conversion – no power in the 'verse

born jewish . . . to baptist parents

July 12, 2013 by Salem Pearce 2 Comments

Although most people who know me know that I’m a convert, it’s not an assumption that people I meet make. At least as far as I know. And based on the experience of other converts, those who aren’t able to pass, I probably would know.

A friend who is a rabbinical student of Irish descent has written about her frustration with the questioning of her identity because of her appearance (as well as other challenges of being a convert). Another friend — a black rabbinical student — can’t escape the questions; she posts on Facebook almost daily about the explanations she is constantly asked to give.

in the balcony of sixth & i, shortly after i converted; photo by mark gail

Though I am always honest about my background, I don’t always volunteer the information. Sometimes I just simply answer negatively when asked if I went to Jewish day school or grew up in an observant Jewish home (usually questions asked about my journey to rabbinical school). And sometimes, I am downright relieved when I pass. As a fellow convert classmate and I have talked about, it can be exhausting having to tell “the story of my conversion” to everyone I meet, as well-meaning as they almost always are. Especially at Shabbat meals, the conversation often becomes all about me — and then I don’t really get to learn about other people, or just to talk about what we have in common. I enjoy the privilege I have in being able to pass.

I make my own assumptions about converts as well; that is, I always assume I’m the only convert around. I am generally pretty surprised when I find out that someone else is, too. Besides my classmate, there are two other converts (who I know of) at my school, neither one of which I would have thought were converts. In fact, the first time I met one of them, I irrationally worried — based on his appearance (peyot, tzitzit, kippah) — that he was an Orthodox Jew who might not consider me Jewish.

The denominations don’t agree on much, but respect for converts is near universal (as long as the conversion as recognized by that denomination — which is another conversation). Once a person converts, it is as if that person has always been Jewish. So technically, I am simply a Jew — not a convert. I love this response, which I modified from an article about how to deal with negative reactions to converts: “Yes, I was born Jewish, but to Baptist parents.”

I do struggle how much of my identity is that of a convert. I’m as Jewish as anyone else — but I am who I am because of my upbringing, and I don’t want to discount that. So I go back to the mikveh each year on the anniversary of my conversion; this year I also asked for an aliyah (the honor to say blessings before and after part of a Torah reading) to celebrate the third anniversary of my conversion, shortly before the high holidays in 2009.

In the past week, two people have made insensitive comments about converts in my presence. Both are good people, and I know neither meant any harm. The comments stung nevertheless. It was strange that both happened within a few days of each other — especially since it’s been a really long time since I have heard any such comments.

In fact, Hebrew College has been one of the safest places I’ve ever been in terms of feeling authentically Jewish. I imagine that most students and faculty know that I’m a convert, but not a single person has ever made so much as an insensitive comment about my status. I suspect my school may be a bubble in this respect though. I have wondered whether, for instance, my status might affect my job prospects.

conversion certificate; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

conversion certificate with my Hebrew name (רחל בת אברהם ושרה — Rachel daughter of Abraham and Sarah); photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

One of my fellow converts didn’t even realize I was a convert until he saw me come up to the Torah for an aliyah; the gabbai (person conducting the Torah service) calls up people so honored with their Hebrew name — and those of their parents. Since converts’ parents don’t have Hebrew names, they are ben/bat Avraham v’Sarah (“son/daughter of Abraham and Sarah”). It’s really the only place in Jewish ritual life where converts are marked as such (though it is possible that a born-Jew could have parents whose Hebrew names are Avraham and Sarah). I’m not sure how I feel about this singularity.

He and I have talked about our experience developing our tefila skills in the school community. We both agreed that we feel very comfortable practicing and learning; we know that we can make mistakes without judgment. But this perception is not shared by everyone at school: There are some who do fear the judgment of those around them. I am not sure on what experiences that fear is based. But we’ve wondered whether our experiences as converts — not growing up in the organized Jewish community — has given us some immunity from that fear.

For another time: the story of my conversion process, which I don’t think I’ve told here in any detail. For now: I don’t have a strong opinion on the nomenclature “convert” versus “Jew-by-choice.” You?

