Editor’s Note: John shared his conversion story during Shabbat services on May 23, continuing our tradition of inviting a different congregant each year to share their journey when we read from the Book of Ruth on Shavuot.

Shabbat Shalom & Chag Sameach.

This is my story of becoming a Jew.

My single mother raised my sister and me in the Episcopal Church. Here’s Episcopalianism on one foot. All the catholic ritual but now Pope free! (it was founded by Henry VIII when the Pope wouldn’t let him divorce Catherine of Aragon). Mom, my sister and I were “regulars.” We came to dinners, picnics and family events. I was the designated volunteer operator of the industrial dishwashing machine at potlucks.

 I was named after the parish priest who had baptized my mother not so many years before baptizing me. 

When I was 12, I became one of the altar boys. 

My duties were to help the priest with the rituals for services. I loved the special tasks, the mystique and even the special clothes. We acolytes wore a black cassock — a full-length black robe — topped by a cotta, a white lacy half-body robe. Eventually, I worked my way up to the coveted position of Thurifer, whose job was to swing the incense pot, called a “thurible” releasing clouds of sweet smelling smoke.

Maybe you know the joke about Tallulah Bankhead and the Thurifer?, Upon seeing an altar boy swinging the censer down the aisle, she’s reported to have said,

“I love your drag, darling, but your purse is on fire.”

In my teens I became interested in becoming a priest when I grew up. I began to pester the priest, the deacon or anyone not too annoyed with my incessant pushiness with questions.  (A lot of questions). I discovered very large gaps in my belief. The advice I kept receiving was to study and repeat saying the “Nicene Creed.” The creed is a kind of “pledge of allegiance.”  A statement required beliefs.  No wiggle room. No doubts. I slowly realized I didn’t have this faith, I could not say this creed.

I was, as it turned out, stiff-necked. 

I fell away from the calling and the church.

But I still loved ritual and storytelling. I think this experience ultimately led me to my career as a  theater designer. Now, you may have heard, there are a lot of Jews in entertainment. And my career brought me into Jewish life.

In graduate school, I met, fell in love with and ultimately married a fellow lighting designer, my Jewish bride, Adrienne. So I came to dwell among the Jewish people starting with my Jewish wife and her family and later, our two Jewish sons.

We were committed to raising our children Jewish, but did not know what that meant. So, we didn’t do anything. Anything at all, save for the bris.

Until, that is, Sam, our oldest, who at six years old, began to ask about God.

We joined Shomrei as an interfaith family and enrolled Sam in the Hebrew School. When he learned the Hebrew alphabet, over his shoulder, I learned with him. When he read storybooks about Jewish history, I read along with him. 

Eventually he began to ask me questions about Judaism that I could not answer. I asked Shomrei’s rabbi at the time, Rabbi Shapiro, if there was perhaps a book called “Judaism for Dummies” or something similar. 

One book led to others and before long I was asking questions again (a lot of questions). Rabbi Shapiro suggested I take the Conservative Movement’s conversion course, even though I was not interested in converting, explaining that the class would give me the knowledge I sought.

Adrienne and I attended the weekly class together for nine months. We studied history, rituals, prayers, holidays, kashrut, peoplehood and Zionism. Questioning was not only encouraged, it was a cornerstone. We literally began to build a Jewish home and family, one concept at a time. It was a meaningful and exciting time. For Adrienne I think it reconnected her to Judaism.  I remember her saying many times, “Oh that’s why we do that!” For me, the more I learned the hungrier I became.

I remember us rushing home after learning about what a be’sam-mim was. The little compartment of sweet spices sniffed at havdalah as a memory of Shabbat.  We had one! It belonged to her grandparents who brought it when the emigrated from the Ukraine. He parents hadn’t know what it was. We got home and found the little compartment door with her grandparents’ spices still in it!

I’d read that the convert should first love the Jewish people and come to live among them. Because if you identify with and love the Jewish people but not yet the Torah and Mitzvot, the love for the people will spill into the other two; but it may not work the other way around.

So I began to live as a Jew as best I could.

Over time I came to feel a new call. It wasn’t any particular moment or event, more of a slowly unfolding realization. I liken it to how Adrienne and I came to be married. It wasn’t one moment of decision so much as the realization that I could no longer imagine my life without her. Over those nine months of the class, I realized I could no longer imagine my life without being a Jew.

I didn’t just want to be facilitating my Jewish family’s religious journey I wanted it to be my journey as well.

The only remaining issue for me was the notion of peoplehood.And I got a little hung up on that.  I was thinking about it as an ethnic connection, I was afraid I’d feel like a pretender, an imposter.

As part of the conversion process, the Beit Din (Rabbinic Court that decides your acceptance) required written answers to numerous essay questions. I’d like to conclude today by reading my essay that I wrote 17 years ago this July.

******

Question #7 Describe your sense of identification with the Jewish people.

In the process of studying Judaism and learning about the different movements, a lot of previously unknown fractures and differences between Jews were exposed to me — not only theological differences, but cultural and political ones as well.

