On marrying out

Amy Klein writes:

When I was 25, my Orthodox girlfriends and I discussed at what age, if we weren’t married, we might sleep with someone. The question was deeper than its "Sex and the City" nature might sound (although those girls had made that decision a long time ago).

The question wasn’t just about sex. It was about our entire upbringing, what we had been raised for: to marry young, have children and build a bayit ne’eman b’Israel: propagate the Jewish people. When would we give up on this dream? At what age would we realize that our lives weren’t exactly going according to the plan — a plan conceived by our rabbis and teachers and parents and community and which seemed to work for many people but us — and we’d have to create our own rules?

These days plenty of people in the Modern Orthodox community deviate from the plan — it’s actually common to marry after 25, 30 and still belong to the community — so it’s not as if one small deviation of the road map (sex before marriage) would necessarily consign us to excommunication. And yet, somehow we knew, when pondering the question, that it might.

Now, a decade later, I ask another similar question. At what age does a Jewish woman consider marrying out? At what age does she realize that even that part of the plan isn’t working out? For me it was Plan B, something constructed haphazardly along the way, making addendums and amendments and codicils as time and circumstance demanded, OK, well, maybe I won’t marry my first love, but I’ll marry someone in the community…. OK, well, I’ll date Conservative and Reform Jews … or completely secular Jews … or Jews-by-Choice that my family might not consider Jewish. It’s a slippery slope, as the rabbis used to warn us: First you rip toilet paper on Shabbos and then next thing you know you’re committing murder. Yes, first you don’t get married at 25, and next thing you know a decade has passed and people are beginning to recommend that you give up on the entire Jewish enterprise.