In Opposition

To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband. But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife.

To the rest I say this (I, not the Lord): If any brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her. And if a woman has a husband who is not a believer and he is willing to live with her, she must not divorce him. For the unbelieving husband has been sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife has been sanctified through her believing husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy.

But if the unbeliever leaves, let it be so. The brother or the sister is not bound in such circumstances; God has called us to live in peace. How do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or, how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife? -1 Corinthians 7:10-16

Almost three months ago, I wrote a blog post called The Unequal Yoke, specifically addressing Christian/Jewish intermarriages in the Messianic community (and to a certain degree, the larger world of Christian-Jewish intermarriage). More recently, I've been following the comments on the Be All You Can Be blog post at Spiritually Unequal Marriage, which seems to be a blog crafted primarily for Christian women who are married to unbelieving husbands.

I occasionally comment on that blog (though I'm not a Christian woman and my wife has a faith) because I am an "intermarried" and believe I can add a unique and hopefully valuable insight to various conversations. In reading some of the comments on the aforementioned blog post, I'm reminded of a more expansive issue in both Christianity and Judaism.

Families can be fractured when one spouse "has faith" and the other does not. It's most typical, at least in my experience, for the woman of the household to be the "faithful" one, often taking the children with her to church or synagogue while the husband stays home or does errands. This is ironic because in both Christian and Jewish traditions, the husband is identified as the "spiritual leader" of the family and has specific behavioral responsibilities (particularly in Judaism) relative to God and family. Nevertheless, women seem to have been designed to be more "spiritually sensitive" than men, perhaps because women are more often communally and relationship oriented than men.

But where does that leave the wives and mothers? Not in a very good spot.

Often, this schism puts the woman at odds with her husband as she tries to balance her responsibilities to both the home and the church or synagogue. While all people of faith can sometimes experience a "higher calling" to God than to the family, in fact, our first "ministry" is in our home. This is more easily realized in Judaism than in Christianity, since the primary focus of worship occurs in the home, particularly for women who are considered exempt halachically from many of the commandments related to praying with a minyan in the synagogue (and in Orthodox Judaism, women cannot make up a minyan, although in a Reform shul, it would be allowed).

Besides being conflicted and feeling guilty, what can women do when they are the person of faith in the marriage and the husband is either indifferent or actively opposed to her religious activities?

I don't have a pat answer for that one. I do know that my own small congregation typically has members and attendees who come without their spouses for exactly this reason. In my case, my wife's faith does not accept Christ as the Messiah, and so she "declines" to attend services with me, even on an occasional basis. There are a wide variety of reasons why I cannot currently attend any activities at the Chabad or Reform synagogues with her in our community, so our active, communal worship lives are isolated from one another.

One of our fellows attends our congregation alone on Saturdays and goes to a more traditional church with his wife and grandchildren on Sundays. A woman, who has been with us for many years, has just recently convinced her husband to begin attending our classes and services, but for a long time, he refused. This illustrates that it is not just marriages in which one spouse is religious and the other is not where this dynamic can be found, but in relationships where each spouse belongs to different religions or different "denominations" within the same basic faith.

Almost always, there's a certain amount of tension in the home as a result of such a conflict and a sense of loss during worship, even as we pray and draw closer to God, because our loved one is not at our side (and while in an Orthodox Jewish setting, men and women do not sit with each other, they are both aware that each is praying within their own context in the synagogue).

I write all this, not to try and solve a problem which perhaps has no visible solution, but to offer a thought. It's not as if God isn't aware of our circumstances and is unconcerned. However, like many of our other needs and difficulties, God doesn't always choose to immediately intervene and "solve" the problem for us.

“So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

“Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” -Luke 11:9-13

From this and many other writings about prayer we see in the Bible, believers sometimes get the impression that all we have to do is pray and God will immediately give us what we have asked for and then some. However, God is not like the genie in the story about Aladdin. Faith, prayer, and our relationship with God isn't quite that simple. There is much we can and must learn from the experience of God not solving all of our problems the minute we realize we have them. If He did, that would pretty much do away with the requirement to have faith, particularly under duress.

