“It feels like we’re on top of the world,” he said.

Stafman’s destination is the city of Bozeman, where, on August 14, he will be installed as the spiritual leader of Congregation Beth Shalom, the Reform synagogue where he has spent 10 days a month for the past year. The ceremony will officially make him one of two active rabbis in the state; the other is an emissary from the ultra-Orthodox movement Chabad, who established a Chabad House in Bozeman in 2004; a third, Beth Shalom’s rabbi emeritus Allan Secher, is retired. It will also make him one of the few intermarried rabbis in the country. Montana is not known as a center of cutting-edge Jewish communal life, and yet by hiring an intermarried rabbi, Beth Shalom has, apparently without dissension, done something that in most synagogues would be as taboo as passing out pork dumplings on Yom Kippur. “I don’t think there’s a single soul in that congregation that resents him being involved in an interfaith marriage,” Secher said. “If there is I absolutely haven’t heard it, and I would have because we’re still very connected.”

That may well be because Montana’s Jewish community is so isolated. Bozeman is a university town of about 35,000 people in a state with about 1,000 self-identifying Jews. Along with Missoula, it’s considered one of Montana’s progressive hubs; Beth Shalom’s president, Jake Werner, compared it to Boulder, Colorado. Almost the entire Jewish community is made up of transplants from around the country. Beth Shalom members say that their congregation is a big tent full of people with often-conflicting views who have nevertheless all sought out the one non-Orthodox shul in town. “You know the joke about three Jews on an island?” asked synagogue board member Franke Wilmer. “There’s only one synagogue on this island.”

“It’s kind of a pioneer congregation,” said Beth Shalom member Bridget Kevane, a Montana State University professor who wrote about Bozeman’s Jews last year for the Forward. “You work with the people who are there to shape a community and it may not be the traditional east coast community.” Kevane’s mother is Jewish, but she was raised Catholic in Puerto Rico; she reconnected with her Jewish roots after marrying a Jewish man. The temple’s past and present presidents are married to non-Jews, as are several other board members. This makeup suggests that what’s really unusual about Bozeman’s Jews is not that they’re heavily intermarried, but that they are intermarried even at the most active, synagogue-going levels.

If Jews in interfaith marriages feel shut out by synagogue life in many places, in Bozeman—where, according to the town’s Chabad rabbi, Chaim Bruk, even 60 percent of Chabad-goers are in intermarried—they’re the only show in town. “I have no doubt that in more established Jewish places it would be more controversial,” Stafman said of his being hired. “There are more expectations, I think. It’s not only a matter of being politically liberal, but a certain kind of open-mindedness and willingness of being able to explore new places, that’s maybe less present in the more established places.”

In many ways, Stafman is a classic second-career rabbi: a socially-minded professional who in middle age felt called to serve on a spiritual plane as well. He grew up in New York and moved to Tallahassee, Florida, for law school. There, he met Beth Lee, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and a Christian spiritual director who, like Stafman, did not consider herself particularly religious. The two married. He became a criminal defense attorney and, for 25 years, specialized in death penalty cases. He and Lee, a freelance artist and calligrapher, decided to raise their children Jewish, and, when their firstborn reached Hebrew-school age, they joined a Reform synagogue. Stafman eventually became active there, eventually serving as president of the board. Lee said she never had any desire to convert—“I have really wonderful Presbyterian roots,” she noted—but she liked being part of a congregation again.

In 2000, Stafman fought what history may remember as his most important case, though it was far outside his usual purview: he was lead attorney for the Democrats’ case in Ronald Taylor v. Martin County Canvassing Board, one of several disputes over vote counting in the 2000 presidential election that were heard in Florida’s Supreme Court. Unlike Gore v. Bush, Stafman’s case never made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, but as in that case, the results marked a loss for the Democrats. That same year (coincidentally, Stafman said), a friend persuaded him to come to a Jewish Renewal retreat, where he began a turn toward the spiritual that would lead him to the rabbinate. Jewish Renewal, a movement that emphasizes an eclectic mix of mystical and spiritual teachings , “spoke to my soul at a deep level,” Stafman said. He began taking classes at the Renewal-affiliated seminary, the Aleph Rabbinic Program—the only one in the United States that, according to a recent article in the Jewish student magazine New Voices, does not reject intermarried applicants outright. But, said Aleph Rabbinic Program chair Steve Silvern, “we say to them that it’s unusual for a community to hire a rabbi who is in an interfaith marriage,” and counsel them about the strain that one partner becoming a rabbi can place on a relationship.

