Conversion Essay
Stefan Lynch

I had never considered being Jewish before I was trying to get Max Strassfeld to go on a date. Max had made it clear to our yenta that only Jews or someone who would become Jewish would be considered for serious dating. I already knew Max was worth jumping through hoops for, so although my Jewish experiences had been solely cultural, and I was fairly certain that my atheism would be a deal killer, I told myself, “It’s just one date...” Max must have thought the same thing because we agreed to several dates without ever bringing it up. Max hates it when I talk like this: like my conversion has anything to do with our relationship. But it does. If I hadn’t fallen in love with Max, I would never have considered it. It has everything to do with it.

That’s why for the last several years I have been trying to figure out what it means for me to be Jewish, separately. At first I thought I would just try to learn everything Max knows, but I realized that not only would it be impossible, it wouldn’t make me feel Jewish myself, without my partner. I also realized that ‘learning’ was going to mean more than Hebrew classes and a reading list; I needed to learn to feel like a Jew.

Identity – Part I

The rest of this essay is about learning to feel like a Jew, building my Jewish identity, doing Jewish things and having Jewish thoughts, and doing and thinking non-Jewish things jewishly. Because of my background growing up in the gay community, my point of reference often returns there, starting of course with the concept of ‘coming out’ and applying it to Judaism instead of gayness. 

I have been publicly coming out as Jewish for a year now, since I first tried leaving the house wearing a kippa. I’ve been trying on other things for size for several years before that: how does it feel to say, “Shabbat shalom” to someone at shul (am I saying it right? Is it too early in the day to say it?) How do people react when I use Yiddish or Hebrew words in a sentence and don’t translate? Do I feel rude, or do I feel subversive, like when as a Canadian I use French or a Briticism while talking to Americans; is it the same thing: a pleasure in identifying as authentically different, or is it simply pleasure in making myself – inauthentically – different? Do I say ‘shul’ only among Jews or can I say it among people who don’t know what it is, or should I say it and ‘synagogue’? And what to do with my Jewish friends who may not know what ‘shul’ means...if I invite them to tashlich do I explain what it is or would that offend them.

All these verbal codes for positioning yourself are difficult to manage when you don’t know your position. It reminded me of the decade between when I started dating (and thus came out as straight to my queer family and community) and when I finally created a community and language to describe my actual position within that family and community. Although I knew I was a part of the gay community, I didn’t know where I fit as a straight man. But without the language of ‘queerspawn’ or ‘erotically straight, culturally queer’ or a community of daughters and sons of queer parents, my core belonging had no conceptual or practical space. My position in my own community, which I had grown up in, was in doubt (or rejected altogether), until I developed this new language and fought for this new space.  When I am ‘read’ as gay it’s natural, because I am, in a cultural sense, although it’s wrong if you want to ask me on a date. But when I am read as Jewish, it’s wrong in both the cultural and technical senses and I end up feeling like a poser. Yet how do I learn to position myself as a Jew if I’m not actually jewishly positioned by others? This speaks to the central struggle of this conversion: How can I become a Jew if I don’t feel like one, yet how do I feel like one before I actually am. 

It’s not easy to come out when you don’t yet have anything to come out about. 

While this paradox has been the central struggle, wearing a kippa has been the most important part of my conversion – outing myself as a Jew. As a straight man who has worn pink triangle earrings, worked in gay contexts and generally ‘acts gay’, kippot felt less like a sign of reverence to G-d, and more like a statement of pride in my identity. At first, wearing a kippa I felt like a gringo gone native. Now, in non-kippot-wearing San Francisco, hardly a day passes without needing to interact with someone as a Jew. Whether it’s my Mexican barber who is convinced that all Jews are rich and will cheat anyone who isn’t Jewish (although his choicest words are reserved for the Catholic church), my Black patients who ask me, “what’s that on your head?” and thereafter greet me with “Shalom” or talk to me about their African Israelite church, or the Israeli who attempted to talk to me in Hebrew at the clinic where I work and because I speak Spanish all day long, I responded, “Que dijiste?” (What did you say?) 

It turns out that Phil, who runs the coffee shop that sells “Turkish coffee” down the street, is Palestinian, “I’m from the same place that you are,” he says after sitting down with Max and me and ordering the customers to make the coffee for each other, “Everyone over there is crazy,” he says, “I left when I was twelve and I haven’t been back for thirty-five years”; City workers shout out, “happy new year” when we’re on the way to Rosh Hashanah services; an Italian-American schizophrenic patient tells me about how he got body lice, in perfect Hebrew (my co-workers think he’s having a break of some sort – it turns out he lived in Israel as a kid because his Catholic father was a forestry expert hired by the government); A woman walks up to me in at the health food store to tell me that today is the first yahrtzeit for her brother who killed himself – she found him exactly one year before. “Is there something Jewish I should be doing?” she asks me. Nonplussed I say, “You should be with your friends and family,” wracking my brain to remember if there is a specific ritual, “and you could say Kaddish if you want to, or anything else that marks this time – lighting a candle for him for instance,” I’m making it up now, “I’m allergic to paraffin,” she says (of course you are, this is the Bay Area); another guy, new in town, stops me on the street to ask about local shuls, and wants to know the halakah around kippot. I want to say, “Do I look like a rabbi?” One Christian so far has tried to convert me.

