‘Why Convert to Judaism: The Pull Toward a People’

By Aaron Mandel

You felt it again at the dinner table, the night your mother asked, gently and not gently, why you would do this to yourself. And you found you had no answer she could hold. Why convert to Judaism, she meant — when it asks so much and promises nothing the world counts as gain? What came out of you sounded thin even to you — something about the prayers, the candles, the way a certain page of Hebrew made your chest go quiet. You watched it land as a whim, a phase, a sadness she could not place. So you went silent, because the truth is larger than the words you have for it. This is the question that brought you here, the one you keep typing into the dark when no one is watching. You are not the first woman to feel this pull without being able to name it. The tradition has carried such women in its memory for three thousand years, and it has never once asked them to explain themselves first.

Why Convert to Judaism, When It Asks So Much

There is a woman at the very root of this. Her name is Ruth, and she was not born to the people she chose. She was a widow on a road out of Moab, with every practical reason to turn back to her mother’s house and her mother’s gods, and an older woman beside her begging her to go. What she said in answer has been spoken under wedding canopies and over conversion waters ever since. (Ruth 1:16) — “Entreat me not to leave thee, and to return from following after thee; for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”

Read the order of it slowly, because the order is the whole secret. Thy people shall be my people comes first; and thy God my God comes second. Ruth does not begin with theology. She begins with belonging — with a people whose road she wants to walk, whose lodging she wants to share, whose dead she wants to lie beside. The God comes wrapped inside the people, not bolted on afterward as proof. If you have struggled to give your family a reason, it may be because you have been trying to lead with the second half of Ruth’s sentence when your own heart is standing in the first. You did not reason your way to a people. You were drawn to one. That is not a lesser thing. It is the oldest thing.

Coming In Under the Wings

Watch what happens to Ruth after she chooses. She is a foreigner gleaning at the edges of a stranger’s field, and Boaz, who owns it, blesses her not for her bloodline but for what she has done with her whole life. (Ruth 2:12) — “The LORD recompense thy work, and be thy reward complete from the LORD, the God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to take refuge.”

Under whose wings thou art come to take refuge. That is the image the tradition reaches for to describe what you are doing when you turn toward this people: coming in out of the weather, tucking yourself beneath a shelter that was always wide enough to hold you. The Hebrew word is kanaf — a wing, and also the corner of a garment, the hem you draw over yourself against the cold. No one has to be born under those wings to belong there. The whole grammar of the verse is arrival from outside. You came. You were elsewhere, and you came, and the wings did not check your papers at the edge of the field.

This is worth holding when the doubt returns — and it will return, usually in someone else’s voice. The pull you feel is not you forcing your way into a house that does not want you. It is you accepting a shelter left open. The Psalmist, who knew that shelter from the inside, kept naming it the same way. (Psalms 73:28) — “But as for me, the nearness of God is my good; I have made the Lord GOD my refuge, That I may tell of all Thy works.” Not a good among the many goods a life can chase. My good — the one she would set above all the rest, the refuge she keeps returning to when the others fail her.

The Word Underneath It All: To Cleave

If you want the single Hebrew verb that holds what is happening in you, it is davak — to cleave, to cling, to be joined so closely that no space remains. It is the word for two things pressed together past the point of parting. And it is the word the tradition uses for exactly this: the soul that has fastened itself to the living God and will not be talked loose.

Moses says it to a whole people standing at the threshold of their life, and he says it as a matter of survival, not sentiment. (Deuteronomy 4:4) — “But ye that did cleave unto the LORD your God are alive every one of you this day.” To cleave is to be alive. Not metaphorically — the verse means it plainly. The ones who held fast are the ones still standing. Whatever you cannot explain to your mother, this is its true name: something in you has begun to cleave, and to cleave is the most alive you have ever felt, even as it costs you the easy version of your old life.

Joshua, at the end of his days, gathers the people one last time and presses the same word on them, knowing how many other gods will pull at them when he is gone. (Joshua 23:8) — “But cleave unto the LORD your God, as ye have done unto this day.” He does not say understand the LORD your God, or be worthy of the LORD your God. He says cleave — hold on, stay pressed close, do not let the space open back up. It is the instruction given to people who already feel the pull and are afraid of losing it. Which may be the most honest description of where you are standing right now.

When You Cannot Name It, Name This

So what do you say, the next time someone asks you why? You may not be able to hand them a reason that fits in a sentence. But you can borrow the language of the women and the singers who came before you, and let it carry what your own words cannot.

You can say, with the Psalmist, that you have found your portion. (Psalms 73:26) — “My flesh and my heart faileth; But God is the rock of my heart and my portion for ever.” A portion is the share that is yours and no one else’s — the piece of the inheritance with your name on it. Some part of you has recognized its portion, the way you know a face you have somehow always known. And you can say it the way the longest psalm says it, in four bare words that need no argument at all. (Psalms 119:57) — “My portion is the LORD, I have said that I would observe Thy words.” My portion is the LORD. That is not the conclusion of a debate. It is the quiet sound a soul makes when it has finally stopped explaining and simply arrived.

You are allowed to not have the whole reason yet. Ruth did not have it; she had a road and a refusal to leave it. The pull came first, and the understanding grew up slowly inside the belonging. What you have been calling a thing you cannot explain is, in the oldest language your soul will ever learn, a thing you have begun to cleave to — and the cleaving is enough to begin.

So begin where Ruth began: not with the argument, but with the step. Keep a quiet page for this season — a place to set down the verses that catch in your chest, the questions you are not ready to ask aloud, the small moments when the wings feel close. A reflection journal is one of the gentlest ways to let a wordless pull slowly find its words, and to watch, in your own hand, a portion become a home.

Published by Higgayon Press. For questions of halacha, consult a qualified rabbi.