Dear Noah Feldman

Rabbi Norman Lamm writes:

My first — and last — impression after reading your extremely well-written New York Times Magazine essay (more properly — a manifesto) is one of sympathy for your predicament, respect for your honesty and profound sadness at the community’s misfortune when one of our best and most well-known yeshiva day school graduates sees nothing wrong with “marrying out.” Worse: You wittingly or unwittingly exposed your coreligionists to opprobrium in arguably the world’s most public forum — even as you express admiration for the Jewish tradition, especially for Modern Orthodoxy.

True, we no longer “sit shivah” for a relative who married out. But all of us experience poignant anguish when a brilliant and once fully committed son of our people, who earnestly believes he is not rejecting his upbringing, effectively does just that in justifying his transgression and holding us up to ridicule.

And why so? Because you violated a major principle of Judaism and yet object when we, your fellow Jews, express our heartache in one of the only ways open to us.