Try It, You'll Like It: Should Jews Proselytize?

Liberal Jews who support outreach claim that active proselytism was the Jewish tradition until the Roman Empire outlawed conversion to Judaism under penalty of death.

By Sue Fishkoff

The following article is excerpted from Moment magazine (August 2002) and reprinted with permission of the author.

 

Christopher and Marie O'Malley are sitting at home one evening when the doorbell rings. Chris opens the door to find a well-dressed couple on his steps, smiling politely.

 

"Excuse me, are you Jewish?" one of them asks.

 

"No," Chris responds.

 

"Have you ever considered Judaism for your spiritual needs?" the interloper continues, reaching into her satchel for a bunch of brochures, which she hands over to the bewildered homeowner. "We're holding a class tomorrow night. Perhaps you'd like to stop by and see what we have to offer."

 

This would never happen, right? One thing that has always set Jews apart from Christians and Muslims, something we point to with pride, is that Jews don't push their religion on other people. Jews don't tell non-Jews that they're going to hell, that they'll be denied salvation if they don't accept the halakhic yoke [the obligation to observe Jewish law]. Jews don't proselytize.

Is Welcoming or Discouraging Converts the Jewish Way?

But we sure used to. Most Jews today may not be aware of it, but Judaism has a long history of not only welcoming, but encouraging gentiles to become Jewish. From the day Abraham picked up a flint and performed his own circumcision, thus becoming Judaism's first convert, ancient Israelites openly spread their teachings among the nations they encountered.

 

Jewish proselytizing was so successful, it's estimated that by the first century CE.. fully 10 percent of the Roman Empire was Jewish--close to eight million people.

 

"It's an incredible number, and it means that the Jewish community was not meant to be this tiny, minuscule group," notes Rabbi Lawrence Epstein, founder and president of the Conversion to Judaism Resource Center in Commack, N.Y.

 

Jews only stopped open proselytism because of pressure from Christian and then Muslim rulers, beginning in 407 C.E. when the Roman Empire outlawed conversion to Judaism under penalty of death. But the internal, theological impetus to be "a light unto the nations" (Isaiah 42:6) persisted through the centuries, albeit undercover, advancing and retreating along with Jewish fortunes in the Diaspora.

Is Outreach Valid in Contemporary America?

Now in 21st-century America, where Jews are a privileged minority openly practicing their religion, powerful in every area of political, social, and economic life, some rabbis and Jewish leaders are suggesting that it's time to cast off the prohibition forced upon us by anti-Semites and return to our original universalistic mission. Judaism is a great religion, with much to offer today's society. Why shouldn't we make it more available to outsiders who might wish to join the tribe?

 

"I welcome the idea of freshening up the gene pool," says San Francisco sociologist Gary Tobin, president of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research and author of Opening the Gates--How Proactive Conversion Can Revitalize the Jewish Community. "We're doing a great mitzvah if we help make more Jews."

 

What does "making more Jews" mean? Not just welcoming new converts once they convert, which virtually all Jewish leaders say they advocate, or being more open to inquiries from potential converts--here the Orthodox are more circumspect than the other denominations--but actually encouraging non-Jews to consider choosing Judaism.

Tobin calls it "proactive conversion," the notion that Jews should stop playing hard-to-get and start issuing open invitations to spiritual seekers from outside the faith. Jews don't need to go door-to-door or hold mass stadium rallies, he says, just open their eyes and realize there's a growing number of non-Jews out there in America who are attracted to Judaism and who would, if given half a chance, make fine additions to the Jewish family.

"In America today," Tobin notes, "people change religions all the time. Two out of every five Americans switch religions at least once."

 

Proactive conversion isn't a "magic bullet" for what ails the Jewish community, Tobin cautions. Education is key, for born Jews and for converts, so that every Jew is actively choosing Judaism.

Private Club vs. Open House

Tobin's book caused considerable debate, as Jewish thinkers from across the religious spectrum considered how far Jews should go in encouraging non-Jews to explore conversion.

 

Many people oppose a more active policy. Some fear that Jewish missionary efforts will antagonize Christians and lead to increased anti-Semitism. Some believe that proselytizing is un-Jewish, and by engaging in such activities Judaism will somehow become "Christianized."

 

But the main opposition Jewish outreach workers encounter is a feeling, deeply held by many, if not most American Jews, that they are special because they are few, endangered, and members of a select blood tribe.

 

The debate over encouraging conversion turns on competing visions of what the Jewish community is supposed to be. Is Judaism an elite club that only a chosen few may join, or a moral and ethical construct that many people could adopt?

