My first contact with Harold Berman was about seven years ago. I had written something about work I was then doing with intermarried families in which the non-Jewish partner was in the process of converting and he sent me a proposal for mentoring such couples.

It was the most thorough proposal of its kind that I had ever read — not surprising since Harold’s position at the time as executive director of the Jewish Federation of Western Massachusetts involved writing lots of such proposals. Subsequently I met Harold his wife Gayle and their children Michah and Ilana on a family visit toIsrael.

Not by accident did the Bermans turn their attention to intermarried couples. When they first met Harold was a clarinetist with the US Air Force band stationed inSan AntonioTexas and Gayle was the choral director of aTexasmegachurch and former winner of the Metropolitan Opera Council Auditions. Music drew them together.

And the fact that Harold was Jewish and Gayle Christian did not seem like an insurmountable obstacle to marriage. Harold too often performed both as a vocalist and musician in churches. Neither wanted children at that stage of their lives so the issue of what religion to raise children did not trouble them.

Doublelife: One Family Two Faiths and a Journey of Hope is Harold and Gayle’s gripping account told in the form of epistolary exchanges of their unlikely path to living as an Orthodox couple in Efrat. Theirs is not the more typical story of the non-Jewish partner becoming enamored of Judaism and dragging the Jewish partner along toward observance kicking all the way. While Gayle took an ecumenical approach from the beginning — fasting for instance the first Yom Kippur of their marriage — she made it clear that she was a believing Christian. For his part Harold despite his Reform upbringing was equally clear that there would be no x-mas tree or other Christian symbols in the house.

Harold already had more than passing familiarity with church services. But to introduce his wife to Judaism the Bermans became regular participants in a variety of nontraditional forms of Jewish worship. They could not help noting in almost every case that their fellow worshippers seemed far less devout that those in Gayle’s megachurch and that the conversation both during and after services seemed to cover every topic but G-d. As a performer Gayle was particularly sensitive when members of oneReformTempletreated the cantor opening his mouth as a signal to begin jabbering.

But just as intermarriage ironically led to Harold looking more deeply into his Judaism than he otherwise might have done so the very emptiness of most of the services they attended kept the Bermans pushing forward as if following an intuition that there must be more to a 3000-year-old religion that has commanded such loyalty from its adherents.

The decision to raise a child was the next spur to religious growth. Harold and Gayle agreed from the start to raise their children in only one religion and to make that religion Judaism though they still did not know very much of what that entailed. Michah whom they travelled to theArctic Circleto adopt showed from the beginning a natural attraction to all things Jewish. On a visit to the Kosel when he was only four he told Harold the message he wanted to convey on his scribbled note pressed between the stones: “I asked that everyone in the world should know that G-d is One and that there should be peace overJerusalem.”

But Doublelife is no fairy tale. As Harold moves along the path toward full observance Gayle expresses her anger that he is changing the terms of their marriage in midstream. (The same feelings are often expressed by Jewish partners when their spouse becomes a baal teshuvah. Rav Shach ztz”l used to tell the baal teshuvah partner to treat their spouse’s reaction as fully legitimate.) In addition to the long odds against any non-Jew making the full commitment required for halachic conversion Gayle faced a particularly difficult obstacle: kol ishah. Singing was both her means of earning a living and her greatest passion.

Not only did the Bermans make it all the way to full Torah lives they are using their own experiences to help others. Harold is a regular blogger at The Times of Israel where he invokes his own “street cred” to attack the “outreach lobby” for full acceptance of intermarried couples and all those Jewish voices today who no longer see intermarriage as a tragedy. Recently he took apart MK Dov Lipman’s proposal thatIsrael should accept for conversion all citizens willing to take on a few basic mitzvos such as fasting on Yom Kippur and lighting candles on Friday night.

In addition Harold and Gayle are busy developing a web presence (www.j-journey.org) designed to assist couples in the same position they once were. Anyone who knows an intermarried couple could do no better than to give them a copy of Doublelife.

