September 18, 2008
This week’s portion opens with an agricultural-calendrical reference that seems curiously out of place as we come close to Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. The portion describes the ancient offering of the first fruits (with its echo of Shavuot, the biblical holiday of first fruits) and an obligatory accompanying recitation (“My father was a wandering Aramean…”) that is included in the Pesach Haggada. Traditional interpreters hold that the wandering Aramean was the patriarch Jacob and thereby, by extension, the ancestral progenitor of the Jewish people.
A halachic question raised in medieval sources is whether someone who comes to Jewish identity through conversion is obligated (or even permitted) to say “My father…” — since her or his actual biological father was not “a wandering Aramean” (i.e., a descendant of Jacob).
Conversion is less an individual’s ‘declaration of faith’ and more an act of taking on ‘citizenship.’
To some people, the question itself sounds peculiar, even somewhat offensive. The received wisdom is that “converts are equal to born Jews in every way” and to raise a question about the first fruits declaration seems to suggest otherwise.
Where is Jewish identity located? It is helpful to make a distinction between the terms “identity” and “status.” “Identity” primarily means the ways in which individuals choose to identify themselves (for example, “I am Jewish”). In the case of a new child, it is the way in which parents identify children, as in “my/our child is Jewish.” In the case of a convert, it is what he or she acquires through study, ritual, and affirmation.
“Status” denotes or denies affirmation of someone’s “identity” by a community, group, people, or some other form of collectivity. For example: “In our congregation, we recognize you as being Jewish,” or, “In our movement, your child is recognized as being Jewish.” Conversely, “in our community” — or “according to Halacha [Jewish law] — we do not accept your claim of Jewish identity,” or “We do not recognize your child as Jewish” or “Your conversion did not include certain required rituals and so is incomplete.”
Communities define themselves in part by determining who is and who is not a member. Communities cannot exist in a meaningful way without such determinations. Even when boundaries are low, permeable, and soft, communities seek self-understanding through self-definition. Contemporary Jews often differ as they try to establish definitions and understandings of what comprises Jewish identity and status. This is not meant as a way of judging people or of “keeping the gates closed.” It is, rather, an attempt to understand Jewish identity as both substantial and significant by defining — as well as a community can in a time of transition — what it sees as the core symbols of identity and the basic content of that identity.
Jewish identity and status are not determined on a purely individual or autonomous basis. Each of the contemporary Jewish religious movements, through its rabbis, congregations, and central organizations, strives to establish basic positions and policies regarding Jewish identity that can be assumed to be consistent within the movement.
Leaving aside the rituals of conversion, how does one actually come to join the Jewish people and experience it as one’s own, if one cannot claim a wandering Aramean as an ancestor? One answer is that when someone accepts and internalizes the story of the Jewish people as one’s own story, Jewish identity has taken root. Because Jewish identity is framed in collective and not only individual terms, conversion to Judaism is less an individual’s “declaration of faith” as a conversion to Christianity might be, and more an act of taking on “citizenship” through joining the Jewish people.
And thus the medieval sage and codifier Maimonides taught that a convert to Judaism was indeed entitled to offer the declaration at the first fruits, because in joining the Jewish people and accepting the Jewish narrative she or he symbolically acquires the patriarchs and matriarchs as spiritual ancestors. And thus someone who comes to Jewish identity through conversion — as well as her or his children — become the descendants of a wandering Aramean.
Richard Hirsh is executive director of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, Wyncote, Pa.
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