{"id":103334,"date":"2023-04-04T17:05:31","date_gmt":"2023-04-04T15:05:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=103334"},"modified":"2023-04-04T07:16:50","modified_gmt":"2023-04-04T05:16:50","slug":"11-05-89","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=103334","title":{"rendered":"A Celebration of Overlapping Faiths"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>A Celebration of Overlapping Faiths<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n

ELISABETH BECKER<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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This year, our family will mark Passover, Easter, and Ramadan at the same time\u2014and honor the three religions that contributed to my children\u2019s heritage.<\/strong><\/span>
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\nTABLET MAGAZINE<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Many people want to know if my two children, born to a Jewish mother and a Muslim father, are Jewish or Muslim. Recently, at a Parisian caf\u00e9 on a central boulevard lined with perfect Juliet balconies, a young professor asked me the question that repeats, like a scratched CD, throughout my adult life: \u201cWhich one did you choose for your children?\u201d When I answered \u201cboth,\u201d that our two children are Jewish and<\/em>\u00a0Muslim,\u00a0she shook her head in disbelief and laughed out loud, asking: \u201cWhat does that make them\u2014nothing<\/em>?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This year, as last year, we will host a Passover Seder in Italy on Easter that is also an iftar (the daily fast break during Ramadan). This is because Ramadan began on March 22 at sundown and continues until April 21, Passover begins on April 5 at sundown and continues until April 13, and Easter falls on April 9. We will celebrate all three holidays together, since all three religions are part of our family\u2019s story.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Last year, my sister and I aligned our five children\u2019s school breaks to meet in\u00a0Bologna, her middle child an Italian history buff longing to see\u00a0garden sculptures and frescoes.\u00a0We\u00a0only later realized that\u00a0we\u00a0would be gathering for\u00a0Passover, which would also be Ramadan, and coincide with Easter. This is now becoming a kind of unexpected family tradition.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Of course, these holidays rarely align. Next year, they will be dispersed throughout spring. Yet when it happens, the intersection of Abrahamic celebrations seems entirely\u00a0appropriate for us.\u00a0We\u00a0are, after all, the daughters of a Jewish mother and a Christian\u00a0father. We grew up with a menorah glowing beside a Christmas tree, annual Easter eggs hunts and searches for the\u00a0afikoman<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Growing up with a Jewish mother on the Upper West Side meant growing up with the belief that\u2014like my parents\u2014half the world was Jewish, too. There, bookstores carried titles about Rosh Hashanah and Hanukkah, delis served pastrami on Jewish rye, and nothing was more beloved to Jews and non-Jews alike than the New York City bagel. Yet it also entailed growing up with a deep awareness of suffering, many of our neighbors having fled Europe during the Nazi era, some having survived concentration camps. Stories of this suffering were told to us by our mother and our grandmother. Images of this suffering marked the books in our school libraries and our neighbors\u2019 skin. And although\u00a0we\u00a0had never crossed the Atlantic, Europe remained the terrifying backdrop of this suffering: Germany, in particular, a taboo land that haunted us, as it did our elders, across the wide divide of the seas.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Curiosity about that land led me to study the German language in college, and eventually down a path in which I, a sociologist, rooted my research, my writing, and my own family in Germany.\u00a0I have lived in Germany on and off for nearly 20 years, as an academic researching Jews and Muslims in post-WWII Europe,\u00a0exposing the marginality that both groups face, but also their agency in contesting exclusions: their place,\u00a0our\u00a0<\/em>place as not only citizens, but also creators of European societies.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I have not only resettled my life in this once-taboo land, but since found a home in the overlaps of Jewish and Muslim life by both embracing my own Jewish identity and marrying a Turkish German Berliner.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Raising children in a Jewish-Muslim household\u00a0means that\u00a0we\u2014my husband of a decade, myself, and our two children\u2014reside in the intersections of our traditions.\u00a0In spite of the desperate pleas of my mother-in-law that I convert to Islam before we married, and the stern assertion of my own mother that my children are undeniably Jewish by maternal lineage, neither of us relinquished our religions.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Being in Italy with my family for Passover, Ramadan, and Easter is a way to actively celebrate the points of unity, such as the notion of overcoming, in all three of the traditions that have shaped my family\u2019s life. On\u00a0Passover,\u00a0we\u00a0remember those who fled Egypt, overcoming\u00a0persecution through liberty found across the opened seas. Easter\u00a0celebrates the resurrection of Jesus, which similarly symbolizes the hope of overcoming great suffering and loss. Ramadan is a period of spiritual rejuvenation through the overcoming of daily desires. The coming together of\u00a0these Jewish, Christian, and Muslim holidays creates a moment of aligned devotion, and\u00a0also the hope that in overcoming, we will create a better world.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We\u00a0all know that such hope matters, not least of all today here in Europe, where war has ravaged Ukraine, with millions of refugees fleeing across the borders to Poland and then Germany.\u00a0We\u00a0have seen the images of children buried under rubble, orphans who arrive at our train stations without their parents, without even a language to share their pain with us.\u00a0We\u00a0have witnessed this up close, with a Ukrainian boy named Alex among my 8-year-old son Sami\u2019s closest friends. I wonder when he asks me if Alex\u2019s family\u00a0will\u00a0die, what else\u00a0we\u00a0can give to him other than a shared sense of hope and togetherness, across our languages and our religious traditions. That they, that we may overcome great hardship, as\u00a0we\u00a0learned from our Jewish forbears in Egypt, from the Christian story of Jesus\u2019 sacrifice, and from the act of fasting for 30 days on Ramadan.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There is, of course, more to our life than harmonious intersections.