I Believe in Conversion

You know, I don’t say this enough:

I believe — whole-heartedly and full-throatedly — in religious conversion.

The way I talk about culture and lineage, you might not think so, or you might think I’m very strict about it or something, and I know that at least Jewish converts often feel exclusionary pressure about that.

That’s never my intention. Converts are holy, holy Jews. The thing is, Jewish conversion is a very intensive process, and that’s where my standards come from.

I say this part a lot; it’s one of my favorite personal cliches. Conversion to become a Jew is more like immigration than baptism, and baptism is the conversion modality invented for the transmission of ideological religions in the culture-erasing milieu of global empires, so it’s usually what comes to mind for residents of such empires: You make a mental and verbal declaration of some ideological payload, you dunk in the water, and when you pop out, you’re in.

That’s not my culture.

But it’s not because I don’t believe in the idea of being cleansed and reborn — where do you think the early Christians, who were Jews, got their mikveh practice from? — but rather because I don’t accept the sufficiency of considering this a personal, private, inward, propositional transformation. That’s not how purification functions in Jewish practice. It’s a communal condition, one that determines one’s readiness for participation in communal life. And that conversion involves both sides.

So to me, a conversion story is one about joining a community, and no human desire could possibly be more understandable to me. When I learn someone is a convert, I expect to encounter a kind of respect and sensitivity that can only be learned by struggling to integrate intentionally into a community full of people who take their own standards for granted because, to them, they’re expected defaults.

When I meet a person who says they’re a convert, that is my assumption about who I’m meeting.

Occasionally, though, they turn out not to be that sort of convert but rather one of the culture-erasing global empire variety, a Seeker™, someone who is exploring the world’s cultures like a bounty to be exploited to improve their personal lot in this world or the next.

But my disapproval of this lifestyle is not a disapproval of converts. On the contrary, it’s a judgment that such a person is not yet a convert. They don’t meet the standards.