In Mark 10:7-9, Jesus, referring to Genesis 2:24 says, "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate”. From this, we see that except under specific circumstances (referring back to 1 Corinthians 7:10-16), a "mixed marriage" is not reason enough to separate a couple and in fact, God expects us to keep the vows we made on our wedding day ("for better or for worse" may come to mind).

Your unbelieving spouse is not your enemy. He (or she) is by design, the closest human being to you on the planet. Depending on your view of marriage as seen through the lens of faith, you may have an understanding that God specifically arranged for you to be married to your spouse and yes, knowing that one of you would be believing and the other would not have faith. God does, or at least allows, a lot of other things we don't understand and sometimes these are things that cause us pain. Why does God allow a child to be born with Down's Syndrome? Why do some children die? Why do some Christian families lose their jobs, their homes, and end up living in poverty?

Why are you a Christian while your spouse is an atheist?

The point isn't that God has the answer and isn't telling, but that you are a person of faith and you are in distress.

I lift up my eyes to the mountains—
where does my help come from?
My help comes from the LORD,
the Maker of heaven and earth. -Psalm 121:1-2

I know that doesn't always help (and maybe you feel guilty because your faith isn't stronger so you "feel" faith instead of frustration), but it's true nonetheless.

In Genesis 32, Jacob's famous struggle with the angel is understood as a struggle with faith. He was about to face his brother Esau, the one who had vowed to kill Jacob, for the first time in decades and Jacob didn't know how he'd handle it. God showed Jacob that he could indeed struggle with even divine adversity and still win.

So can we, but as Jacob's example teaches us, sometimes it takes awhile (Jacob wrestled all night and the match wasn't over by dawn) and sometimes it hurts (after the struggle, Jacob walked with a limp for the rest of his life).

Yet we struggle...because that is life and that is faith.

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.

Jews, Christians, and Marital Metaphors

Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church - for we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery - but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. -Ephesians 5:22-33

As mentioned, things were somewhat different for Jewish women. Traditionally, women and men were seen as equals, but with different responsibilities and obligations. Thanks to God's revelations to Moses at Mt. Sinai, the Jews even had laws in place that governed the intricacies of marriage and divorce, as well as laws that specify what is to happen to a woman suspected of adultery.
Rabbi Aaron Parry
The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Talmud

Bilateral Ecclesiology and the Gentiles Series

I've been using marital metaphors in previous blog posts Bilateral Living and The One Who is Two to try and illustrate how it might be possible, based on scripture, to support at least some portion of Mark Kinzer's suggestions in relation to "Bilatereal Ecclesiology" as chronicled in his book Postmissionary Messianic Judaism: Redefining Christian Engagement with the Jewish People (2005). Keep in mind, I'm not completely sold on each and every point Kinzer makes in PMJ. I believe that the suggestions contained therein need a lot of work before they could be made a viable model to be pursued by Messianic Judaism and the Christian church as a "partnership plan". Nevertheless, the idea requires further investigation, particularly as it maps (or fails to map) to the Apostolic Scriptures, which is what I'm doing here.

Laugh if you must, but in trying to get a ground-level beginner's handle on even what the Talmud is, I've been reading The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Talmud, which by the way, is a very good starter's primer. I decided to spend a small part of my Sunday afternoon reading the chapter "All About the Women" which addresses Nashim (Women), the third order of the Talmud. I barely got a few pages in when inspiration struck.

I was taken by how some of the descriptions regarding women and marriage not only seem to match up to the teachings of Yeshua and Paul, but how they could be applied to the "bilateral" relationship between Messianic Jews and non-Jewish Christians (and yes, there is and must be a relationship, otherwise, the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of the Jewish Messiah was in vain). What first struck me was Rabbi Parry's words, ...women and men were seen as equals, but with different responsibilities and obligations. That's more or less how the concept of Bilateral Ecclesiology describes the relationship between Jews and Gentiles in the believing realm, both in the time of Paul and today.

