Shalom Brothers: A Tale of Two Fathers (Parashat Yitro)

Rabbi Noam Raucher, MA.Ed — Executive Director, FJMC International

One of the best things about being a rabbi is that oftentimes one finds themselves with real people. Rabbis get to be “in the trenches” with people as they face life head on. We hear real stories of joy and despair, triumph and failure, life and death all in one day. Here are stories about two men I met in my travels as a rabbi.

John was a young non-Jewish father who was doing everything he could to help raise his daughters as Jews. You could tell him he had nothing to worry about — his wife was Jewish, after all, and in many traditional frameworks that means the kids are Jewish. But that wasn’t how John carried himself. He believed it mattered to impart Jewish values in the home, even if he didn’t claim the label “Jewish” for himself. He learned the rhythms of the calendar. He showed up for Hebrew school carpools and Shabbat dinners and participated in parent meetings.

That year, John gave the best bat mitzvah speech of any parent I heard — clear, humble, and serious about the work of raising a human being. In fact, his seriousness quietly embarrassed some of the Jewish parents in the room, not because they didn’t love their kids, but because John made something visible: you can’t outsource Jewish life to nostalgia. You have to practice it. You have to choose it again and again.

And yet — John couldn’t shake the outsider feeling. Not because anyone was cruel to his face. It was subtler than that. It was the constant background noise: overheard conversations about “intermarriage” like it was a diagnosis, a threat, a failure. The way people talked about interfaith families in the abstract, as if they weren’t sitting two rows away. The assumption that the “real” Jewish work was done by the mother, and the father — especially if he wasn’t Jewish — was, at best, an accessory.

The irony is that “intermarriage” never resonated with John as a personal category. He didn’t ascribe to any faith. He wasn’t leaving a religion; he wasn’t importing a competing one. He was trying to build a Jewish home with the woman he loved, and he wanted his daughters to grow up fluent in Jewish values because he believed those values made for decent human beings.

John’s story is not rare. What’s rare is how rarely communities support men like him.

Then there was David.

David is Jewish. He is madly in love with his wife, who isn’t Jewish. And he carries a guilt that sits in his chest like a stone: in traditional Jewish terms, his children wouldn’t be considered Jewish without conversion. David isn’t trying to win an argument. He’s trying to build a life. And he works his ass off to give his kids Jewish experiences — Shabbat dinners, holiday memories, burnt latkes — because he doesn’t think it’s right or fair that his non-Jewish partner be saddled with the responsibility for Jewish life at home.

Especially since David’s eldest will be bar mitzvahed soon — if David can find the right synagogue willing to navigate his family’s circumstances with dignity. Every step feels like an audition: are we “Jewish enough”? Will we be welcomed without being whispered about? Will my son feel celebrated, or measured? No matter how hard David tries, he can’t shake the sense that he is failing the Jewish people if his kids don’t become the “right” kind of Jews.

That’s not just personal insecurity. It’s cultural messaging. Dr. Keren McGinity has written about the “Jewish masculine mystique,” the way Jewish men can feel their Jewish legitimacy is questioned — especially around intermarriage — leaving them with a persistent sense that they are letting the community down even when they are doing extraordinary work to build Jewish life. It is a shame-loop disguised as communal concern.

This is why this section of Torah known as Yitro (Jethro) is such a needed corrective.

Yitro is a non-Israelite priest. A Midianite. An outsider by any tribal definition. And when he hears what has happened — liberation, survival, the birth of a people — he does something profoundly countercultural: he shows up. He brings Tzipporah, Moses’ wife, and their children back to Moses. He blesses the God of Israel. He rejoices. And then he does the most loving thing a father-in-law can do: he looks at Moses collapsing under the weight of leadership and says, essentially, This isn’t sustainable. You need help. Build a system. Delegate. Share the load.

Yitro is not threatened by Israel’s story. He is in awe of it. He is not competing with it. He supports it — practically, relationally, structurally. Torah does not frame him as a problem to manage. Torah frames him as wisdom arriving from the margins.

That matters for John. Because John is a kind of Yitro: a non-Jewish man who doesn’t want to dilute Jewish life — he wants to strengthen it. He wants to honor the Jewish person he loves and help build Jewish children with joy and depth. If we say we care about men connected to Jewish community, then we cannot keep treating men like John as invisible. They need respect. They need support. They need a place to stand that isn’t conditional on pretending they are someone else.

And that matters for David too. Because David is living a different version of the same story: the Jewish man who is trying to do the right thing and still feels like he’s failing. Yitro teaches that family systems survive when responsibility is shared and dignity is protected. Moses doesn’t treat Yitro’s counsel as an insult; he receives it as a gift. That’s what David deserves from Jewish community — not suspicion, not pity, not endless “it’s complicated,” but the gift of partnership.

So what does Yitro ask of us?

It asks us to stop talking about “intermarriage” like it’s an abstract threat and start talking about real families: the men at bedtime reading Jewish picture books; the men learning blessings; the men driving to Hebrew school; the men standing at the bimah trying to speak Jewish love into their children’s lives.

It asks us to build infrastructure, not just attitudes: classes specifically for supportive non-Jewish partners who want to raise Jewish kids; support groups for Jewish men carrying pressure; synagogue pathways that preserve communal standards where communities hold them while also offering dignity, clarity, and genuine welcome of all types of Jewish families.

Most of all, Yitro asks us to expand our definition of who strengthens Jewish life. Sometimes it’s the non-Jewish father whose bat mitzvah speech puts the room to shame in the best way. Sometimes it’s the Jewish father who refuses to outsource Jewish continuity to his spouse or to guilt, and fights to give his sons a Jewish future.

These men deserve our warm hug — backed by learning, support, and full human acceptance.