Hope in Times of Cultural crisis: Rob & Elize Berman
Today, I’m with Elize and Rob Berman from South Africa. They are navigating increasing antisemitism as an intermarried couple. Here is their story.
“But you, O Lord, are a shield about me, my glory, and the lifter of my head. I cried aloud to the Lord, and he answered me from his holy hill” (Psalm 3:3-4).
Listen on…
Interview Transcript
Tuvya: Hi. This is your host, Tuvya Zaretsky, and I’m with Elize and Rob Berman. I say, “I’m with,” but they are in South Africa, and I’m in California. It is my morning and their early evening. Elize, your family are sort of pioneers in South Africa. Is that right?
Elize: My family line started in South Africa around the 1680s or 1690s. So, we’ve been in South Africa for a little while (said with dry wit).
Tuvya: Rob, your family came from where, and when did they arrive in South Africa?
Rob: So, it depends on which parents. My dad’s family members are Jewish, and my great-grandfather came to South Africa in 1912. He came from what is today Latvia. It was then Lithuania. He, like so many others in Eastern Europe, was fleeing persecution. He arrived in Cape Town, moved inland, and eventually settled in Johannesburg. My mom’s family gave me some British and French Huguenot heritage. In my family, there are lots of cross-cultural aspects, different religious backgrounds, cultural backgrounds, and geographic backgrounds, so there’s lots going on there.
Tuvya: How was your father raised?
Rob: He was raised in the Reform synagogue in Pretoria. His family was very involved in the synagogue as part of the Jewish community. His dad, my grandfather, divorced his wife, and that isolated them in the Jewish community, since there was a stigma around divorcees. My grandmother got involved with a Gentile, and that was basically the last seal. They were pushed out of the Jewish community. The guy my gran married was a Christian. Through him, my gran came to faith in Jesus probably around mid-age. So, my dad was deeply angered by the divorce and then his mother’s turn to Christian faith. He resisted their testimony. He rebelled and pushed away from it. He was always connected with the local synagogue. I think he was searching for identity. But at the age of 16, he realized that Jesus has to be the Jewish Messiah.
Tuvya: So, when he married, your dad and mom shared the same faith?
Rob: Yes. They had a shared faith when they met. They created a Messianic home, a cross-cultural home that gave us an interesting identity along with an uncertainty of identity.
Tuvya: And today, we are talking a little more than five months since the events took place in Israel on October 7, 2023. I want to ask you both about the shared experience of a Jewish-Gentile couple maneuvering through a season where we have witnessed what Hamas did there and the tremendous antisemitism in response to what happened. Many Jewish people have spoken of the sense of vulnerability and pain from shared identity. One of the questions I have been asking is how intermarried couples are navigating these times. So, Elize, what has it meant to you being married into the Jewish people right now?
Elize: So, my culture is Afrikaans. I am what you would call an Afrikaner. I realized the seeds of being married to a Jewish man were sown a lot earlier than I imagined. My mom, when she was in her final year in school, had a Jewish friend. That was actually extremely rare for the time, in the 1960s. It was rare for an Afrikaans woman to have befriended a Jewish girl, just simply because of a language barrier and a cultural barrier. So, I grew up in a household that was very, very pro-Jewish people. To this day, I actually find antisemitism very confusing, I think because it was so not a part of my household when I grew up. When Rob asked me to marry him—by the way, I never said, “Yes”—I just burst into tears. So, to this day, I still haven’t said, “Yes”! (Laughter by all!)
Tuvya: Seems like it’s still working though!
Elize: Thus far, yes. It’s been 10 years in, and I still haven’t said, “Yes”! But anyway, in preparation for our wedding day, I felt very much that the Lord placed a specific Scripture on my heart. I gave it to Rob as a wedding gift. It is Ruth 1:16–17: “For where you go, I will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people will be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will.” But I wasn’t realizing the gravitas of what that actually would mean to our journey as a couple. It was, at the time, a commitment. I’ve known for many years that those words Ruth spoke to Naomi are the words of a covenant. And I was obviously aware that I was entering into a covenant before the Lord with Rob. It only seemed appropriate to me that I echo those words because, as a non-Jewish person—a Gentile person—I was adopting his people. I don’t even know if that’s a correct term, but I was taking his people as my people. And as the years and our journey together have continued, I’m discovering more about Jewish culture, the Jewish people. And then in light of what happened on October 7, I have aligned myself more and more with his people.
Tuvya: And Rob, can you recall what you were thinking the moment Elize gave you that little plaque with the words of Ruth on it? It is now hanging on your wall. What did that mean to you?