I had previously read Rabbi Judith Z Abrams's book The Talmud for Beginners: Volume I Prayer and she describes how, while women are not forbidden the commandments that men obey (except those that are obviously gender specific), some obligations, such as those that are time-bound, are not required. This includes praying the Shema twice per day, since the timing may interfere with a woman's duties and responsibilities in the home and to her children (and the feminists reading this right now must be pretty much outraged).

This sugya deals with a different kind of interference that prevents one from reciting the Shema with the required intention. In the rabbis' view, being a woman interfered with one's ability to relate to God. They assumed that a woman was responsible for the demanding, and time-consuming, tasks of raising children and managing a household and therefore could not be held responsible for performing positive, time-bound commandments...

Rabbi Abrams also states:

There are many exceptions to the rule of this system. Women are, in fact, obligated to perform some positive commandments, such as lighting the candles on Hannukah. Women are not forbidden to perform positive time-bound commandments; they are simply not obligated to do most of them...They may perform these mitzvot voluntarily if they wish to do so.

Because women are not obligated to do these mitzvot, the rabbis ruled that women cannot have the same intention and sense of responsibility regarding the mitzvot as men do...

I previously recorded these quotes and a more detailed account of Rabbi Abrams's book in my blog post The Right Question, but the content fits right in with what I've been writing about more recently, so I'm repeating it in this post.

It makes me wonder about God's plan in first, establishing His covenants with the Children of Israel, and making them His "treasured splendorous people" (Exodus 19:5) and then commanding the Israelites to be a "light to the nations" (Isaiah 49:6). It also makes me wonder about this:

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. -1 Peter 2:9-10

Of course, Peter was the "emissary to the circumcised", so you could say he was writing to an exclusively Jewish audience, except in verses 11 and 12, he says, Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.

If he were talking to Jews; people who were already members of the covenant, why would he call them foreigners and exiles, since they clearly weren't such a thing. Yes, in verse 12 he tells his audience to live such good lives among the pagans, but as Messianic disciples, the Gentile believers in the audience would no longer be pagans. Also, in the original quote, Peter refers to his audience as Once you were not a people which makes absolutely no sense if his audience were Jewish covenant members.

Don't worry. I'm not saying that believing Gentiles are equal to believe Jews, except to the degree, as Rabbi Parry states, that Jewish men and Jewish women are equal, but with different obligations and responsibilities. To extend the metaphor though, if Gentiles and Jews are equal but different in the manner that the Talmud describes Jewish men and women to be, then can we say, like Jewish women, that Torah obedience is not specifically forbidden to Gentile Messianics (i.e. Christians) but is allowed on a voluntary basis?

I know some of you are thinking that there are sections of the Talmud that specifically forbid Torah observance by Gentiles or sections that praise Gentile obedience to the commandments, with the understanding that those mitzvot are limited to the Noahide laws, but wait.

Remember that the Talmudic sages, probably down to a man, would not have considered the status of Gentile disciples of Yeshua (Jesus) as relevant to their opinions, particularly because Jews and Christians were very much at odds while the Oral Laws were being documented and certainly during the time when the sages were writing their Gemara on the Oral traditions.

This is a limitation, perhaps a necessary one, that restricts some of the application of the Talmud to the current argument, but not completely.

Daniel on his blog "Christian for Moses" has illustrated that there is Talmudic precedent for non-Jews to perform the mitzvot, though with different motivation, and I've blogged on similar topics and presented further quotes of the sages in the opinions of Rabbi Mayer Twersky and my review of FFOZ's tefillin booklet.