In 2003, after getting Lee’s blessing, Stafman applied. He continued to practice law for another two years, but then quit working as a lawyer entirely. “Even though I never had a client get the death penalty, there came a time when I came to see that the system lacked any capacity for healing and reconciliation and forgiveness, and I realized I didn’t want to be part of that system anymore,” he said.

Last summer, several months before he was ordained, Stafman inquired about rabbinical positions at two congregations, one in Fort Collins, Colorado, and one in Bozeman. “I made a point on the very first contact of finding out whether they would consider someone who was intermarried,” he said of his initial interviews with Beth Shalom. “And the reaction I got was one of, like, ‘So what?’ And one person said that it might be a great asset because we’re so intermarried here that you might have a better understanding of the congregation. It’s not like there was a universal round of applause that I was intermarried, but I’ve never heard that it was a defect or cause for concern.”

Indeed, said Wilmer, a member of the hiring committee—and a high-ranking Democrat in Montana’s state legislature, who grew up Episcopalian and converted to Judaism after she married a Jewish man from whom she is now divorced—an enthusiasm for working with interfaith families was one of the explicit criteria for candidates. “It’s very much in keeping with our congregation,” said Romi Neustadt, a public relations consultant who volunteers as the temple’s communications director, and is one of Montana’s few native-born Jews. “My husband and I are very much in the minority in that we’re both Jewish. I think it will be very beneficial to those interfaith families in the community, and that they will really feel they have a home at Beth Shalom.”

Of course, there were also practical considerations for the search committee: not too many rabbis, especially those coming out of major rabbinical schools, are eager to take a half-time job in Montana. “We can’t really be choosy about what we we’re getting, we’re not going to have a huge pool,” said Josh Burnim, Beth Shalom’s recently installed president. “We were pretty over the moon to get someone with the qualifications of Ed Stafman.”

The fact that he’s taken an unlikely job isn’t lost on Stafman. “Not too many 55-year-old people leave the home they were in for 30 years, pack up everything they own and put it in two moving vans for a new job that’s actually a half-time position, leaving all of their connections, including friends I’ve had for decades,” he said in a phone conversation as he drove through the Badlands. He trailed off: “I’m looking at my wife and she’s getting upset.”

It’s the age difference more than his belief in arranged marriage that makes me reject out of hand the idea of dating Amir. It’s not clear to me that arranged marriages work out worse than the contemporary kind, especially when people marry young. I’m not sure most seventeen-year-olds would make a better choice than their parents would make for them, and in much of the world people still marry young, women often as teenagers.

Arranged marriages were the rule in my own family within living memory. My mother’s father and mother were introduced by a matchmaker, though this might have been because both bride and groom were aged for the time, forty and thirty. My mother’s mother’s mother, Pesha Gitel, born around 1860, had her husband, Baruch, picked for her. And Baruch’s grandparents, born at the beginning of the nineteenth century, were brought together by their families when they were barely thirteen. Of course, those couples, like Afghan couples today, lived with their extended families, and that was part of the glue that made the marriages work.

I’ve always thought of my own parents’ marriage as arranged, though not successfully. They met on a blind date and married a year later, but they never seemed a couple. On some level I must have registered this. When I was very small, I asked my mother if I would have to marry a man named Andy because my parents were named Bernard and Bernice. I was so young I didn’t know the difference between first and last names or that married couples had the same name after they got married, but not before. Or maybe I saw that my parents’ names were one of their few obvious similarities.

My mother and father had few interests in common, never hugged or kissed in front of me, and didn’t seem to have a link to each other besides their respect for each other’s intelligence and their role as parents. One time when I described the way they lived in the same house without seeming to be together, my friend Samuel cut to the chase: You mean they lacked a sense of complicity. That was right. I never thought of them as having an intimate life of their own behind their bedroom door. When I read Freud in my early twenties, the passionate oedipal jealousies he described didn’t register with me. I’d never envied my parents’ private life. It wasn’t clear they had one. Possibly this has something to do with why I haven’t married.

