Rabbi Schulweis Urges Jews to Seek Converts

Hoping to overcome Judaism’s centuries-old distaste for missionary activity, an influential rabbi urged his synagogue Friday night to seek converts among non-Jews.

The notion of conversion “is upsetting to some Jews because they feel Judaism is less an ideology than a biology, a matter of chromosomes, not choice,” said Rabbi Harold Schulweis of the 1,800-family Valley Beth Shalom, the largest synagogue in the San Fernando Valley.

Judaism is a world religion with something to offer, he said in a sermon he prepared for his congregation’s Friday-night service.

“Far from being a sectarian, ethnic clan, we are a people whose faith and wisdom and ethics have endured for four millennia.”

Convert-seeking missionary efforts are common among Christian faiths and Islam, and the liberal Reform wing of Judaism has launched national programs welcoming non-Jewish converts this decade. Orthodox Jews, the most traditional group, concentrate on reclaiming nonpracticing Jews. But the centrist Conservative wing--to which Schulweis belongs--has yet to back any program or spell out a compelling rationale for conversion.

“Rabbi Schulweis is a barometer for Conservative Jews, a visionary, so what he says raises interesting questions for us as a movement,” said Rabbi Daniel Gordis, dean of the rabbinical school at the University of Judaism in the Sepulveda Pass, a school that is linked to the Conservative movement.

Schulweis said in an interview that he hopes to promote in national Jewish circles the idea of seeking converts. However, he first wants to gauge reactions in his congregation--not only to the idea of advertising in the mainstream press but also to his thesis that the biggest obstacle to seeking converts is a bias against religiously embracing outsiders.

The bias is expressed in vulgar form, he said, by those who maintain that “Jewishness comes from a mother’s milk” and “a Gentile remains a Gentile.”

Schulweis said some other Jews are incredulous that any “normal non-Jews” would find spiritual uplift and value in Judaism. “They can only suspect that the converts have something wrong with them.”

World Jewry’s losses sustained in the Holocaust and, in the United States, from cultural assimilation and intermarriage with non-Jews are deepening concerns among Jewish leaders for the future of Judaism. But compensation for those losses, Schulweis believes, should not be the motivation to seek converts.

Nor should Judaism proselytize in response to beefed-up efforts by Southern Baptist missionaries and the campaigns of such groups as Jews for Jesus.

“It’s not a tit-for-tat deal,” he said during the interview.

“Jewish mission,” Schulweis said in his prepared text, “does not mean denigration of other religions or vulgar promotion of evangelical enthusiasm . . . and circus conversion.”

Rather, he said, an open-arms, low-pressure explanation of Judaism’s emphasis on ethics, intellectual inquiry and varieties of spiritual expression will in turn remind Jewish-born congregants of what they already have but only dimly appreciate.

“It is important for Jewish self-understanding, pride and dignity,” he said.

His reasoning is similar to the expressed motivation of the Reform wing. The theme of recapturing Jewish self-esteem was struck in 1991 by Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, who proposed that Reform Judaism actively seek converts among non-Jews.

“Let us demonstrate our confidence which our faith enshrined,” Schindler said in that groundbreaking speech. “Our desire to welcome converts should be made explicit rather than implicit.”

Schindler’s call to conversion efforts was at first controversial, perhaps partly because some members “envisioned people knocking on doors,” said Rabbi Janet Marder, the Los Angeles-based regional director for Reform temples.

But Reform leaders adopted convert-seeking programs and now advertise a free course about Judaism in 90 cities for people uninvolved in Jewish life, Marder said. A survey taken last year of the first 2,000 enrollees found that 45% were non-Jews, one-third of whom went on to take a longer course and 14% of whom eventually converted, she said.

When the courses were introduced at 10 Reform synagogues last year for the first time in the Los Angeles area, a few hundred people signed up, Marder said.

Schulweis said that he and another rabbi at Valley Beth Shalom will begin that synagogue’s pilot program with four free lectures on successive Wednesday nights in January.

Though Schulweis said he would seek out religiously unaffiliated people who may have experimented with New Age religions, he admitted in an interview that “if they are interested in supernatural mysticism, I will not be able to satisfy them.” But, he added, he would then refer them to more mystically minded Jewish groups, such as the Chabad movement or those teaching the cabala.

Schulweis said Friday night that the Jewish faith was once peopled by noted converts and that even King David, ruler of ancient Israel, was the son of Ruth the Moabite. The Prophet Isaiah urged Israel to be “a light for the nations,” and a Talmudic rabbi suggested that “God exiled the Jews from their homeland for one reason--to increase the number of converts.”

A modern Jewish historian, Salo Baron, estimated that Jews grew in number from 150,000 in 586 BC to 8 million in the 1st century, said Schulweis. The Gospel of Matthew expressed early Christian hostility toward Jewish proselytizers: “For you cross seas and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.”

Jewish proselytizing continued until Christianity became a dominant influence in the Roman Empire and Jewish conversion efforts were banned. As Christian hegemony spread through Europe in later centuries, the combination of Christian missionary efforts and anti-Semitic persecution left a long legacy among Jews of rejecting proselytization.

Some insights are offered by John Crites, a convert from Sherman Oaks. This year, Crites was accepted for rabbinical studies at the University of Judaism.

“I think that among older Jews there is a bias against proselytizing because of the anti-Semitic experiences suffered by their parents and grandparents,” said Crites. “That feeling appears to be disappearing somewhat in the younger generation.”

Crites, 44, said he grew up in a nonreligious family, converted to Catholicism as an adult and eventually found what he wanted in Judaism with the help of Temple Aliyah in West Hills.

“Had anyone suggested to me five years ago that I would embrace Judaism, be active in the community and be studying to be a rabbi, I would have thought he or she was crazy,” he said. “I found a way of living that sustains, nurtures and promotes the idea that human beings can, and must, create heaven right here on Earth.”