The Acceptance/Alienation of the Convert

In the Bible, the Hebrew word for what in the modern era we call a convert is "ger," which roughly translates to a foreigner or stranger. While one would not generally refer to a religious convert as "Joe the stranger" in conversation, I feel that after "coming out" as a convert, people treat me differently. Overwhelmingly, their reactions are very positive: "Wow! When/why/how did you convert?" At times, though, the person I'm talking to begins to mock themselves in the form of a compliment to the convert by saying something like, "you're so well-informed … I was born Jewish but didn't know about that."

What's harder, though, are the moments of confusion when someone assumes that I was born and raised Jewish until I say something about my parents going to church or visiting my grandparents for Christmas. Before I went to college, I didn't have to explain that I was a convert in the middle of what started out as simple conversation about plans for winter break or upcoming Jewish holidays.

Harder still is finding a place for yourself in the community when your family isn't Jewish. Since so much of Jewish observance is centered around family meals and celebrations, if your family isn't Jewish (or observant, as is the case for some) you become dependent on the goodwill of Jewish outreach services for finding a place to celebrate a Passover seder, light a menorah, make holiday food and celebrate the sabbath (unless you're lucky enough to be a college student on a campus with a large, engaged Jewish community).

That shaky interim period between calling your parent's house "home" and creating your own that seems to start in college I've tried to see as a time of intense religious reflection, because once you become responsible for a spouse and children you have much less time or space to make big changes religiously. When you're a convert and also the only Jew in your family, you're forced to think for yourself a lot anyway. Much earlier than most of your religious brethren, you have to keep track of the holidays for yourself, pay your own membership dues, find places to go for holiday meals and services and educate yourself. There are, I think, advantages to this, but it at times it feels quite taxing.

Given that most converts to Judaism that I've met seem to convert around birth (for adopted children) or marriage (for a non-Jewish person marrying someone Jewish), I wonder how many other converts have that awkward period of being tied to your birth home and needing to make your own home. For me, the ultimate fulfillment of marrying and having a family would be to observe the holidays in my own home, with my children, and not having to rely on others' charity. Even more than that, the relief of no longer feeling so stuck, in many respects, outside both my family and the Jewish community.

Nurture and Religion

Today at lunch I had the pleasure of being party to an engaging interfaith conversation that was neither full of touchy-feeling gushing with phrases like "our common ground" nor marked by aggressive arguments over why people had particular beliefs and practices.

Some of the topics covered were: the ultimate purpose of religion and philosophy, the nature of religious truth (as opposed to mathematical and scientific truth), Paul's tendency to write really long run-on sentences, the distinction between personal religious experiences and religious dogmas and hierarchies, and possible reasons why there is a much larger percentage of self-described religious people in the United States than in Western Europe.

One of the earlier points touched upon by a few of the people present was the quality of their experience with their religion, and how it differed in their childhood from the present. There seemed to be, at times, an unconscious message that when you have a "bad" experience with religion, you most likely leave religion altogether or choose a faith community very different from the one of your childhood.

A lot of the time, I think it's more appropriate to focus on what is the "right" place for someone, religiously. It's not just about how people in a community treat you, about how other people talk about G-d. The church in which I was raised was very nurturing and for the most part I had a very good experience there religiously and socially. Since it was a city church, there was (and still is) a large focus on outreach to the city's homeless and hungry. In the church youth group, we did a lot of service projects inside and outside the city, which were organized in the spirit of justice rather than pity.

However, as I realized later in high school, Protestantism did not click with my beliefs about G-d. My next course of thought was "this doesn't quite work, I need to find something that does." I know some people "drop out" of religion because their childhood religious upbringing didn't click with them or made them feel rejected, and I can understand why they make that choice. Religion in its major, organized forms is not for everyone. But I don't get the people who extend their anger from a specific religious experience towards organized religion as a whole. It's just a lot of unnecessary hate that hurts both nonbelievers and believers, and there's enough unnecessary hate polluting the world to begin with.

Every other Jew is a convert or baal teshuvah…

The title for this post comes from something one of my neighbors said about our generation of Jews. It may not be literally true, but some days it does feel like everyone on our floor is a convert or baalat teshuvah (a woman who became religious later in life).

I don't know what the experience of religious conversion is like for Christians or Muslims (other than the ritual requirements being somewhat more simple). Prospects for Jewish conversion, including myself, are reminded that we are not only joining a group of believers, but we are also joining an am, a people, a family of sorts bound by a tradition and history going back thousands of years. While most communities, I think, are very welcoming of converts, there are still awkward gaps between born Jews and converts.

Except for cases in which the convert has a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, or was adopted by Jewish parents, the convert usually doesn't have a family history of Judaism or the experience of living Jewishly as a child. Sometimes, they come with an entirely different set of social standards (Protestant Time vs. Standard Jewish Time) and religious experiences.

There are some blessings in these gaps, like the [sometimes] privilege of being an interpreter to one's relatives and friends, as well as shortfalls. Sometimes it becomes tiring to explain why you're Jewish but you're family isn't to Jews and non-Jews, or to hear what people say when they assume your family is Jewish ("we have to watch out for [insert non-Jewish group]").

On the other hand, I certainly won't forget the time I was talking to a Lubavitcher chassid about the generational differences within my family. I told him that the custom of marrying young in many chassidic and Orthodox communities reminded me of my grandparents and parents, who married in their early 20s, and noted that my brother is 29 and unmarried.

He replied, "that is because your parents' and grandparents' generations really cared about the tribe." (Well, they do, I thought, but not like that…)

Christmas is Coming

Coming from a good ole' semi-traditional Protestant family, one of my first visual memories is the shadows a Christmas tree makes on the wall behind it at night. The silhouettes of pine needles in duller hues of the lights on the tree all mingled together in the frigid silence of a New England December night.

My first Christmas after I had started going to synagogue junior year was, needless to say, kind of awkward. The childhood memories of Christmas and family traditions of selecting a Christmas tree and decorating it were still strong. Though the religious significance wasn't there for me, I wasn't blind. My parents still wanted to have Christmas, and I still lived at home, so I agreed to sort of keep the family aspect. On Christmas morning there was a dreidel in my stocking and I didn't have presents marked "from Santa."

The following year was easier, since I had studied more and my parents gave me a menorah and dreidel-shaped cookies. So, for eight days we had a lit menorah in the living room window and a fully lit and decorated Christmas tree in the background. 

The year after, I had been Jewish for nine and a half months and was at school for Chanukah, so I got a freebie menorah and candles from the semi-off campus Chabad house and celebrated in the midst of finals.

This year, I've ending up working retail during the ever-growing "holiday" (do you think you're fooling anyone, PC-ish stores?) season. I realize that I can't really view Christmas as a "national" or "secular" holiday, yet I can justify enjoying Christmas songs on the radio by telling myself that there are, indeed, secular-ish aspects of the holiday and that, well, Jingle Bell Rock is *really* fun to listen to.