ABSTRACT

On August 23, 1991, I underwent the formal process of converting to Judaism. The day was the culmination of a commitment I had made nearly ten years prior to that August morning. In the late 1970s, I became interested in Jewish ethics and ritual. As I read and studied, I saw in Judaism a religious system that I felt would allow for the deepest expression of my own spiritual nature. By the early 1980s, I was intent on conversion. There was no Jewish man in my life urging me to convert, although this is the assumption people repeatedly make when they discover I am a convert. I was motivated to take this step by a profound sense of identification with Judaism, and an inner attraction to Jewish religious life that I am still unable to fully explain in rational or intellectual terms. My more spiritually inclined friends consider this long search an act of divine influence. My cynical friends suggest I read too many Isaac Bashevis Singer stories. I consider it a process of coming to peace with my own spiritual and ritual inclinations. In this short article, I would like to discuss the related issues of how I am often asked to narrate my experience of conversion to Judaism, and what I feel to be the tensions that conversion and the rising profile of converts to Judaism raise in the larger Jewish community. Converts, unlike people who are born Jewish, are often required to explain their Jewishness, and the structure of asking converts about their decisions to convert has become one of the avenues for the exploration of a range of charged and sometimes painful issues in contemporary Jewish life.