What’s in a name?
When a person converts to Judaism, he often takes on a new name, a Hebrew name, to signify that transformation. The name chosen usually depends on any number of factors: an affinity for a certain biblical character; something that symbolizes his Jewish journey; a name that bears similarity to the name given at birth. But every Hebrew name contains two parts: the proper name and the name of one’s parents, the latter of which a convert cannot choose. Conversion makes one a child of Abraham and Sarah, the biblical patriarch and matriarch. Becoming a “Jew by choice” means joining Abraham’s and Sarah’s family.
What’s interesting about this is that the Hebrew term for a convert, ger, is first uttered in the Bible by none other than Abraham, but in a context that means something else entirely. When he wishes to purchase a burial plot for his wife Sarah, he says to Ephron the Hittite, “I am a stranger [ger] and an inhabitant among you.” Here, as elsewhere in the Bible, the term ger refers to a stranger who has not joined the host group. Why did the rabbis choose a name that denotes outsiderness rather than a more inclusive term?
Maybe the rabbis were attempting to highlight something fundamental in the transition — by joining the family of Abraham and Sarah, a convert becomes like the stranger that Abraham was to his neighbors. Alternatively, it could be the opposite, that by joining Abraham and Sarah’s family rather than being born into it, the convert remains on some level a stranger within.
This linguistic curiosity reflects a fundamental strangeness at the heart of Jewish conversion. While other religions have historically invested vast energy into conversion, Jewish attention to the concept is rather scant: a handful of rabbinic texts and a smattering of conversion stories in the annals of Jewish history (some real, some not). The Jewish tradition has long been at pains to accommodate itself to conversion. The Mishnah instructs, “If one is the child of converts, another may not say to him: Remember the deeds of your ancestors, as it is stated: ‘And a ger shall you neither mistreat, nor shall you oppress him’” (Exodus 22:20). The Mishnah’s notable omission of the remainder of the Exodus verse, “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” makes it doubly strange. If the verse is speaking of our forefathers in Egypt as strangers, is the implication that all Jews are really the children of converts?
The Mishnah’s dance with the term ger can be read as an attempt to resolve the tension inherent in chosenness by turning it ever so slightly fluid. How can an already-chosen people accept strangers into its chosen status? Apparently by reminding ourselves that before we were a nation of priests, we were a nation of strangers. As Yossi Klein Halevi has eloquently put it, “The Jews are a story we tell ourselves about who we think we are; without our story, there is no Judaism.”
Isn’t it interesting, then, that the story we tell ourselves about our future is so focused on our conversion past? The Book of Ruth tells the story of a convert who, like many converts of today, comes to Judaism via a romantic partner. But the death of that partner only solidifies the convert’s commitment to Jewish peoplehood. “Do not urge me to leave you, to turn back and not follow you. For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people” (Ruth 1:16). While the rabbis debate whether Ruth was allowed to become a member of the Jewish community in spite of the fact that she was a Moabite, the text of the Book of Ruth ends by identifying this new member of the community as the ancestor of King David and, ultimately, the Messiah.
If the Jews are a story we tell ourselves about who we think we are, we sure do think that our messianic future will be born of conversion. The inclusion of Ruth in Judaism’s biblical canon is a foundational statement about how inextricable converts are from the Jewish story, where it’s been, and where it’s going.
More and more people have joined this story in recent years. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, I was involved, as a Modern Orthodox rabbi, in not quite 50 conversions per year. In 2023, it was 75, and in each of the following two years, it has been pushing 200. I have heard anecdotally of similar trends in the Reform Movement. As these numbers rise, the Jewish community is being thrown headfirst into many new challenges that are at once theological, social, and historic. It is the current generation’s task to meet them as creatively as did our forebears, who redefined the word ger and who incorporated Ruth’s story into our own, because today’s converts are tomorrow’s Jews.
To put it succinctly, it is one thing for a convert to be chosen by God and by the rabbi administering the conversion. It is quite another for that convert to be chosen by the Jewish people, and that responsibility lies with the Jewish community at both a local and global level. The convert’s choice to join the Chosen People generates an obligation on that people to choose them back. It is an obligation fundamental to their identity as a community with a divine mission, in the words of Leviticus, “The strangers who reside with you shall be to you as your citizens; you shall love each one as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I, YHVH, am your God” (Leviticus 19:34).
The inclusion of Ruth in Judaism’s biblical canon is a foundational statement about how inextricable converts are from the Jewish story, where it’s been, and where it’s going.
