How To Explain Hilchos Geirus To The Skeptic
Thought experiment in three parts: How would you explain the essence of being Jewish, or the Jewish mission, to an interested outsider to the halachic community – Jewish or non-Jewish? After you formulate your answer, try your hand at another question. How would you explain the need for exacting legal detail in the admissions process to the Jewish people, a.k.a geirus. Now, in what may be the hardest exercise, how would you get both of those answers to coexist with each other – in more minds than your own?
Despite both of us quite often disagreeing with each other, Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo and I have remained good friends over the years. So I can admit to being jealous of his masterful treatment of the three questions. To be sure, some of us might use slightly different ways of expressing similar thoughts, but we can all gain from the humanity, sensitivity, and effectiveness of his approach.
What follows is his essay, as it appeared on his website. It is republished here with permission.
What makes one a Jew? Being born to a Jewish mother? Converting to Judaism? Not really. It is living by the spiritual order of Judaism that makes one a Jew; living through the Jews of the past and with the Jews of the present and future. We are Jews when we choose to be so; when we have discovered Jewishness on our own, through our search for the sacred; when we fight the never-ending spiritual struggle to find God, realize that the world needs a moral conscience, and carry that exalted burden so as to save the world and provide it with a mission.
One becomes a bit Jewish when one realizes that there cannot be nature without spirit and there is no neutrality in matters of moral conscience. But all this is not enough. We have a long way to go before we grow into full-fledged Jews. We must recognize the noble in the commonplace; endow the world with majestic beauty; acknowledge that mankind has not been the same since God overwhelmed us at Sinai; and accept that mankind without Sinai is not viable.
To create in ourselves Jewish vibrations we need to see the world sub specie aeternitatis (from the perspective of eternity). We must be able to step out of the box of our small lives and hold the cosmic view, while at the same time not losing the ground under our feet but dealing with our trivial day-to-day endeavors and sanctifying them. Not by escaping them through denial or declaring them of no importance, but by actually engaging them and using them as great opportunities to grow. As one painstakingly discovers this, one slowly becomes a Jew.
Some of us have to struggle to attain this; others seem to be born with it. They possess a mysterious Jewish soul that nobody can identify, but everyone recognizes it is there. It has something to do with destiny, certain feelings that no one can verbalize. What is at work is the internalization of the covenant between God, Abraham and, later, Sinai. It is in one’s blood even when one is not religious. It murmurs from the waves beyond the shore of our souls and overtakes our very being, expanding our Jewishness wherever we go.
Most Jews “have it,” but so do some non-Jews. They know they have it. It is thoroughly authentic. They are touched by it as every part of one’s body is touched by water when swimming, its molecules penetrating every fiber of one’s being. Nothing can deny it.
These are the authentic Jews, but not all of them belong to the people of Israel. Some are gentiles with gentile parents; others are children of mixed marriages. If they should wish to join the Jewish people they would have to convert in accordance with Halacha, although they have been “soul Jews” since birth.
But why are they not already full-fledged Jews, without a requirement to convert? All the ingredients are present! Why the need for the biological component of a Jewish mother, or the physical act of immersing in a mikveh (ritual bath)?
The reason must be that Halacha is not just about religious authenticity and quality of the soul. It is also about the down-to-earth reality of life. It asks a most important question: How shall we recognize who is Jewish and who is not? Can we read someone’s soul? How can one know for sure whether one is really Jewish? Can one read one’s own soul and perceive it? How do we know that our believed authenticity is genuine?
The world is a complex mixture of the ideal and the practical, where genuineness can easily and unknowingly be confused with pretentiousness. To live one’s life means to live in a manner that the physical constitution and the inner spirit of man interact, but also clash. There is total pandemonium when only the ideal reigns while the realistic and the workable are ignored.
Tension, even contradiction, between the ideal and the workable is the great challenge to Halacha. It therefore needs to make tradeoffs: How much authenticity and how much down-to-earth realism? How much should it function according to the dream and the spirit, and how much in deference to the needs of our physical world?