\u00a0But I have also learned from our traditions that overcoming does not entail resolution. It entails a great many questions and creative answers: finding a way forward, beyond the challenges we all encounter on our paths. Since I gave birth to our first child, we\u00a0have had skirmishes over\u00a0how to celebrate my father and his Christian traditions (settling on socks filled with candy) on Christmas.\u00a0We\u00a0have had a naming ceremony for our children in a synagogue, giving Sami the Jewish name \u201cNoah,\u201d my very favorite name, which I relinquished when my mother-in-law struggled to pronounce it; I similarly refused my husband\u2019s favorite name, Yusuf, from his most beloved Quranic story, for our son.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We are far from the first to walk this path. My own parents had an interreligious marriage. And so, too, did the Prophet Muhammad, who had a Jewish wife.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Still, nothing prepared my husband and me for the questions about who we are and who we, together, could be. What would marrying one another mean for our religious and cultural identities? What would the household of a traditional, practicing Turkish German Muslim man and a liberal Jewish New Yorker look like? What would\u00a0we\u00a0lose in gaining one another? And perhaps, most\u00a0importantly, when\u00a0we\u00a0had children, what would\u00a0we\u00a0choose for them?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We\u00a0did not choose\u00a0for\u00a0<\/em>them. Instead\u00a0we\u00a0chose them as they are, born pink, plump, and perfect: grown in a household that is very Jewish and very Muslim, very American and very Turkish, somehow, and somewhat German, too.<\/span>
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Today, my 8-year-old son Sami takes pride in being American, Turkish, and German. He sees himself as both Muslim and Jewish, and close to Christianity through my late father, whom he never met but knows through my stories as a kind and gentle man. Sami is at home in the\u00a0synagogue, where he learned to light Shabbat candles and make challah of his own. He is at home in a mosque, where he watches his father pray on turquoise carpets that remind him of the sea. And he is certain that Santa Claus does not discriminate against Jewish and\/or Muslim children in his gift-giving (Santa is from Turkey, after all).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Sometimes, at home, Sami asks me to recite a verse from the\u00a0Torah before he sleeps, as a protective and calming salve that accompanies him from wakefulness to that otherworld of dreams. \u201cCan you tell me the Jewish Quran?\u201d he asks.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Sometimes, when I am asked which religion\u00a0we\u00a0have chosen for our children, I describe this request: the understanding, the words, the question that forges new paths. The very existence of our children remakes our world as I imagine God meant for it to be made, where we do not dwell in the places that divide us, but where we overcome them so that we may come to know, may come to love one another as both different and the same.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We\u00a0have done the best\u00a0we\u00a0can to make this world not only bearable, but beautiful for our children, with Jewishness and Muslimness not only familiar, but an unwavering home for them and also,\u00a0with them<\/em>, an unwavering home\u2014built by Noah and Yusuf, so many other prophets, so many surviving texts\u2014for ourselves. Their both-ness has given us a shelter from the questions, the audacity of those who call my children, who are my everything,\u00a0nothing<\/em>, those small and painful daily storms.<\/span>
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And they, our children, have already made me, as a Jew, far more whole: connecting with my traditions, from the baking of hamantaschen to the recitation of Torah, in order to pass them on. They are the reasons that I joined a synagogue for the first time, and why I have crafted a life in\u00a0Germany centered on the redemption of\u00a0Jewish life.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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On\u00a0Passover, we conclude with the words \u201cnext\u00a0year, in Jerusalem,\u201d to describe longing for the Jewish homeland. Today\u2019s Jerusalem is a place of conflict, but also one imbued with the cultures, the heritage, and the hopes of all three Abrahamic religions, together and apart. This\u00a0year in Italy,\u00a0we\u00a0will\u00a0celebrate Passover\u00a0with an iftar on Easter, with the\u00a0Four Questions of the youngest child, who\u00a0will\u00a0now be Sami, reading\u00a0the Haggadah for the first time. My husband\u00a0will\u00a0break his fast not with bread but with matzo.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This day\u00a0will\u00a0be\u00a0one of the only\u00a0days on which\u00a0we\u00a0are not asked to choose: a day on which I, a Jewish mother, can celebrate with my Muslim husband, while remembering my Christian father.\u00a0And if I\u00a0hold\u00a0this moment close, perhaps it\u00a0will\u00a0give me strength, so that\u00a0the next time someone asks what\u00a0we\u00a0have chosen for our children, I can\u00a0confront their uncertainty with stories of this Passover, this iftar on Easter in Italy. I may tell them that our Jewish-Muslim children are living, breathing proof that\u00a0we\u00a0are not all the same, but\u00a0that we\u00a0spring from the very same source. But I will also warn them that this does not make them\u00a0nothing<\/em>. Nor are we, my family, everything. We are simply at home in the intersections and overlaps of our traditions, not in-between, but knee-deep in the plurality that makes our world beautiful and also whole.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There is so much that we, in this simple togetherness, have and can overcome.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Elisabeth Becker<\/strong> is a sociologist, currently the Freigeist Fellow at Heidelberg University.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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A Celebration of Overlapping Faiths ELISABETH BECKER This year, our family will mark Passover, Easter, and Ramadan at the same time\u2014and honor the three religions that contributed to my children\u2019s heritage. . TABLET MAGAZINE Many people want to know if my two children, born to a Jewish mother and a Muslim father, are Jewish or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103334"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=103334"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103348,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103334\/revisions\/103348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=103334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=103334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=103334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}