We have much to learn from Ruth in this regard. Just as the Jewish tradition incorporated Ruth into its story, Ruth incorporated the Jewish story into her own. In my work with converts, I have witnessed many versions of this firsthand. Recently, one of the conversion candidates exclaimed after her immersion in the mikvah that she “always felt part of the Jewish people” even though she had grown up Catholic. At no point in the process did I suggest to her that this was the case. But in going through the conversion course, learning about Jewish practice, belief, and history, she became identified with the story that we tell ourselves. Converts who identify their place among the Chosen People through their decision to become Jews by choice tell their own story in a manner that places them in the middle of Jewish history and the Jewish experience, similar to how the Jewish tradition has subtly written conversion into its own story. This mutuality in narrative is something that should be more actively welcomed in the conversion process.
The conversion process itself emphasizes that, by joining the Jewish people, the convert is accepting the fate of the Jewish people as her own. Prior to immersion in the mikvah, the members of the rabbinical court supervising the conversion ask the candidate a series of questions:
- Do you accept the God of Israel to the exclusion of all other gods?
- Do you reject all other religions except Judaism?
- Do you recognize that the enemies of the Jews do not distinguish between Jews who are born Jewish and those who convert to Judaism?
These questions leave no room for discrepancy between the fate of the convert and that of the Jews. At the same time, the recent proliferation of conversion, even Orthodox conversion, has brought with it a set of new challenges that would have been unthinkable in previous generations, some of them exceedingly delicate. I’ll share a recent example.
A woman, non-Jewish by birth and now partnered with a Jewish man, approached me wishing to convert together with their toddler son. However, she also has a teenage daughter from an earlier relationship who is not going to convert. The daughter is worried that if her mother converts, she will no longer be able to celebrate Christmas with her, including having a tree in their home.
Just as the Jewish tradition incorporated Ruth into its story, Ruth incorporated the Jewish story into her own. In my work with converts, I have witnessed many versions of this firsthand.
Is there space within the convert’s choice to join the Jewish people, and given her affirmative answer to the above questions, to fulfill her older daughter’s desire? There are of course several elements to this question: the relationship between the mother and the daughter, the relationship between the mother and her Jewish family members, and, of course, the mother’s relationship with her Judaism. How is a Jew-by-choice to navigate this challenge to her evolving Jewish story, and how are we, the Jewish community and its rabbinic leaders, to do the same?
Challenges like this one that commonly arise in a blended Jewish family are issues that, for the most part, are not addressed by classic rabbinic authorities. They arise because of the unprecedented social integration of Jews into Western liberal societies, and they are far from simple. But neither was the case of Ruth in her own time. The responsibility of rabbis today is, as it was in the times of the Mishnah, to address these challenges in a way that’s sensitive to both the human and religious dimensions of new circumstances. While many Orthodox rabbis today would choose not to convert one member of a blended family if any member of that family will remain non-Jewish, I would argue for an alternative approach, informed by the view of Rabbi Lord Immanuel Jakobovits, former chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth, particularly as it pertains to Jewish chosenness. Rabbi Jakobovits writes:
In fact, I believe that every people — and indeed, in a more limited way, every individual — is “chosen” or destined for some distinct purpose in advancing the designs of Providence. Maybe the Greeks were chosen for their unique contributions to art and philosophy, the Romans for their pioneering services in law and government, the British for bringing parliamentary rule into the world and the Americans for piloting democracy in a pluralistic society. The Jews were chosen by God to be “peculiar unto Me” as the pioneers of religion and morality; that was, and is, their national purpose.
According to Rabbi Jakobovits, the chosenness of the Jewish people is not a devaluing of other nations or systems of belief, nor does it preclude the chosenness of others. Rather, it is a realization of the unique contributions of every nation, including the Jews. This concept of multiple chosenness does not devalue a convert’s parents, or her children and their religions. It affirms them as stories of their own, and the application of this concept requires making space for those stories as the Jewish one changes. I advised the mother to place the Christmas tree in a discreet room in the home, demonstrating that it does not represent the beliefs of the mother or the family as a whole. In the spirit of Rabbi Jacobovits, the mother is not rejecting the religion of the daughter. Yet, at the same time, she is drawing a necessary distinction between what is appropriate for the daughter and what is correct for the rest of the family.
There is certain to be disagreement among rabbis and within the community over how to address some of the emerging challenges of this new era, but everyone should recognize that as unprecedented as some of these challenges are, transformations are always unprecedented. The Mishnah’s transformation of the word ger was unprecedented, but the rabbis of the time understood their responsibility both to individual converts and to the Jewish community they were joining. They made the necessary transformation to push the Jewish story forward, and they did it by employing the ethical thrust of the biblical text.
The biblical term ger refers to the stranger and not the convert, but it asks us to love that stranger even if she remains apart. How much more so ought we love those who join? The love ethic reflected in the Torah for the ger must be extended to the ger of today, those who choose to join the Chosen People. And as the description of Ruth’s kingly descendants makes clear, we, Jews by birth and Jews by choice, are all destined for the same story.