As much as Halacha would like to grant full dominion to the ideal, it must compromise by deferring to indispensable rules that allow the world to function. Just as it must come to terms with authenticity versus conformity (see Thoughts to Ponder 275), so it must deal with authentic Jewishness and the necessity to set external and even biological parameters for defining Jewish identity. And just as in the case of authenticity and conformity, here too, there will be victims and unpleasant consequences.
Some “soul Jews” will pay the price and be identified as non-Jews, despite the fact that “ideal” Halacha would have liked to include them. However unfortunate, Halacha must sometimes compromise the “Jewish soul” quality of an individual who because of these rules cannot be recognized as Jewish. Were we not to apply these imperatives, chaos would reign.
But there is more to it than that. There needs to be a nation of Israel, a physical entity able to carry the message of Judaism to the world. All members of this nation must have a common historical experience that has affected its spiritual and emotional makeup. There need to be root experiences, as Emil Fackenheim calls them, such as the exodus from Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea and the revelation at Sinai. The impact of these events crafted this people into a most unusual nation ready to take on the world and transform it. For Jews to send their message to the world they need to have a historical experience – as a family and later on as a nation – in which people inherit a commitment to a specific way of living even when some of its members object to it.
The fact that Judaism allows outsiders to join, though they were not part of this experience, is not only a wondrous thing but is also based on the fact that not all souls need these root experiences to become Jewish. They have other qualities that are as powerful and transforming, and that allow them to convert as long as they are absorbed into a strong core group whose very identity is embedded in these root experiences.
In terms of a pure and uncompromised religious ideal, this means that some Jews should not be Jews and some non-Jews should be Jews. Authenticity, after all, cannot be inherited; it can only be nurtured. Ideally, only those who consciously take on the Jewish mission, and live accordingly, should be considered Jews. If not for the need for a Jewish people, it would have been better to have a Jewish faith community where people can come and go depending on their willingness to commit to the Jewish religious way and its mission – just as other religions conduct themselves.
So, the demands of Halacha create victims when some “soul Jews” are left out of the fold, as is the case with children of mixed marriages who have non-Jewish mothers, or children of Jewish grandparents but non-Jewish parents. Similarly, with gentiles who have Jewish souls but no Jewish forefathers at all. All of these are casualties.
This is the price to be paid for the tension between the ideal and the need for compliance; for the paradox between the spirit and the law. That Halacha even allows any non-Jew to become Jewish through proper conversion is a most powerful expression of its humanity. In fact, it is a miracle.
There are probably billions of people who are full-fledged “soul Jews” but don’t know it, and very likely never will. Perhaps it is these Jews whom God had in mind when He blessed Avraham and told him that he would be the father of all nations and that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the seashore.
“In terms of a pure and uncompromised religious ideal, this means that some Jews should not be Jews.”
I see it differently. All Jews should be Jews, in every sense of the word, but some have a cloudy vision of themselves for whatever reason, preventing them from actualizing their Jewishness.
The best exposition of the Jewish mission remains, for me, the brilliant little book by the genius known as R. Aryeh Kaplan: If You Were God. I have yet to read a more lucid vision of the purpose God intends for the Jewish people on this Earth.
Humanity and sensitivity are nice, but not at the expense of halachah.
I emphatically reject the notion that “Halacha create victims” or “casualties.” דרכיה דרכי נועם – there are no victims or casualties from pleasant ways.
“What makes one a Jew? Being born to a Jewish mother? Converting to Judaism? Not really.”
What if I answered yes?
The image that comes to my mind when reading Rabbi Cardozo’s almost majestic words above, is that of President Abraham Lincoln. He has been my favorite President since I was a small child, and now in my more advanced years, I have returned to reading about him with increasing interest. And the more I read about him, the more I realize that I am drawn to him because he just seems so Jewish to me, so much so that had he been born Jewish but had to hide the fact, that he would have acted the same way as he did as a gentile. I also imagine, when reading Rabbi Cardozo’s words, that among the gentiles he talks about, who are so Jewish in spirit if not in the law, are the very quotable philosemites in history, such as John Milton, John Adams, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Paul Johnson, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Huckabee. And think of the tens of millions of Fundamentalist Christians who are so instinctively pro-Israel, that they often seem to care more about Israel than many Jews do. America itself was founded by Christians so enamored with our Torah, that they referred to themselves as Old Testament Christians.