Filed Under: Boston, rabbinical school Tagged With: conversion, hebrew, mikveh, names, prayer, privilege, ritual, torah

living waters

October 13, 2012 by Salem Pearce 3 Comments

Before the holidays, I visited the mikveh, as I usually do in the early fall, when I officially became Jewish three years ago, completing my conversion with a beit din and a visit to the mikveh.

mikveh at mayyim hayyim; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

The community mikveh in Boston is called Mayyim Hayyim (“living waters”). It’s egalitarian, which means that both men and women can use it “at the same time.” Most traditional mikvehs are used almost exclusively by women, with prescribed, separate times for men on those rare occasions when they might visit, and the pool is drained and refilled between the times for women and those for men. At Mayyim Hayyim, there are co-ed times, when men and women could both be immersing, though obviously in separate pools. It’s an unusual arrangement.

Every time I go to the mikveh, I think that I should do it more often. It is a truly relaxing and refreshing experience. It’s also a wonderfully solitary experience, which this introvert especially appreciates from among the majority of Jewish rituals that are communal experiences. (There are some immersions which are halachically required to be witnessed, but mine was not, and so I declined the presence of the mikveh attendant.)

The ritual of the mikveh requires complete cleanliness and removal of all clothes and accessories, “[i]n order to remove all physical barriers between you and the water of the mikveh,” as the preparation instruction sheet notes. You shower and clean every part of your body, scrubbing underneath nails and sloughing off dead skin on knees and elbows. You remove all makeup and nail polish. You brush and floss your teeth. Mayyim Hayyim has a beautiful set of meditations for this process.

I actually got a little stuck on the removing of nail polish this time; I’d just gotten a pedicure the week before (I should have timed that a little better). It is so silly that it was so hard for me, and I tried to reason that it was just because I hate to waste money. But I finally decided the polish was emblematic of something that I was trying to hang on to but also needed to let go for the new year. (I’m actually not sure I’ve identified that specific thing is. At least I’ve symbolically let something go?) Off it went.

mayyim hayyim gate: “go in peace”; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

A mikveh visit typically consists of three complete immersions, with head underneath the water and feet off of the ground, and with blessings said after each one. Mayyim Hayyim has a selection of blessings for various rituals, from conversion to marriage, from coming out to healing. There’s not an existing ritual, as far as I know, for commemorating a conversion (more on that below), so I chose blessings for the new year.
The meditation after the last immersion follows:

May I return to my true self and be strengthened as I continue my journey of tikkun halev—repairing the heart, tikkun hanefesh—repairing the soul and tikkun olam—repairing the world.

As part of the commemoration of my conversion, I also asked for an aliyah at the morning Torah service that week. I told a classmate when he asked that I don’t usually mark the anniversary publicly. As he noted, Jewish tradition holds that once a person converts, it is as if s/he has always been Jewish. Indeed, there is a sense in which I have been Jewish my whole life. But there’s also a part of me that likes to remember that day, which felt like the first day of the rest of my life.

The classmate who was leading shacharit that morning offered the kavanah of gratitude for the service, and she asked me to connect the occasion to gratitude when I came to the Torah.

I am grateful, every day, to be Jewish.

Filed Under: Boston, holidays, rabbinical school Tagged With: conversion, mikveh, mindfulness, prayer

return

September 25, 2012 by Salem Pearce 2 Comments

empty road sign; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

I opened the front passenger-side door and sat down, glancing at the three other people waiting for me in the car as I shut the door. He smiled at me: “You miss home. Not just your family. You must if you’re taking pictures of a sign by the side of an empty road.”

I felt the tears begin to form. “I do miss home. Sometimes so much I can’t allow myself to think about it.”

I’ve never been to this particular place before, but I instinctively feel it as familiar.

I’m at a rest stop in Ellinger, Texas, on Highway 71 between Austin and Houston. I stand at the edge of the small parking lot, on a curb that gives way to a shallow ditch that runs alongside that empty road that passes by green fields and that seems to end at the horizon a couple hundred feet away. Even in mid-September, the heat rises from the road in shimmery waves, the exhaust from cars on the highway and in the parking lot adding to the 90-degree air temperature.

