One morning in the summer of 1978, and in the manner prescribed by Jewish law, I became a Jew. Such an event is something one does not easily forget, and in my case the occasion was made especially memorable by its setting and circumstances.
My conversion took place in New York during my first visit to the United States. The final ceremony was performed somewhere in the Flatbush area of Brooklyn, in a neighborhood with an evidently large population of Orthodox Jews—not the kind of district which British visitors normally have cause to seek out. And because, among other formalities required by Jewish law, it included a ritual immersion, that ceremony was held in the local mikveh or ritual bathhouse, which was also a new and strange environment for me to find myself in. Finally, some of the things which happened there that morning, though no doubt routine occurrences to the three rabbis who supervised my conversion, struck me at the time as being extraordinary and mystifying.
Nine years later, however, it is not only the exotic or alien nature of that experience which makes it stay in my mind. I was to discover that the actual process of my conversion had engaged my interest and also aroused my feelings in ways which beforehand I would not have thought possible.
The project, I have to say, was one about which I had felt not the slightest tremor of religious or transcendental sentiment. Nor did it at any stage engender such emotions. I had undertaken it with reluctance, only to meet the needs of my future wife’s parents, who had been literally sickened at the prospect of her marrying a non-Jew. I approached the matter, therefore, with diffidence and embarrassment—indeed with some sense, from my own point of view, of its absurdity. Yet, to my surprise, the nature of the experience itself was such that these feelings were changed into interest and respect—into admiration for the three rabbis, and what they stood for. It would be overdoing things to say that I came to mock, and stayed to pray. But in the days that followed my conversion—once I had found time to make sense of the multiplicity of impressions the event had made on me—I realized that it had contained meanings and expressed truths which I had neither expected nor sought from it. In a dim, approximate, and unspiritual way, it had acquired a kind of authenticity.
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At home in England it seemed that a conversion to Judaism was certain to be a wearying and lengthy process, so I had decided to look elsewhere. Because of my misgivings about the propriety of what I was doing, I wanted to get the business over with quickly. The thought of being circumcised did not worry me too much, and in the event, that burden was to incommode me for less than two weeks. What I most wished to avoid was being obliged to sustain for a lengthy period an appearance of moral or religious commitment. Although the borough of Brooklyn seemed an unlikely place to find the kind of conversion I was looking for, I was advised that there the whole matter could be dispatched with American efficiency, as it were—quickly and without fuss. And so it was. After I had been in New York for only two weeks, the proceedings had already reached their final stage. Two successful meetings with the head of the Beth Din, the Rabbinical Court, which was to perform the conversion, were behind me.
On the first of these the head of the Beth Din had been discouraging, and had made some effort to dissuade me from the course of action on which I had embarked. I interpreted this, however, as a “conventional” effort on his part, especially as we concluded our meeting by making arrangements for a second meeting within a few days. (Later I was to discover that an effort at dissuasion is a virtual requirement of the conversion procedure, in order to test, however briefly, the postulant’s determination.) At this second meeting I was examined courteously on various aspects of Jewish law and practice about which (as I shall describe later) I had informed myself. These trials were now behind me. Now all that remained were the concluding formalities.
My conversion was accomplished therefore with a degree of speed which was certainly, as such things go, unusual, and which some people may even judge indecent. For all that, there was nothing illicit about it. The Rabbinical Court I dealt with was an Orthodox one. If it moved quickly, it did so, I subsequently learned, with the warrant of the ancient rabbis, who directed in the Talmud that a conversion take place as expeditiously as possible. Moreover, the Rabbinical Court appeared to perform its duties punctiliously, and the validity of my conversion (exactingly tested since then) has never been questioned.
In a way the very speed of the act seems to me in retrospect to have been a necessary ingredient of its style, contributing to the powerful impact it made on me. The whole transaction, including its formal procedures, and the manner and spirit in which these were handled, was brisk and businesslike; its outward forms neatly and economically embodied the meanings I chose to draw from it. These I took to include certain perceptions about the world and about human behavior, which, in spite of their antiquity, I as a proselyte was to find novel and refreshing. They were unmistakably present that morning in the mikveh, in those events which I found—at the time—so bewildering.
