Beliefnet contributor Rabbi Brad Hirschfield , author of You Don’t Have To Be Wrong For Me To Be Right, Finding Faith Without Fanaticism, offers this post on the family implications of the December Dilemma.
Yes, it’s that time of the year again – lights are twinkling, children’s expectations are rising, and so is intra-familial tension as America’s twenty-eight million interfaith families struggle through the holiday season trying to honor their own origins, deal lovingly with their partners’ expectations, and all the while create a warm celebratory environment for themselves and their kids. And it’s not so simple.

Of course at the heart of this conflict lie the unresolved issues that most of us carry around about our own religious backgrounds and the spiritual journeys on which we find ourselves. And for no population is that more true than those who are making a life with someone of another faith. Even for those who declare that they are “past those issues” or have “no faith at all,” the holidays are about much more than dogma and doctrine, and therefore bring it all up.
The holidays are about family, and memory and our desire to bring warmth and beauty into our lives. So how could this not come up even for the most seemingly secular among us? Not to mention that most people who have chosen to be in an interfaith relationship have been told by their own coreligionists that such a choice reflects an abandonment of their faith, and having integrated that interpretation because they don’t know how to explain how false it is, find themselves surprised by the intensity of their own feelings during this time of year. So what to
do?
First, partners must admit that no matter how much they told each other that “it really didn’t matter” what they observed or how, they actually do care and that they were not holding out back then, but were just discovering how deep their feelings run. That’s a great thing in a
relationship because it creates new levels of intimacy, which is always a good thing.
Second, people of different faiths can use the “tree/menorah debate” to explore their feelings not only about the faith into which they were born, but that of their partner. Utilize the moment as one of appreciative inquiry about what it is that the person they love most loves about their religious/ethnic identity. It’s not a test in which each side must prove the value of their respective faiths, but a chance to speak about the values and memories that flow out of each person’s experience which they most want to celebrate, as others from that same community also do.
Finally, it’s a chance to remind ourselves that we can support each others’ spiritual growth and religious celebration even when it doesn’t express itself in exactly the way we would do it for ourselves. We can do that as long as the underlying values are not mutually exclusive, but
if the relationship is healthy, they rarely are. When they are, each partner recognizes that they can learn from those different values even if they don’t fully share them. But in either case, we clarify the difference between practices like candle and tree lighting, which are unalike, and values like light and warmth, which are deeply similar, no matter how different the garb in which they come. Too often we fight about the practices in the name of values instead of acknowledging that multiple, even competing practices may support shared values about which we need not fight at all.
When we integrate the message that you don’t have to be wrong for me to be right, at least not nearly as often as we have been led to believe, the December dilemma becomes a sacred opportunity to express, with genuine integrity, our love of one tradition and our openness to the dignity of others — something we could all use a bit more of in the coming year.
Rabbi Brad Hirschfield is the author of the new book, You Don’t Have To Be Wrong For Me To Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism (Harmony), and President of CLAL-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership.