#convert feels

So fun fact for those keeping track at home and remember the struggles and wrestlings I have had with being de facto intermarried because my spouse did not convert with me:

Guess who's converting now?

And not because I asked, or pushed, or pulled. There have been other relationship struggles, but this is something else; he is finally having a real spiritual experience for the first time, and I've gotten to watch him fall in love with Judaism in real time, and chaverim?

Commit to listening only to Jewish music for the foreseeable future. It’ll really help both your Hebrew and your ability to intuit where a song you don’t know is going and/or where the line repeats are (because of course they aren’t marked lmao)

Make learning alef-bet a top priority, because the faster you can follow along with the Hebrew and wean yourself from the transliterations, the less frequently you’ll be lost. You don’t have to know the full words or their actual translations just yet - learn a few highly recognizable words and then keep up while people are reading/chanting by recognizing the first letter.

Davening (even just saying the morning and evening Shema) and working on the home rituals and the brachot will really help your Hebrew and ability to follow the liturgy in addition to being a good habit to get into.

Listen more than you talk. I know this is really hard as someone who nervous-talks, but just force yourself to accept some awkward silences and get really good at asking people questions.

Immerse yourself as much as possible. I mentioned this in the tags of that other post, but this is a lot more like acculturating than regular socializing, so diving in headfirst is actually a lot more helpful than tiptoeing in.

You’re gonna make awkward mistakes. It WILL happen. Most people won’t notice, won’t care, will do it themselves next time, and/or won’t remember. Learn to laugh at yourself.

Seriously everyone gets lost at least once or twice per service except That One Guy who’s been attending services every week for the last 80 years and just... don’t worry about him.

As my bestie taught me early on (and was 110% right about): Someone Is Always Later Than You

Corollary to the above point: Sometimes It Has To Be You And That’s OK

So like, not all rabbis are equally good with people, but please try to keep in mind that they usually have a LOT going on, especially around the holidays, and try not to take distance personally.

You don’t have to have a good voice or know the songs to sing along. Or, as one service leader said: “If you know the songs, sing along; if you don’t know them sing louder.” If you’re really hung up on it, sit next to someone who sings loudly off-key until you’re more confident.

If people offer you food and you are capable of eating it, eat the damn food!

Try to remember that most people are totally absorbed in their own lives and are not likely to remember that awkward thing you did or said. Really. Paranoia about this is more likely your anxiety biting you than based in reality.

Most people are nice (or nice enough) and want you to feel comfortable there.

On the other hand, if people really are being mean, you may want to find a way to mention it to your Rabbi.

If it’s a really bad fit, you may need to find another synagogue. Don’t be afraid to jump ship or branch out if you need to.

Because converting is *so* permanent and irreversible, and one should take it at least as seriously as entering a marriage (with the understanding that there is no divorce, only alienation), I think it's honestly a good idea to wait until you've had a major fight with your Judaism before you complete your conversion.

It's the same principle as wanting to wait until you've been sick with the flu together or had a major life setback or are lost at 2 a.m. on a road trip with your fiance before you actually get married. In that case, you want to know (1) what does this scenario bring out in them? (2) what does this scenario bring out in you? (3) how do those things interact with each other? and, most importantly: (4) how do you resolve it together?

With Judaism, it's easy to fall in love with Torah. It's easy to fall in love with an idealized version of your community. With the rituals and the liturgy and the music and the ruach.

It's harder to learn a point of halacha that hurts deeply and to be forced to reconcile what you know in your bones is right with the reality of the words of Torah and its interpretation by the rabbis. It's harder to meet your congregation in love and tochecha when they have fallen short of their vision and failed you in important ways. It's harder to force yourself to engage in mitzvot that you don't see the point in or that are boring or repetitious or do not spark joy.

And until you know how you will react when (not if) that happens, until you know how you will resolve it - or if you will even want to - you aren't ready to commit to something you can't just take off.

Sometimes it sucks to be a Jew. Sometimes Torah is more yoke than honey. Sometimes you're just not feeling it. And that's okay! That doesn't make you an imposter or a bad Jew; it makes you human. But you still need to address it, because that day will come.

"Ger" literally speaking, meant "foreigner" or "stranger" before it ever meant "convert," and in some texts still means that. Famously the Jewish people is described as being "gerim" in the land of Egypt. Does that mean we were converts in Egypt? No. We were foreigners - strangers whose rights were easily taken away and oppressed, and this is why we are commanded to be kind to foreigners. But there is the rabbinic double meaning of "convert," and the Jewish people is commanded to love converts as well.

But I would argue that there is an element of foreigness to our conversions as well. We are always in some ways immigrants to Am Yisrael. For some of us that may simply have been the experience of it being a paperwork issue, and culturally you have always been at home here.

But for many gerim, we come from outside. We come for any number of reasons, finding our way here through the intuition of our neshama, by chance or by luck, by family or friendship, by allyship, by exposure to Torah or exposure to the Shechinah - or any combination of the above and more.