Rob: I don’t think I can remember exactly, but I do recall it being a very significant moment. I remember thinking similarly to what Elize has expressed. I don’t think I grasped just how significant it would be. But in the story of Ruth the Moabite, this Gentile woman joined the covenant community of Israel. And not just that, but later she was listed as the great grandmother of King David. And I think of her commitment—what Ruth pledged to Naomi and her people—was to join their destiny in life and in death. That’s what we understand modern marriage vows are saying. We are joined until death do us part.
Tuvya: Yes. And during that life together hard things can happen, like the events in Israel on October 7. How’d that affect you two?
Elize: Well, first and foremost, on a psychological level, you look at the brutality of what happened, the inhumanity, and that in and of itself was already so shocking that it’s almost paralyzing. Then, you take it further, and we face that Rob has family in Israel. We were worried to death about them. We were texting them, trying to find [out] if they were okay, asking what was happening. Then for me, on an intellectually spiritual level—if I can call it that—was just the knowledge that these are God’s chosen people. And these horrific things are happening to them. You know, your mind is just going in every direction that it possibly can. I was trying to grasp something that didn’t make sense. The more I watched, and the more I heard, and the more I thought, nothing about it made sense. I cannot understand how this was actually happening.
And then you take it, as the non-Jewish partner in this relationship, a step further where you think, I’m not Jewish, but I am married to a Jewish man. And you realize there are repercussions to that. In a non-violent “kumbaya” world, it would be great because there would only be love and happiness. But that’s not the reality. The reality is the people in Israel were targeted and persecuted just because they are Jewish. And there are non-Jewish partners who are targeted and persecuted because they are married to someone who is Jewish. Then you look at that from my perspective in South Africa, and I think, What stops it? There’s nothing that stops that from happening to me.
Tuvya: Does that leave you feeling vulnerable?
Elize: Yes. The best example that I can give is [that] a while back I had a bit of bathroom drama. As can happen, a small leak resulted in us having to replace all the carpet in our bedroom. So, I sent out for price quotes to get the process of replacing the carpet started. Turns out, a man who was clearly a Muslim came to take these measurements. Now I must say, he was perfectly respectful. He never put a foot wrong. He was only delightful the whole time that he was in our house. But then at the end, he asked, “Please won’t you just write down your name, surname, cell phone, and email address so [I] could send the estimate to your correct contact details?” In that moment, I felt so vulnerable because I have a Jewish surname. It hit me that the shear fact that I had taken someone else’s surname now put me in the proverbial line of fire. It was the most unsettling feeling.
Then I thought of people like Corrie Ten Boom who also was not Jewish. But she had a heart for the Jewish people and ended up paying a very high price for that during the Shoah. And it was this realization [that] there can be a potential cost for every decision that you make. There are the spiritual repercussions as well when you align yourself with God’s people. The enemy of the Jews obviously hates them, detests them, and you as the Gentile partner have also become a target of Satan’s hatred for God’s chosen people.
Tuvya: I really appreciate you bringing that out. What you’re illustrating is how in a moment of complete innocence, a reality hits you that your life is in the crosshairs simply because you are bonded with a Jewish person and the Jewish people.
Elize: Yes.
Tuvya: Rob, I forgot that you have family in Israel. What part of the country are they located in?
Rob: They live in the Jezreel Valley just outside of Afula. Strangely enough, of all my Jewish family, we are closest with them. We love going to visit them. They live on a kibbutz, and that’s an interesting experience. So, on October 7, Elize and I were out for a morning run. Afterward, we were sitting in a café having coffee and breakfast when just before 9:00 a.m., the messages started coming through. There was a shared sense that this was happening to us too. I feel a very strong connection to Israel and especially to my family members. My immediate concern was for them. So, we just started to reach out to them to hear if they’re okay. But then reports were coming through of what actually was happening. And my one cousin, who was in the Tank Corps, was immediately called up for reservist duty. He’s got two young sons: one less than a year old and a five-year-old. He had to leave his wife and two young sons to go and fight.
Tuvya: For our audience, when Israeli citizens are called up to defend the country, it is part of their military duty until age 45. Did you know whether your cousin was sent to the north or to the south?
Rob: Originally, he was sent to the north, and later they redeployed into the south.
Tuvya: Afula is closer to the northern border where Hezbollah was firing mortars and missiles into Israel. So, your cousin was assigned to a post just up on the northern border which would be about 75 kilometers from his home?
Rob: Yeah.
Tuvya: That is well within range of Lebanon. I think it would help Americans to understand when Israeli defense forces are deployed to defend their country, it is more than a military tactic. They know they are defending their homes, their parents, grandparents, and cousins who live just down the road. Often, they are stationed close enough to go home from their base for the weekend. The attacks from Gaza in the south and on the northern border have been very real for all the people who live there. They touched you and Elize as relatives of Israelis.