Another reason might be that I haven’t found a man who feels like family to me. I understand Amir’s desire to marry within his tribe (in his case, literally the same Pashtun subtribe), because I felt the same way until my late thirties. “I’d have more in common with a Jew,” I told friends when I was in my twenties and thirties, but I didn’t really understand what it was that lovers ought to have in common. I thought of intimacy as based on shared traits and interests, rather than on an emotional connection.

It felt right to me when I just turned nineteen that my first boyfriend, Scott, was Jewish, but at the same time I thought he was too Jewish. I didn’t like it that he owned several different yarmulkes, or that he lit Hanukkah candles even in his dorm room. From the start I found his Jewishness not a positive characteristic so much as the absence of a negative, Christianity. Dating a Christian would have raised questions with my family. Although my parents never explicitly told me to marry a Jew, it was understood that I would, just as it was understood that I’d go to an Ivy League college.

Scott and I were together seven years, from the time I was nineteen to twenty-six, but I never saw myself marrying him. Part of the problem, I would have said at the time, was that Scott was too involved with his family. They struck me as stiflingly close; the three adult children still ate Friday night dinner with their parents most weeks. I’d just escaped an unhappy home and didn’t wish to immerse myself in someone else’s family life, however warm.

And on some sort of primitive chemical level, Scott and his family weren’t right for me. I never liked their looks. Scott likely felt something similar. Once he said that I was awfully dark, and his tone made me wonder why he was my boyfriend. Not that he wasn’t attracted to me—we made love nearly every night we spent together, right till the end—but maybe he didn’t want to be. It might have mattered to him that my black hair and eyes and olive skin spoke clearly of Middle Eastern or southern Mediterranean stock. His pale skin and brown hair could have been anything. I thought but never said, Who knows if they are even really Jewish? They could only trace their ancestry a few generations back; my mother’s father’s family was an old rabbinic line, descended from King David. Of course we were awfully dark. I didn’t identify as Jewish from a religious standpoint, but I was proud of my blood.

Being a member of the tribe, I learned from my years with Scott, didn’t make a man feel like family. I wanted someone who looked Jewish but wasn’t, and Scott wanted someone who didn’t look Jewish but was. He got his wish. He married, a pale redhead who converted to Judaism, though I stubbornly refused to think of her as really Jewish. Decades later she finally did something that made me change my mind: She became a rabbi.

Still, for years after Scott, I told people I wanted to marry a Jew. I said so even when I was dating a Catholic or a Protestant. I said so after deciding that I got along better with Christian men than with Jews. I said it after going to Israel and hating it. And my assertion was not so simple as bad faith. Part of me felt that Jews were in some sense better than other people, and Judaism a more reasonable religion—not that I had chosen it. (Shirin thought Amir felt this way about Afghans, and Pashtuns in particular.) Part of me thought it would be easier to marry someone who shared this prejudice. But I knew it was strange for someone who had no religious convictions to care about marrying within the faith. I probably wanted to make a faltering desire true by saying it aloud.

It just so happened that I had trouble getting along with my Jewish boyfriends after Scott. They were defensive and prickly, quarrelsome, critical of me in ways that reminded me of my dad. They were also fussy and wimpy in ways that didn’t remind me of my dad, who (whatever his other faults) was physically brave, athletic, and, until he got Parkinson’s disease, rugged. I was drawn to Jewish men’s dark looks and to something in their presence that reminded me of family, but personality differences always pulled us apart.

I’d wanted to marry a Jew, it now seems to me, because it was a shortcut to the intimacy I had heard belonged to the married state, the intimacy that was missing from my parents’ marriage. Amir, oddly enough—or maybe not, since the Pashtuns claim to be descended from King Saul—looked like my family. If I squint, it’s Amir who looks back at me from a photo of my mother’s father Abe, from his stocky frame to his thick black hair and hooked nose. Amir looks like a Jew but isn’t.