Wednesday, November 7, 2012
Convert Controversy
12:24 PM | 
Posted by
Rabbi Chaim Coffman |
PROS
AND CONVERTS
A newly minted Orthodox Jew discovers the
promise and perils of blogging her religious journey.
Megan Greenwell is an Angeleno and a senior editor at ESPN The Magazine.
Dylan C. Lathrop is a designer that thought it was yesterday all day.
A decade
ago, Amanda Edwards was attending Christian youth meetings at the University of
Nebraska. Today, her name is Chaviva Galatz. She is one of the most prominent
Orthodox Jewish bloggers in the world and a recent immigrant to Israel,
alternately hailed as a poster child for conversion and vilified as a false
prophet.
A casual
reader of her blog, which includes nuanced examinations of complicated Torah
passages and critiques of people who talk in synagogue or don’t keep fully
kosher, would assume she’s been Orthodox since birth. Watching the 29-year-old
fluently recite Hebrew prayers at a Seder, even a rabbi likely wouldn’t guess
that she grew up nominally Christian and had never heard of Passover until
sophomore year of college. They’d both be wrong—a fact that illustrates a
centuries-old debate over the role of converts in the strictest branch of
Judaism. But Chaviva’s story has a 21st-century twist.
Judaism,
one of the only religions that prohibits proselytizing to nonbelievers, has
always had a fraught relationship with converts, particularly in the Orthodox
tradition. Even the Talmud itself, which is formatted as a discussion among
ancient rabbis, is inconsistent on the merits of conversion. In some sections,
the rabbis suggest converts occupy a privileged place in Judaism because they
chose a Jewish life instead of simply inheriting it from their mothers. In
others, the tone is grave: Converts are a blight on Israel. The uncertainty
lingers to this day. The conversion process can take years, and many of those
who have completed it successfully say they’re still forced to prove themselves
to born Jews suspicious of their intentions.
The rise
of social media has complicated matters further. Potential converts are no
longer reliant on religious leaders or scholars for information. A blogger
who’s only been reading about Judaism for a couple of years can become a
trusted resource for those starting the process. That enables people to build
informal support networks and ask questions they might be too intimidated to
take to a rabbi. Yet empowering lay leaders without divinity degrees or years
of experience also creates the potential for spreading false information.
And sets
the stage for a deep sense of betrayal when a blogger doesn’t want to be a role
model anymore.
Chaviva’s
path to Judaism began as a search for a new family. When she was growing up in
Missouri and Nebraska, her family lived in near-poverty. They had their car and
furniture repossessed when Chaviva was 12. She began working at fast-food
restaurants at age 14 so she could lend her parents money. When she was 17,
they asked her to sign up for a credit card because they needed to fix the
family van and couldn't get financing themselves.
Her
mother, Debbie, who had struggled with mental illness for years, buckled under
the stress. One night, the family was driving and Debbie and Robert were
fighting in the front seat. Chaviva can't remember the subject all these years
later, but she knows it was at least tangentially about her. "And my mom
turned around and looked right at me and said 'I wish you'd never been born,'
" she recounts. Sitting in her living room under a framed piece of Hebrew
calligraphy and a poster proclaiming “I love you blogs and coffee,” she tells
the story calmly, her huge brown eyes betraying no hint of pain. Sharing the
most intimate details of her life has always come naturally to her.
So years
later, when she learned in a Jewish history course at the University of
Nebraska that every Jew is considered a son or daughter of Abraham and Sarah,
the teachings spoke to her. An online "What Religion Are You?" quiz
she took in high school had suggested she might be Jewish at heart, but she
forgot all about it until she began exploring Judaism in college.
Jews
aren't common in Lincoln, Nebraska, and her one Jewish friend stopped
accompanying her to synagogue after a couple of trips. She marked Passover 2004
by eating matzo alone in her dorm room, having already decided to convert and
move somewhere with a larger Jewish family to join.
Because
she had always been a curious student, reading about Jewish history and
learning Hebrew were a major part of the appeal, so she sailed through the
study process with a rabbi in Lincoln and converted to Reform Judaism, the
religion’s least observant branch, in 2006.
"I
suddenly belonged, I had people, I had a history, I had a shared dream. I had a
home," she wrote later on Kvetching Editor, the blog she started around
that time to chronicle her conversion process.
I
suddenly belonged, I had people, I had a history, I had a shared dream. I had
home.
