A Story About Being Pushed

I once took a phenomenal Greyhound road trip with my best friend to California for a Phish concert. It was so romantic to throw caution to the wind and head down there together just to see a concert… I’ve never done anything like that again before or after.

One of the challenges in the trip was that I did keep Shabbat and a certain level of Kashrut, and the concert was not until Saturday night. My friend, who was not Jewish, and I stayed with an old friend of my father’s who was Jewish, but Reform. It was not the best experience. The guy was very insulting to my friend, including suggesting that I use her as a Shabbos goy to drive me to an Orthodox shul. (Ironically, she instead walked with me Friday night to a Reform temple several miles away and waited outside for me. She was too uncomfortable with religion and has had enough struggles in life to have good reason to doubt the existence of a God.)

When we got home we had to fend for ourselves for dinner. The family had actually either gone out for dinner, or left us something very treif. I can’t quite remember which. In any case, at that time in my life I had recurring nightmares about eating on Yom Kippur or about accidentally breaking Shabbat. I now stared at the non-Kosher, non-Shabbostic dinner I had pulled together for myself and my non-Jewish friend and I broke into tears.

“I don’t know,” I explained to her. “I don’t know if I’m observant enough. I don’t want to go too far, but I’m missing something.”

She looked at me, stunned, and said she envied that I could struggle with something like this. That with her lack of belief in G-d and her resistance to religion, she could never experience something like that.

That incident remains in my memory as a symbolic turning point. I didn’t become more observant anytime immediately after, but I remember seeing myself in her eyes and realizing how much I wanted MORE out of Judaism, how much I was holding back.

But as I alluded to in The Myth, I’m not sure I ever could have taken the final steps without the unexpected conversion process “forcing” it upon me. Sure, I wanted it, but why? And I had few enough role models to help me become observant. Yes, my Kashrut standards went up as soon as I moved post-college to my first Jewish Orthodox community, but even that was simply a test. I wondered if I could do it, gave it a trial run after Yom Kippur one year, and found it satisfying. As for pushing some of the other limits, I might always be asking the question of whether I could go far enough but for one thing. During my conversion process, I went further than was right for me (and further than I think should have been expected halakhically). Once I’d gone too far, and then settled back to what was right for me (and my family) and acceptable halakhically, the nightmares stopped.

But as I write this I anticipate lectures from people saying I’m no authority, that whatever the rabbis say goes, that I have no right to decide what’s right for myself.

In theory, those lectures would be on target.

And yet I suspect that I’m where I need to be and those lectures are much louder for me than for someone who never has had to face conversion in any form.

Hence, once again, the secrecy. Don't ask. Don't tell you're a convert.

The Myth

One of the more difficult things that converts face is the fear that if they ever slip a little in halakha, someone will “catch” them and question their status as a Jew. And people WILL question it. I know that. (All the more reason why it is hurtful to expose a convert.) However, a beit din cannot take away your status. Once the mikveh is done in a completely Kosher way, it’s done.

I think the myth partly comes based on how many people – my mother included – have had conversions and were later expected to “upgrade.” And I once had the miserable experience, before my own re-conversion of being treated as a totally different person once I’d let slip that my mother had converted to Judaism. (At the time I was less obviously observant so the person who treated me that way assumed I was utterly ignorant. In a way he was right. That was the first sense I ever had that my mother’s conversion could not have been legitimate enough for me, and ultimately this helped me become more osbervant. But I still resent the way I was treated by that man, and I feel a little cheated that I had to be almost forced to enhance my halakhic growth rather than just get to it in my own time. It’s for another time to discuss whether I ever would have reached a point when I was happy with my own observance if I hadn’t been pushed in that way.)

In any case, while a beit din can legitimately question a non-Kosher conversion, it cannot take away a Kosher conversion. At the same time, however, if a person has a halakhic conversion and then openly and brazenly violates halakha, the beit din will become much more cautious about converting anyone else. The truth is, I think that if I were on a beit din and responsible for making a person into a Jew, I would really keep an eye on them to make sure my sense about them was well-founded. And I can see too why a beit din can be so very slow and cautious about completing a conversion for that very same reason… to make sure they’ve done the right thing. But it’s not fun, or fair, to live in fear of Jewish eyes in that way.