I also think it would be interesting to have some kind of discussion on what areas of Judaism that Rabbi Adlerstein and Rabbi Cardozo differ in their viewpoints from one another.
“In terms of a pure and uncompromised religious ideal, this means that some Jews should not be Jews”
At the risk of sounding knee jerk, I’d say chas v’shalom. Is there any justification for such an opinion in Torah sources? The dictum of ‘אע’פ שחטא ישראל הוא’ seems to indicate the opposite, as does the whole point of klal yisrael being an ‘עם’
[YA – As I said, I would have phrased some of this differently. But if all you seek is some justification, that should not be too difficult. Consider, for example, the Zohar’s assertion that a certain class of trouble-makers for the community – including some of the wealthy – while halachically Jewish, come from the erev rav. And the shitah of the Besht that before the times of Moshiach there would be a birur acharon, that would weed out those who had joined Klal Yisrael and didn’t belong there – an idea echoed by other achronim.]
“I emphatically reject the notion that “Halacha create victims” or “casualties.” דרכיה דרכי נועם – there are no victims or casualties from pleasant ways”
– it takes a certain breadth and poeticism to jump outside our natural literal inclination and understand that certain phrases are used בדרך מליצה. That tradeoffs exist in Halacha is evident from things like לא פלוג, which acknowledges that we would have liked to have been able to pasken differently for a particular יחיד but must keep the Halacha standard, for a greater good. Whether you term the impacted יחיד as a ‘casualty’ is a matter of semantics to which R Adlerstein alluded to when he implied that we each have our own style of expression. But to do so at the expense of appreciating the main point is to do oneself a disservice
If you have the luck to be born (fill in the blank here: Jewish, American, British), because your parents were part of that people or because you were on their soil, then you are by chance, part of the people, whether or not you embrace the values and culture. If you were born in another place or to other people, you are not. However, sometimes, countries/peoples allow immigrants to join. Requirements to join a people might include a residency requirement (live in the US for five years, live in a religious Jewish community for three years) or they may ask you to show allegiance (swearing in ceremony, living according to the Torah, taking a test or language learning). You may be asked to state your intention to live the way the new people do, announce you share their values, give up a former citizenship.
Being Jewish is NOT like joining another religion – it is more like being adopted into a new family/people. What’s hard to understand about why converts can’t just say, “Hi, I want to be Jewish.”
The image that comes to my mind when reading Rabbi Cardozo’s almost majestic words above, is that of President Abraham Lincoln. He has been my favorite President since I was a small child, and now in my more advanced years, I have returned to reading about him with increasing interest. And the more I read about him, the more I realize that I am drawn to him because he just seems so Jewish to me, so much so that had he been born Jewish but had to hide the fact, that he would have acted the same way as he did as a gentile. I also imagine, when reading Rabbi Cardozo’s words, that among the gentiles he talks about, who are so Jewish in spirit if not in the law, are the very quotable philosemites in history, such as John Milton, John Adams, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Paul Johnson, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Huckabee. And think of the tens of millions of Fundamentalist Christians who are so instinctively pro-Israel, that they often seem to care more about Israel than many Jews do. America itself was founded by Christians so enamored with our Torah, that they referred to themselves as Old Testament Christians.
I also think it would be interesting to have some kind of discussion on what areas of Judaism that Rabbi Adlerstein and Rabbi Cardozo differ in their viewpoints from one another.
David F-
While your sentiments are laudable, many people, including major talimidei hachamim have difficulties understanding the way a mamzer is treated, or the law to eradicate
all Amalekites. For that matter, what about a Kohen who falls in love with a divorced woman? While we can say the restrictions that they confront are for the ultimate good of Am Israel, emotions can still interfere interfere with this outlook.
Rabbi Cardozo’s prose is certainly most edifying. To me there remains but one question. Does he have a mikor for his assertion that but not for the “compromise” concern, being Jewish would be simply a matter of your innate spirituality. Is there truly no inherent spiritual change when one undergoes conversion? No infusion of a new Jewish soul?
