CBI Blogs

When I was 23 years old, I met the love of my life. She was sitting alone at a conference table in what we lovingly referred to as “the war room” – the front room of a rowhouse in Baltimore, MD, that serves as headquarters of the community organizing network that I worked for. Libby was Texan, educated in Oxford, with no trace of Southern or British accent and the posture of a ballerina, which she had been since she was a child. She was also raised as a Christian in Evangelical and conservative Presbyterian churches, and was in the process of being confirmed as an Episcopalian. On that day, I did not know that I would fall in love with her, although it became achingly apparent in the months that followed. Nor did I know that day that I would continuously make the choice of loving her, and she would choose to love me, through all the joys and challenges of building a life together, especially a life that blends both of our deep commitments to our respective faiths.

In his book Judaism is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life Rabbi Shai Held – founder of the Hadar Institute, an egalitarian center for Jewish life, learning, and practice – writes that “The kind of love Judaism speaks about is not an emotion or an action; it’s an emotion and an action…Love, our central concern, is both an emotion that leads to action and, equally, a commitment to action that elicits emotion.” (Held, 2024, 9)

In choosing an interfaith life, Libby and I have always gravitated to spaces that welcomed us and affirmed our choices. Socially, this has never been a problem. But as you can imagine, religious communities have not always been as open. When we were married by a priest and a rabbi in my hometown in Western Massachusetts, my Conservative childhood rabbi was unable and unwilling to lead the service; we ended up hiring a local rabbi we had never met to co-officiate with a pastor who was a friend and community leader. That experience left a sadness in me that I still feel today.

When we moved to Austin in 2018 and found Congregation Beth Israel, it was immediately clear that we would be welcomed here. Since day one, we have always been loved by this community – a love that is CBI’s disposition and its choice. Just as I have been embraced as a congregant, a dad, a volunteer, a board member, and as Executive Director, Libby and our children Micah and Claire have been deeply loved and held by this community.

Last month Libby and I had the incredible opportunity to spend four days on a spiritual retreat with Rabbi Held and Dr. Ellen Davis, renowned Old Testament scholar and Distinguished Professor of Bible and Practical Theology at Duke Divinity School, at Laity Lodge, a historically Christian retreat center nestled in a canyon along the Frio River in the hill country.

Not coincidentally, the property that includes Laity Lodge will be the site of CBI’s first Community Retreat in many years, January 23-25, 2026. As a CBI community we will spend two days together singing, playing, reflecting, hiking, eating, and praying together in one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to. And the space has been given to us for free by the H.E. Butt Foundation! The only cost to CBI is our travel and our food. Now is the time to pause reading and mark your calendars for January 23-25, 2026! And if you would like to be a part of the planning team for this retreat, please reach out to Sarah Jew. Flyers and more details to come soon.

At the retreat Libby and I attended in June, the first interfaith retreat ever held at Laity Lodge, I felt more connected to my Judaism then I have ever felt before. When our group of 50 strangers sang these words at the start of the retreat “Let us learn to love each other…let us learn to pray together…let us learn to weep together”, my sometimes-cynical mind laughed at the idea of crying in a room of people I did not know. You can ask Libby—in our 10 years of marriage I have barely cried in front of my own wife!

That night, as we gathered in a performance space and recited Jacqueline Osherow’s haunting and beautiful poem “Psalm 37 at Auschwitz”, in which she wonders if any of the young scholars killed at Auschwitz recited the psalms aloud, my body broke down as I silently convulsed in tears. Then, Rabbi Held shared his experience, and the experience of so many Jews, that we are taught time and again that we cannot trust Christians. And finally, the Slovakian cellist Jozef Luptak, who played throughout the retreat, sat before us and apologized, openly, to Rabbi Held for the “black mark” that hangs over Slovakia’s history when 73,000 Jews and others were sent to their deaths. When he began to play slowly, beautifully, I felt my heart tugged through space and time.

I sobbed as I thought of my family members killed in camps who’s stories I will never know; of my mother reading holocaust literature since she was a child to connect her history and the horrors of that time; of my father eating graham crackers with jelly in an apartment in the Bronx with his grandfather who escaped, the two divided by language but able to smile together over a shared snack; and of my wife’s grandfather, who himself was a German Jew forced out of his homeland who built a new life for himself in America. I cried thinking about our children, who are raised in a loving interfaith home that blends our two faiths. I cried thinking about the community of St. Matthews Episcopal Church, who opened their doors and their hearts to our CBI community in our darkest moment, in those painful months after our sanctuary was set ablaze. And I thought of my wife, whose hand I gripped as tears fell onto my shirt, who chooses to love me, and all of us, and believes deeply in the project of growing this Jewish community that means so much to so many.

Rabbi Held writes “the world is a complicated place, suffused with beauty and barbarism. Any given day can make us dance with joy and recoil in horror. We shudder at the depths of human depravity and marvel at the extent of human goodness…” (Held, 2024, 6).

Like many of you, I have shuddered and marveled many times in the last few months, and years, and decade. And I have come back, time and again, to the world that we are building at CBI. The choices that each of you make again and again to be a member of this community: to love one another, to navigate our lives together, to worship, sing, dance, laugh, and cry together, and to be proudly, unequivocally and complexly Jewish together. It is a beautiful thing, and I hope we never take it for granted. I hope we continue to invest in it, with time and treasure. And I hope we celebrate it, as we start this next chapter in our communal story.

Thank you for choosing love.