Okay.
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Okay.
I grew up Jewish - Conservative, to be precise. My mother's side of the family has been Jewish for a very long time - my great-grandfather was a kosher butcher whose family immigrated to the US from Poland in the early 20th century. As for more recent generations, my uncle is highly religious and can read Torah with the best of them. He leads family Pesach seders and other holiday celebrations in a way that kept me engaged as a child and still engages my younger cousins today. Also, my father was Christian and converted when he married my mother, but that's a side point.
Although I am no longer religiously Jewish, I still attend these seders. I attend these other celebrations. I attend Yom Kippur services with my family! I fast for a religion I do not believe in! And why do you think that is?
My denomination emphasized questions. It makes sense, really, given that just about the entire Talmud is composed of rabbis debating with each other over the meaning of the Tanakh. During our seders, we would recount the story/legend of how, when the Jews of ancient Rome were persecuted, the rabbis would still set up their seders in hiding. They would get so involved in their debates that their pupils had to tell them the time for morning prayer had arrived - in other words, that the sun had risen and they were no longer safe. This was only written down about 90 years after it was said to have happened, so it's probably just a legend, but even today, seders do not last past dawn.
The youngest child at the table would sing "Ma Nishtana" - the Four Questions. Why is this night different from other nights? Why can't we eat leavened bread? Why do we eat maror? Why do we ritualistically dip the karpas twice? Why do we recline on pillows? Why? The next several minutes are spent answering the questions - we don't do these things "just because". We have reasons.
We also had the story of the father and his four children - the wise child, the wicked child, the simple child, and the child who does not know how to ask. The wise child asks a question about one of the finer points of the seder, and the father answers the best he can. The wicked child asks "What does all this mean to you?", implying that the seder does not mean anything to him, and gets the appropriate response - "It is because of what God did for me when my ancestors were led from Egypt." (I, personally, think that the question is valid, although it could be better phrased as "What is your interpretation of the seder?")
Now here's where it gets interesting. The simple child asks "What is this?" The father responds: "We were freed from slavery." And to the child who does not know how to ask, the father describes the story of the Exodus at length.
One interpretation that I personally like is that the wise and wicked children are adults, and the simple and unasking very young. The simple child, who was inquisitive enough to ask his father what was happening, becomes a wise adult, and the child who asks nothing at all becomes a wicked adult.
So maybe - maybe - conservative Judaism, as a whole, asked "what's wrong with inter-dating?" and couldn't come up with a satisfactory answer. Can you?
(As for the actual subject of the quote, good for them! Everyone should be able to pray in their own way, or not at all.)
