“Money can’t buy me love,” sang the Beatles, but per a recent New York Times advice column, money can buy lovelessness.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, a.k.a. the Ethicist, fielded a question from a reader whose mother “informed each of her children that she and my stepfather put a codicil in their wills disinheriting any of their children married to someone not recognized as Jewish by her local Orthodox Rabbinate.”
While the letter-writer’s own spouse makes the cut, they write, they “have three middle-aged siblings who are all not religious and unmarried.” Concerningly, they explain, “I think they remain so at least partially because they’re stuck, unable to both follow their hearts and avoid betraying my mother’s love—and its most powerful signifier, her will.”
Appiah explains that the parents are going against Jewish law in this request, as well as being manipulative. The latter, at least, is self-evident.
There are exactly a million different additional angles here, and I expect to cover only 900,000 of them.
One is that it is plainly rude, no matter the request, to dangle the prospect of an inheritance or lack thereof as a way of influencing one’s adult children’s major life choices. Rude, as well as the plot of many a murder mystery for a reason. (Source: all 10,000 seasons of Midsomer Murders.) People have, as the saying goes, murdered for less.
Another is that the only proper response, if you’re an adult child in that situation, is to assume the money is not coming your way, and to act accordingly. There are more reliable sources of income than a maybe-inheritance. I mean watch one of these kids (‘kids’) marry an Orthodox Jew to appease/inherit, only for the parents to die at 120 years old, leaving them with change for the bus. More reliable, and less psychically draining. Is it really great to be sitting around with one’s parents all the time with them, dwelling on their eventual demise? The siblings, whatever their financial situations, need to turn to mom and be like, We wouldn’t take it even if offered. Because quite frankly nothing is being offered.
But the angle that most interests me here is not about inheritance, but rather the detail about the middle-aged children staying single rather than marrying out. Or not even marrying out, as a Reform Jew might not be good enough.
If the letter-writer is correct, their siblings are rejecting specific romantic possibilities in the ever-more-distant hopes of marrying and perhaps even starting a family with a sufficiently Jewish spouse who has yet to materialize. As in, the implication would seem to be that the siblings do have partners but are not marrying these individuals because they don’t want mom to be sad/to not give them $5 in the year 2063. The siblings are therefore stringing their partners along, as well as refraining from having families while that is possible.
This gets to something I’ve long wondered about anti-intermarriage discourse. There’s often this undercurrent of an assumption that everyone has a potential Jewish spouse waiting in the wings. This sort of, don’t turn down the Nice Jewish Boy/Girl, spoken as though there is in fact such an individual available to them. As though failure to marry-a-Jew is an act of intentional rebellion. When the reality is, in minority-Jewish settings, aka anywhere in the Diaspora that is not a super-observant community, there is no convenient Jewish childhood sweetheart being rejected in favour of going further afield. Dumping a gentile partner does not cause a Jewish one to spring up in that person’s place.
It’s hard enough for people in the modern world to find a compatible partner at all. Reject the ones you do find, and the likeliest outcome is you’re left with none. If the mom and stepdad’s hope is Jewish continuity—and if not, what else is this about?—insisting that one’s middle-aged Jewish offspring not reproduce is sure a funny way of going about it.
So my ethical advice to the mom-and-stepdad here would be this: Stop holding forth about the fate of the loose change you keep between your couch cushions, and start offering a welcome mat to the Jewish community to the siblings’ partners, should they exist. And should they not, then—assuming the kids are on board, which seems ridiculous but they seem rather manipulated already—time to pony up for a matchmaker or a subscription to JSwipe or a trip to Israel or a synagogue membership or absolutely straight-up whatever would make it possible for a Jewish spouse to make themselves known.
The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter @bovymaltz