The empty road dead ends into the highway, and across the intersection the arrows of two black-and-white signs, both with “71” inside an outline of the shape of Texas, point in opposite directions: north and south. A few abandoned tin-walled structures sit behind the wooden fence that separates highway from field.

Back on my side of the highway, three signs give the distances to the local Baptist, Lutheran, and Catholic churches, down the empty road that must become fuller past the horizon. Another sign advertises pecans for sale beyond the furthest church.

Peh-CANHS, I think. That’s how we say it here. Not PEE-cans, as they do elsewhere.

Walking across the empty road to take my photograph, I see an enormous white canvas that the church signs have obscured. “Romney-Ryan 2012” is backwards, since the logo faces the highway. I wonder whether it sits on public land at the same time that I know that few will care. This stretch of highway and this empty road is red.

Small white clouds only intermittently dot the expansive blue sky, which I always think seems bigger in Texas. Or was I just taught to think it so? Would I really recognize this landscape as Texas if the outline of the state were removed from the road sign?

I am a Texan, but I haven’t lived in Texas in 12 years. And there’s a chance that I might not again. When my nephew was born, the hospital gave his parents a discharge sheet congratulating them on “the birth of your new little Texan.” Will my children be so-called? What does it mean that he is a “Texan”? What does it mean that I am?

I love my family and Tex-Mex and Shiner Bock and Longhorn football and Astros baseball and bluebonnets and mesquite trees and the hill country and the car ride from Houston to Austin on a hot day.

I don’t love the death penalty and retrograde politics and homegrown presidential candidates and heat and humidity and traffic and suburban sprawl. I’ve become an East Coast urban Jew, like my husband, and so much of my former home has become an anathema to me. And perhaps I have become an anathema to it.

Molly Ivins said, “I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part, and discuss it only with consenting adults.” She knows the mixed feelings that come with loyalty to a state that is often easy to deride as buffoonish. How can I be homesick and horrified at the same time?

In his memoir of his life under the ayatollah’s fatwa, Salman Rushdie writes about his and others’ dilemma as Indian writers but expats in the United Kingdom:

Who were they, and to what and whom did they belong? Or was the idea of belonging itself a trap, a cage from which they had been lucky enough to escape? He had concluded that the questions needed to be rephrased. The questions he knew how to answer were not about place or roots, but about love. Who do you love? What can you leave behind, and what do you need to hold on to? Where does your heart feel full?

He is surprised when a writer still living in India explains that his writing, that of a native son, is “highly problematic” in the country.

I claim Texas, but would Texas claim me?

As I fly back to Boston, it doesn’t feel like home. I like it, and I may one day grow to love it, as I did D.C. I think that home is Texas, and I always leave a part of me there. It’s a part that wouldn’t know what to do in Boston.

Rushdie calls this migrant consciousness. I moved because I couldn’t do what I want to do there. So I’m here now, and I am grateful and blessed. But the move required the construct of a new identity. You can’t ever go home again.

My parents have lived in Texas for more than 40 years. My grandparents were born and went to school in Texas – and moved back in retirement; my aunt and uncle did the same. My cousin moved to Madison after college for graduate school and then work and moved back several years later. My brother never left.

Re-entry into my “real life” has been very hard this time around. Enrollment in rabbinical school has amplified the differences between who I was and who I am. Will I ever feel whole in either place?

Filed Under: memories, travel Tagged With: conversion, family, texas

open thank-you letter

August 22, 2012 by Salem Pearce 4 Comments

Dear –,

I am writing this here because I don’t know how to write you directly — and because what I have to say deals directly with my journey to the rabbinate, which this site chronicles. I am writing on the off-chance that you have found or will find my blog. I know it is at least a possibility. And if you don’t make your way here, I’ll feel better at least putting this out there in the universe.

