CJ: Voices of Conservative/Masorti Judaism

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When Steven Wernick was a rabbi in Philadelphia, a member of his synagogue asked him a question that caught him completely off-guard. “Rabbi,” the man said. “I have to ask you something. I’ve been a member of this synagogue for two years. For the last year I’ve been taking my daughter to synagogue virtually every single Shabbat. Most people in this synagogue don’t even realize that I’m not Jewish. How come you’ve never asked me to convert? Is there something wrong with me?”

Wernick, floored, invited the man to begin conversion classes, which he did. For Wernick, it was an eye-opening moment. “What would it mean,” he asks today, “to really step up and say that Judaism is a world class religious tradition, one that’s worthy of other people’s interest to convert to and to participate in?”

Traditionally, Jews do not encourage people to consider conversion. Once someone does express an interest in becoming Jewish, it’s customary to dissuade him three times. These practices date back to a time when Jews were very suspicious of outsiders. That’s less relevant today. “The custom of turning someone away three times is not in Jewish law,” notes Rabbi Stephen Lerner, the director of the Center for Conversion to Judaism in New York City. Lerner has guided close to 1,500 people toward conversion. While he wants to make sure that potential converts are serious, he places a priority on being welcoming.

Most of Lerner’s conversion students have chosen Judaism because they’re in a relationship with someone Jewish. While nobody advocates pressuring non-Jewish spouses to convert, a number of rabbis have argued that one way to address intermarriage is to make conversion seem like a more viable option for couples who might otherwise be hesitant – or, like Wernick’s congregant, simply not know where to begin.

Conversion in the Conservative movement generally involves classes, attendance at services, and meetings with a rabbi, culminating in an appearance before a rabbinical court and a dip in the mikvah. The whole process usually takes between nine months and a year. Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue in New York would like to speed that up – or, more accurately, flip it on its head. Citing a famous story about Hillel, in which the sage converts a man who’s standing on one foot, Cosgrove has proposed performing the conversion first, and holding the classes afterward. In the face of rising intermarriage rates, this is “a policy aimed to create the maximum number of halachically defined Jewish families,” he writes.

When couples ask about conversion, Cosgrove explained in an interview, “The first response of the Jewish community should be, ‘Yes! How can we make this happen?’” Is his proposal halakhically acceptable? On this point, Jewish law is vague. “I’m not declaring lobster kosher,” says Cosgrove. “I’m asking a question that to the best of my knowledge exists in a halakhic grey area.”

Even without such speedy conversions, there are probably ways that Conservative communities could make conversion more accessible. Rabbi Adam Greenwald, director of the Miller Introduction to Judaism Program in Los Angeles, points out that financial obstacles, for instance, can make conversion seem less than welcoming. Potential converts pay several hundred dollars for a class. Then they pay for the mikvah. Then they go to a shul, where, says Greenwald, “They say, ’Great, we’re happy to have you as a member. Now give us money.’” That financial burden tends to fall on young couples, the demographic that can least afford it. “We need to make this available and possible for everyone,” Greenwald argues.

The simplest approach, perhaps, is for the movement to speak more openly about conversion. Jack Wertheimer, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, argues that Conservative communities should have ambassadors: “Let’s send out formerly intermarried families where the non-Jewish spouse had converted to Judaism, who might testify in the sense of speaking publicly about their own family’s experiences and why this conversion to Judaism helped their family life, strengthened their family life, and certainly strengthened their children’s commitment to Jewish life.”

Wertheimer suggests that conversion can be a kind of Conservative niche. “What the Conservative movement could do to be quite distinctive, because neither the Orthodox nor the Reform are doing this, is to be the movement that says, if you intermarry we will do everything possible to educate you as to the virtues, to the benefits, of unambiguously Jewish family life,” he says. The line between promoting conversion and unintentionally discouraging it, though, can be very fine. Greenwald, for example, has had many students who decide to convert, but say they would have left their introduction to Judaism classes immediately had they sensed any pressure. “I think we do better by not pushing,” he says.

It’s important to remember, too, that many non-Jews raise Jewish families and play an active role in their synagogues. Their reasons for not converting are manifold. Becoming Jewish is a very personal, and in some families very fraught, decision. Recognizing the range of Jewish involvement and identities, sociologist Steven M. Cohen has suggested creating a way to have some kind of official Jewish identification without undergoing religious conversion. Rabbi Ed Feinstein of Valley Beth Shalom in Los Angeles, in a similar vein, speculates about having some kind of green card to Judaism – a kind of intermediate step toward conversion.