And then we saw anti-Israel demonstrations break out all over the world. There is evidence that they were pre-planned and coordinated because they happened so quickly after. There were identical signs displayed, chants, and slogans of condemnation. Did you witness demonstrations in Johannesburg as well?
Rob: Yes. They were all around the country. There were a lot of demonstrations around the Jewish areas, particularly in Johannesburg and in Cape Town. So, there were a lot of clashes. What was interesting is that the Christian community in Cape Town came out immediately in support of Israel. They took a stand against antisemitism. And there were some clashes between Palestinian supporters and Christians. There were some scuffles and some injuries. Something that I noticed is there usually need to be clearances, approvals for demonstrations and marches. But the Palestinian supporters came out in huge numbers with a lot of coordination, similar messaging, all approved and everything pushed through quickly. It doesn’t help to ease the sense of vulnerability that we live in a country where our government (which formerly suffered under and fought against apartheid) is now siding with what they believe to be a people “suffering under Israeli occupation.” That support leaves us feeling very vulnerable indeed.
Tuvya: Yes, and that brings me to a question that’s been underneath this conversation all along. What have you two found that’s been an anchor to help you throughout this time?
Rob: One experience we had some years back helped us when Elize’s dad fell suddenly ill. He had a dissecting aortic aneurysm. Roughly 70 percent of people with that condition don’t even make it into the hospital. It was a very traumatic time. Incredibly, he spent two months in the ICU. At the end of those two months, he passed away. That was a traumatic time for us—our personal crisis. After that happened, we were in Israel on Yom HaShoah, the day of “Holocaust Remembrance” speaking about it with our Israeli family. Elize was speaking honestly that she couldn’t relate to the enormity of the Holocaust. But in her life, her personal tragedy was when her dad was in the hospital and dying.
Elize: During that time, my dad was in this slow and steady decline. It literally went from “We think he’s dying today; you need to come say goodbye,” to the next day, my dad sitting up in bed looking like he’s going to live. And then the next day, he was crashing again. So, it was this unbelievably wild rollercoaster ride for two months. And I was crying out to the Lord, asking Him to save my dad. Obviously, I wanted my father to live. At the same moment, I was realizing, I suppose, deep, deep down and in my subconscious that he was dying, but not wanting to accept that fact. There was a point in the second month of my dad’s time in the ICU, when I had what I would classify as a crisis of faith, a complete and utter implosion. And the question was never “Is God real? God isn’t there? There’s nothing out there, so my prayers are only going up to the ceiling?” It was a far more nuanced doubt. A seed was planted in my head, and the seed was, “What if I have misunderstood the character of God?” I believe that God is real. I believe that He is there, and He hears me when I pray. But what if I have misunderstood the Scriptures? What if I have misunderstood what His character actually is? And that’s a very sneaky, subtle doubt. If you start doubting the character of God, then pretty much immediately, you start doubting everything, because if God isn’t who He says He is, then He is a liar. And then everything is a lie. And so, pouring my heart out to this God, begging Him to save my father, means nothing if He is actually a liar. And that was a crossroads for me.
In that moment, I had to decide. No, I believe He is who He says He is. I believe that what I read in Scripture is true, that He is trustworthy and what He does is good and right, even if I don’t understand it. If I go down that other route, thinking He is a liar, I am just walking away from everything. Yet, I truly believe that it was His mercy that I made the right decision. I chose in that moment to say, “No, I will not listen to this poison that is being poured into my ear.” I chose to believe that He is who He says He is, in spite of everything that was happening, in spite of the storm that I was in. He is the anchor, and He is the one who held me in this craziness that I was experiencing.
I want to add that after my dad died, knowing that the Lord is who He says He is, I haven’t succumbed to grief. I was extremely close to my father. I counted him as one of my best friends. The way that I can cope with that is to know that God is who He says He is. He is in control, and He is the anchor of my soul.
Tuvya: And you two have what you’ve described as a spiritual harmony to sustain both of you?
Rob: That’s so well captured in Psalm 3. King David describes the Lord as being a shield about him. In context, David was fleeing from his own son, Absalom. In Verses 1 and 2, he wrote, “O Lord, how many are my foes! Many are rising against me; many are saying of my soul, ‘There is no salvation for him in God.’” I think that Elize in the same way was sensing if God is not trustworthy, if the Lord is not who He says He is, there is no deliverance. Then in verses 3 and 4, David confessed, “But you, O Lord, are a shield about me, my glory, and the lifter of my head. I cried aloud to the Lord, and he answered me from his holy hill.” So, when we experience a storm raging around us, we have nothing to anchor ourselves to besides this “shield”—the God that David trusted and described.
Tuvya: Yes. And thank you both for sharing so openly. I look forward to hearing from others who are blessed with your story. Thanks for doing this.
