Dvar Torah on Parshat Lech-Lecha

Here in Israel, a battle has been raging (no, not that battle) between different factions about what our policy should be towards conversion. To briefly summarize: one group, headed by the Charedim (ultra-Orthodox) and the Israeli Rabbinate, wants to make conversion a long, difficult process, and demand a very high commitment to all of Jewish law and custom from would-be converts. They also are skeptical of the Judaism of people unable to conclusively prove they are halachically Jewish, or who have already converted within frameworks not approved of, for various reasons, by these groups, even in cases where normative Jewish law would seem to rule that their circumstances indicate that they should be accepted as Jews. The other group, who can be typified as more liberal, modern Orthodox Rabbis and thinkers, feel that we should be more accepting of converts, and more willing to meet them half-way on their journey to Judaism. This is especially true, they argue, for the large number of Russian olim in Israel, many of whom may be halachically Jewish but just can’t prove it (due to the difficulties of Jewish life in the Soviet Union), and also because most come from some kind of Jewish background, and all of them are already living fairly committed Jewish lives in Israel: celebrating the holidays, speaking Hebrew, their children learning Jewish basics from nursery school and up, and risking their lives to defend the Jewish people, and their state, in the army.

Parshat Lech Lecha has an opinion about converting people to Judaism. In the parsha, the patriarch Avraham begins his career. The Torah is maddeningly silent on who he was and why God chose him and his descendants to be His people, leaving it to the Midrash to fill in the gaps. The Midrash describes Avraham as the convert to monotheism par excellence, embarking on an intellectual journey that leads him away from power-worshipping pagan idolatry to a belief in the one creator of the universe, the just and kind God of all living things.

Interestingly, the Midrash depicts Avraham as a proselytizer for this new belief system, willing to challenge the despotic pagan ruler and his coercive system and, at great danger to himself, preach his new religion publicly.

When God does address Avraham, He seems to want this proseltyzing to continue. He tells him that “all the families of the earth will be blessed though you”, indicating that Avraham’s message and mission are universal. The Rabbis tell us that Avraham, along with his wife, Sarah, lived up to this challenge: when the Torah says that they embarked for the Land of Canaan they “brought with them…the souls which they had made in Haran”, the Rabbis teach that that refers to the people whom they had converted to this new faith in the one God. Clearly, Avraham and Sarah are spreading the word about the God who would later become the God of Israel to the entire world.

All of this, coming at what is actually the birth of the Jewish people, would seem to clearly argue for a position of openness, at the very least, towards spreading the Jewish message to the world, and welcoming new believers into the fold.

Now, this is obviously a very big topic, and there clearly is material that seems to tell us to be cautious and not proactive when it comes to conversions, but I would argue that most of that attitude stems from the difficulty we had in even thinking about non-Jews converting to Judaism while we were a minority in a non-Jewish world; it was simply to dangerous to contemplate. The real position of Judaism, however, as we see from our father Avraham’s career, as well as from most of the original halachic material in the classic codes and elsewhere, which do not seem to demand such a high level of knowledge of and commitment to the details of Jewish practice, is that Judaism has a universal message, one which should be disseminated, and into whose arms converts should be accepted. Now that we are living in our own sovereign state, it would seem that we should be able to discard some of the traditional reluctance we have had about converts and embrace the challenge which God put to Avraham, and make Judaism a blessing for all the families of the earth.

Time and space do not permit me to go too deeply into this question, but I would like to bring one of my favorite examples of the classic openness to converts, and conversion, which I believe is the true and correct Jewish approach. Maimonides, in his introduction to his great halachic code, the Mishneh Torah, goes through the chain of transmission of the oral law, listing the Rabbis who were responsible for receiving, developing and handing down the oral tradition. In this list, he goes to the trouble to tell us that two of these important links in the chin of Jewish tradition, Shmaya and Avtalyon, were converts, and two others, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Meir – certainly two of the greatest of the Rabbis of the Talmudic period – were sons of converts. This apparently unnecessary mention of the pedigree of these Rabbis serves, I believe, to stress the open and universal nature of Judaism and the Torah – even newcomers, or their immediate descendants, are a full part of, and can make a crucial contribution to, our faith.

I believe that here in Israel we certainly are obliged to free ourselves of the hesitancy we had about conversion during our time in oppressive Muslim and Christian exile, follow the example of Avraham, along with the simple meaning of the bulk of the halachic material, and be much more welcoming and accommodating to those who choose to join the Jewish people, and tie their fates to ours.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix