"I have been thinking a lot about Judaism, and I'm kind of pissed at it right now."

This IM from my friend Sarah* was strangely startling. She spent the morning before this conversation stoned off her ass. She had a stressful weekend, and she needed to relax. She got high, turned off all her electronics, and it was "the most spiritual thing [she had] done in a long time."

The best part came when Sarah told me she had a religious epiphany over fruit. "I ate an orange.  I peeled the orange and realized that it was probably the closest to G-d a food can be, because it was so protected from the rest of the world. So I said a bracha (prayer) over it."

This girl grew up in Progressive Judaism. When Sarah "does Jewish", it is to "connect with family and community and to eat." She told me that she lacked a spiritual education and bottom line, secular, non-spiritual Jews raise other secular, non-spiritual Jews. Many of these Jews, tired of their lack of "feeling" in Judaism, move onto esoteric faiths like Buddhism, or get absorbed into the atheist fold of America.

There is one group who completely shatters this idea: Baal Teshuva. Formerly secular Jews who had become religious as adults, Baallat Teshuva defy the myth that Orthodoxy is completely self generated. I recently spoke at the Jewlicious Festival, a three day Jewish learning and cultural event in Long Beach, California. I was surrounded by Jews who came from non-religious backgrounds and had embraced the difficult, yet rewarding, lifestyle of Orthodox Judaism. I admired their strong connection to spirituality, family, tradition and Jewish law. Part of me wanted to join them, to drink the Orthodox Kool-Aid and find a wife as fast as possible. It wasn't the first time: I am happy to have several Modern Orthodox friends who have inspired me to move to the other side of the fence. Like them, I strive to be better in the eyes of G-d and to make myself holy. But I can't bring myself to Orthodoxy, because their way simply isn't mine. 

Instead, I propose that the Progressive Jewish Movement create some form of New Baalat Teshuva. This would be a process where people can undergo intense spiritual learning about all areas of Jewish life, from different perspectives. This would allow our Baal-Teshuva-Version-2.0 to connect with G-d and the spirituality of Judaism, undertake a stronger Jewish life, without needing to seek out the nearest Chabad house. It would also radicalize Jewish institutions. While it's great that secular Jews work in the Jewish world and connect to Judaism in this way, it might be interesting to see what would happen if Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist Jews believed in their mission statements, not just out of cultural bias, but out of a religious devotion to a higher power.

What would happen if the secular, non-religious Jews of today became the Alterna-Frum Jews of Tomorrow? 

 

*Named changed to protect the innocent

When I decided to embrace my Jewish roots, however short and stubby, I had no hesitation. My mother always said, "Just wait to see who you marry first!" as though my love life - or lack thereof - should have some bearing on my cultural and spiritual identity, but I understood it was a personal decision. And I made it on my own.

Maybe it was naïveté, but I never saw flares of anti-Semitism or prejudice when I spent time with my Jewish friends as a child. Even as an adult, I should probably count myself lucky to have never witnessed a malicious attack on Jewish beliefs or practices.

But there is one thing I have noticed: the more openly I've embraced Judaism, the more my friends think it's okay to tease me about it. Yell Jewish-sounding words when I'm in the room - that's hilarious. There's nothing like a well-placed "Challah" to win a crowd over. I wrote before about mean-spirited ignorance, but I've also faced the obstacle of an over-abundance of seemingly charming and repetitively irritating Jew jokes.

I don't mind when people say, "Ashley, you're Jewish-what's the deal with keeping kosher," even though I haven't adopted all the laws of kashrut. I have no problem sharing my knowledge, as I continue to learn, with people less versed in Jewish culture or practice. It's another thing entirely, however, when a person plays up his or her ignorance as a means to a laugh or some other sort of attention.

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It's frighteningly easy to overlook things as you move on in life. We've all left something in a hotel room on our way out the door, locked our keys in the car on our way to work, or neglected to send a friend's birthday card on time.

So it's only natural that I overlooked something in my journey as well. Perhaps it was wishful thinking that I wouldn't have to deal with negative attitudes towards my decision to embrace Judaism. We all, unfortunately, know the sad truths about anti-Semitism, racism, discrimination, hate, and stereotyping. But those are things that don't happen here, we think - they happen "over there." And perhaps it was my naïveté to the closeness of these negative energies that blinded me to the undertones of others' attempts to stifle my ambitions.

Argument One: "You're not really Jewish."

By nature of my upbringing, and also the decisions my mother made when it came to conversion, some try to stifle me by stripping me of my Judaism. My mother didn't have an Orthodox conversion, so I'm not really Jewish to my Orthodox friends. This may be true. But until the decision comes down from the rabbinical court in the next few weeks, I'm not worried. And even if it is true that my mother's conversion wasn't halachically sound enough for me to be completely received by the Orthodox community, I have every faith that my Orthodox friends will assist me in any way possible as I try to settle into whichever denomination I feel I belong. "Once a Jew, always a Jew," my rabbi told me last week, and I'm not going to let a technicality tell me otherwise.

Argument Two: "You didn't grow up Jewish; you don't understand."

I wasn't raised Jewish, so I can never have the same cultural feelings as other Jews my age. I disagree. I may take pride in my Italian motivations to smother my food in garlic and survive solely on carbohydrates, but my Italian-Catholic upbringing didn't isolate me completely from Jewish culture. I may have only been immersed in it during the summers, when we spent time visiting family friends at the Jersey shore, but I was never in a position to be an outsider to basic, secular Jewish culture. I'm reminded of a ski trip I took at age six, when I gave up on the sport before even reaching the slopes because I didn't want to "schlep my skis." I may have been a latecomer to bagels with lox, but I was a fussy eater until I turned 20 anyway.

Argument Three: "You're making a mistake by choosing to be a Jew."

I understand that not everyone can fully grasp the magnitude of my decision to embrace Judaism. But to argue that I've made a mistake is disheartening. Some have said that now is a terrible time to be a Jew, with allusions to my naïveté as a basis for clearly not understanding the true plight of Jewishness. Every culture, religion, and way of life has its strong suits and its unpleasantries. I don't do convention - I'm the proud product of a single-parent home, for one thing, and I fail to see what is so overwhelmingly detrimental about my rearing. I understand that embracing Judaism means taking the good and the bad. I never assumed this process would be easy, even knowing that I have it much easier than most Jews-by-Choice. If I had been seeking an easy way to explore my faith, I wouldn't have uprooted my entire religious upbringing to read books and take classes and attend worship services I often don't understand. All Jews, I think, struggle to some degree to continue to learn and better ourselves. And that's just for the immensely positive quality of knowledge. Conversely, I also understand that, as a Jew, I may need to explain myself or defend my views more frequently than I did before, or to deal with jokes made by friends who think they're innocent with quips about bagels, Hebrew, Moses, or how the "second half" (New Testament) of the Bible "gets better." And there's more to it than that, of course. But I understand that, as with anything, it is impossible to reap the benefits without accepting the pitfalls.

And so, for better or for worse, I am proud to be a [new] Jew [by choice]. Coming soon with no disclaimers.

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.