When I am called to the Torah, I am called as Sarah bat Avraham v’Sarah. While my birth name signals the Sephardic roots of my father, Carlos Luria, announcing my Hebrew name before the congregation outs me: I am a convert. With the short walk to the bimah I leave behind my non-Jewish mother, Martha Reading, and take up a new mother, Sarah. It is a Book of Ruthmoment: “And thy people shall be my people.” But excluding my real mother in this public moment of aliyah is a source of discomfort and even pain.

While my aliyah name is a seemingly small issue, it points to the larger one Jews face today: our relationship to the non-Jews we encounter through intermarriage, adoption, conversion. I was surprised to find hope in what I thought was the symbol of my problem: the Book of Ruth.

On Shavuot, when we celebrate the receiving of the Law, we read a story that emphasizes love. “The LORD [cause me to die], and more also,” Ruth vows to Naomi, “if aught but death part thee and me” (Ruth 1:17, King James). Rabbi Michael Strassfeld notes that Ruth reminds us during Shavuot that in the desert all Israelites had the “status of converts.” Like Avraham, Judaism’s first convert, they left what was familiar for a place they did not know and, like Ruth, voluntarily took on the obligations of the laws they heard at Sinai. JTS Chancellor Arnold Eisen adds “The rabbis in having us read Ruth each Shavuot, thereby teach us…that on the day when we celebrate reception of the laws of Torah we need to remember that law is never enough. Certainly it will not bring the messiah, whose lineage goes back to Ruth. For that, the world needs [acts of love], needs hesed.” (Strassfeld,Jewish Holidays, 73).

This juxtaposition of laws and love leads to a transcendent power. In the Talmud, Ruth’s words answer the rabbis’ reminders to the would-be convert of the laws Jews must keep:

We are forbidden…“to move on the Sabbath beyond the Sabbath boundaries”!

“Whither thou goest I will go….”

We have been commanded 613 commandments!

“Thy people shall be my people.”

We are forbidden idolatry!

“And thy God my God.” (Yevamot 47b)

The rabbinic injunctions and Ruth’s replies don’t quite match. Ruth translates the legalistic, restrictive discourse of the commandments into the calm transcendent force of poetry, thus transforming the terms of observance. In response to obligation, she speaks of choice; to the inherited “we,” she forms a new connection where “thy” becomes “my” — a connection that starts with her love for Naomi and through that love she works her way to God.

Love thy neighbor as thyself, we are commanded. It is particularly wonderful that Ruth exemplifies this love for the “other,” for not only do we see Ruth as “the stranger” (convert), but Naomi too is a stranger (an exile) in Moab. While conversion is often a problem in the Jewish tradition, at Shavuot Ruth’s conversion offers an ideal fulfillment of Jewish law.

My born-Jewish friends think to pay me a compliment when they say they don’t see me as a convert, but as a Jew. But the Book of Ruth suggests a more satisfying affirmation: conversion has always been an integral part of Jewish life. I want to be known as a convert. And yet to say I am bat Avraham v’Sarah erases what is most powerful about conversion, because it represses my non-Jewish past, the connection that I represent across tribal lines. It asks that I assimilate rather than preserve my hyphenated self.

Surely we now have the confidence to acknowledge more forthrightly our ties to other peoples without fearing we will be swallowed up by them. We converts mark those connections, but only if we can remember our people, our Chinese ancestors, Indian ancestors — our ancestors who were Jewish but did not lead very Jewish lives. This is not to say that all those Protestant and Buddhist and Moabite family members should be considered Jews, but that we should recognize that we are irrevocably tied to them by virtue of who we have been, who we are, and whom we love. I do not want to hide behind my oh-so-Jewish sounding name; I do not want to pass; I want to be known as Sarah bat Martha and Carlos, a convert, which is to say, a Jew.

For earlier generations of American Jewry, the distinction between Jew and non-Jew was clear. Jews were born Jews and stayed Jews because the larger society would not accept them as anything else. In this context, converts were often viewed with suspicion. Why would anyone from the outside want to be Jewish? Judaism in all of its joys, trials, and traditions was not something you chose; it was a condition of life.

