The following was originally written out free-hand and kind of meanders through a number of concepts that I've been mulling over.
I think that one of the major challenges facing Jewish converts is the concept of Judaism as a people hood. How do you convert to a people? How do you legitimately adopt what can be seen as ethnic customs? How can you do so and at the very least feel legitimate? We have this hurdle, and it is one that can be, at times, insurmountable, and at others like stepping over a crack in the sidewalk. We did not grow up with traditional, or even nontraditional, customs that our fellow Jews have. We can feel like pretenders when we try these out. I think it can be difficult to separate the rituals that we do to sustain our religious lives from those that sustained the culture of the Jews. Lighting candles, praying, studying, putting on tallit and tefillin, keeping kosher--these are ways, rituals, that enhance our religion (and by extension, culture). We should never feel illegitimate by adopting these, but it happens.
I think it is important to emphasize the concept of a Jewish people hood to converts, but to do it through Torah, through religious aspects. Not through food or Eastern European customs or Yiddish phrases. Torah should be the entry into Judaism, for all Jews, not just converts. Developing in people a love of Torah is essential.
When I was going through my conversion, each Saturday my rabbi would allow us all to come up to the bimah with him as he read from the Torah. And as I learned Hebrew and the stories I was hearing, I had this amazing physical connection to the Torah that I don't think a lot of people in the conversion process do. It wasn't just a spiritual or intellectual connection. And as I write this now I find myself thinking about how ironic it is that I don't kiss the Torah--clearly I feel a connection to its physicality, but to me the physicality is human-created manifestation of God's word and so I don't want to kiss the object of the Torah. I want to kiss the words of the Torah through my devotion to learning it, my quest for a closeness to God, my yearning to be holy. I don't want to fall into revering this physical presence more than I do the presence of God in the words.
I read Torah for the first time 2 years ago, though it wasn't on the morning of my bat mitzvah, but rather a few weeks prior. And it was such an intense and emotional experience it truly cemented my love of and connection to Torah. It is was the combination of how hard I had worked + the fact that I was reading from the scroll which I had been seeing my rabbi read for years + the feeling that for the first time I was really speaking the word of God. For those few minutes I was completely overwhelmed by God's presence--I had opened myself up to it and sought Him by seeking out the Torah and there He was.
Heschel says that "to sense the presence of God in the Bible one must learn to be present to God in the Bible" (God in Search of Man, 252). We must make ourselves open to the idea that the Bible is a living document, a living ideal, and that God lives through it. We cannot just study the Torah for its historical meaning, or for literature (though those are both legitimate studies). We must be willing to see the spiritual realm of the Torah for God to be present when we read and study it.
I am a fairly rational person--I want good reasoning behind the whys and wherefores of things, but when it comes to Torah, I'm okay not having a rational explanation for the parting of the Red Sea or for the prophets or for any of the miracles. Because God is not rational. Belief in God cannot be reasoned out.
Heschel also says that "we do not explore first and decide afterwards whether to accept the Jewish way of living. We must accept in order to be able to explore. At the beginning is the commitment, the supreme acquiescence" (282). And I disagree with that. While my belief in God may not be rational and reasoned, my journey into and through Judaism is. Because Judaism is my approach to my belief in God I feel it is vital to do what is right for me. And blindly accepting traditional Judaism and then learning about what I've accepted just doesn't make sense to me. And I think this is how many serious Reform Jews approach their Judaism--we believe in God, and we accept that, but we aren't willing to just accept everything and every practice within traditional Judaism. I think it is somewhat insincere to accept the idea of Judaism without informing yourself about what you are accepting.
But, you might say, what about when the Israelites said (and I paraphrase) "we will do and we will hear?" Is it truly antithetical to Judaism to learn and then decide? I don't believe so because we are not standing at Sinai as the Israelites did. The Judaism we would be accepting today is not the Judaism that they were accepting at Mt. Sinai. And honestly we each do have our own Sinai moments where we accept the idea of God and then try to hear what he wants of us. "Even the laws of the Torah are not absolute," (415) Heschel writes. Therefore the laws that man derived from the Torah are not absolute. Heschel says that "nothing is deified: neither power nor wisdom, neither heroes nor institutions" (415). But has traditional Judaism not done just that? Is it not just as big as sin (by traditional standards) to break the laws that man derived from the Torah as the actual Torah laws themselves? If the laws of the Torah are not absolute, and by extension the laws of man are not absolute, isn't it being a responsible Jew to study and to learn and to make informed decisions about what is right?
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