Growing up, I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about what I ate. One of my parents and then a housekeeper for a while, used to cook dinner for me and made my lunch to take to school. We didn’t keep any sense of kosher; I didn’t really understand what kashrut was until I was much older. My parents attempted to instill the values of healthy eating, feeding us fresh produce, buying food from whatever farms existed in suburban New Jersey, but beyond the health aspects, we never really discussed food in any other way.

As I grew older, I was confronted with a variety of food ethics, whether cultural, religious or health related. As I spent time thinking about the food choices I make now, I realized that the decisions I make about most aspects of my life reflect how I think, how I was raised, my cultural context and my values. As a child of an interfaith marriage, there was always a combining of cultures in our household, from the most mundane of details to the most controversial. Whenever two people combine their lives and create a family even if they seem incredibly similar on the surface, there is bound to be a certain amount of combining (usually preceded by a hefty degree of compromise).

But my parents were not only intermarried in terms of their religious backgrounds, but my mother was from high treif (non-kosher) land, New England, and my father’s family was old Jewish Bronx (brisket, anyone?). Some of my fondest food memories are when we visited my mom’s family in Ipswich, MA: fried clams, steamers, lobster rolls, scallops, you name the seafood, we ate it, and we ate it joyfully. Since I did not live near my mom’s family and was being raised as a Jew, the love of seafood represented my connection with them. I thought about giving it up over the years, as I had given up pork, but those family moments, those points of connection always prevented me. I studied and contemplated and struggled with my decision because I wanted to maintain my own sense of integrity in who I am and what my title represents. But even as a rabbi, as a leader and example in the Jewish community, I long ago decided that having a connection to my family, being able to sit with them and break bread (and lobster claws) was more important than keeping kosher. And I have never once regretted it.

We live in a world of abundant choices and options and as our community grows ever more diverse, we will only continue to face these types of decisions. There is no one right answer, it’s up to each of us to take the time, do the work and decide how we want to live our lives.