My wife, Sarah, had prepared a briefing folder the night before consisting of three of the Rabbi’s High Holiday sermons (downloaded from the synagogue website) and the directions from Map Quest. We made unusually good time, so stopped at the Potomac Village crossroads for coffee and a grain shovel (much better for heavy snow than a standard snow shovel). Even with the stopover, we arrived at the synagogue about fifteen minutes early.
We could see the rabbi in a large meeting room leading his Wednesday morning minion, so we wandered around the synagogue to get a feeling for the place. A fairly new structure nestled in a wooded neighbor hood, the buildings seemed to blend into the surroundings. We learned later that the architect was a member who lived not too far away.
Rabbi MW of my wife’s family’s “modern orthodox” synagogue in Baltimore recommended this place, even though Rabbi SW was conservative and had come to the conservative stance from a reform starting point. The rabbis knew each other well and for many years. Judaism offers, to the newcomer, a bewildering number of variations that, for most purposes, are lumped into three large “denominations”: orthodox, conservative, and reform. I suspect the Baltimore rabbi directed us toward a conservative synagogue primarily because of his close friendship with Rabbi SW but also because men and women do not sit together at orthodox services. That logistical fact would make it impossible to have Sarah’s guidance in many aspects of the service.
After looking into the sanctuary, the library, and reading the names on the tree of life, we found the rabbi’s office and checked in with his assistant. She had been extraordinarily friendly and helpful a few days before in providing information and background on the synagogue. We knew that the rabbi had built this congregation from scratch in 1988 into a politically and socially active group, and that he is highly regarded in the metropolitan area and beyond. We chatted amiably for a few minutes until the rabbi came in from the minion.
We were warmly greeted and welcomed into his study. Other than the referral from the rabbi in Baltimore, he knew nothing about us, so we spent ten minutes on general background – what we did, where we lived, how we met, children, family, our different religious backgrounds – before coming to the point. Why become a Jew? Why now?
Sarah was a little afraid (with probable cause) that I would respond to this question in a semi-humorous way, my usual entre to a more serious discussion, after the modus operandi of Socrates. When she first put the question to me a few days earlier, my deflections consisted of “It’s about the real estate,” referring to the unoccupied burial plots that her father held for the family in the Baltimore synagogue cemetery. This particular family joke owed its origin to a dear, and recently departed, Czech friend when I first met him at a dinner we hosted at our home soon after we married. “So,” he deadpanned while looking around the house, “You married her for the real estate.” It took me two beats to adjust to his very dry Czech sense of humor (two orders of magnitude beyond conditions in the Mojave Desert) before I said, “Sure. That’s it.”
We had, when our mothers passed away a year apart, discussed the fact that only Jews could be buried in a Jewish cemetery, so if we were to be together through eternity we needed to find a Christian cemetery immediately adjacent to a Jewish cemetery, and arrange for plots along the boundary, one on each side. Such places actually exist! Amazing how the marketplace solves problems of this sort.
The joke, of course, reflects a deeper purpose. We were married in Baltimore nine years ago in a ceremony performed by a reform rabbi and having all of the outward appearances of a Jewish ceremony, except for the critical words, “under the laws of Moses.” Another joke could be made at this point: “I wanted to make her an honest woman.” And it would also reflect a deeper purpose.
When my wife’s mother Sophie passed away, my wife assumed the ritual Sophie had long conducted of lighting the candles and saying the prayers with Willie, to begin the Sabbath at sundown on Friday. The observance took place in Baltimore and Washington, with the prayers said over the phone and sometimes, when we were traveling, at points around the world – Prague, Paris, Rome, Rapid City to name a few. I also gained a deep respect for Willie, who seemed to me to effortlessly “to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.” This had become my spiritual family.
Inspired by this simple act of honoring her father and the memory of her mother, I began something similar with my mother (at half time on a Super Bowl Sunday), which I called “telephone church.” Starting with Genesis, I would pick a passage, read it along with her, then ask her some questions. This worked, even though she was having short-term memory problems at the time. Talking about things she had learned when young could lead to a current, real-time conversation.