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It was in, of all places, Jerusalem that my journey to the mikveh in Brooklyn began. I was in Israel at the time working on a series of television films for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on the origins and history of the Arab-Israeli dispute, a project I had long nursed. My future wife was back in London, where she then worked as an emissary of the Jewish Agency. Her parents, a fairly traditional couple in their early seventies, had emigrated to Palestine in 1933 from Hungary. They had been told something of our relationship and knew by now of our intention to marry.
One day my future wife’s brother came to the hotel where I was staying. We sat in its courtyard drinking coffee. It was obvious that he too was in the role of emissary. His parents, I was told, liked me. That I was divorced and the father of teen-age daughters constituted no problem. Nor did they make it a condition of their approval that I convert. But they were very unhappy about the situation. As I knew, they were both in the frailest of health, and the sleeplessness and anxiety they were currently enduring were the cause of great concern to everybody. Could, therefore, the question of a conversion at least be discussed? He used the word “hypothetically,” as if to introduce a note of rationality into proceedings where that quality was not likely to prevail.
I went through the motions of argument. The children—were there to be any—would be Jewish anyway, as the offspring of a Jewish mother. We intended to live in Israel where a Jewish education would be guaranteed. How, anyway, could I promise to keep the Jewish obligations or mitzvot when my future wife (or he for that matter) was far from observant herself? Jewishness, I argued, was a condition, and not just a religion, one from which I was excluded by birth and national feeling. A conversion would imply beliefs which I did not hold. It would be a dishonest procedure, as his parents knew, without meaning to me, and in consequence, I felt it ought therefore to be of no significance to them. It would not change the real world.
My future brother-in-law ignored all this. He looked at me steadily. “Do it,” he said with great vehemence and urgency. “Just do it.” And then he added, in a tone of high moral seriousness as though his proposition would be self-evident to all good men, “You don’t have to believe it.” This remark would not, I imagine, meet with rabbinical approval, but it seems to me now that there was something very Jewish about it. He was asking me to perform a good deed, something which in its way could be construed as a mitzvah. Judaism, as far as I know, urges but does not demand that people feel good about doing good.
A week later, back in London, my future wife and I made an appointment with a Liberal (what in America is called Reform) rabbi in the hope that something would be on offer in that quarter. Although her parents were religiously observant, any gesture on my part would have pleased them. Had I not read somewhere that on the progressive edges of Judaism there were rabbis who described themselves as “deists” or “agnostics”? I had found that difficult to understand, but it had given me heart. The word “Liberal,” however, had misled me.
The rabbi’s study was tastefully furnished, very different from the Brooklyn rabbi’s dining room where I was to be questioned six months later. There, I remember, the wallpaper took the form of a large, golden brown photo blow-up of a sylvan scene in autumn. The walls of this room, however, were lined with books, many of a secular kind. This rabbi was bareheaded. He got up from his desk to greet us, switching off, as he did so, a record player on which, I recall, the music of the Greek composer Theodorakis was being played. My hopes—raised by this ambience—were soon in decline.
A conversion was possible, but I would be expected to attend classes on Judaism for a year, and to take part in “discussions.” So too would my intended wife, in order to acquaint herself with the principles of Liberal Judaism. Circumcision was not excluded. Finally, and in due course, we would both be expected to join the rabbi’s congregation and take an active part in its life.
My future wife’s amour-propre was offended by the reception given to us. She was a Jew, a literate and well-informed one. She couldn’t see what the discussions could do for her. Nor was I at all willing to go through all this. My motives, far from being disguised, had, with my future wife present, been openly on display. Yet I was being asked to make a sustained show of “sincere” commitment, not merely for a year, but for the indefinite future. Gloomily (and perhaps unfairly) I imagined myself attending seminars on “Jewish Values” or “Judaism and Feminism.” With circumcision as well, these were formidable demands.
