I’ve been asked: “If your faith is essentially Jewish, why would you need to go through a formal conversion? Aren’t you already Jewish?”

My answer is: “Because that very Jewish faith tells me that I will be Jewish only when Jews recognize me as Jewish.”

A Jewish faith is not a faith of comprehension of truths. Judaism is not essentially a “belief system.” Jewish faith is orientation toward what transcends one’s own finitude in time, in space and in understanding — calling for a whole-being response: whole mind, whole heart, whole strength. And the faith is oriented toward reality that responds back. Judaism is radically and actively mutual.

I’ve been asked: “Why undergo all that arbitrary ritualistic rigmarole of Jewish conversion?”

My answer is: “Undergoing conversion is my way of honoring the priniciple that the most important things we can learn are arbitrary until suddenly and miraculously they stop being arbitrary to us. These rituals might have enormous meaning that I will understand and re-understand later. Until then, participation in these rituals is, for me a ritual of demonstrating my teachability. That’s the first part. The second part is the blunt fact that this is what it takes to recognized as Jewish by the Jewish community, and even if I do not understand the requirement, I respect it as something I do not understand. In undergoing conversion I am making a sacrifice of intellectual self-mastery to the transcendence of other understandings and to other people. Compared to what was asked of Abraham, it is a minuscule sacrifice.”