What is Jewish Conversion?
On Parshas Emor and the boundaries of Jewish belonging
If someone asked you to study any aspect of Jewish law, where would you begin?
I’m not just talking about how you would introduce someone to Judaism, but which area of in-depth Torah study would you begin with?
It is always a fascinating question because it forces people to consider how Torah moves them and shapes their own Jewish identity. I remember asking this question to Rabbi Eliezer Brietowitz, Rosh Yeshiva of Darchei Torah in Toronto, and he said, “The laws of lashon harah, negative speech.” It was a fairly unexpected answer but I’ve come to appreciate it more and more. Some outreach programs deliberately begin with the laws of damages, which nicely highlight the rhythm and internal logic of Talmudic discussions.
I would begin with the laws of geirus, conversion. Not because I think people should convert to Judaism or have some sort of plan B if they fall in love with a non-Jew, but rather because I think the laws of conversion most clearly express what Jewish faith, law, and family are all about. It is also fairly easy to explore. There are three major passages in the Talmud that form the basis for nearly all laws of conversion.
(1) The longest is the discussion in Tractate Yevamos (46a-49b), where the Talmud outlines the basic procedure for Jewish conversion: circumcision (for males), immersion into a mikvah, a ritual bath, and finally a special sacrifice that was offered in the time of the Temple. (I wrote about the more intrinsic connection between Tractate Yevamos, which discusses levirate marriage, and the laws of conversion in my ongoing Talmud essay series for Tablet, you can read it here.)
(2) There is a short discussion in Kesubos (11a) about how young children are converted to Judaism.
(3) In Tractate Kerisus (9a) there is a foundational discussion that explains that all of the laws of Jewish conversion are derived from the experience of the Jewish People at Mount Sinai.
There is one other essential rule for conversion and this is the one that has made conversion so tricky to navigate, namely, that conversion must take place in front of a beis din, a formal Jewish court.
The Talmud derives the requirement for a beis din at Jewish conversion from a verse in our parsha. The context is important. In the course of discussing whether a prospective convert has agency to perform their own conversion (a term known as b’yado, בידו, meaning within their hand or agency), the Talmud explains that conversion is not a status that people are considered to have agency over because of the requirement for a beis din. If a beis din is required for conversion, the Talmud reasons, “Who says that those three will be available to him?”
Really? This is why conversion is not considered something one can perform on their own? Because it may be too difficult to assemble three Jews to serve on the beis din? Why does the Talmud assume this will be such a challenging condition for conversion? A smart convert could just put up a sign that says “free food” outside a mikvah and wait for Jews to gather—once they do, just jump in and there’s the beis din! Who says you can’t convene a beis din without their knowledge or consent? Just jump into a mikvah in front of 3 Jews! Instead of saying “Canonball!” just shout “For the sake of Jewish conversion!”
To understand the nature of conversion and the requirement of a beis din, let’s explore some of the history of Jewish conversion.
In many ways, questions related to Jewish conversion are quite modern. This is for a few reasons. Firstly, for much of the Middle Ages, particularly in the Christian world, it was forbidden for a gentile to convert to Judaism. In fact, in many works published about the laws of conversion, the censor made them add a disclaimer that such legal processes are no longer in use. Some older works republished today, like certain editions of the Shulchan Aruch and Aruch HaShulchan, still include the censor’s disclaimer that conversion to Judaism is no longer practiced.
(Rav Moshe Feinstein actually explains a stringent ruling of Rav Akiva Eiger regarding teaching Torah to prospective converts in light of this historical reality. Rav Akiva Eiger rules that the prohibition of teaching a non-Jew Torah even applies to prospective converts. Rav Moshe Feinstein explains that Rav Akiva Eiger’s ruling must refer to a time and place where Jewish conversion was prohibited, so teaching a conversion candidate Torah would not necessarily even materialize to an actual conversion.)