But
joining a family involves taking on its squabbles as well as its celebration
dinners, and choosing Judaism dropped Chaviva into long-running dispute over
the role of converts—especially after she decided to pursue a full Orthodox
conversion in 2008. Because Orthodox Judaism is the only denomination that
holds strictly to Talmudic principles, and because neither Orthodox rabbis nor
the Israeli government accepts Conservative or Reform conversions, the debate
over the validity of conversions is largely limited to the strictest branch of
the religion. And although technically all Jewish people are descendants of a
convert—Ruth, the great-grandmother of David—that hasn't made it much easier
for her modern-day followers seeking an Orthodox life.
Just 13
percent of American Jews identify as Orthodox, which requires dedicating one's
entire life to religious practice through 613 commandments, or mitzvot. Women
must dress modestly, forsaking pants and covering their elbows, knees, and—if
they are married—hair. Services and even parties are gender-segregated, and
people are not allowed to touch non-family members of the opposite sex—which
means couples have no physical contact until their wedding day. Keeping kosher
requires not just abstaining from pork and shellfish, but owning separate
dishes for meat and milk, buying only ingredients certified by licensed rabbis,
and not eating out at restaurants or friends' homes that don't follow the
rules. During the Sabbath, which runs from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday,
Orthodox Jews may not handle money, drive a car, ride in an elevator, or use a
computer. The rules have not changed in centuries and can make Orthodox
followers feel isolated from mainstream culture and even other Jews.
Until
2006, requirements for Orthodox converting were largely left up to individual
rabbis. That year, the Israeli Rabbinate, which controls all matters of Jewish
law throughout the world, announced a new, more restrictive standard for conversions,
calling into question thousands that had been completed and hundreds of rabbis
who had performed them. To comply with the new restrictions, the Rabbinical
Council of America mandated a new curriculum. Potential converts now must
undertake months (sometimes years) of study with a rabbi. They must appear
three times in front of a beth din, a panel of three rabbis aiming to weed out
people who aren't doing it for the right reasons or who they don't believe will
follow all the laws. (There are only 11 authorized beth dins in America.) Male
converts must be circumcised.
The
conversion process can cost hundreds of dollars—or more, for people who don't
live near an established Orthodox community. But Rabbi Barry Freundel, who
oversaw the revision of the standards as chair of the RCA’s conversion
committee, says the results have been wholly positive. “There were wildly
divergent standards, and that's not good for anybody,” he says. “Now, if
someone moves to a new community, their new rabbi knows that conversion has
been done the right way.”
The move
called into question conversions that didn’t live up to the new standards, and
upset many rabbis, who argued they were the best judges of how to convert
members of their own communities. Among many converts, a culture of fear set
in. At any moment and for any reason, they fret, the Rabbinate could invalidate
their conversions. Nobody knows if that’s a real possibility, and that’s part
of the problem—the RCA isn't known for its transparency or clarity. Whispered accusations
of breaking the rules are enough to earn a conversion candidate an
interrogation from the beth din.
As she
worked toward acceptance in the Jewish family. Chaviva had no trouble following
the rules. Around the time she started exploring her options for an Orthodox
conversion, the readership of her blog began climbing steadily. People began
asking for her advice, and Chaviva began offering more unsolicited opinions,
too. “I get all tingly and excited when I talk about my blog and how I’ve
managed to help people get through the conversion process, how I've been able
to calm fears,” she wrote.
Between
75 and 100 Americans successfully convert to Orthodox Judaism each year, so the
community is tight-knit. And when a convert—especially a prominent one—breaks
the rules, many others take it personally.
After a
little more than a year of study, Chaviva’s beth din declared her ready to
convert to Orthodox Judaism on New Year's Eve 2009. The next day, the first of
2010, she arrived at a nondescript building on Manhattan's Upper West Side to
enter the mikvah, the ritual bath that signifies purity. The years of
preparation culminated in a process that took just a few minutes. She verbally
committed to lead a Jewish life, then entered the water and dipped three times,
reciting blessings in between. And then she was an Orthodox Jew.
“I stand
firmly by the idea that my entire life I have carried within me the Jewish
neshama that has shined so brightly these past six or seven years,” she wrote.
“But standing there, looking into that mirror and later listening to the rabbi
bestow upon me my name as a Jewess, I felt different.”