[YA – Without taking sides on the issue, if all you want is mekoros, that should be easy. Not everyone, apparently, believes in differences between Jews and non-Jews on the level of the neshamah. See http://www.hakirah.org/Vol%2016%20Balk.pdf and its treatment of the Rambam. It may not be the majority view – certainly not what you and I were brought up to think – but it is a view, and can be cited.]
I emphatically reject the notion that “Halacha create victims” or “casualties.” דרכיה דרכי נועם – there are no victims or casualties from pleasant ways.
Another viewpoint can be found in Guide 3:34 (http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/gfp/gfp170.htm)
It is also important to note that the Law does not take into account exceptional circumstances; it is not based on conditions which rarely occur. Whatever the Law teaches, whether it be of an intellectual, a moral, or a practical character, is founded on that which is the rule and not on that which is the exception; it ignores the injury that might be caused to a single person through a certain maxim or a certain divine precept. For the Law is a divine institution, and [in order to understand its operation] we must consider how in Nature the various forces produce benefits which are general, but in some solitary cases they cause also injury. This is clear from what has been said by ourselves as well as by others. We must consequently not be surprised when we find that the object of the Law does not fully appear in every individual; there must naturally be people who are not perfected by the instruction of the Law, just as there are beings which do not receive from the specific forms in Nature all that they require. For all this comes from one God, is the result of one act; “they are all given from one shepherd” (Eccles. xii. 11). It is impossible to be otherwise; and we have already explained (chap. xv.) that that which is impossible always remains impossible and never changes. From this consideration it also follows that the laws cannot like medicine vary according to the different conditions of persons and times; whilst the cure of a person depends on his particular constitution at the particular time, the divine guidance contained in the Law must be certain and general, although it may be effective in some cases and ineffective in others […]
It is a noteworthy feature of this style of argumentation that the only alternative to precise adherence to the author’s views is invariably “chaos”.
Rabbi Adlerstein. I read the Hakira article you linked to. With all due respect, do you feel that his hypothesis of the shitas harambam has a leg to stand on. Not every opinion need be given the imprimatur of being even a daas yachid. And then to top it all off to take the famous rambam re get meusa and completely twist it to fix his theory.The mishna say kofin oso ad sheyomar rotze ani. To say that this only applies to an otherwise Torah observant Jew, when there is no precedent in halacha for such smacks of hubris and irresponsibility. This is is no mere philosophical discussion. This Rambam is hard halacha and has always been taken at face value. Lets not jettison hashkafa yisroel on the altar of political correctness
[YA – 1) I find it appalling to suggest that anything the Rambam says could be even less than a daas yachid. It might be better to say that significant numbers of those who followed the Rambam strongly disagreed. Given the license that exists in hashkafic areas that doesn’t in halacha, that hardly amounts to a criticism of R Cardozo. This is especially true when it comes to the Rambam, who like it or not, does function as a hashkafic lodestar to many frum Jews. I woudln’t count myself as a Maimonidean rationalist, but I would shudder to invalidate their right to champion the views of Rambam. 2) The idea that Ishus 2:20 may only apply to Jews who see themselves as part of the mitzvah community is an old one. There has been a machlokes for centuries as to whether it applies to an apostate. See – among many others – sources cited in the Ohr Someach]
“– it takes a certain breadth and poeticism to jump outside our natural literal inclination and understand that certain phrases are used בדרך מליצה” etc.
I understand that this MAY have been his intention, but Rabbi Cardozo has taken certain liberties with regard to conversion in his previous works [e.g. deriving from Esther’s marriage to Achashverosh that sometimes for a very important cause it’s okay to be very lax on halachic requirements and the same principle should be applied to Hilchos Geirus] and I am very leery of accepting anything he says even בדרך מליצה when it strikes an uncomfortable note.
YA, I think you misunderstood ‘reder’–he was not saying that the Rambam’s shitta was a daas yachid/less than a daas yachid, he was saying that The Hakirah article’s interpretation of the Rambam wasn’t a valid approach. Meaning, not everything that can be said as p’shat in something is necessarily “An Opinion”.