What’s clear is that the old model of turning away potential converts is a thing of the past. When it comes to conversion, says Cosgrove, “We should see ourselves as agents, not gatekeepers.”

The post The “Conversion” Conversation appeared first on National Center to Encourage Judaism.

Why I Converted to Judaism While 7 Months Pregnant

By Leslie Contreras Schwartz | Jul 11, 2016 | Read the article

I was pregnant with my first daughter when I stood above the steps leading into the mikveh. After years of study, private and at a synagogue, and months of preparation, I was converting to Judaism. Naked and heavily pregnant, with my husband and rabbi standing in witness, the room was full of light and the still water before me.

It was fitting and symbolic for me to be converting so close to delivering my first child. As a third-generation Mexican-American, I had grown up in a cultural limbo. I grew up in a mostly Black and Latino area of Houston where I was considered too “white” by my peers, yet whites never considered me American. I had no sense of belonging to any community.

Although I was brought up Catholic, its dogma, saints, and forms of worship never spoke to my heart. I had always longed for a community in which its members shared my same passion for giving, justice, and respect for humanity, and related that to their relationship with God, in a way that connected to me on a spiritual and intellectual level.

My Jewish husband and I had a rabbi and a priest officiate our wedding five years before. Years later, when I understood one of the interpretations of the glass being broken at the end of the ceremony, something shifted in me. The story I like the best was that the breaking of glass was a symbol for tikkun olam, or the need to bring together a shattered world through compassion and loving kindness.

That connection drove me to start volunteering at the Holocaust Museum Houston, where I helped staff the gift shop. There, I met a longtime volunteer and his daughter. This man was close to 90 years old and was himself a survivor. Born in Transylvania, he forged a passport when the Germans arrived and managed through subterfuge and cunning to find his way on a boat to Israel. He had been volunteering for years every Saturday and he spoke kindly to everyone, even those completely ignorant of the Holocaust who (surprisingly) knew next to nothing about it. I saw something in him that I wanted to do—to carve out for myself a humility and giving spirit through love for both a community and humanity at large.

I attended a class at a nearby Reform synagogue with my husband. I discovered that many of the traits and values that I loved the most about my husband stemmed from his connection to Judaism—the belief in education and learning, and how is it something that cannot be taken from you; the protection of the family unit; his belief in the inherent goodness of people and the responsibility of helping others; and most especially, his emphasis on focusing on the here-and-now of life, rather than the afterlife and its supposed consequences or glory. The glory, in Judaism, is the present.

In the Book of Job, God asks a series of questions to Job, who has fallen to his lowest point of suffering. This section, called The Voice in the Whirlwind, asks a series of questions that focuses on God’s nature as a Creator, and it does not answer Job’s own questions of the reason why he is suffering. Probably more of a Reform manner of believing, some interpret this answer to mean that God wants Job to know that all humans—whether evil or good—experience suffering, and that life is not a series of God’s rewards and punishments. (“The sun rises on the righteous and sinner alike.”)

Growing up, it was ingrained into to me that I was punished directly for my actions, and that my suffering was somehow caused by something I did or did not do. I did not like this version of God because I did not believe in it. I wanted to love God not for what he could do for me, but for the inherent relationship itself.

And when I decided to go through the conversion process while pregnant, I did it so that my daughter could know this relationship from the beginning: to know that God was both mysterious and loving, that it was good to believe in doing good for its own value. And to be like Job, who said, though he submits to God, “Yet will I argue with him.” Because the Jewish people are the ultimate wrestlers. I am one of those people now.

As I floated, fully submerged it the mikveh waters, the water holding up both me and my baby in its own kind of womb, ever the poet, I began writing a poem in my head as I thought of my new relationship with God. At home, I wrote it down: “To call God, the name I have chosen. // Adonai, I say, and the baby and I float, / perched on the edge of this name. / To enter the world / as we choose, to enter // with our eyes wide open, gasping for air /as if we call out for this // through our very breathing.”

I had found a way to name the struggle I had always had with understanding God, and a community for which I had longed. Like the exemplar convert Ruth, which became part of my Hebrew name, I followed my longing to know God as she followed Naomi into a strange land. And also like Ruth, I did not simply convert to the Jewish faith. I became Jewish.

I continue to learn the long history of traditions, rituals, songs, and prayers. I have learned enough to teach Sunday school at my congregation, to participate in worship, and to teach my children at our private observances. Sometimes, I even teach my husband things he did not know or did not practice growing up. And it is this constant growing in my relationship with God that I love.

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