Drashot for Shabbat Ki Tavo

Rabbi Capers Funnye, a convert to Judaism and
cousin to Michelle Obama

What’s “Wrong” with Converts

Friday, 7 September 2012

I’ll never forget one conversion student I worked with a few years back.  He was a man in his fifties.  His wife had just converted to Judaism under my sponsorship a few months earlier when he suddenly came to me and told me: “Rabbi, now I’m ready.”

            So I worked with the man for a few months.  He was an interesting candidate, and somewhat unusual.  He was an alcoholic who had sobered up a few years prior thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous – or, is it is often called now, Friends of Bill W.  Everything in Jewish spirituality to which I introduced him, he compared to spiritual beliefs and practices from AA.  It was quite a journey for both of us.  Because the man had been forced to some extent to go on his wife’s journey only months before, I did something I seldom do.  I granted him ‘advanced standing,’ not requiring him to remain in the process for an entire year.  A few months after he formally began his studies, I presented him to a beit din.

            At the end, after the beit din accepted him into the Jewish people, he pulled out his mobile and rang up his wife.

            “Good news, honey!” he exclaimed gleefully. “There’s one more Uppity Jew in the world today!”

            What was wrong with this man, anyway?  And while we’re at it, what’s wrong with converts in general??! 

            My student was, of course kidding.  But his proclamation brought to mind – then, as now when I reminisce about the many proselytes I’ve shepherded through the system – an essential ambivalence.  Most of my colleagues, when their guard is down, will admit to being troubled by this ambivalence .

            Before I identify this ambivalence, let me make one thing clear.  Just about every rabbi I know will tell you that the reception and mentoring of proselytes is one of the most rewarding parts of their rabbinate.  I am personally no exception.  I feel few rewards greater than that when, after working with someone who came to me expressing interest in becoming a Jew, I can present that person to a beit din.  It is ultimately satisfying to guide converts through immersion and their first aliyah in front of the community.  Conversion candidates are, to be sure, ‘labour intensive’ for their mentoring rabbi.  Often we will spend many hours with a candidate only to see them drift away from the process either because they’ve lost interest or gotten frustrated along the way.  But ultimately there are fewer rewards greater than seeing one’s student emerge from the mikvah a new person.  So when I ask, what’s wrong with converts, anyway, I hope you understand that I do so with tongue firmly in cheek.

            The rest of the congregation often share the rabbi’s enthusiasm to some degree.  Why shouldn’t you?  Someone chooses, of their own free will, to become a Jew even though they must first jump through a series of hoops to do so.  It provides an incredibly positive affirmation of the value of being a Jew.  It’s like that in all religions.  Most members of any given religious faith are ‘born into’ it.  But the stories of those who have voluntarily adopted their faith are important to the born-religionist’s self-identity.  Judaism is no exception.  We celebrate those who choose to be Jews.  But do we really succeed in making the Jew-by-choice feel truly equal with the born Jew?  Not always, and therein lies my ambivalence.

            We’re all people and therefore patently imperfect.  Collectively, our imperfections are often the source of great mirth.  Or great consternation.

            As you know, Jewishness exists on a number of levels.  It is a religious faith, of course.  But let me ask you something.  Do we question the bona-fides of Jews who lapse in their practice of Jewish religious ritual, or who cease to actively affiliate with the community, or who openly repudiate the essential tenets of Judaism?  If Jewishness were only a religious identity, then of course we would.  But we don’t question the Jewishness of those who do these things, do we?  And the reason is that Jewishness is far more than a religious identity.  It is a community of faith.  But it is also a community of fate, of individuals tied together involuntarily by accident:  by the circumstances of their birth.  This is something that Jews have known all along.  But it became crystal clear during the Shoah, that tragic series of events that showed us that the rest of the world considers Jewishness to be a ‘Terminal Condition.’  Nothing Jews might do to change their identity, is thought to negate our Jewishness to our malefactors.  If they hate us, they’ll hate the out-convert just as much.  Sometimes more.

