The recent survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life told us what we already knew: America is becoming more and more religious. The draw of a spiritual life is growing in all sectors, and apparently all over the world—even in the officially atheist China. Christians in China: no longer in hiding(I guess this is another case of "atheists" who believe in God). The Chicago Tribune has a fascinating article on the rise of Christianity in China, that mentions some of the reasons that people are coming to church: 

Many of the church's new adherents profess a common belief that 30 years of ungoverned capitalism, amid the fading of communist ideology, has opened a yawning spiritual gap.

A public debate in China over ethics in business has bloomed in recent years from an unlikely source: the same unsafe products that have bedeviled U.S. consumers. In the most infamous case, 13 Chinese babies died and 200 were sickened in 2004 when a manufacturer skimped on the ingredients in infant milk. The case became a symbol of an economy so out of control that people could no longer trust their countrymen to adhere to the most basic ethical standards.

Later in the article, a Chinese professor is quoted saying that he thinks Christianity may be what helps Communism to survive in China.

And in the States, though evangelical Christianity continues to attract hordes of worshippers to mega-churches every week, the quest for spirituality leads in all directions. The Atlanta Journal Constitution covers the trend of black Americans converting into Judaism. Many of these converts feel they are “coming home”: 

That's how Sivan Ariel sees her experience. Born to a Catholic family in the Virgin Islands, Ariel now believes her biracial grandmother practiced Jewish customs she learned from her mother.
"She would always talk about the laws of God" and the Exodus story, Ariel said. Her grandmother would light white candles, which now remind Ariel of those lit on the Sabbath.
"She was the only person I knew that actually did that, so I wondered if it was actually witchcraft," Ariel said with a chuckle.

Ariel left Catholicism when she moved to Atlanta for college and joined a Pentecostal church for a while. But she never felt comfortable there, and she began a spiritual search that led her to convert to Judaism.
…
Ariel, referring to her experience and those of other black Jews, said, "Some of us know beyond a shadow of a doubt we're here because we're home."

Rabbi Norry called this an "unprecedented time" of interest in Judaism.

"Business is booming," he said. "On any given Shabbos, there's 10 non-Jews at our service, visiting or studying to be Jewish."

Still, he asks every convert: "Why would you ever want to be Jewish? Don't you know how many people hate us?"

The black converts respond differently, he said. They look at him as if to say: "Welcome to my world."

People seek religion for a variety of diverse reasons.  How the spread of Christianity might influence the nation of China, and how the growing number of black Jews might ultimately influence Judaism remains to be seen.

So you wanna be a Jew? The Talmud says:

Our Rabbis taught: One who comes to convert at this time, they say to him: 'Why did you come to convert? Do you know that Israel at this time is afflicted, oppressed, downtrodden, and rejected, and that tribulations are visited upon them?' If he says, 'I know, but I am unworthy,' they accept him immediately…" (Yebamot 47a).

Apparently, if you want to be a member of the Tribe you gotta want it bad, and you have to prove it, too. But if you prove it, you’re in, right? Um, not so much. The next page of the Talmud contains a fairly unsavory comment, “Rav Helbo said: Proselytes are as hard for Israel [to endure] as scabs'" (Yebamot 47b). Ouch.
Ruth Converted: And we're sweet on her...
So what’s the deal? How are those of us born Jewish supposed to react to converts (or Jews-by-choice, as they’re often called today)?

Well first of all, we have to be nice to them. Rav Helbo or no Rav Helbo, the commandment to welcome the ger, the stranger, is all over the Torah. Take, for instance, Deut 10:19 which says “And you are to love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt.”

Beyond just a general precept on being a mensch, I’ve heard a number of rabbis speak about precisely what one can and can’t say to a convert. It’s generally accepted that referring to their conversion or to their life pre-Judaism is verboten, because it may cause them shame, or cause them to lose credibility in the community. Basically you don’t want to say anything that will cause the person to be seen as a non-genuine Jew.

