husband had died, when Naomi was preparing to return from
Moab to Judah. The marriage itself
had had no strings attached; Ruth's later conversion was entirely
voluntary. Wasn’t the moral of the
book one of toleration and acceptance, not of exclusion? Only the next day, on re-reading Ruth, did I find that I was correct. I was angry at the rabbi for having
played the sophist, and chagrined at myself for not having had a response at my
fingertips.
In the event, as the negativity from Helen's father and my
mother increased, I became more and more nervous that we might not be able to
withstand it, so I suggested to Helen that we immediately get married in a
simple civil ceremony. She agreed,
and within days we were married in the San Francisco Superior Court, with only
two close friends attending.
Ironically, the judge was the son of a rabbi and performed a touching
ceremony.
It was all an eye-opener for this ingénu.
Although Helen and I did raise our children as Jews, that personal brush
with the mischief of religious tribalism was just one more spur in my long trek
of distancing myself from my own "tribe"; it might also have
contributed to my
already growing atheism.
E. O. Wilson says in a book I previously discussed
that the tribal instinct was already deeply inbred into hominid ancestors of Homo
sapiens well before our species emerged. It led early humans to form clans to
underpin their needs for identity, security and well-being. That may be so. Yet of all the tribal associations in
which we immerse ourselves, perhaps the most pernicious is religion, possibly
the cause of more pain and destructiveness than any other form of tribalism,
even more than nationalism.
Will the clergy ever abandon their stultifying doctrines, which serve
only to maim our psyches, constrain our humanity, and oftentimes lead to
religiously induced mayhem?
Probably not. I find it
encouraging, though, that a few parts of the world, particularly the
democracies of Western Europe, are becoming more secular. Those countries have discovered that
all of the moral and ethical behavior claimed by religions as possible only through
their auspices can also be fruits of secular democracy, without any of the
pitfalls. Would that the rest of
the world follow the example, including our still hyper-religious America!