Chaviva
embraced her status as a role model for aspiring converts. In May 2010, she
married a man she had met on the Jewish dating website JDate and moved to
Teaneck, a heavily Orthodox community in northern New Jersey. She earned a
master’s degree in Judaic studies from the University of Connecticut and soon
started working toward a second master’s at New York University. She wanted,
she wrote on her blog, "to throw myself into the tidy box of Orthodoxy—Get
Married, Move to a Big Orthodox Community, Have Only Orthodox Friends, Dress
the Part, Wear the Headcovering, Go to the Mikvah, Live and Breathe the Box of
Orthodoxy." She wanted to show converts that they could be just as
Orthodox as someone born in Teaneck.
By 2009,
Chaviva's Kvetching Editor blog was drawing several thousand visitors a month.
Bethany Mandel was one of them. She frequently emailed Chaviva with questions
about conversion and always received a response. But Chaviva also demonstrated
a stricter side, warning her, for example, that there were no exceptions to
dietary laws. "She relished in it, and she was good at it,” Mandel says.
“She was judgmental, but she knew her stuff."
Chaviva
admits she was occasionally harsh on her fellow Jews. In one post, she
confessed to thinking badly of friends who didn't uphold the strict kosher
standards she maintained in her own home or didn't dress as modestly as she
did. "I go through these phases of feeling like a horrible person because
I don't feel comfortable being around people that a year ago or even six months
ago I was completely comfortable around," she wrote. " Have I become
a monster? To look at my fellow Orthodox Jew and think, Shame on you."
In a follow-up comment, she added, " Hypocrisy in all things bothers
me in a way that nothing else bothers me."
Several
readers responded that Chaviva had crossed a line. "Who the hell are you
to judge your fellow Jew like that? This kind of attitude will be your downfall
in the Jewish community, or perhaps your ticket to ultra-Orthodoxy. You make
the call," wrote someone using the pseudonym Tamar Halivni. Three weeks
later, when Chaviva took offense at the opening of a Manhattan pork-centric
restaurant called Traif (which means non-kosher), other commenters said she had
become what she had always claimed to hate: a self-appointed judge of whether
other people were "Jewish enough."
The
accusations underscored a paradox created by the combination of the new
conversion rules and the rise of social media. Though Orthodox Judaism is
officially governed by a handful of Israeli rabbis, their secrecy empowered
Chaviva to pass judgment on what it means to be Jewish after just a few years
in the faith. ”You chose to be what you are,” one commenter wrote on her blog.
“How is it right to judge those who had no choice?
Between
75 and 100 Americans convert to Orthodox Judaism each year, so the community is
tight-knit. And when a convert - especially a prominent one - breaks the rules,
many others take it personally.
Last
fall, Chaviva asked for a divorce after just 16 months of marriage. The week
the divorce was finalized, she packed her car and drove to Denver, where she
had once spent a summer, to escape the Orthodox bubble of Teaneck. Naturally,
she blogged the entire journey, leaving out only the intimate details of her
marital problems. She moved into a sprawling apartment complex on the
decommissioned Lowry Air Force Base, where much of Denver’s small Orthodox
community lives. But unlike in Teaneck, living among Orthodox Jews in Denver
does not mean living exclusively among Orthodox Jews. Walking around Teaneck,
"there were a lot of strangers, but they were always Jewish
strangers," Chaviva says. In Denver, the strangers came in all religious
affiliations.
Including
the attractive, charming strangers. Chaviva had noticed the barista with the
spiky hair and the wire-rimmed glasses at her local Starbucks, but didn't think
much about him until he started flirting with her about a month after she moved
to town. Though that branch of the coffee shop is so popular with the Orthodox
community that it's known as "Jewbucks," it didn't take much
sleuthing for Chaviva to realize that Taylor Hibbs wasn't Jewish. But she didn't
have a ton of friends yet, and none of the 613 commandments prohibit talking to
a nice guy in a public place. Having him over for dinner, though? Kissing him?
Spending the night together? The Talmud is pretty clear on the answers to those
questions.
For
weeks, she didn't tell anybody, including her best friend in Denver, who lived
just across the parking lot from her. But the rumors didn't wait for an
official announcement, and they spread all the way to Teaneck. So, fittingly
for someone who had chronicled six years of her life on the internet, she wrote
a post titled "The Big Reveal."
"Right
now, he's perfection for me. He makes me laugh, he makes me smile, he makes me
feel okay being me," she wrote. She also confessed that she had begun
eating out at non-kosher restaurants—first, only vegetarian ones, then others
that had good vegetarian options—though she still maintained a kosher kitchen.