Today, the boundaries between Jews and non-Jews have become fluid. Antisemitism is no longer a significant force in American life. Jewish holidays are respected in most workplace environments and schools. Love has replaced hate as intermarriage has become a fact of life and non-Jews even use the Internet dating site J-Date to find Jewish spouses. Given these shifts, it is not surprising that many young Jews no longer see their Jewish heritage as a central feature of their identity but as only one strand in a complex fabric of interests and connections. Judaism is now a choice, not a condition. Without antisemitism to impose Jewish identity, it is easy to identify oneself as a Jew, but it is just as easy not to.

Some regard the high rates of intermarriage as the reason behind the declining numbers of Jews in North America. They argue that to maintain the distinctiveness of Judaism in a society of diverse cultures, we need to strengthen the boundaries around Judaism and focus on defining who is a Jew and who is not. This approach is misguided. Our concern should be to welcome people into our community, not to build barriers around it. It is just as important to be welcoming to Jews as it is to non-Jews. Today, all Jews are Jews-by-Choice. To build a vital Jewish community for the 21st century, we need to be open to all who wish to add their voices to the Jewish story.

Let us think of Abraham and Sarah’s tent in the Torah as an image for Jewish community. By rabbinic tradition, the tent was open on all sides to welcome travelers coming from all directions. Welcoming guests is so important to Abraham that he even interrupts God to greet three strangers. (Genesis 18) Though Abraham eventually learns that these strangers are angels, he is unaware of their identities when he invites them in, bathes their feet, and offers refreshment. He simply accepts them. We should take the same approach to all who approach the tent of Jewish life, no matter what their parentage.

It is not the borders of the tent that should be our main concern, but what happens inside. Jewish communities should be places of learning, where all are invited to encounter Jewish texts, culture, history, and spirituality. They should be places of joy where the rhythms of the Jewish calendar punctuate time with moments for reflection and celebration. The Jewish tent should be big enough to accommodate many kinds of Jewish practice and to foster respectful debate. It should be wide open to the outside world, so that even as we cultivate our own community, we ask what it can offer to the world at large.

Conversion, in this vision, is not a condition for entry into Jewish life, but a decision that one makes from the heart, when ready. There are many examples of people who, married to Jews and raising Jewish children, take years before deciding they are ready to convert. Whether people choose to make a commitment to Judaism has a lot to do with the quality of the welcome they receive. Abraham’s example teaches that it is not enough to say, “Come in and sit”; we must say, “Come in and sit with me.” Then we can all begin to learn together.

Jews in North America have succeeded beyond the dearest hopes of the immigrants who built our community, most of whom were more concerned with building better lives for their children than helping them become better Jews. But if Judaism is to stay significant for future generations, we need to take a critical look at what we are doing. Are we holding onto vestiges of the old suspicion of the stranger and thus pushing people away? Do our synagogues, Jewish community centers, Israel programs, and Hillel chapters create communities where all who enter may find a substantive, joyful connection to Judaism? Are we opening not just our doors to newcomers, but our hearts?

The last two years have been a trying time for converts to Judaism in both the United States and Israel. With very little warning, the status of individuals who make the highly personal and private decision to convert to Judaism has become the lynchpin in a massive shift in Israeli rabbinic authority and, through a new kind of religious imperialism, a robust assertion of power over both Israeli policy and the American rabbinate.

Converts to Judaism in Israel have often found themselves in the middle of a uniquely Israeli culture war. There, conversion is not just a matter of individual choice and identity, but of national identity and state policy, with its own bureaucracy under the auspices of the chief rabbinate. In the early days of the state, placing “personal status” issues under a chief rabbi who was reflexively Zionist seemed of little consequence in a homogeneously Jewish and Ashkenazi society. But the question of conversion intensified in the 1980s, the unintended result of welcoming hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jewish immigrants to Israel. To streamline these olim into full Jewish citizenship in Israel, the Israeli government has attempted — in concert with religious authorities — solutions that converted them without undermining the halakhic integrity of the chief rabbinate. The latest attempt is the Conversion Authority, formerly supervised by Religious Zionist Rabbi Chaim Druckman.