There is another more essential reason why issues relating to conversion are decidedly modern and that is because the very notion of changing one’s religious identity is a product of modernity itself. As David Ellenson and Daniel Gordis argue in their fascinating work, Pledges of Jewish Allegiance: Conversion, Law, and Policymaking in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Orthodox Responsa, “Modernity has dissolved the “synonymity” of status and identity.” As they explain, the state of pre-modern Jewry was quite different from the world we now take for granted:
…the Jewish community was politically autonomous or semiautonomous in governing the lives of its members, and it informed their sense of self-identity even as they internalized the cultural norms and teachings of the community. There was little or no dissonance between public and private spheres, or between individual and collective realms, with regard to Jewish status and identity. In a world where pluralism was controlled politically in such matters and where individualism and voluntarism had not yet arisen as they have in a modern setting, being Jewish was more than an expression of religious affiliation; it defined a person’s political status, informed his culture, and determined his identity…Being a member of the Jewish collective was not a matter that was subject to an individual’s own beliefs or desires but was dictated by the rules of Jewish law and the communal structures that enforced them.
The establishment of the State of Israel magnified the Jewish conversion questions that modernity had already brought to the fore. In particular, Israel’s “Right of Return” guaranteeing Israeli citizenship to anyone Jewish raised the obvious but somewhat intractable question: Who is a Jew? Meaning, according to whose definition of Jewish identity, and who decides the procedures for Jewish conversion? In 1958, a decade after the establishment of the State of Israel, David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, posed this question to over fifty Jewish leaders from across the spectrum. He sent letters to leading Roshei Yeshiva, rabbis, and scholars. The responses were later collected and published as a book entitled, Jewish Identity: Who Is a Jew?, a fascinating work of Jewish law, history, and policy. Israel certainly has not found the perfect answer to this question. Still, the centralized Chief Rabbinate in Israel has essentially managed to preserve the traditional definition of Jewish identity: either born of a Jewish mother or a halachic conversion.
Whereas in Israel the difficulty was finding a standard that would work for the entire country, Jewish conversion in the United States was beset with a different set of problems. American Judaism has always been shaped by America’s commitment to Freedom of Religion, which has drastically reshaped the contours of American Judaism. In America, there is no Chief Rabbinate (not for lack of trying!) to centralize fundamental questions of Jewish identity and conversion procedures. In the absence of any centralizing authority on Jewish conversion, and still unresolved issues among the different American denominations on the binding nature of Jewish law and its interpretation, rabbis from various denominations have differed on the very definition of Jewish identity. So, like it is today, each denomination conducts its own Jewish conversion procedures. Non-Orthodox conversions are generally not accepted by the Orthodox community leaving many Jews in limbo regarding the very nature of their Jewish identity.
In 1977 a group of rabbis from across the denominational spectrum met in Denver, Colorado. They wanted to change the way Jewish conversions were performed in the United States. It was simply not tenable, they reasoned, to have Jews considered Jewish in some denominations but not others. Instead, this group of nine rabbis—reform, conservative, and Orthodox were all represented—experimented with a jointly developed Jewish conversion program. Every rabbi would have to compromise. Orthodox rabbis would have to be willing to tailor their standards for a wider audience, while the non-Orthodox would have to become comfortable insisting on a conversion standard their movement did not normally require. It was an ambitious vision that ended in total disaster.
Rabbi Daniel Goldberger, one of the Orthodox rabbis involved in the joint conversion beis din later characterized his feelings about his involvement as “guilt, guilt, guilt.” When he began to analyze the conversion candidates, he saw that out of the 130 candidates, 94 had been recommended by the Reform rabbis with just 8 coming from the Orthodox rabbis. It was becoming harder and harder to justify Orthodox participation. It felt to Rabbi Goldberger that the Orthodox participation was just, in effect, giving a stamp of approval to Reform conversion standards.
The tension was further exacerbated when in March of 1982 the reform movement formally recognized patrilineal descent, giving Jewish status to anyone born with a Jewish parent, regardless of whether it was the father or mother. This break from over two millennia of tradition created what seemed like an unbridgeable chasm between Orthodox and Reform definitions of Judaism. In the early summer of 1983, Rabbi Goldberger and the other Orthodox rabbis finally had enough, it felt like they were compromising far more than their non-Orthodox colleagues. The Orthodox rabbis informed their non-Orthodox colleagues that they planned on leaving the joint beis din.
Word quickly spread within the Orthodox world about Denver’s conversion experiment. Condemnations came from across the Orthodox world—Rabbi Meir Kahane, the Algemeiner Journal, and Agudath Israel’s Jewish Observer all ran editorials decrying what they saw as a flagrant compromise of Orthodoxy’s values. All of Denver’s participating Orthodox rabbis were summoned to a disciplinary hearing from the Rabbinical Council of America, the Orthodox rabbinic umbrella group of which they were all members. In March of 1984, the New York Times ran a story covering the fallout entitled, Rabbis’ Denver Project Fuels Fight on Converts.
