FOLLOWING OUR MOTHER RUTH: THE STORY OF A CONVERSION

We had a party Saturday.  Ice cream cake, fruit, songs and verses.  It wasn’t exactly a birthday party, but kind of.  It’s very tough to convert to Orthodox Judaism. Rabbis ask you over and over if you’re serious.  You have to study.  You have to read out loud in Hebrew.  You have to answer questions to a board of 3 (male) rabbis.  Then, you have to immerse yourself in a Mikvah. It’s the culmination of several years of study and soul-searching.

So we had a party today.  To celebrate a young woman who had navigated the process and, just this past week, emerged from the waters  – Jewish.  As she spoke to the assembled women she told us not just about her own journey, but, in a way, about our own.  Unable to begin without tears, she decided first to read the passage that seemed to her to describe where she’d been – and where she’s landed.  (Another convert friend of mine told me she’s clung to the same verses   — they have particular meaning to those who choose to become Jewish and "go where we go.")  Standing at one end of a table covered with ice cream cake and fruit
and surrounded by many of the women of our congregation gathered in her
honor, she began to read.

Mother-in-law Naomi is
trying to convince her widowed daughter-in-law Ruth to go back to her own
nation and not suffer with her.

But
Ruth answered, “Don’t ask me to leave you!  Let me go with you.  Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you live,
I will live.  Your people will be my
people, and your God will be my God.  Wherever you die, I will die, and that is
where I will be buried.  May the LORD’s
worst punishment come upon me if I let anything but death separate me from you!”

The story represents much of what she feels about her new life.  Her choice: to meet the very demanding requirements of conversion and join the tribe that I was born into and, for much of my life, lived within – accepting my identity as a Jew but very little else. 

In many ways, I have made the same choices she did.  Compared to the way I live now, the Judaism I knew then was an  identity easily moved aside when inconvenient.  Now, after four years of increasingly observant life, my identity is so tangled with my Judaism that there’s no way to pretend it isn’t there, isn’t affecting all I see and every choice I make.  They call it "the yoke of heaven" — acceptance of the rules handed down so long ago.  It looks so weird from the outside, so whether you’re my young friend choosing to become a Jew, or me, choosing to actually live like one, you’re somewhat set apart by your decisions.  Keep kosher – you can’t eat in most restaurants or even at your old friends’ homes.  Observe the Sabbath, you can’t go see Great Big Sea or Bruce Springsteen or a good friend’s 40th birthday party because they’re on Friday night.  Honor the holidays and you may antagonize clients and risk losing business.  And sometimes, friends, and even family, look askance, withdraw or just shake their heads.

Even so, what my friend has chosen — what my husband and I have chosen — what the community of friends we love has chosen – is a life rife with meaning and commitment, with tangible goals to be better, more honorable, more committed beings with an informing value system and sense of purpose. After a lifetime that was pretty successful and often seemed glamorous and highly visible, this is a choice of which I am very proud.  Different from before, but at least as demanding intellectually, ethicially and emotionally as any other stop on my life’s journey.  In many ways, it has allowed me to rediscover the person I used to think I was, and liked – as a writer, a thinker, a wife and mother and friend.    I am grateful that I have found it, and so very glad that this generous and articulate young woman reminded me, through the moving and exquisite reflections on her own choice, just why I made mine.