[Avodah] Officiating at a Mixed Marriage

[Zev Sero]

Akiva Blum wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Zev Sero <zev at sero.name> wrote:

>> The marriage of two non-Jews certainly does have halachic validity;
>> the wife becomes an eshet ish.  And a rabbi is absolutely permitted
>> to perform or supervise at a ceremony to make it so: I even know one
>> non-Jewish couple who were married under a chupah by an Orthodox rabbi!
>> I couldn't make it, so I don't know exactly how different it was from
>> a standard chupah, but if I were to do it I'd probably just omit the
>> shem umalchus from the brachot, and replace "kedat moshe veyisrael"
>> with "keminhag kol ha'amim".  And translate it all to English.
     

> Not so poshut at all.
> See Chelkas Yaakov EH 78, and Cahvos Yair 185.

Both of these are about making a shiduch, not about marrying them.
The only reason the Chelkas Yaakov comes up with to forbid making
the shiduch is that it will eventually cause children to be born
who will worship AZ.  Where that is not an issue, there should be
no problem with making the shiduch.   The Chavos Yair has even less;
he says there is no issur in making a shiduch, but only that he
received from "gedolim uzkenot" that it's not a good idea, without
any reason given at all.  Given that, I don't see any reason to
refrain even from making a shiduch, but that's not even at issue here.

When a non-Jewish couple ask a rabbi to marry them, they've already
found each other, and if the rabbi turns them down they'll just have
a different ceremony or none at all.   Even in the unlikely event that
their eventual children will serve AZ or make tzoros for yidden (and
that is unlikely in any couple who would ask for a Jewish wedding in
the first place!) the ceremony doesn't assist, even indirectly, in
those children being conceived.  They're already together, their
first child may already have been conceived, so what possible harm
could a ceremony do?

-- 
Zev Sero                      The trouble with socialism is that you
zev at sero.name                 eventually run out of other people’s money
                                                     - Margaret Thatcher