            So although we can’t always articulate clearly what Jewishness is in its totality, we all understand that ‘religious faith’ is only part of the story.  And we attach great importance to that amorphous string of things that unite us, which are not particularly religious in nature.  A few weeks after I arrived here in Australia, I noted that a bagel and lox brunch was held as a Guild fund-raiser on the day of the AGM.  Although we understand that Sephardic Jews don’t identify eating bagels and lox as a particularly Jewish practice, to the rest of us eating those hard boiled bread rolls with slices of smoked salmon and cream cheese on top is an essentially authentic Jewish practice.  If anybody told us they were Jewish but then and told us they didn’t like bagels and lox, we’d immediately start to suspect them of fraud.

            So converts, or Jews-by-choice as we politely call them, can never be ‘quite as Jewish’ as one born into the tradition.  We can fill their heads with knowledge about Torah and halachah, and we can require that they attend services frequently in the hopes that they’ll continue doing so after they’ve been to the beit din.  But no matter how hard we try to embrace them and mentor them, they will seldom feel Jewish.  They will probably never look Jewish.  Now, please don’t ask me to explain what it is that makes someone look Jewish!  It’s undefinable, yet we all know one when we see one.  Right??!

            Sometimes our Jews-by-choice understandably feel that they have not been completely accepted into our communities.  When this is the case, they sometimes compensate by trying too hard.  We all know a Jew-by-choice who fits this description, and some of us have known several.  Their attempts to ‘out Jew’ the Jew-by-birth, can be humorous when they’re not sad.  They always have to know more, do more, attend more, and give more.  They often develop a Messiah Complex of sorts, internalising that G-d has sent them to ‘save’ the Jewish people from themselves.

            What these Messiah-Jews really need is unconditional, and unreserved acceptance.  They need us to respect them even when they haven’t yet developed a taste for bagels and lox.  Or gefilte fish.  Or pickled herring.  Or hummus.  And even when words like schlep, schluff, schtumpf, ferklumpt, and schvitz don’t roll off their tongues naturally.  When they don’t know what hock me a chinick means.

            The problem is that we’re unaccustomed to giving unconditional or unreserved acceptance.  It’s not that we withhold it deliberately.  But we send multiple messages to our Jews-by-choice, telling them in subtle ways that they’re not quite the Jews that Jews-by-birth are.  Even when we go out of our way to repeatedly praise our Jews-by-choice for the knowledge they have and the service they give, we give them the unintended message that their acceptance is contingent upon something.  And that ‘something’ is, that they can ‘out Jew’ us.

            These thoughts are on my heart this week in particular, because one of my students has completed her giyur, her conversion.  The next time that you see her – next Shabbat, G-d willing – she will be a Member of the Tribe.  She’s now one of us.  And it is up to us – every Jew in our congregation, and by extension every Jew in Knesset Israel – to make her feel unconditionally welcomed.

            While we’re working on the kind of welcome we show to our newest Jew-by-choice, we can reflect on what we’ve done and not done to make previous converts feel only conditionally welcomed.  We can reflect on the way that we send both intentional and unintentional messages that converts aren’t quite equal to born Jews.  In this season of soul-searching, this is an important inventory to take.

            Think about the Jews-by-choice whom you know.  As you relate to them in the New Year and beyond, think about the ways that you separate them from the ‘rest’ of the Jews.  Make yourself a strong commitment in your heart to do better in the future.  We must do better.  Converts are ours to cherish.  They are ours, to create monsters out of them.  They are ours, to ultimately drive away.  Let’s celebrate the addition of one more Jew this week – not an ’uppity’ Jew by any measure – by resolving to do a better job of accepting converts.

Ancient Egypt

Modern Egypt

Saturday, 8 September 2012

What’s Wrong with Egypt?

