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Life in a Multi-Faith Family

In a world of polarized religion and politics, forming authentic relationships across faith boundaries can be a challenge. Yesterday we heard about local religious groups supporting each other at an institutional level; today, WMRA’s Christopher Clymer Kurtz looks at one Harrisonburg family’s personal embrace of two faith traditions.

Bill Goldberg and Lisa Schirch are not as unlikely a couple as one might think.

Lisa is from Bluffton, Ohio and can count the months she’s not been affiliated with something directly Mennonite. Bill was raised Jewish in Baltimore; he now claims that religious heritage in a more secular sense.

BILL: I do embrace the culture, the history. I do identify as Jewish.

They met in Pittsburgh in 1995 when they were hired separately to co-teach an international negotiation summer course. By the end of the five weeks, Lisa says, all one hundred of their students thought they were dating.

LISA: Which we were not.

But, she says, they did work well together.

LISA: Mennonites and Jews in the 1500s and onwards were both persecuted by Catholics and Protestants. There is a very long Jewish-Mennonite history and I know so many Mennonite-Jewish couples and I already knew those interfaith marriages when I met Bill, so it didn't feel unusual to me. I read mostly Jewish authors. Chaim Potok was my favorite author growing up, and I think a lot of Mennonite youth, we read Jewish literature because it's like a mainstream version of Mennonite.

Now they both work at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University, where they make their international and interfaith professional relationships work just like they make their interfaith marriage work:

LISA: The ethics and values of progressive Christianity are no different than the ethics and values of progressive Judaism. If you start focusing on doctrine and you must believe in the virgin birth and so forth, then it doesn't work.

BILL: It depends upon where you put people in the religion. If relationships with people, if loving thy neighbor is the most important part, that's where you're going to focus.

It’s a theme that also surfaced with the other people interviewed for this series.

Dr. Ehsan Ahmed, of the Islamic Association of the Shenandoah Valley, remembers a man who approached him following a post 9/11 engagement at a church. The man, his daughter and granddaughter in tow, told Ahmed,

AHMED: “This is the first time I have met a Muslim in my life and you don't really look any different than any of us in the sense that your daily life is no different.”

Ann Reed Held, retired pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church:

HELD: You can be opposed to this or that, but you get to know the person as a person, then all of a sudden, "Oh," and you stop lumping people and you stop stereotyping people.

But differences must also be recognized. Harrisonburg and Staunton rabbi Joe Blair said that his congregants “absolutely” feel “other.” When Blair first began as rabbi more than a dozen years ago, some congregants pressured him not to wear his kipa as they feared it would single out him and, therefore, his congregation.

BLAIR: They were trying to fly under the radar.

Now, however, far fewer people share those feelings, in part because in a small community, being noticed is inevitable. That discomfort eventually dissipated, because his kipa

BLAIR: just became the norm. So I think part of that disappeared in its own right.

Bill and Lisa attend Shalom Mennonite Church, where their family feels free to explore both of their heritages; Bill notes the Hebrew word in the church name. They wish, though, that they could experience that same sort of welcome of their multi-faith home at the synagogue, which does not allow mixed couples who are raising their children in both religions.

When Bill and Lisa’s daughter Miranda recently planned her bat mitzvah, they learned they would not able to hold the Jewish celebration at the synagogue because Miranda was also raised Christian, unless she would be converted to Judaism. Bill understands the synagogue and Rabbi Joe’s position.

BILL: In thinking about it a lot more, he is the defender of the religion in Harrisonburg, and I understand his point of view, but it was just difficult to hear, “No, your daughter's not considered Jewish anymore.”

So, they created their own service led by a Jewish community leader, and Miranda gave her bat mitzvah talk as a sermon to their church, gave the Shema, spoke Hebrew.

BILL: The comical side of this is, so in Judaism when you're bat mitzvah’d there's a specific Torah passage from the week you were born, and my vegetarian daughter's passage was about how to cleanly slaughter animals for sacrifice. Which was what do we do with this? So we spoke to a good friend of ours who is a rabbi, and he said, “You know what, pick a passage that means something to you,” which was

MIRANDA: And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb.

Miranda’s takeaway from her multi-faith family?

MIRANDA: I guess just the appreciation of both religions, of religion, and having two different families from completely different traditions.

LISA: Being a multi faith family is something that makes life more rich. I think the same is true for Harrisonburg, that we are incredibly honored to have a mosque, a temple, and churches. These are treasures. This brings richness.

Christopher Clymer Kurtz was a freelance journalist for WMRA from 2015 - 2019.