In the U.S., matters have always been different. Religious identity here is a personal matter, largely devoid of implications beyond the synagogue walls. While issues of denominationalism — whether Orthodox authorities would accept Reform or Conservative converts — are a real part of American Jewish politics, they have little impact on a convert’s acceptance into the American Jewish community. And if American Jews, converted under Orthodox auspices in the U.S., made aliyah they could usually count on their conversions being recognized by the chief rabbinate, regardless of the specific affiliation of the Orthodox rabbi who supervised them.

But in the last year the status quo in both countries has been dramatically upset by two separate but linked incidents. The first was the decision made by the Great Rabbinical Court of Israel to affirm a decision by the Bet Din ha- Gadol of Ashdod that invalidated the Jewish status of a woman converted by the state Conversion Authority under Rabbi Druckman. Audaciously, in a decision penned by R. Avraham Sherman, the council then declared all conversions performed by Rabbi Druckman’s commission retroactively invalid. And Rabbi Druckman, aged 75, was forcibly retired, ostensibly because he had reached the maximum age of service under civil service laws.

Further, in recent years, the Israeli state rabbinate has turned its attention to the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), one of the two largest Orthodox institutional bodies in the U.S. In a decision contrary to the entire history of the relationship between the RCA and the chief rabbinate, Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar, whose portfolio includes authority over the status of converts, announced that individuals who converted under the auspices of the RCA would no longer be uniformly accepted as Jews in Israel. Seemingly in response, last February the RCA created the “Gerus Policies and Standards” (GPS), which identified a list of fifteen acceptable batei din in the U.S. that would be acceptable to the chief rabbinate as the only sanctioned bodies to perform conversions.

As conversion is a complex and sensitive process, it makes sense to argue that it is best handled by experts — rabbis with the knowledge to ensure that the individual convert is fully aware of the implications of their choice and the moral responsibility that it entails. While experts should have the best interests of both the convert and the institutions they represent at heart, these recent incidents seem to highlight the injection of more dubious concerns into the mix, even if the principal players act in good faith. There is the issue, most obviously, of the phenomenon Samuel Heilman has aptly described as a “slide to the right,” the ascendance of a conservative, rigid, and isolationist tendency in the Orthodox world, achieving what could be its most muscular expansion of power in Israel and beyond. There is a representative of the Israeli chief rabbinate, no longer simply a reliable dati leumi (national religious) extension of the government, undermining with impudence the decisions of an Israeli state agency. Related is the perception (whether correct or not) of the American rabbinate knuckling under to a foreign state authority, essentially surrendering its prerogative to adjudicate in a major aspect of modern American Jewish life to the Israeli chief rabbinate.

But it is the human cost that is the most disconcerting. From the woman whose longtime status as a Jew living in Israel has been nullified (along with her children, who are now no longer Jewish according to the chief rabbinate), to the American Jew whose conversion was supervised by a rabbi in good standing in the RCA but is now left off the new list (and the names of those left off indeed comprise very prominent names in the Modern Orthodox world), and who now lives in perpetual doubt about his status, it is difficult to quantify the major damage these maneuverings have wrought. Regardless of the principles at stake, whether to streamline entrance of immigrants into Israeli society, or preserve an ideal of religious purity, there is something gratuitously cruel about the use of converts in service of any agenda, regardless of the side of the combatants. No converts ask to be fodder for Jewish culture wars; indeed, few ask for more than to simply live their lives as Jews, accepted as full members of their communities. All power struggles have their victims; it is a dark time in the Jewish world that those victims are the ones least able to defend themselves.