She was curious to know why I was suddenly reading the Bible with her now. To keep her curious, I evaded answering the question for almost two months, when at last I explained to her the Sabbath ritual of Sarah and Willie. Her reaction, without any sense of irony: “I have always loved that Sarah. She will make a good Christian of you yet!” In my mother’s world, being a good Christian had very little to do with theology and everything to do with a nurturing kindness to everyone she knew and an unerring sense of doing the right thing in all circumstances.
I told this story to Rabbi SW, and also described a little of the family history, noting in particular that both of our families spent a century in Czarist Russia, a few hundred kilometers apart in Ukraine. Both families knew the horrors of the rise of Slavic nationalism and as a result, emigrated to the United States -- my father’s family from the Black Sea region near Odessa in the 1870 to 1880 time frame and my father-in-law from a village near Kiev in 1920. The family of Sarah’s godchildren emigrated at the same time as my father’s family from a nearby village outside Odessa to a village less than 10 miles away from where my great grandparents homesteaded in the Dakotas.
Apart from the historic and geographic connection, I was struck from the beginning at the shared values of hard work and high ethical standards that each of us received as our family heritage. In my case it was the natural by-product of at least seven generations of Pietist Lutheran observance and rigorous religious instruction. In Sarah’s case, innumerable generations of Orthodox Jewish observance. I was also struck by the fact, but did not mention, that most of the Yiddish expressions I had heard were variations of the German dialect and the idioms of the language that my grandparents and my father spoke.
The rabbi summed it up by saying, “Pretty much the same history, except for the anti-semitism.” I did not respond, though I could have recounted to him the horrors visited on the 1,000,000 or so Black Sea and Volga Germans whose lands were confiscated, whose woman were raped, whose families were exiled to slave labor camps in Siberia and literally worked to death, whose villages were pillaged and whose leaders were executed prior to and during World War I and World War II. See, The Great Terror by Robert Conquest. I could also have told the stories of those Black Sea Germans who took into their families and sheltered Jewish families from the even greater atrocities visited on them by the invading Germans, or the horrors that followed World War II when Black Sea Germans and Jews alike were forced to return to the miserable and hostile conditions in Russian controlled territories from which they had just fled. But, of course, nothing compares to, or should be compared to the incomprehensible evil of the mass genocide that was the Holocaust.
The rabbi then moved to the attention grabber of the meeting. “It is my duty as a rabbi to shun you, discourage you from converting, and to refuse you three times,” he said, “And then embrace you, if go ahead anyway.” I could not resist. “I have had experience with this, having proposed to Sarah three times, before she stopped objecting to the form of the question.” “Then you know what I mean,” he said, enjoying the joke.
First, he raised the issue that most deeply divides and defines the difference between Christianity and Judaism: the divinity of Jesus. The divinity of Jesus, as special and distinct from the divinity of all mankind as the children of God, had always perplexed me, so much so that it came close to derailing my confirmation when I raised the question with the wife of our Methodist minister in confirmation classes. I had noticed very different formulations among the four gospels, with Mark being the closest to what I perceive as a continuation of one strand of Jewish theology in the teaching of Jesus: namely, the recognition that, since all men are children of God, the love of your neighbor as yourself is essentially equivalent to the love of God. I told the story to the rabbi.
Second, he turned to the observances of Judaism, notable among them the attending services (Shabbat) and the ceremonial circumcision for men who are already circumcised (hatafte dam bit), and the purifying immersion in water (mikvah)-- the antecedant of Christian baptism.
Third, we discussed the logistics and the time required for completion of conversion classes and learning some rudimentary Hebrew, the involvement of the rabbi as my sponsor, working with my father-in-law on some of the material, and other practical aspects. We decided that Sarah would attend classes with me and that we would attend Shabbat services in Potomac, except when attending in Baltimore, with conversion classes taking place in conjunction with another synagogue in DC.
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