To some of this that may seem like a fairly obvious ruling. The law against embarrassing people clearly stands here as it would anywhere else (although I struggle with the concept of Jews-by-choice being ashamed of their past to begin with). But the sad truth is that there is plenty of evidence of the Jewish community being less than welcoming to converts. In the book The Intermarriage Handbook: A Guide for Jews and Christians by Judy Petsonk and Jim Remsen, Petsonk and Remsen write about dealing with negative Jewish attitudes about converts:

Try to let someone's first insensitive comment or glance roll off your back. You are an emissary for all converts and need to keep your image in mind. At first, if confronted, be abstrusely polite or disarmingly direct: "Yes, I was born Jewish, but to Episcopalian parents." "Yes, I'm a convert. Have you known others of us?" "I converted and I'm trying to settle into it. Have any pointers?"

If the person is well meaning, it should be easy to fall into pleasant conversation. But if she is scornful, you can turn on a bit more tartness. Tell her there are Irish Jews, Chinese Jews, blond Jews, black Jews--and there always have been. Tell her that Judaism honors you as a righteous convert.

As this is happening, remind yourself of the many people who have welcomed you into the religion. Try to redraw your friendship circle for awhile so that it brings you into contact with the welcomers and not the rejecters. Gail has felt suspicious glances from some parts of the community, but she has tried not to let them penetrate. "To some people I will never be Jewish," she says. "That's the way they feel. But that doesn't mean that I can't consider myself Jewish, just because one Jew in the whole world doesn't feel that I am Jewish."

I wish I could write off Gail’s experiences as the exception, and not the rule, but I recently read Girl Meets God by Lauren Winner, a memoir about a woman from an intermarried family who converted to Orthodox Judaism in college and then became Anglican in grad school. I expected to hate the book based on its premise, but Winner is an unbelievably good writer, and she makes us face some hard truths about the Jewish community. She writes:

So anyway, when I tell the story of leaving Judaism, I can’t begin with the small space for women.

The story begins instead with a lacrosse-playing, Prada-clad college classmate of mine named Sarah. Sarah was a biology major from New Jersey. She had long curly black hair and a wonderful toothy grin. We were at a party one night, a party where I met a beautiful older man, a man who had moved from New York to Israel as a teenager and served in the army and was just returning, and was full of desperate, drunken, profound stories about violence and rape and suffering. I was standing with the men, over by the window, and Sarah leaned over to a friend and, just loud enough, said that I had only converted because I wanted to marry a Jew.

There were lots of Sarahs, lots of pretty Orthodox girls who snubbed me, the convert, never mine all the rules the rabbis piled up forbidding Jews to remind converts of their background. Those small snide remarks, which I should have been able to overlook, those, I think, are where this story begins.

Or possibly it begins with Hank Hirschfield. This was just weeks after the mikvah. He was the older brother of a friend of mine, and met twice, three times, at a bar near Columbia called The Abbey, and he introduced me to his favorite beer, a sweet-tasting red brewed by Belgian Trappist monks. We talked, at that bar, about Torah and God and Tolstoy and the Rolling Stones, and then one night he turned up at my dorm and said really h couldn’t do this, date me he meant, “Because of your conversion,” he said. “Because, you see, I want my parents to dance with my in-laws at my wedding, I want my bride’s family and my family to have giant holiday celebrations together, giant shared Passover feasts and Purim chagigahs. So I could never marry a convert.” I wept that night, cried myself to sleep for the first time ever, and when I woke up, I found that Beth had filled my wall with homemade, hand lettered signs: Lauren is a Jewess, they said, Lauren the Jew, to remind me that I was really Jewish, pay no attention to what Hank Hirschfield said, or how he acted, or how I felt.

It takes a certain kind of callousness not to find this heartbreaking. And yet I’ve heard my friends echo Hank Hirschfield’s feelings. For some reason many of us want a REAL Jew to join us under the chuppah.