An entire chapter is dedicated to the story of Denver in Samuel G. Freedman’s incredible work, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Judaism. Freedman summarizes the speculative theories that different parties offered to explain the fallout:
Various theories, none of them correct, laid the blame for the Denver program’s demise on different factions. One version condemned the ultra-Orthodox for their ferocious criticism; but that criticism had come only after the fact. Another indicted the Reform movement for having adopted patrilineality; but that ignored problems inherent in the Denver system from its genesis. The joint-conversion panel collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, fundamental differences in doctrine that no amount of belief in Klal Yisrael could wish away. “The lesson that we learned from this six-year experiment,” Rabbi Wagner said in 1984, “was that it’s erroneous to build the idea of Jewish unity on religious or ideological compromise.” Put another way, Denver discovered it was easier to change a Jew’s status than a Jew’s soul.
In a sense, the failure of Denver’s joint beis din for conversion highlighted the underlying tension that animated much of Jewish life, particularly in America: the tension between Judaism as a religion versus Judaism as a people. As Jonathan Sarna artfully explains in his classic work American Judaism: A History, “The tension between these two visions—the one focused on Judaism and faith, the other on Jewishness and peoplehood—would characterize American Jewish life throughout the twentieth century, inspiring a great deal of disputation but no permanent resolution.”
And this brings us back to the role of a beis din for conversion.
The role of a beis din for conversion is different than other forms of beis din. An essential part of Jewish conversion is joining the Jewish People. As Rav Shlomo Fischer explains in a powerful essay in his work Beis Yishai, Judaism began as a family and only afterward became a religion. Our forefathers and all those who lived before Sinai, Rav Fischer explains, were a part of the Jewish family even though the formal obligations of the religion only began at Sinai. Conversion to Judaism, therefore, begins by joining a people rather than affirming a specific religious ideology. It is through joining the Jewish People, and becoming a part of the Jewish family, that our religious obligations and responsibilities emerge. That is why the Talmud refers to converts as a child reborn (גר שנתגייר כקטן שנולד דמי)—Jewish conversion is tantamount to being reborn within the Jewish family.
How does one gain acceptance from the Jewish People though? Do you have to ask every Jew individually?
This is why the beis din for Jewish conversion is so essential. As Rav Shaul Yisraeli (1909-1995), former Rosh Yeshiva of Mercaz HaRav and member of Israel’s central beis din explains, the beis din for conversion represents the Jewish People. This is why, as opposed to most other forms of beis din, a beis din for conversion needs to be convened willingly. “Who says you will be able to convene three people?” the Talmud asked regarding a beis din for conversion. The Talmud’s concern is specific to the beis din of conversion where simply jumping into a mikvah in front of three unsuspecting Jews is not enough. Since the beis din represents the very acceptance by the Jewish People their consent and willingness to serve in such a capacity is paramount.
The religious obligations of Judaism and the notion of Jewish family and peoplehood are inexorably connected. It is impossible to join just the religion and discard the family in the same way it is impossible to join the family but ignore the religious obligations that come along with it. When Rav Shlomo Goren was asked if it’s possible to become a part of the Jewish religion without joining the Jewish People, his answer was an unequivocal no. The Jewish faith and the Jewish People are bound together.
And this is why the laws of Jewish conversion are so powerful. The entryway into Jewish life and identity illuminates the entire nature of the Jewish experience itself. We are a family, and like every family, we have familial obligations and responsibilities. And it is the eternal existence of the Jewish family, with all of our religious obligations, that will continue to survive, thrive, and bring light to the entire world.
Shabbos Reads — Books/Articles Mentioned
Family Ties, David Bashevkin
Pledges of Jewish Allegiance: Conversion, Law, and Policymaking in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Orthodox Responsa, David Ellenson and Daniel Gordis
Jewish Identity: Who Is a Jew? Baruch Litvin
Rabbis’ Denver Project Fuels Fight on Converts, Kenneth A. Briggs
Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Judaism, Samuel G. Freedman
American Judaism: A History, Jonathan Sarna