To Tree or Not to Tree

Mary Pottker Rosenbaum '75 helps couples overcome common obstacles in Christian-Jewish marriages.

by Matt Getty

December 30, 2008

Ned and Mary Pottker Rosenbaum '75 in front of their home in Kentucky.

Mary Pottker’s date had fallen asleep hours earlier, but there she sat in his parents’ kitchen still talking to his older brother Ned, amazed at how much she had in common with this tall, lanky history graduate student nearly five years her senior. Ned had seen Mary before in one of his brother’s high-school plays, and he’d already fallen for the 17-year-old girl with intense brown eyes. When he finally took her home, he had a simple but strange question.

“What are you doing this spring?” Ned asked.

“I don’t know,” Mary replied, confused. “Graduating high school? What do you mean?”

“Because I have plans for you this spring,” he added, “and the spring after that, and the spring after that, and the spring after that.”

Just two years later they were married. “That was it. We were basically engaged on that first night,” recalls Mary Pottker Rosenbaum ’75, who recently celebrated her 45th wedding anniversary with her husband Ned Rosenbaum, professor emeritus of religion and classics.

Falling in love was simple, but marriage presented some unforeseen challenges. Mary was Catholic; Ned was Jewish. It was 1963, and there were only two rabbis in the country who would perform an interfaith marriage let alone offer any useful advice on how to make one work. Then of course there were all those questions: How would they decorate for the holidays? What religion would the children be taught? Would there be baptisms or brises? Would meals be kosher? Would one partner try to convert the other?

All these happily married years later, Mary now spends most of her time helping others answer those questions as the director of the Dovetail Institute, the only national independent organization offering advice for interfaith couples. In the last four decades, marriages between Jews and Christians have become more common, increasing from 7 percent among Jewish families to nearly 50 percent. Yet the challenges remain, with divorce rates for interfaith couples estimated to be as much as one-and-a-half times as high as divorce rates among couples sharing a religion.

Though Catholic priests have long offered counseling for interfaith spouses, Dovetail has no religious affiliation. Its quarterly journal, biannual conference and numerous informational resources offer advice straight from intermarried couples themselves.

“For a long time there wasn’t really anyone talking about this except the clergy,” says Mary. “And guess what? They weren’t married, so they lacked a certain amount of insight into the subject.”

The Dovetail staff’s insider perspective has enabled them to see that the biggest challenges for marriages with two faiths aren’t usually about religion. “There are a whole lot of cultural things that are often colored by religious background but aren’t actually about religion—different approaches to food, money, humor, sex,” Mary explains. “For instance, the perennial big problem between Jewish and Christian couples in this country is to tree or not to tree, and that’s not a religious question. The Christmas tree is not a religious object, but there’s a whole lot of emotion there, and you can’t just dismiss it by saying, ‘It’s not a Christian symbol in its origins, so let’s just forget about it.’ ”

From her own experience, Mary learned that debates over divine mysteries were nothing compared to arguments over how often to call your in-laws or when it’s appropriate to borrow money from your parents.

“Jewish families, generally speaking, tend to see money as a family issue that crosses generations, whereas Catholic families tend to see the couple as its own economic entity,” Mary says, adding that early in their marriage Ned borrowed $100 from his parents without giving it a second thought. “I was devastated. I thought the marriage was over. The two of us would have had to have been a lot closer to starving for me to call my parents, and he was taken aback by my reaction. We had to hammer at this and come to the conclusion that this was a cultural difference, that there wasn’t a right or wrong here.”

Knowing the difference between cultural and religious conflicts, Mary says, is the first step in negotiating the compromises essential to interfaith marriages. “It won’t end the conversation, but at least it will clarify what it is you’re talking about. If you can say, ‘This is a cultural difference; this is just something that means a lot to me,’ that’s not quite the same thing as, ‘This is something I believe in, and I can’t compromise on it.’ ”

Surprisingly, when it comes to those compromises, fairness doesn’t always mean equality. “One of the things that I discovered early on was that a Jewish-Christian marriage cannot be 50-50,” she says. “It’s easier to be a Christian married to a Jew than to be a Jew married to a Christian.” That’s because despite living in a predominantly Christian culture, Jewish partners simply can’t take part in Christianity the same way Christians can take part in Judaism.

“Because Christianity sees itself as growing out of Judaism, there is no theological conflict for Christians attending Jewish services,” Mary explains. “I can go to any Jewish service and never hear a word I can’t say amen to. When Ned goes to Mass with me, however, he can’t participate in anything. … I’ve talked to a lot of couples in which the Christian partner will say to me, ‘I’m willing to go halfway and do his holidays or go to his services; why can’t he take part in mine?’ Well, because there is what St. Paul rightly called the ‘stumbling block’ for Jews, and this is the idea of the divinity of Jesus.”

But education in one’s own religion can be as important as learning a spouse’s customs. “I can’t tell you how many Catholics I’ve talked to who’ve said to me, ‘I’m in love with this Jewish guy, but how can I possibly marry him when he’s going to hell?’ ” Mary explains. “And I have to say, ‘Well, you know, the Catholic Church does not actually teach that.’ So the first and most basic piece of advice is to educate yourself even about things you think you may already know.”

When it comes to children, however, religious education is often the biggest obstacle. Though many couples fear that teaching both religions and allowing their children to choose their own path will rob them of a truly spiritual life, Mary argues that it can actually lead to a deeper one—depending on how you view the purpose of religion.

“Our children were raised with both traditions, and the good news and bad news are the same—they don’t have an easy, automatic religious identity,” she explains, noting that one of her three children is now a practicing Jew while the other two do not belong to an organized religion. “So if your main reason for being religious is that sense of community and belonging, then that’s a bad thing. But if you think of religion as a way of approaching your own spirituality and doing what the Jewish renewal movement calls ‘God wrestling,’ then that’s a good thing.”

The same can often be true for husband and wife. Mary notes that the negotiations and debates that come with an interfaith marriage often will deepen each partner’s connection to his or her own religion. Ned, in fact, switched his graduate studies from history to religion largely because of their marriage.

“I didn’t know very much about my religion when I met Mary,” he explains. “You know how you can get an amoeba to grow a false foot by poking it with a stick? Well, she poked me, and I grew a Ph.D. in Jewish studies.”

That’s what eventually brought Ned to Dickinson, where he helped establish the college’s Judaic studies major and was a religion professor for nearly 30 years. As a mother of three married to a professor in the 1970s, Mary recalls that being an unconventional student was challenging at times, but she credits the college with laying the foundation for her work with Dovetail today.

“I found the religion department very welcoming and fertile ground for exploring different religious approaches,” she says. “That attitude and openness to other religions helped nurture our whole philosophy. … Ned always said that when I graduated [with a major in religion and a minor in Greek],  I’d be prepared for a career of standing on the street corner and giving good advice—which is pretty much what I’ve been doing.”

And though providing that advice without the institutional support of an organized religion poses constant challenges, Mary knows that the work must continue. That young couple who fell so quickly in love more than 45 years ago didn’t have a place to turn for an insider’s perspective on interfaith marriage, but she wants to make sure that today’s couples do.

“Sometimes it gets tiring,” she admits, “but then somebody calls up crying and says, ‘Thank God I found you,’ or someone comes up to you at a conference and says, ‘We finally feel like we can have children without being horrible, selfish people.’ And that kind of thing makes you think, ‘Yeah, this is what we should be doing.’ ”