I was talking about this with a friend, a Jew-by-choice, and she had a fascinating insight. She said she thinks about her non-Jewish life as an ex-boyfriend. This ex wasn’t an awful guy, they had lots of great times together, and they came from the same background and everything, but in the end the attraction just wasn’t there, and they broke up. And yes she still thinks about him, and she’s not ashamed of him, but she has a new beau now, and she’d rather not talk about the ex in front of the new beau because it seems rude.

That, to me, was the perfect guideline for situations where I’m unsure what I can and cannot say without offending someone. Think about their non-Jewish life as an ex. While it’s not inappropriate to remind one of something that happened while they were with the ex, reminding them that they were with the wrong guy (or girl) is uncouth. It’s a good rule of thumb for conversations with Jews-by-choice.

Prince Asiel: A Jew to you?Maybe you're all a step ahead of me, but I had never even HEARD of the Black Hebrews until today.  Little did I know there was a booming population in my own town.  But this article in American Jewish Life Magazine is (as we say here in Atlanta) off the chain.    Astounding.  You need to read it!

Maybe you didn't know about this particular flavor of Judaism (which is often described as a cult in the American media).  But it seems more Jewish than a lot of what I see in the secular Jewish world (albeit a little crazy) and it's growing:

There are now about 3,000 African Hebrew Israelites living in Dimona, with another 20,000 in American cities such as Chicago, Atlanta, Cleveland, St Louis, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Detroit.

And, despite public opinion otherwise, the Black Hebrews all consider themselves Jewish. It’s why I’ve been trying so hard to interview them. Mainstream American Jewry looks at them, at best, as a circus act and, at worst, as a dangerous cult. Regardless, they claim to be my biblical brother so I wanted to hear them out.

While the group traces their roots back to the assumed existance of black Jews in biblical times, their written history really begins with a man named Ben carter...

Carter, a factory worker from Chicago, claims that in February 1966 the angel Gabriel appeared to him in a vision and told him to lead African Americans (who he believed were from the lost tribe of Judah) back home to the promised land. Carter promptly changed his name to Ben Ammi (Son of My People) and began hosting classes to spread his new message.

Before they could return to Israel, Ben Ammi told his followers that they would have to cleanse themselves of Western culture during a layover in Africa. So in May 1967, Ben Ammi and a couple hundred followers landed in Liberia where they spent two and a half years “detoxing” themselves from what Prince Asiel dubs the “mentality that America had superimposed upon us in terms of its culture. Then we reconnected with our Jewish roots.”

In July 1969, the first family left Liberia, went to Israel, and eventually settled in the desert community of Dimona, about 30 kilometers south of Be’er Sheva, the biblical city of Abraham.

Now, I realize that this all sounds nuts, but  before we make too much fun, I want to say that these people are HARDCORE Jews, if we grant that they're Jews at all (and it would seem that Israel has.  Black Hebrews are servng in the IDF right now). They keep rigid (vegan) dietary laws, observe the Sabbath, speak Hebrew, wear Tzitzit, read Torah. 

Do you?

Reading the (very long) article today, learning about about their polygamous lifestyle, their amazing compound in Southwest Atlanta, I didn't know what to think...  All of my definitions of observance and culture were challenged in some way by this story. 

Most of all, I had to put my own aesthetic instincts aside.

I can't possibly do justice to this story in a blog post, but I want to stress that the day that AJL editor Benyamin Cohen spent with Prince Asiel makes for a compelling read.  And it seems to be that it's part and parcel of my ongoing question here...

About who is a Jew.

One thing the story doesnt address directly is whether any of the members of the earliest generation of Black Hebrews converted legally.  But it does go into the way they've had to fight to be accepted in Israel by the law of return, so I'm inclined to think that they did not undergo a legal conversion at any point.

Still... they really do seem to be living Jewish lives. 

If the Jews had spent a little while shacked up with Mormons.