[YA – Please see my several responses to “reder” elsewhere. Your last sentence is true – but like other truths, is often misapplied or applied too broadly. In areas of parshanut, midrash, etc. there really is not any absolute hachra’ah unlike conventional halachah. Three are exceptions, such as that analyzed by the last teshuvah of the Chasam Sofer in Yoreh Deah, in regard to the opinion of Hillel that there will not be a human Moshiach in the future. A great contemporary posek once insisted to me that this should not be extrapolated even to the other ikarim of the Rambam. The Chasam Sofer’s case is special, because the daas yachid was firmly rejected already within the gemara. I do think that we must concede that there are disturbing positions that must be regarded as “an opinion.” This should not deter us from following what we see as a mesorah from our own rabbei’im. We can conclude that we would not want our children taught by someone who believes that the Zohar and/or all of kabbalah have no legitimacy. I would campaign not to hire such a person in schools attended by my kids. Nonetheless, I would not be quick to call R Kafach an apikorus, and would resist taking such (minority) declarations at face value. Bottom line: we should be able to enthusiastically embrace a particular view, while conceding that competing views do indeed have the status of legitimate opinion.]
A non-Jew who feels Jewish in his soul is not a “soul Jew” or any other kind of Jew until he has met all requirements for geirus. Before achieving that, he can be a proper Ben Noach, which is nothing to sneeze at.
[YA – In halacha, there are only two options: Jew or non-Jew. Someone who has not met all the halachic requirements is simply not Jewish. There is a realm outside of halacha, however, in which Jewish souls are found in places before being reunited with the body of the Jewish community. Gedolei Yisrael have spoken of this in the past. It is hinted at in seforim hundreds of years old. See, e.g. what the Ohr ha-Chaim ha-Kadosh writes about the korbanos of Succos. Baalei halacha have even assigned halachic weight to the idea of zera Yisrael, or partial, non-halachic descent from Jewish progenitors. So halachically you are correct – but so is Rabbi Cardozo.]
Rabbi Adlerstein. Firstly, let me mention how much I appreciate you posts. Ever since I discovered this blog I look forward to your writing. My only critique us that there isn’t more of it. Let me clarify my last response I didn’t c’v mean to imply that the Rambam’s opinion isn’t valid. Certainly the rambam doesn’t need my ok. What I was trying to say was that I don’t believe that rabbi balk’s take on the rambam is the conventional understanding of the rambam’s opinion. It seems that his proofs can be refuted. Just because the rambam discusses the spiritual level to which a non-Jew can reach as being in certain cases equal to that of a Jew doesn’t seem to mean that there is no inherent spiritual difference between them. You are much brighter and better versed in understanding of hashkafa than I. Do you feel that his hypothesis in the rambam is conclusive. thanks for telling me about that ohr someach. I wsnt aware of it
[YA – I plan to take issue with R Balk (who is an extremely fine Ben Torah who knows his material, but along different lines. He is not the first to make this case within the Rambam. Much of the case is built on what the Rambam does NOT say. Namely, one is hard pressed to find places where he speaks of essential differences between Jews and non-Jews, unlike e.g R Yehudah Halevi the Maharal the Baal HaTanya and Rav Kook. Looking at what he does say, it is not hard to make the case for the Rambam believing not in a difference in essence, but in role and mission. This should not be too disturbing. For most of us, the fact that so many over centuries deeply disagreed with the Rambam is enough to get us to hitch our hashkafic horses elsewhere. But c”v to reject the validity of the Rambam as a possible way to go, and one that many can find valuable in their own quest for the truth.]
“Perhaps it is these Jews whom God had in mind when He blessed Avraham and told him that he would be the father of all nations and that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the seashore.”
….these words are quite generous, and filled with hope, for the prospective convert to be able to understand the ‘Halachic way’ which is necessarily complicated, and sincerely lovingly and embracing at the same time!
Self-recognition of our personal role in life happens only after arduous tests while navigating the adventure of a personalized journey scripted in our treasured ‘road-map: The Torah’