A few weeks ago I was standing outside my clinic triaging patients who line up for open appointments when a well-dressed man with a salt-and-pepper beard crosses the street straight for me and says, “I am a Muslim and you are a Jew, but I have been watching you do this work of God with these people, and I thank you”; I’ve had to bow out of being counted in only one minyan; a very dark skinned patient with an accent says, “Shalom” to me and when I say, “Shalom” he starts talking to me in a totally unfamiliar language. When he sees the blank look on my face he says, “What, you don’t speak Amharic?” and chuckles to himself. Falasha living in the Tenderloin, go figure. For some reason, a visit home to Toronto elicits uniformly circumcision-related questions which nobody in California has even thought about as far as I can tell. Relative strangers in Canada make comments like, “that’s a hard choice for man, if you know what I mean”; my best friend, an atheist who dabbles in Wicca, says to me when she first sees my covered head, “so do you believe in God now?”

Connecting to Jewish Concepts

Yes I do, although my sense of God is so removed from the anthropomorphized omniscient guy in the sky that I might as well say I’m still an atheist. I have a two-sided view of God – the first is from physics which explores the natural laws which govern the interaction of energy/matter. God is however these laws came into being, whatever it is that created gravity and decreed that acceleration of a falling object towards the earth will occur at 32 feet per second per second. This was the act of Creation and is as awe inspiring to me as any literal Torah. The second is God as connection – as ecology, the food chain, the way that a school of fish can turn in the exact same direction instantaneously – faster than it would be possible for their nervous systems to register and respond to their neighbor or a leader turning, and most importantly the sum of efforts that people put into breaking down barriers between us as individuals trapped in autonomous, disconnected bodies. 

Across the board, from God to the usefulness of prayer to good, evil, sin, righteousness – what has changed over the last 5 years is not my beliefs, so much as my definitions of them. I’ve heard some converts say that they ‘found’ something in Judaism that they had been missing. I don’t feel as if I was missing anything, but Judaism has given me a new grammar to structure and articulate what I already believed. 

So when a co-worker’s father and brother were seriously injured in the London subway bombings, and I wanted to support her, I thought how would that work Jewishly? Prayer seemed the immediate answer, but I don’t believe in a God who ‘hears’ prayers and does something about them. I thought about it and realized that I do believe there is healing value in human connection…so I asked her if I could pray for her and her family…humbly, especially since she is Hindu and I don’t know her well. The act of prayer in isolation, I felt, was not the point as I conceive it. The point was to reach out to her, so that she (and her family if she tells them) know that a relative stranger took a moment to express concern for them. Then the act of praying for them, of saying their names during the Misheberach, was following through on a commitment I had made to them.

Prayer is a reminder that my good luck can only be possible, can only really exist because someone else is unlucky. 

My dad once said to me as a teenager, a couple of years before he died, that his two biggest failures as a parent were that he had pushed too hard for me to learn piano, and that I had never read the Bible. This is the only time I can remember him saying anything positive about religion – or anything at all. Bible-thumpers wanted us dead, or better yet, to never have existed to begin with. I would get cold sweats the few times I entered a church when visiting my grandmother, thinking that they would know I didn’t belong and turn on me. I had the same reaction the first several times I went to shul. There, however, Hebrew allowed me to make my own, unburdened, meanings for concepts like God, covenant, prayer and congregation. Hebrew – which I have the tiniest grasp of – let me come to these terms on my own terms.

But the gateway word for me was in English: “spirituality”. Four years ago I had a well-paying, easy, make-my-own hours job as a computer guy, but after a few years I started feeling empty – I explained to myself that I wasn’t doing political work, or work that was useful, or helped people, or had meaning. After repeating these ad nauseam it sprang at me that the problem was that my work didn’t feel connected to a greater whole. I came to think of the work simply as spiritually disconnected, and the change to nursing was in large part about finding a spiritual connection. Work that tied into the life-cycle more intimately. Once ‘spirituality’ had a place in my identity, other religious concepts had a foothold.  

A concept like Mitzvot which was completely alien, even repulsive to me a few years ago has fallen into place as laws which encourage connection and discourage isolation (or can be interpreted, very generously, as such). My relationship to mitzvot are that they are stepping stones on a path which encourages connection between people, if you don’t work or spend money on Shabbat (interact with the material world) then you should be interacting with the world of people (praying together, eating together, having sex) and discourages actions which cut people off from others and from their place in the ecology around them – killing, even ‘adultery’ which I see in terms of honesty. Kashrut, which even if I wasn’t vegan I would follow, is a source of connection to Jews past, and of a path to increased consciousness about the sources of food and its meanings. My favorite way of thinking about mitzvot (and minhagim) is not to actually think too hard on why to do them. “You do them because that’s what Jews do,” said Max to me in the Intro to Judaism class we took early on. (Which of course leads to the question that a woman in the class asked, “I do yoga and I’m Jewish…why doesn’t Yoga count as my Jewish observance?” Max almost got on a plane back to New York that night.