 

Much of the initial interest in promoting Judaism among non-Jews was driven by the same demographic urgency that led to outreach programs directed at disaffected Jews: the intermarriage crisis and the resultant dwindling of the Jewish population. "There is strength in numbers in America," Tobin says. "Jews have been a potent voting force. If they don't grow as a community, they will become more and more marginalized."

 

The solution, Tobin believes, is upping the numbers by bringing in more Jews. "I think if we devote resources to the various target populations--people married to Jews, people who have Jewish heritage, people who are interested in Judaism--I believe that in 10 years we can have 10 million Jews instead of five and a half million."

 

Even in the Orthodox world, there's a growing feeling among rabbis that they should be more welcoming to potential converts with Jewish blood, particularly the children and grandchildren of intermarried Jews.

 

Hands down, it's the Reform movement that goes furthest in opening the spiritual doors to non-Jews. Faced with growing numbers of non-Jews in their own congregations, Reform rabbis and educators have come up with programs both to make these people feel comfortable with synagogue life and--gently--to encourage them to explore the conversion option.

 

Leo Baeck was the first major Reform leader to call for proactive conversion, stating in a 1949 address to the World Union for Progressive Judaism that the Reform movement should establish a "missionary center" in America to train Reform educators to go out and spread the faith. "Our self-esteem, our self-respect asks it of us," he insisted.

 

The late Rabbi Alexander Schindler, longtime president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, issued a similar call in a landmark 1978 address in which he urged Reform Jews to begin offering Judaism to the "unchurched"--gentiles not affiliated with a particular Christian church.

 

Still, the message was met with resistance. The Reform movement's outreach department was initially charged with facilitating conversion, not instigating it. It was only in 1994, a year after Schindler repeated his exhortation in another address to his movement leadership, that the Reform movement came up with an even more preliminary yet far-reaching program--a three-session course called "A Taste of Judaism," conceived of as a "first taste" of Judaism for non-Jews at the initial stages of interest.

What the Movements Are Doing

Since its inception, the Reform movement's national outreach director Dru Greenwood says 45,000 people have completed the course. About half were non-Jews. A survey of the first 2,000 graduates found that 14 percent of the non-Jews went on to convert.

Outreach Shabbats, interfaith support groups and mentoring programs for converts, are by now standard parts of Reform congregational life.

 

The Conservative movement's approach to outreach is still primarily focused on encouraging conversion of non-Jewish partners in mixed marriages. But that's the leadership. On the ground, some Conservative rabbis say the movement's New York-based leaders have to catch up with their constituency.

 

Since 1986, Rabbi Neal Weinberg has directed the Miller Introduction to Judaism Program at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles--the Conservative movement's West Coast flagship institution. About half his students are non-Jewish, many of them involved in interfaith relationships. But growing numbers of his students aren't involved in an interfaith relationship at all. More than 8,000 students have come through his course in the past 15 years. About 2,000 have converted.

 

To critics who charge that he's running a conversion mill, Weinberg responds that in 16 weeks of three-and-a-half-hour classes, he gets to know each student personally and is able to judge the sincerity of their intentions as well as or better than a rabbi who meets weekly with conversion candidates one-on-one, the traditional method of pursuing conversion to Judaism.

 

Weinberg strongly believes that the Conservative movement should be "more proactive" in promoting Judaism to the outside world. Why not set up Jewish reading rooms, he suggests, where interested non-Jews could stop by in a non-threatening atmosphere to pick up information? Why shouldn't local Jewish Federations fund positions like his, setting up their own non-denominational educational-cum-conversionary introduction courses?

 

The Orthodox view is that Judaism does have a universalistic mission, but it is to spread Judaism's ethical teachings among the gentiles without necessarily converting them to Judaism.

 

Greenwood [the Reform outreach director] says that although Gary Tobin's call for proactive conversion "may seem fringe," he is in fact describing the substance of what the Reform movement is already doing--an assessment, by the way, that Tobin does not share. But neither is Tobin's sense of urgency shared by the majority of Jewish leaders interviewed for this article. Epstein of the conversion center in Commack, N.Y., who is passionate about the need for Jews to restore their sense of universal mission, believes the Jewish community is not ready for the kind of wholesale conversion pitch Tobin advocates. Not yet, anyway.

 

[Harold] Schulweis [a Conservative rabbi who set up a popular outreach program, described in the associated perspectives], on the other hand, feels there's no reason to hesitate. "Jews need to be convinced they have something unique to offer the world," he says. "It's all up to the rabbi and the congregation to make these people feel welcome. The synagogue should say, 'We want to meet you. We want to help you.'"

 

Sue Fishkoff is the associate editor of a weekly newspaper in Monterey, California and a regular contributor to the Jerusalem Post, Moment magazine and other Jewish publications. She is the author of The Rebbe’s Army: Inside the World of Chabad Lubavitch (Schocken Books 2003).