Mixed-Faith Families Share Spring Rituals

Many people refer to my family as interfaith, but they're wrong.

"Inter-" means between, and we don't alternate between faiths; we celebrate our multiple beliefs, religious and otherwise.

I grew up in one of those families that talked about absolutely everything openly. Nothing was sacred. And my husband and I are following in that tradition as we create a family for our son. We air our diverse views on everything from whether God exists to whether snoring has an evolutionary advantage.

Every year at this time, we participate in several rituals which allow us to express our beliefs.

First, we join other families for a Passover seder, the annual re-telling of the Jews' exodus from Egypt after slavery. The story was particularly difficult to swallow this year, given Israel's decision to restrict Yasser Arafat's movements. And that discussion became part of the evening for us, along with the matzo ball soup and macaroons.

We were joined at the seder by three other families, two of whom were also of mixed faiths. In one family, the husband is a lapsed Catholic, and in the other, the wife is a devoted Baptist whose children have always attended a Jewish day school.

Our seder may sound unusual, but it isn't. At least not in the southern city where I live. About half of the 530 families in my synagogue include non-Jewish members, a constantly growing number in spite of the fact that it's very difficult to find a rabbi who will marry members of different faiths.

Why is the number growing? Partly because our world has changed so dramatically, and people now use different criteria when choosing a mate than our parents' did, or their parents before them.

Partly, I believe, the number is growing because people stubbornly insist on being who they are in spite of what others tell them they should be, and there are fewer social controls to prevent this from being a public act as well as a private one.

For example, my husband's purely secular family is very aware that our son loves being Jewish. In another era, we might have handled their sensitivity to this fact differently. These days, we expect them to accept that he's our son to raise as we choose.

And we don't deny them their rituals. Because my son is so Jewishly identified, I don't have any problem letting him participate in an Easter egg hunt at my in-law's house. The annual rite of spring is as important to him as the Passover seder, for different reasons.

He loves running around the yard with my mother-in-law, finding round chocolates nestled in colorful plastic, chatting about the blooming flowers and reveling in the change of season. That's their tradition, and I would no sooner deny them it than go a year without a seder. One is about faith in a people, their history, and their God, and one is about faith in the power of family.

We are truly a multi-faith family, and richer for it. The difficult part for us is not understanding who we are. It's explaning it to others so that they too can celebrate diversity in a world that asks us to check only one box to describe ourselves.

Julie Moos is a thirtysomething who lives with her husband and son. Her column appears every other Thursday.