Because of my work in the theater and because of my wife’s very large extended family, I have circulated among many Jews for most of my adult life. I’ve heard many discussions among Jews about what’s wrong with “other” Jews. I’ve observed heated conversations among Jews about Israel, atheism, Judaism, Orthodoxy, the “primitiveness” of Kashrut, etc. I’ve witnessed eye-rolling at “too much observance” and “tsking” at too little observance. I’ve had Jews say to me “Why would you ever choose to be Jewish?” and I’ve had Jews say to me “What a wonderful thing you are doing!” All this is to say that Jews, like everyone else, are going in every direction all at once.

It’s a lot to connect with.

I can’t ever be ethnically Jewish, but there is more to the connection than theology or belief. There is this notion of peoplehood.

So what is it that defines “peoplehood?”

I don’t know, but I know it when I see it.

I recently (well 17 years ago) designed the lighting for a musical review of William Finn’s work. (now of blessed memory). He’s a Tony award winning lyricist and composer who happens to be Jewish and gay. His work is infused with the American Jewish experience. 

Finn is a gruff, messy, sometimes unpleasant, cantankerous grump who writes beautiful, emotion filled songs. He’s often in conflict with his own Jewishness and in love with it at the same time. His songs are a reconciliation.

One song in the show was about Passover. It begins with humor, irony and some mocking and ends remembering family members who have “passed over.” The song ends:

Uncle Bernie passed over
Uncle Harvey passed over
Nana Ida passed over
And my mother
My dear mother passed over – Passover

It’s powerful for me on a universal human level, but also on a Jewish level. Having sat at seders with my wife’s family for a dozen years, I can connect to those recollections in a way any Jew would. So I feel connection, some identification with his particularly Jewish experience.

I will lead a vastly different Jewish life from an ultra-Orthodox Chasid. But they are reading, debating and struggling with the same texts and the same rabbis from the past. So I feel a connection to them.

I felt a connection to other Jews while at the deli counter of Fairway market (of blessed memory). I heard a man request his turkey be sliced on the ”kosher slicer.”  Diabolical! I never thought of that danger! Of course one had to think of that!

I play in a monthly poker game in the city. I’m by far the youngest player at 45.(ahh, such a baby I  was back then!) Most of the players are in their 70’s. Everyone is Jewish in the game. We play for dimes and quarters. In the conversation between fifty-cent bluffs and busted flushes, it came out that I was converting to Judaism. The reactions varied from indifference to a degree of hostility. Perhaps the most hostile reaction being

“Oh, don’t do that! You’ll become a fanatic.” coming from my best friend in the game, Joan. 

Joan (also now of blessed memory) is Jewish but is an atheist, anti-zionist, avowed Marxist. But it’s ok, I still love Joan.

So, over the course of months, I’d make the occasional comment about something I

learned or quote a Rabbi I’d just read about – just small chitchat. Sometimes to tweak

Joan but also to share my experiences. Joan would just shake her just head. 

Once she asked me if I was growing peyes yet.

The last game I attended was after I had a date for the beit din and mikvah. I told everyone that the next time we played cards I might be a Jewish. 

Joan grimaced but didn’t say anything. 

On the sidewalk, after the game, as everyone was going their separate ways, she pulled me aside. She gave me a big hug, told me that she knew I would make a good Jew and she’d be proud to be in the “same tribe” as me.

Here was this woman who has rejected all the religious aspects of the Judiasm welcoming me into “her tribe”. I hope to make almost all the opposite religious choices as her, but we will yet share this one thing which even she cannot deny – peoplehood.

Peoplehood  transcends ethnicity, if only because conversion exists in the first place. The convert and his or her descendants are as Jewish as any other Jew. Ruth doesn’t just say, “Your God will be my God.” She says, “Your people will be my people.” In fact she says that first! She was joining not simply a religion, but a tribe, a people. First the people, then God.

Bill Finn, the Chasids, my wife, her family, our sons, the community of Shomrei Emunah, the Jews of Israel, the Jews of the Fairway deli counter  and Joan the Marxist are all part of the people which “will be my people” they are all part of my shtetle who I have chosen to live among.

They all come as a package.

We’re all responsible to and for each other.

******

Addendum 1

I used to come to the Sunday minyan a lot.  The week after I went to the mikvah, I attended. Just before starting when the Rabbi said “we have a minyan” some said “Rabbi, rabbi, we’re not quite met.” Meaning one of the ten present wasn’t Jewish. My heart fell. I assumed someone didn’t know I was “official”. I didn’t say anything. Later I asked Geoff if it was me.  “No, no” he said, it was known that we had a non Jewish visitor.  

As there are no secrets in a synagogue, the following Sunday, at the minyan. The Rabbi asked if we were ten?  Larry Ariel (of blessed memory), Linda’s father said loudly, “I’ll count. One… two, three, and pointing right at me, FOUR…

I never felt more Jewish.

******

Addendum 2

Many years after answering question #7, my mother came to live with us in her last year of life. In a time of chemo, tests and sickness, we spoke of many things. I think of it now as a precious, holy time in my life.

She asked me once, “What ever happened to you wanting to be a priest?” After telling her much of what I’ve recounted to you today, I added, “the Jewish people consider ourselves a “nation of priests’’

“Well, I guess you made it!” she said.

Thank you.

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