Hi folks. Although I’m not a regular participant on the Emerging Women blog, I facilitate our local emergent cohort here in Chicago and am part of the leadership team at my emergent church, Wicker Park Grace. My name is Rebecca and, recently, I became involved in a new project that is trying to create an online community of people who are engaging Judaism in non-traditional ways. We are trying to move beyond the discussion of whether or not intermarriage will destroy the Jewish people by working from the premise that it will not, that it is here to stay and that some of us need to take leadership roles for how to constructively help Judaism adapt to this new dynamic. The website can be found at www.fiftypercenters.com. It’s a lot like the work we’re doing for emergent Christianity and that you’re doing for feminism. All we can do is tell our stories as we keep trying to live out this ideal. We believe that will help shape the future.

This project is engaging my passion right now because two and a half months ago, I married a practicing Jewish man. I struggled so much with feelings of rejection from the Jewish community: a community that still speaks with a fairly unified voice that families like mine are not welcome. To give you some idea of the scope of this refusal, I have only heard of three rabbis in the entire city of Chicago who will even perform a marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew. The feeling of being somewhat helpless but also full of righteous indignation was so similar to how I felt when churches I had tried to be a part of told me that they didn’t want me unless I wanted to fit into the limited identity they had laid out for.

I worked through these feelings on my personal blog and with friends and with my therapist but what we’ve all learned from our participation in the emergent movement is that finding a community that has similar experiences has all sorts of redemptive power. Thus Fifty Percenters was born. As my family expands and as the world changes, we want to be at the forefront of that change, contributing and creating the necessary dialogue to ensure that people have unfettered access to God in the language that their souls speak. If you are at all interested in this project or know of anyone who would be, please visit us or direct your friends to us. The more voices that we have responding to posts and the more eyes we have reading the stories that are being told, the more likely it will be that lives will be changed.