She would watch TV or use the elevator on the Sabbath if Hibbs pressed the
buttons.
Nobody
from her congregation back in Teaneck has gotten in touch since she moved, she
says. Just under two years after her Orthodox conversion, she removed the word
"Orthodox" from the header of her blog, relabeling herself
"Underconstructionist." "I don't want to be in a box," she
says, though she went through years of study and hardship to earn entrance to
that box just two years ago. " I've sort of seen the fluid nature of what
I believe and what I practice."
For many
of the people who had seen Chaviva as a role model for a perfect post-conversion
Orthodox life, the news hit like a bomb. In blog comments, Facebook wall posts,
and emails, people told her that her actions were chillul Hashem, a desecration
of God’s name. That she was lost and they’d pray for her to find her way back.
That she was setting a bad example. Some friends stuck up for her, but others
turned their backs. The woman she had once referred to as her “Yiddish mama,” a
friend from Teaneck, sent her an email expressing disapproval, then stopped
talking to her—except for a text message sent from Chaviva’s ex-husband’s
wedding.
Devoted
readers of her blog, including many Chaviva had helped guide through the
conversion process, were also worried. They’d heard stories of Jews whose
conversions were invalidated or questioned, and they feared a prominent
Orthodox blogger’s fall could undermine their own conversions in the eyes of
the Rabbinate. “Your actions, especially after conversion, matter,” Skylar
Curtis, who was converted by the same beth din as Chaviva, wrote on her own
blog. “We rely on each other to be good Jews and give converts a good name.
When one convert ‘goes bad,’ we all suffer for it.” Mandel says she doesn’t
care who Chaviva dates, but wishes she didn’t feel compelled to spill the
details on the internet. “You’ve been warning for years about people setting a
good example for just this reason.” The outcry prompted Chaviva to temporarily
disable her blog.
Rabbis
agree that highly public cases like Chaviva’s give the conversion process a bad
name, but they say Israel would never revoke other people's conversions based
on her reveal. They emphasize that once a conversion is completed, that person
is Jewish no matter what. “The hardest test of a convert is not when they’re
going through the classes; it’s after they convert, because then nobody's
checking up on them,” says Rabbi Chaim Coffman, an American living in Israel
who runs online classes for conversion candidates. “She’s not the first to
violate her conversion so soon after the fact, but the fact that she's this
public figure who’s still offering to help people while living off the derech
is really a problem.”
Meanwhile,
Chaviva is reconsidering her definition of family. In April, she broke up with
Hibbs—she was frustrated with his lack of career ambition and decided she
needed more time to recover from her divorce. She stopped going to synagogue
while they were dating because she felt judged. Since the breakup, she’s only
been to services a handful of times. Sitting among happily married couples and
their parents at a Passover Seder, she says, made her feel like an orphan.
So now
she's back on the Orthodox path. She’s starting to think about how to create
her own family in Jerusalem. She’s looking forward to meeting an Israeli man
and remarrying. And although she’s still blogging, her writing these days
focuses much more onA the events of her daily life than on analyzing the Torah
or other Jews’ behavior. For the moment, at least, she’s happy to leave role
modeling to the professionals.
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3 comments:
I converted.
This kind of behavior, from my point of view, means failure on the part of the Beit Din.
She seems like a flake from the little you tell about her story.
It shouldnt be hard, to weed out the flakes.
My Beit DIn, would not convert me, until I promised to go to Yeshivah upon converting. In hind sight I see the wisdom to it. You cant must taste JUdaism in Teanec and Lincoln. People converting, should be required to live in a large community. Not a small one. Its just a need of the times.
This kind of behavior, spells flake to me.
When these people convert, I view it as failure on the part of the Beit Din. They should be able to weed out flakes.
The attitudse of the Rabbanim, and their approach, seems way too non-chalant to me at times.
They need to invest more personal time with eahc convert, search tme out.
In Israel, definately the conversion process is horrible. I have met people converting, or who "converted" here, and there is no commitment to Torah observance!!!!!! They have no interest in Mitsvot!!!
As I said in the article, the most important part of the conversion process is after the conversion, being in touch with the sponsoring rabbi and continuing having a connection to a mentor. Can't overemphasize that enough.
The beis din has a hard job. The community issue is a real issue and the more the convert is integrated in a proper community the better
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