If you start putting all of the pieces together, the picture of the jigsaw puzzle begins to become recognizable. Getting back to something I said earlier, perhaps it was God's plan all along, to create a "nation of priests" of the Children of Israel, and then to use them as a "light to the nations" to, in effect, "marry" the groom to the bride, creating "one flesh" or "one new man" out of the two "individuals", each being equal or co-heirs and co-citizens to one another, but with different responsibilities and obligations to God, the Torah, and each other, much as what you would find in almost any marriage. I liked what Rabbi Parry said here:

According to Jewish thought, marriage is considered one of life's greatest treasures. What's more, it's believed that the relationship that most closely parallels the relationship between man and God is the marital union between a man and a woman.

Both the Tanakh and the Apostolic Scriptures use marital metaphors to describe the relationship between the Children of Israel and God as well as the union between the Jewish and Gentile Messianic community and the Jewish Messiah.

“Return, faithless people,” declares the LORD, “for I am your husband. I will choose you—one from a town and two from a clan—and bring you to Zion. Then I will give you shepherds after my own heart, who will lead you with knowledge and understanding. In those days, when your numbers have increased greatly in the land,” declares the LORD, “people will no longer say, ‘The ark of the covenant of the LORD.’ It will never enter their minds or be remembered; it will not be missed, nor will another one be made. At that time they will call Jerusalem The Throne of the LORD, and all nations will gather in Jerusalem to honor the name of the LORD. No longer will they follow the stubbornness of their evil hearts. In those days the people of Judah will join the people of Israel, and together they will come from a northern land to the land I gave your ancestors as an inheritance. -Jeremiah 3:14-18

Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. -Ephesians 5:24

I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy. I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him. -2 Corinthians 11:2

Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready. Fine linen, bright and clean, was given her to wear.” (Fine linen stands for the righteous acts of the saints.) Then the angel said to me, “Write: ‘Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb!’ ” And he added, “These are the true words of God.” -Revelation 19:7-9

I don't think Kinzer's book is the final word on how this "mixed marriage" or rather God's plan for a "mixed marriage" between Christians and Jews is ultimately supposed to work out. Also, the One Law movement is very good about describing the "equality" between the "husband" and "wife" but not so good about describing the inherent differences in responsibilities and obligations that must exist, even between two people made into "one flesh" or two people groups made into "one new man". Clearly, no one has a "lock" on understanding how Jewish and Gentile Messianic relationships are supposed to operate.

I don't know how it works either, or rather, how it will work. I do think that we'll keep struggling with our relationship until the Jewish Messiah returns and straightens us all out. Then, we will all take our places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven together (Matthew 8:11).

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark, ignoring the light of the world. Look for the lamp who lights your path or you may become lost in the dark forever.

"A Jew never gives up. We're here to bring Mashiach, we will settle for nothing less." -Harav Yitzchak Ginsburgh

Bilateral Living

Even if I could guide my congregation into a viewpoint more like my personal stance, I don’t think I could stay. The dissonance between that lifestyle and living with a Jewish wife isn’t something I can resolve over the long haul. If I’m going to be considered a Christian in relation to her being a Jew, I might as well try to own the label and see what our lives together are going to be like as we both continue to travel down our paths together (and that’s an odd image to visualize…two people traveling two separate paths together…I wonder if that’s “Bilateral Ecclesiology?”).
-My comment on the Daily Minyan blog post:
Bilateral Ecclesiology: Infrequently Answered Questions

Bilateral Ecclesiology and the Gentiles Series

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I'm not 100% sold on everything proposed by "Bilateral Ecclesiology" (BE) as presented in Mark Kinzer's book Postmissionary Messianic Judaism: Redefining Christian Engagement with the Jewish People. I understand and even support the need of the Jewish community contained within the Messianic movement to establish and maintain a uniquely Jewish identity and practice rather than assimilating into the Christian culture. However, I believe that BE may actually  be working against one of it's stated goals; to promote "unity" between the Messianic synagogue and the Christian church. Often, the blogosphere discussion revolving around BE seems to build a brick wall between Jews and Christians, rather than encourage an open exchange.