I’ve thought about you often in the past year as I applied to rabbinical schools and reflected on my reasons for doing so. Almost every time I answered the question, “Why do you want to be a rabbi?” (and it’s been asked quite frequently, in various contexts), I alluded to you.

Things did not end well between us, and that still does not sit well with me. But I want to tell you how much I valued your support at the beginning of my Jewish journey. I’ve had the opportunity to tell everyone else who helped me along the way.

You were the first Jewish guy that I dated, and maybe the first Jew with whom I was close. You made the fairly obvious to most — but stunningly liberating to me — observation that I did not have to remain in the religion of my family of origin. It was a revelation. And you knew of what you spoke, because your mother is a convert.

I went to shul with you for the first time, I opened a siddur with you for the first time, I stood on the bimah with you for the first time. You encouraged me to learn about Judaism, and you helped me to realize that I have a Jewish soul. You’re who I think of when reading Anita Diamant‘s words:

[T]he fact is , many people find a home in Judaism as a result of falling in love with a Jew. As one Jew-by-choice wrote, “What better way to discover Judaism than through love? People sometimes say deprecatingly, ‘Oh, she converted for marriage.’ Or, ‘Oh, he converted for her.’ . . . The point is: in these instances, the non-Jewish lover sees the beautiful in his beloved and identifies with it. What is it but the Jewishness of the Jew that he wants? And so he chooses to become a Jew himself. This is not something to scoff at.

It’s hard for me to see how I would have gotten here, on the cusp of the beginning of rabbinical school, without you. We did not last, but what I gained from you lasts yet.

Thank you.

Filed Under: memories, rabbinical school Tagged With: conversion, gratitude

beit din

March 22, 2012 by Salem Pearce 1 Comment

Yesterday, I got an email at 7:30 a.m. from the rabbi who married me and for whom I do clerical work once a week (she has a private practice). She needed a third for a beit din and a witness for the concomitant mikveh. I had a meeting that ended when the event was supposed to begin, but I agreed to duck out early, grab a cab, and race north to Adas Israel, the location of the community mikveh in D.C. It wasn’t what I was planning to do yesterday morning, but I am so happy that I did, for many reasons.

The event was a conversion for a 13-year-old boy who was marking his bar mitzvah in Israel in two weeks. Neither of his biological parents were Jewish. His father died when he was very young, and his Jewish step-father adopted him at a very young age (the boy even had the stepfather’s last name). His mother is still not Jewish, but she and her husband have raised the boy so.

A beit din (literally “house of judgment”) for conversion consists of three individuals — generally rabbis, but two can be educated Jews as long as one is an ordained rabbi who is an expert in the rules of conversion. I served along with two rabbis.

adas israel mikveh

I was really impressed with the young man. He was articulate about his desire to affirm his Judaism — and he was honest (saying, for example, that he didn’t like his Hebrew school — hee!). The beit din was mostly just a conversation among everyone. We then headed to the mikveh. The male rabbi and his father actually witnessed the three immersions, but the door to the mikveh was slightly ajar so that we could all hear him say the blessings, including the Shehecheyanu, one of my favorite blessings. We threw candy at him when he emerged from the room. Unfortunately, the rabbi had brought (kosher!) taffy, which he couldn’t have because he had just gotten braces; I was able to scrounge up a piece of hard candy in my purse for him. At the end of the ceremony, the father asked if he could make a donation to a charity I cared about to thank me for my participation, and I asked for a gift to the D.C. Rape Crisis Center, where I serve on the board.

This experience was so amazing — very special to me and incredibly holy. I was thrilled that I made the effort to be there. Plus, the rabbi on the beit din who I didn’t know has already been super helpful. He was very encouraging about my rabbinical school decision, and we’re already having a discussion about a possible fundraising job during school!

I got to sign the conversion certificate, the same template that I received two-and-a-half years ago. (Also, it turns out that I have as much trouble writing in cursive in Hebrew as I do in English. Must practice!) Before the family departed, the father thanked me for participating, noting that “you always remember these moments and those who were there.” I smiled and flashed back to my own beit din, knowing it was true.