Wanted: A Means of Expression

According to media reports 1.5 million Israelis — a full quarter of  Israel’s Jewish population — were expected to visit cemeteries last week on Yom HaZikaron. Even if that number is high there can be no doubt of the depth of the mourning felt in Israelon that day. The media is filled with heart-wrenching interviews with bereaved families and accounts from comrades of the heroism of the fallen. Yom HaZikaron bears no resemblance to Memorial Day in theUnited States which is primarily an occasion for a long weekend and the running of theIndianapolis 500.

The chareidi community holds itself largely aloof from the general mood though within the chareidi community too there have been changes over the years. It is far rarer today for chareidim who are in public at the time of the sirens to keep on walking as if nothing were happening. It is generally recognized that to ignore the siren is tantamount to rubbing salt in raw wounds. Some recite Tehillim and I have never heard a word of criticism of those who acknowledge the siren in that fashion.

But it must also be admitted that few of us devote any great part of the day to reflecting on the sacrifices made on our behalf or on the pain of bereaved families.

At the inception of the State it made sense for chareidim to look askance at ceremonies of the new state. The community was small and vulnerable. Secular Zionism appeared to one and all to be the wave of the future; Torah observance a remnant of a vanishing past. In the War of Independence it was said that even in Meah Shearim “There was no house without it’s dead” — i.e. at least one member swept away into the camp of secular Zionism.

But the chareidi community has grown 500-fold since then. The tides of history have turned again. That being the case perhaps the time has come to consider whether we should not be looking for ways to express our hakaras hatov to the soldiers of the IDF and to be nosei b’ol im chaveiro with the suffering of our fellow Jews. Not as a matter of public relations but as an expression of our Torah values.

Does anyone deny that the security of Israel’s millions of Jews will require a top-flight army as long as we live in a world of Hashem’s hiddenness? Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner writes in the first ma’amar on Rosh HaShanah that a Jew who does not show proper hakaras hatov engages in an act of self-destruction. Do we not owe a debt of gratitude to all those who put their lives at risk to protect us? Do we not corrupt our own middos if we deny that fact?

Rav Chaim Shmuelevitz famously referred to Israeli soldiers killed in battle as “harugei Lod” of whom the Gemara (Bava Basra 10b) says “ no created being can stand within their presence” and he spoke every leil Yom Kippur about the need to empathize with the dangers soldiers face.

The Klausenberger Rebbe used to give thanks for not being spared from the suffering of millions of his fellow Jews during the Holocaust. And Rabbi Yisroel Zev Gustman explained why he liked to watch the boys from Yeshivat HaKotel dancing on leil Shabbos: If you have seen as much Jewish suffering as I have it is good to also see Jewish joy. Both were expressing a desire not to be too far removed from the sorrows or joys of their fellow Jews.

During Pesach I heard a powerful drashah on the subject of “sharing the burdens of our friend.” The speaker cited an eye-opening explanation from Rav Yonoson Eibeshitz on why Pharaoh exempted the Levi’im from servitude: His astrologers foresaw that the savior of the Jews would come from the tribe of Levi. And Pharaoh reasoned that if the Levi’im did not feel the pain of servitude no member of that tribe would be capable of leading the Jewish People out ofEgypt.

The Shelah HaKodesh hints to a similar idea. He notes that in Parashas Va’eira (6:14-16) the word shemos (names) only appears with respect to the tribe of Levi but not with respect to those of Reuven and Shimon mentioned earlier. He deduces from that extra word that each of the names of the sons of Levi was deliberately chosen to remind their bearers of the pain of their fellow Jews. The greatness of Moshe Rabbeinu was that despite being raised in the royal palace far removed from the torture of the Bnei Yisrael he went out to his brothers and “saw their suffering.” When he felt that pain he could then lead Klal Yisrael out ofEgypt.

How we should fulfill our Torah obligations of hakaras hatov and nosei b’ol im chaveiro with respect to the sacrifices of those who serve in the army and their families I do not profess to know — perhaps each of us will have to find his or her own way. But I do know it is a subject we must think about.