But we come to the Jewish people asking for shelter and connection. Some of us come with a whole pedigree of Jewish studies and deep prior connections, and some of us come as refugees from other faiths and cultures, with nothing but the spiritual shirt on our backs and dreams of a better future.

And over time, we assimilate. We readily learn the culture and the language and the customs. We learn to cook the food and to follow the laws. We change our clothes to fit with our community and we move to the neighborhood where the other Jews live so we can walk to shul. We reshape ourselves into yiddishkeit and work hard to naturalize.

And eventually we do! We become part of the fabric of the Jewish people forever - having changed our whole lives and changing the shape of the Jewish people in turn. But our roots always lead back to this process. That's not a bad thing or a lack of authenticity - just take a look at the stories of naturalized citizens and you'll see the pride and strength they bring to their new nation. Even so, we are, and always will be, foreign immigrants to this community. Our Hebrew will always have an accent. Our background will lack many of the early milestones that other Jews experience. Our stories and relationships to our families will always be different. You will feel that sometimes. That's okay! That's normal, even years later.

What caught me a bit off-guard, though, is how much part of being a Jew in the diaspora is to always, in some way, be a foreigner also. It seems obvious enough, right? But I had never fully connected that feeling of foreigness from my conversion in to the perpetual foreigness of Jewishness that takes root from our conversion out.

Because once you leave, once you change your culture, you become an outsider and a foreigner to the dominant non-Jewish culture around you. You sound different. You dress different. People perceive you differently and you in turn react differently. You have changed your culture, and in so doing, become a cultural outsider.

There's a bit of ennui to it sometimes, I've found, of always being on the periphery. We are joining, have joined, a liminal people and yet are liminal people even within that people. This is nothing to do with active exclusion — many of us are lucky enough to have found ourselves ensconced in wonderfully welcoming communities that treat us as valued members of the tribe. Rather, it's much more just a practical reality of being a person who left behind one culture and assimilated into another. You can never fully sever your roots any more than you can rewrite the past, but you have also changed so deeply that to return would not be any more possible than returning to a past iteration of yourself. That person is gone, and you are new, and you have become something different, and you are from There and have come Here, and in so doing, a part of you will always be a ger, a traveler, a foreigner, a stranger, and the only thing you can do is embrace it.

What is the weight of a penny?

It was a penny in my pocket that taught me what it is to carry.

It's not just a schlep

It's walking to shul looking for all the world like a frum yid

Yet feeling the burning weight of the working world inside

Feeling the sanctity of Shabbat and tasting its sweetness

But with a tether to the chol

It is feeling the cage around your neshama as she tries to rise

And feeling that profound connection to the One

Yet always with a barrier between

A barrier made of what is and what could be

Oh, the goyim around you tried to tell you how the mitzvot are a spiritual prison

How the Covenant will hem you in, constrict your life, clip your wings, and cut you off from the pleasures of the world!

And you laughed

They have never felt as light as you did your first erev Shabbos after you emerged from the mikveh

And emptied your pockets

~~◇~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~◇~~

To be clear: my point of connection is (in terms of tangible, concrete, provable connections) strictly religious. I don't know 3/4 of my ancestry for a number of reasons (adoption, divorce, estrangement, etc.), but what I do know is (ironically) my matrilineal line, which is primarily German protestant. My adoptive patrilineal side is Danish. No known Jewish ancestry or Jewish relatives.

So I have no idea how to talk about the experiences I had growing up that in hindsight show that I have always had a Jewish soul in search of my people. My relentless questions directed at my Christian leadership that they could not answer and did not understand, but that was, in its own way, a form of love. The fact that my given name is a biblical name very common to born Jews and between that and certain physical features, people throughout my childhood asked me if I was Jewish to my confusion and fear (but also weirdly pride.) This feeling of belonging nowhere and diaspora and huntedness that never made any sense until I began to assimilate into Jewish culture. The fact that in learning history, I always identified with the Jews fleeing persecution rather than the usual childhood imagining that you would be the hero going against your own people; that you would be one of the few "good ones." This, despite my known blood heritage being literally from the people doing the persecution. (And to clarify, this was not just an empathy reaction to any/all historical victims; just Jews.) And so then when I finally did find my people, when I finally stopped fighting this deep sense of connection and approached the community to convert, all of these things both made more and less sense. I leaned into the religious and spiritual side of it because that, at least, parses for other people. But there's this other layer; a layer that feels much more like my transition than something that makes sense as a rational part of my spiritual life.

And I never know how to talk about it. Because it's all very loaded, and I never want to talk over people whose families actually *do* have this known history, who know names and sometimes faces of people they lost or never got to meet. Who have whole phantom limbs of a family tree that never came to be. Whose names are the only memorial possible for their ancestors. That is all brutally real and tangible, and so I end up never talking about my deep but utterly intangible connection because it always feels disrespectful, even if it is part of a separate conversation.

I don't know. I don't have any answers for this. But as always, with Tisha b'Av coming up, I am thinking about it. Trying to understand it. Trying, and mostly failing, to put words to it.