Rabbi Urges Jews to Overcome Bias in Seeking Converts

Hoping to overcome Judaism’s centuries-old distaste for missionary activity, an influential Los Angeles rabbi is urging his synagogue 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 Encino’s 1,800-family Valley Beth Shalom, the largest synagogue in the San Fernando Valley.

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

“Far from being a sectarian, ethnic clan, we are a people whose faith and wisdom and ethics has endured for four millenia,” he said.

Convert-seeking missionary efforts are common among Christian faiths and Islam, and the liberal Reform branch of Judaism has begun national programs welcoming non-Jewish converts this decade. Orthodox Jews, the most traditional branch, concentrate on reclaiming non-practicing Jews. But the centrist Conservative branch--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 linked to the Conservative movement.

Schulweis said in an interview that he hopes to promote the idea of seeking converts in national Jewish circles. But he said he first wants to gauge reactions in his own congregation--both to possibly advertising in the mainstream press, and to his thesis that the biggest obstacle to seeking converts is a bias against embracing outsiders religiously.

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

Schulweis said some Jews find it hard to believe 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.”

But Schulweis said the search for converts should not stem from a desire to compensate for the shrinking number of Jews in the wake of the Holocaust and, in the United States, cultural assimilation and high rates of intermarriage with non-Jews. Nor should Judaism proselytize in response to beefed-up conversion efforts by Southern Baptist missionaries--targeting Jews--and efforts of groups like Jews for Jesus.

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

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Rather, Schulweis called for an open-arms, low-pressure explanation of Judaism’s emphasis on ethics, intellectual inquiry and varieties of spiritual expression--an approach that will also resonate with Jewish-born congregants, he said. “It is important for Jewish self-understanding, pride and dignity.”

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, when he 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, 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, Marder said. A survey taken last year of the first 2,000 enrollees found that 45% were non-Jews, a third of the non-Jews went on to take a longer course, and 14% of them eventually converted, she said.

Introduced last year for the first time in the Los Angeles area, “a few hundred people signed up” for the courses at 10 Reform synagogues, 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 would then refer them to more mystically minded Jewish groups, such as the Chabad movement, or those teaching the Kabbalah, he said.

Schulweis’ Friday night text noted 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.”

Schulweis noted that a modern Jewish historian, Salo Baron, estimated that the number of Jews grew from 150,000 in 586 B.C. to 8 million in the First Century A.D., and that 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 persecutions left a long legacy among Jews of rejection of proselytizing efforts.

“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 John Crites of Sherman Oaks, who is himself a convert and was accepted this year for Rabbinic studies at the University of Judaism. “That feeling appears to be disappearing somewhat in the younger generation.”

Crites, 44, said he grew up in a non-religious 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.”