While Gene Shlomovich makes a compelling case for Bilateral Ecclesiology in his latest blog post, I still think the ideal has a long way to go before it can be effectively and practically implemented in a manner that doesn't automatically reject most churches and the vast majority of Gentiles who, in one fashion or another, have attached themselves to Messianic or Messianic-like groups.

That said, a rather odd thought occurred to me the other day, but you'll need a little background about me first.

My wife is Jewish. More accurately, her mother was Jewish (my mother-in-law passed away many years ago) and her father was a Gentile (which still makes my wife halachically Jewish). My mother-in-law became estranged from her Jewish family in Boston decades ago and my wife was raised without any awareness that she was Jewish. She knew she had Jewish aunts, uncles, and cousins living in Southern California where she was raised, but she didn't make the connection back to her mother and then back to her.

When my wife began attending university in San Francisco, her dorm roommate was Jewish. As they started to get to know each other, they talked about their families, and it was my wife's roommate who put the pieces of the puzzle together and figured out my wife was Jewish. On a school break, my wife went home and confronted her mother and it was confirmed. My wife discovered her Judaism. She has since gone through the local Chabad Rabbi and had her background looked into and found that all of her mother's deceased relatives are buried in Jewish cemeteries.

You'll need to know all this to understand what I'm going to say later on.

When my wife and I married, neither of us had a religious faith. My wife was even more vehemently opposed to religion and religious people than I was. By that time, she knew she was Jewish, but it didn't make any particular impact on her life. I spent a lot of my history having secular Jewish friends (including other Jewish girlfriends before my wife), so I was "familiar" with Judaism, but only within that context. I never met any of my wife's Jewish relatives from back east and I only met one Jewish cousin from California, and his lifestyle was completely secular (and by the way, when he passed away, we went to the funeral and he was buried in a Jewish cemetery in Los Angeles).

In other words, as "intermarrieds", we had virtually none of the issues you'd expect in a Jewish interfaith marriage.

Time passed.

Long story short, we both came to faith in Jesus Christ in our early 40s and started attending a church. As "new believers" we had lots of questions but the church didn't seem to have lots of answers. Also, the "cliquishness" of the various "in groups" in the church gave us a very poor impression of Christianity, although we met many wonderful people who epitomized the grace and compassion of Jesus (I still miss Pastor Jerry).

My wife, by "accident" (if you believe in random events occurring within a created and purposeful universe) came into contact with our local "Messianic" (One Law) congregation and she was instantly hooked. I was finally finding a role in our church and it took some time for me to transition but eventually, I adopted a traditional early First Fruits of Zion (FFOZ) One Law perspective on Jews, Gentiles, the Torah, and God. I never looked back.

Another long story short, I stayed with the "Messianic movement" as my preferred worship and faith lifestyle, while my wife shot out the other end, through conservative and reform Judaism (for decades, the only synagogue in Southwestern Idaho was comprised of a reform group and a conservative group which had merged to create a viable, single membership) and into the Chabad, where she studies and worships today (though she still has strong ties and friendships in the reform/conservative community).

Welcome to my Jewish interfaith marriage.

Now for the "odd thought".

I'm not telling you all of this because I think my life and marriage are generally fascinating to the blogosphere, but because I realized when I wrote the words on Gene's blog which I quoted above, that my life and the proposal of BE have something in common. Let's take a look at the core of my realization again. I'll edit my original comments to provide clarity:

I'm a Christian man married to and living with a Jewish woman. Our lives are like two people who are traveling down two separate paths together. How can two people travel down two separate paths and, at the same time, be side-by-side, sharing the same lives and even to some degree, the same lifestyles, but being two separate and unique beings?

It's an odd image, but maybe not as odd as you might think:

That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh. -Genesis 2:24

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate. -Mark 10:7-9

Anybody who's been married knows that men and women seem to be so different from each other, it's as if we were originally supposed to live on different planets. We conceptualize our environments in fundamentally different ways. We use radically different neural brain paths to process the same information. Men tend to be linear thinkers and are task-oriented, while women tend to be global thinkers and are relationship-oriented.