I like the concept of “informed choice”, but with a strong sense that you don’t always have to be informed, or if you are, that ‘it’s what Jews do’ in and of itself carries weight, that Jews have done something over a long period of time implies that you connect with other Jews, with something bigger than yourself, with God, when you do them. This to me is the difference between a religious and a spiritual Jew – religion is a set of guidelines, rituals, and organization that facilitates spirituality, particularly a spirituality that is structured – which has upsides and down. I can be spiritual without religion, but because spirituality does not live in the individual, but rather in the connections between individuals and the ecology, religion is a facilitator. Even meditation, if it’s to be spiritual as I conceive it, needs to lead to action or interaction (like meditating in groups, or taking action that positively affects those around you because of insight from your meditation). 

So I have begun to think of myself as religious: as participating in communal, historically derived, consistent activities that if all goes well, lead to a greater wholeness and connection. I have begun to think of political activism as a spiritual act with religious (ritual, communal, historically derived) elements. 

Covenant is perhaps the concept I have struggled with the most. I’ve asked several Jewish friends what ‘covenant’ means to them and for their life and have received answers like, “I don’t really know what covenant means.” Or “Do you mean how do I feel about circumcision?”  The process of asking, though, has lead to some wonderful conversations and insight. First of all, I think everyone should have a covenant with God, in my meanings this is an agreement that you make with the world around you to encourage wholeness and discourage fracture. 

But the big huge flashing neon sign the sort of drowns out my cozy conception of covenant reads “Chosen-ness”. It’s hard to ignore.  I don’t feel like I will have a relationship to God that is more special than any Gentile’s. Different, unique, but not more so. However, I can think of being chosen as having personal responsibility for tikkun olam, ‘if I don’t heal the world, then nobody will’. Finally, as a convert, especially in the context of a ‘mixed’ relationship, covenant has a special meaning: in becoming a Jew I am throwing my lot in with the Jewish people from now onward unmitigated and unmediated by my relationship with Max or anything else.

Identity – Part II

I struggle with my positioning with the movements of Judaism. Because Max has been such a strong Jewish presence for me, I would like to say that I’m a Strassfeld Jew – although generationally that means different things within that family. I have largely come to terms with the importance of organized religion – that it’s not all bad. Shul is a community center for a very specific slice of the community that has specific needs that are often best met through collective action and activity.

Part of the problem identifying as a ‘Strassfeld Jew’ is feeling like there’s so much to learn to be a ‘real Jew’. After describing my goals for becoming Jewish to my Rabbi the first time she said, “You’re planning a bar mitzvah, not a conversion.” I can barely read Hebrew after several courses and weekly attempts at ignoring the transliterations in the siddur. I have not memorized more than a handful of short brachot (fortunately the shema and motzi are the two prayers that I enjoy most – the former for its simple assertion of wholeness as the bottom line, the second because its about being mindful of where your food comes from…a theme I never tire of). I couldn’t quote chapter and verse of anything. The word “Aramaic” makes me shudder, and I get all mixed up when trying to explain why we study the Oral Law in books. With my rabbi’s coaching I am mostly at peace with my ignorance, that the Jewish learning will never stop, that I can be ‘a good Jew’ without knowing everything.

Conversations about early drafts of this essay, where I was much more ambivalent about whether I would actually ‘be Jewish’ after this conversion, illuminated something surprising to me: that many Jewish-born-Jews struggle with feelings of Jewish inadequacy: whether it’s their limited Jewish education, that they haven’t been to Israel, that they have not circumcised a son, or can’t read Hebrew, it seems that I am in good company. And that shared feeling of shortfall has actually helped me feel more Jewish.
 
Instead of Jewish inadequacy, I am thinking more in terms of Jewish opportunity: that I get to find a Jewish role for myself in a Jewish community which will work for me and Max. It’s very easy to ride on Max’s coattails, but as I enter into the covenant I will continue to search for my Jewish strengths and my Jewish interests. I envision my Jewish role as rebbetzin – cooking, kibitzing, and ironing tallitot. This exploration of my Jewish self is a way I see to engage with Torah.

One of my fears has been that that our kid(s) would quickly outpace my knowledge and I wouldn’t have anything to offer them jewishly that Max couldn’t offer ten times better. Through the course of writing this essay, however, and reflecting on what Judaism has brought to my life, and how I interact with it, I am left with few doubts. While Max will have so much to offer our children in minhag and learning, my strength, I hope, will be in providing Jewish community and running a Jewish home and valuing Jewish curiosity.

It’s exciting to know that our family will have a rich engagement with rituals to mark, honor, ease, or stop short the passage of time; that between the Jewish and queer and queer Jewish communities we have deep support, and that my own family’s values of learning, justice, creativity and friendship will be reflected and reinforced by our Judaism.