We are instructed to repeat the story of our redemption from Egyptian slavery every year.  Most of us are more than happy to comply.  No matter what else is going on in our lives, most of us would be loath to miss attending a Passover Seder each year.  Every year on my rabbis’ list serve, as the month of Nissan approaches there are numerous enquiries by various rabbis.  There’s a couple from my congregation who must be in Lisbon, Portugal on Passover.  Does anybody know where they would be able to attend a Seder?  One of my congregants has a son who is doing a semester abroad in Bologna; anybody know where he can go for a Seder?  Often, the request is specifically for a ‘Progressive’ Seder.  I’m not sure exactly what is a ‘Progressive’ Seder, apart from that it’s a Seder done by Progressive Jews.  To me, a Seder is a Seder.  Every Jew has their own particular customs for how they do it, and therefore every Seder is different from every other Seder.

            Although I have no problem with Progressive Judaism’s dropping of the second day of obligation for festivals, I make an exception with Passover.  I always conduct two Seders on consecutive nights.  This gives Clara and me a chance to offer a ‘Seder-event’ to the community, and also to enjoy our own Seder á la Levy in our home, incorporating our own family traditions, sharing them with a few close friends.

            Repeated surveys show that attending a Passover Seder is one of the most widely-observed rituals in the Jewish calendar, behind only lighting Chanukah candles.  We read the story of our freedom every year, in its ritualised fashion with symbolic foods and items on the table, and it sticks.  We all know the story, and we can all more-or-less recite the chronology of events.  It’s no surprise that the image of making the transition from slavery to freedom is powerfully, and indelibly ingrained in the Jewish consciousness.

            You may wonder why I’ve chosen this as the topic of this morning’s drash, when Passover is half a year away, and we’re in the middle of frantic, last-minute preparations for an entirely different holiday!

            I’ve chosen it because our Torah reading this morning includes an admonition with regard to Egypt.  The admonition is for Israel as a collective to follow the law of their G-d.  And if they don’t, they will be inflicted with the plagues and diseases of Egypt and even sent back to Egypt in chains to be put on blocks for sale as slaves.  And nobody will buy them!  This is like my telling my children:  If you don’t do as I say, I will consign you to your room.  And then you’ll have a stomach ache in that room.  And then you won’t be able to go to the bathroom, because the door will be locked.  I don’t know about you, but that sounds like some very serious threats.  We can really see that G-d does not want the people Israel worshipping other gods.

            What’s the matter with Egypt, after all?  Okay, I get it…slavery is no fun!  But why does this image of Egypt as such a distasteful place in and of itself, persist throughout the Torah?  Why does G-d seem to throw Egypt up in the faces of the Israelites whenever they’re a bit naughty?

            I’m sure that at least several of you in this room have travelled to Egypt once.  I have not personally, although my wife Clara has.  Although tourists in Egypt tend to travel in a ‘bubble’ of opulence, they can plainly see the squalor of the place.  Cairo is one of the world’s most over-populated cities, with millions more inhabitants than the place can reasonably support and house.  Visitors to Egypt report a terrible pall of dust and filth hanging over the city.  They report acre after acre of run-down housing and many thousands of Cairenes living in the garbage dump and even the city cemetery, among the graves!

            Why is there so much squalor in Egypt?  And what is the connection to the ancient Egypt that the Israelites experienced?

            Part of Egypt’s problem is geography.  A political map shows a large country in a roughly rectangular shape.  But that’s all desert.  In reality, the entirety of Egypt’s population lives along the banks of the Nile River or in its delta.  The river itself provides great agricultural riches.  The name of the country, in Arabic, is Misr, meaning corn or grain.  But that doesn’t sound like a recipe for Squalor.

            The other part of Egypt’s problem is cultural.  Of course, we see Egypt as an Islamic country.  There is a significant Christian minority, the Copts.  But they are more and more persecuted into being a presence socially insignificant to the Muslim majority, except as scapegoats for the country’s problems.

            Some years back I saw a documentary film on Egypt – it was made in the 1970’s.  The Arab filmmakers showed a very accurate picture of the country’s ills.  At least I thought it was accurate at the time, because it was so unflattering.  It talked of the squalor I’ve mentioned, as a result of too many young men from farms upriver crowding into Cairo looking for work.  Ultimately, many of the displaced young men go abroad to work:  to places like Beirut, Damascus, and Kuwait.  And the film’s ‘bottom line’ was that all these problems can be laid at the feet of Israel, that evil entity to Egypt’s east and north.  Apart from being repelled by that idea, I was completely mystified.  How can Israel possibly be the root of all of Egypt’s problems to these filmmakers?  They had just carefully laid out a case for explaining Egypt’s problems.  Then they say:  Oh, by the way…it’s all Israel’s fault!