The proselyte is more beloved unto God than all those multitudes who stood at Mount Sinai. 
—Midrash Tanhuma, Lekh Lekha

Why on earth would anyone choose to become a Jew? That was the simple question with which I began my documentary film project, “More Beloved by Gd.” It’s not that I don’t enjoy being Jewish — I find great beauty and wisdom in the religion and culture. In fact, my own journey has brought me closer to Jewish cycles of time, Shabbat, kashrut, and serious study of Jewish text. As I’ve moved deeper into Jewish circles and a Jewish lifestyle, I’ve met many committed Jews who started their lives in other faiths or in no faith at all. I’ve been struck by their choices, and curious about their decisions, especially since my fully born-Jewish, New Jersey, suburban family has moved further and further from any type of Jewish observance (and has a nearly 100 percent record of intermarriage). So, I set out to explore conversion through some of the amazing people who have chosen this path.

I began by talking to friends and people I’d met along the way who had decided to become Jews. And these people led to others who were generous with their stories and often eager to participate. Each meeting began with an explanation of who I was and why I was so fascinated by this topic; I usually became more interviewee than interviewer! But I understood that to gain people’s trust with such intimate details of their personal and spiritual lives, I needed to share some of my own personal history.

While this film project is in the early phases of shooting, among the people you’ll meet onscreen (visit shma.com to view) are: an Italian, Catholic-born rabbi from Sicily, an African-American hip-hop artist from East Baltimore, and a former ballerina whose half-Jewish status led her through the challenging year of an Orthodox conversion. We’ll meet her as her journey reaches a climax…and begins anew. Each story is unique. And it is through the openness of these individuals, and their willingness to share their journeys with us, that the Jewish world can gain new appreciation and understanding of itself, and of what the newest Jews bring to the Jewish people.

As part of my work, I regularly introduce Jewish high school students to homeless people on the streets of Washington, DC. Bringing students to a downtown square where homeless tend to be, I challenge students to find a human connection and initiate conversation. I tell them: “Consider the concept that each person is created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. For the next halfhour I want you to treat everyone you meet accordingly.” It is a powerful experience that has affected thousands of young people and has profoundly affected the way I look at the world, not to mention other human beings.

And yet…When I am alone, in a rush or otherwise occupied, do I always act in the manner I am teaching? When approached on the street, I make it a rule that I must at least offer “words of kindness.” In the words of Rabbi Yizchak, “He who gives a coin to a poor man is rewarded with six blessings, but he who encourages him with friendly words is rewarded with eleven.” (Baba Bathra 9a) At the same time, I must admit to times when I simply pretend that I don’t see. I fear the look in the eye, and what that might mean. How do I understand both my joy at the connections I have made, but also my occasional reluctance to make those connections?

The French Jewish Philosopher Emanuel Levinas offers a helpful way to understand what is happening in each of these encounters. Levinas teaches that the essence of an encounter with another person, especially a face-to-face encounter, is not simply about connection, but at its core is about responsibility, of being commanded.

When I look at a little baby, my response is not only one of affection or happiness; it also encompasses a profound sense of responsibility. Simply by connecting, I have incurred responsibilities. I become commanded. When I first became a parent and took my first gaze into the eyes of my little daughter, I felt a profound sense that I had no choice but to organize my whole life to meet her needs.

When I teach teens to treat all people as though they are made in the image of God, it implies that seeing the Divine image in others is what we most need to do in the world. Levinas takes that value one step further: We must not only seek to recognize the infinite dignity of others but also be prepared for our responsibilities to them — the ways in which they will command us.

We know this instinctually, and it’s terrifying. We may try to ignore homeless people not because we fear for our safety or don’t consider them made in the image of God. Rather, we fear encountering the homeless because we know they are a valuable and unique image of the Divine. We are afraid that if we look into their eyes in a face-to-face encounter, our sense of responsibility will be so profound that it will be overwhelming.

As Jews, our job is to seek out mitzvot, to feel that commands are not burdens, but privileges and opportunities to connect with God. We are at our best when we do not avoid, but actually seek those opportunities for connection, as well as the responsibilities that inevitably follow.