The pre-Shavuot newspapers were filled with the usual stories about converts to Judaism — but none more so than the Jerusalem Post, long Israel’s leading proponent of a more welcoming attitude toward converts.
I once participated in the production of a documentary on gerei tzedek (righteous converts) for Israel TV. And my own life as a Jew has been greatly enriched by the converts I have known, beginning with a brilliant philosophy major at the University of Chicago. Her Orthodox conversion forced me to consider the possibility that there might be something worth looking into seriously about my religion. I have visited Orthodox congregations in the Jewish hinterlands of America in which gerei tzedek constituted almost a quarter of the congregation.
The extraordinary commitment required to sever ties with one’s former life and accept Judaism’s rigorous commandments cannot help but inspire. But, by definition, the extraordinary can never be common or mass produced.
Calls for a more “welcoming” attitude towards converts — i.e. large-scale efforts to encourage conversion — invariably begin by noting the demographic disappearance of world Jewry and its consequences, such as the declining pro-Israel political clout of American Jewry. But accounting tricks to increase the number of American Jews will neither help Israel’s cause, nor are they necessary.
As American Jews show less and less interest in their Judaism, they also concern themselves less with their fellow Jews in Israel. Abortion rights rank above Israel on American Jewry’s list of priorities. American Jews have plighted their troth to a political party that, like them, is in rapid demographic decline, and whose core constituencies increasingly resemble European elites in their attitudes towards Israel.
President George W. Bush won 97 out of 100 of the fastest-growing counties in America in 2004. Fortunately, as Richard Baehr points out in The American Thinker, those counties constitute the core of Christian Zionism in America. Jews are concentrated in fewer than 50 congressional districts, but 375 representatives can be classified as strong supporters of Israel.
Efforts to encourage mass conversion put the cart before the horse. Large and numerous are not Jewish terms of measure; purity is the Jewish standard. Long ago, the Torah foresaw that we would be the smallest of the nations. An intense core can generate numbers — fewer than 10,000 Ashkenazi Jews in Rashi’s time grew to 13 million by the Holocaust. But numbers will not generate purity.
The real problem facing world Jewry is that Judaism has ceased to be meaningful for the vast majority of those born Jewish. Without addressing that fact directly, all hopes of reversing Jewish population decline are doomed to fail.
How can a religion that cannot even inspire in its young the basic commitment to marry another Jew and raise Jewish children hope to attract others to its banner? Two out of every three marriages involving a Jew in America today are intermarriages, and the situation is worse elsewhere in the diaspora.
At the same time, Jewish birthrates are among the lowest for any group in America. A religion that is manifestly failing to provide its members with spiritual sustenance, and is seen by its adherents as little more than a certain political position and cultural attitude, has little to offer others.
Anyone can obtain a “conversion” in America that involves nothing more than reading a book or two or learning the first verse of Sh’ma. Yet the rate of “conversion” for non-Jewish partners in mixed couples is dropping. That statistic shows why “conversion” on easy terms only increases the core problem facing world Jewry — the perception of Judaism as something trivial.
Jonathan Rosenblum is a writer for the Jerusalem Post, where this column previously appeared.
TWO VIEWS:
Can we save Judaism through conversion?