            I say:  Plus ça change, plus c’est le même chose.  The more things change, the more they remain the same.  The Pharaoh ‘who knew not Joseph’ decided to ‘deal shrewdly’ with the Israelites.  His rationale was that they might form a fifth column, interfering with the Pharaoh’s absolute rule over his people.  Coming from a different place, a wide-open place of hills and valleys and fertile wilderness, the Israelites did not have the same mentality as the Egyptian people who were used to life in a narrow place, a place of limited horizons and limited opportunities and mobility.  The servitude imposed upon them was intended to beat the spirit out of them.  The Hebrew word for Egypt – Mitzrayim – means a narrow, constricted place, or a place of woe.

            So that’s what’s wrong with Egypt.  Egypt is narrow place, a place of constricted horizons and limited opportunities.  It’s not only that we were in some form of servitude to the capricious Pharaohs.  Rather, the entire mentality of the place rests in submission to the authorities.  In that sense, it is the antithesis to Judaism, to the Jewish weltamschauung.  In Judaism, even in its most traditionalist forms, there is a tradition of direct responsibility of the individual to G-d.  That’s what the bar and bat mitzvah are all about, isn’t it?  The 13-yerar-old is now responsible and answerable directly to G-d.  In Egypt, the individual’s needs are subsumed into the ruler’s ambitions.  But Rabbi, how can you say that when the Egyptians have just had their ‘Arab Spring’ and deposed their despotic ruler, Mubarak?  Easy; they exchanged an autocratic regime – that of Mubarak – for a totalitarian regime – that of the Ichwan, their own version of the Taliban.  Islam means ‘submission.’  The Pharaohs ruled centuries before the genesis of Islam, it’s true.  But Islam’s authoritarian structure clearly reflects the pre-existing mindset of the peoples who shaped it as a force.  I know that’s not a very polite thing to say, but…look at the evidence.

            Egypt, then becomes a leitmotif for not only slavery, but for everything that is in contrast to the freedom to live in one’s own land, under the authority only of G-d.  The Torah repeatedly invokes Egypt and its ills as a warning to the people Israel.  When it does, it means to contrast the limited, constricted life of servitude to capricious and rapacious kings to the free life of a people answerable only to G-d.  It contrasts self-reliance to dependence upon others.  It contrasts the fearful life of one living as a subject to the ideal presented in First Kings:  Every man beneath his vine and fig tree shall live in peace and unafraid.

            That’s what’s wrong with Egypt.  And that’s what’s wrong with Israel.  Israel’s sin is not that it occupies someone else’s land.  Israel’s sin rather, is that it is populated by a people whose mentality is in contrast to the authoritarian, even totalitarian impulse of the Arab world.  In the nineteenth century, the Arab landlords of Turkish-ruled Palestine welcomed the Jews because they created a thriving economy.  That welcome ultimately wore off because the basis of that economy was the sense of freedom and possibility.  The Jews, despite centuries of incredible persecution, had an entrepreneurial spirit, a spirit of The Possible, a spirit of reaching for the goodness that was there and waiting to be uncovered.  That was ultimately a serious threat to the Arab system, based as it is on servitude and authority.  The Palestinian Spring happened in the nineteenth century.  The Egyptian Spring occurred in 2010.  Both were handily put down by the respective people’s traditions of submission.

            When the Torah warns us of the ills of Egypt, the message is complex and deep.  It means, stick to your principles.  It means, keep your priorities straight.  It means, do not let your eyes, and the desires they awaken, deceive you into accepting something that is not good for you.  On this Shabbat, as we begin the final countdown to Rosh Hashanah, let us be ever mindful of the lessons of Egypt.  Let us remember the Torah’s warnings.  Let us not be deceived into accepting Egypt when we can have the Promised Land.