There are days when my wife just about drives me nuts...and I'm sure the reverse is true.

But what's all this got to do with Bilateral Ecclesiology? Plenty.

Despite all our differences based on being a man and woman, our different cultural backgrounds, differences in where we were raised, how we were raised, and now, differences in how we conceptualize God, the Bible, and faith, it's amazing we can live in the same house and still have a civil conversation.

But we love each other.

We share three grown children and one adorable grandchild. We live together, talk together, argue together, laugh together, cry together, drive each other crazy together, eat together, and we are married together...in spite of those things, including our interfaith marriage.

We are what God joined together.

As they set out from their place above, each soul is male and female as one. Only as they descend to this world do they part, each to its own side. And then it is the One Above who unites them again. This is His exclusive domain, for He alone knows which soul belongs to which and how they must reunite.

Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai (2nd century CE)
Zohar, Book I, 85b

Now imagine that the Christian church and Messianic Judaism are married. I know. What a shock. I've probably just offended every Messianic Jew/Bilateral Ecclesiologist on the Internet. I hope I didn't, because this is the vision I have that, if such a thing is possible, would make the Bilateral Ecclesiology vision (I won't even call it a model because it's not that far along in its developmental process as yet) work. Read what I said again but in the current context:

I'm a Christian man living with a Jewish woman. Our lives are like two people who are traveling down two separate paths together. How can two people travel down two separate paths and, at the same time, be side-by-side, sharing the same lives and even to some degree, the same lifestyles, but being two separate and unique beings?

Two peoples progressing together like a man and a woman who are traveling down two separate paths but who are together.

I don't know how it will work, but I do know my marriage works. No, I don't have a "perfect" marriage. It has plenty of warts, bruises, and scars. But it also has the advantage of enduring for almost 28 years through terrific stresses and trials, and also through terrific joys and celebrations. If you can answer the question about what keeps a marriage together under far less than optimal and problem-free circumstances, you'll probably have the answer to what has to happen to make BE work.

A word of caution. My daughter told me something this morning. We aren't out of the woods by a long shot. Here's why.

A friend of ours (a Gentile Christian woman married to a Jewish man and who attends the Chabad shul together) was "babysitting" for the Rabbi's six kids (yeah, that's a lot for a father and mother to have who are both under the age of 30). She took the kids to the main branch of our local library and they spent time looking through the children's books. At one point, one of the kids realized she was looking at a book about Christmas. Suddenly, as if the book had just burst into flames, she threw it out of her hands and cried out, "It's goyishe!"

She didn't mean it as a complement.

This is my "concern" about Bilateral Ecclesiology. I don't know exactly how the Chabad community views things that are Gentile and people who are Gentile, but this child's reaction seems to indicate that she was taught that "goyishe" things are "bad"...really "bad". Kind of like picking up what you think is a pretty flower only to realize its what the dog left on the lawn. Yuk!

If any expression of BE depicts things that are not Jewish (and people who are not Jewish) as "yukky Goyishe" and behaves as if even touching them is disguisting, we are going to have a problem. This was the problem that Peter had to confront:

About noon the following day as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the roof to pray. He became hungry and wanted something to eat, and while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles and birds. Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”

“Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.”

The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” -Acts 10:9-15

We can have a beautiful marriage together. Yes, it will be full of all of the special challenges and difficulties that any interfaith marriage faces, but with a lot of work, patience, and understanding, we can overcome those obstacles and be what God wanted us to be when He put us together.

This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. -Ephesians 3:6 (ESV)

Are we going to stay married honey, or are you going to ask (God) for a divorce? Your choice.

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark, ignoring the light of the world. Look for the lamp who lights your path or you may become lost in the dark forever.

"A Jew never gives up. We're here to bring Mashiach, we will settle for nothing less." -Harav Yitzchak Ginsburgh