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I had heard about the possibility of being converted in Brooklyn from a cool young Londoner. He himself had not long before returned from his own conversion there and was already married to the Jewish girl (like my own future wife an Israeli) whose family had insisted on it. “It’s completely kosher,” he had assured me cheerfully. A letter of recommendation from an Israeli rabbi acquainted with the family had been called for, and this we knew could be arranged in our case too. The young man told me of the kind of questions I would be asked by the head of the Beth Din. He wished me luck, lent me some books which he had found useful, and gave us the address to write to.
Although all this information proved to be accurate, the tone of his remarks was misleadingly blithe, as though the experience I was to share with him were no more exacting than, say, a visit to the dentist. As I have already indicated, it was to be far more perturbing and much more interesting than this. Still, we dutifully followed the procedure he had outlined. Conveniently for us, my future wife’s brother was just then posted to New York on a two-year stint of Israeli government business. There he acted as my agent, arranging—albeit in the teeth of much resistance—the first appointment on my behalf with the head of the Beth Din for a few months later. No promises were made, but by indirect means we were able to infer or at least hope that if I presented myself at the right time and exhibited some familiarity with Jewish religious law, a conversion would be likely to take place.
Tutored by my future wife, I began a modest course of study. We read the Shulhan Arukh, Joseph Caro’s 16th-century codification of Jewish law. I learned by heart a number of prayers and she explained the significance of the Jewish festivals. We dipped into Maimonides. As Passover was due, I was taken through the Haggadah, and I followed the first of the nine seders I have since attended with some understanding and interest. I was charmed by the way it involved children, and moved by the contemporary parallels which lay in its pages, and which, I supposed, had always done so. I realized too—to qualify the remarks I shall be making below about the appearance of the mikveh—that for Jews it is in domestic matters that religious and aesthetic feeling come together; for example, in the seder, or in the lighting of the Sabbath candles.
Throughout this period, I was still immersed professionally, through the series of films I was making, in the early and nominally secular history of Zionism, and my full-time work was given an added dimension by my elementary explorations of Judaism. To save time in New York I arranged to be circumcised in London, discovering, curiously enough, that it could be done by the National Health Service, though in this, as in more crucial matters, there would be an unconscionable delay in securing a bed. So I put myself privately into the hands of a Jewish surgeon whose credentials to perform the circumcision did not, in the event, go down well in Flatbush. I spent one night in a plush little hospital reading Chaim Weizmann’s autobiography and speculating about the condition of my bandaged penis. Shortly afterward we flew to New York. Two weeks later I went to keep the appointment arranged for me at that mikveh.
On the morning concerned, I made my way to Flatbush by subway. I carried a briefcase which contained the accouterments required for the ceremony. These included a blue velvet yarmulke with silver trimmings, perhaps a shade frivolous, I felt, for so solemn an occasion. I also took with me a set of phylacteries, or tefillin, the ritual objects containing passages from Scripture with which observant Jews bind the left arm and head during prayer. These items were the property of my wife’s nephew who had just had his bar mitzvah. The briefcase was my own, though it bore the letters “BBC” stamped over its lock.
At that point I had worked for the BBC in London for nearly twenty years, most of them as a producer and writer of educational and documentary films. I was then forty-eight years old. As I walked through the unfamiliar streets from the subway station it occurred to me that my film work had included many sequences of the kind in which I myself was now to be the principal actor. Not actually a conversion to Judaism, but other and similar rites of passage—a child’s first day at school, a Hindu wedding. Here, the voice of my profession told me, was the material for an example of that genre. The sense, induced by this thought, that I was observing myself from the outside was to add to the feeling of unreality I experienced in the episode which followed.
I had never seen the inside of a mikveh before (nor for that matter have I done so since) and so had little idea of what I would find there. This one was a small, single-story building of rather worn appearance. Naively, knowing of its religious purpose, I had half-expected to see there some signs or artifacts of an elevated or pious character—perhaps a menorah or some volumes of the Talmud. Inside, however, its anteroom was devoid of ornament. On its otherwise bare walls there was only a large notice which said “MIKVEH, $5—SPECIAL $10.”
In front of the notice was a row of massive and aging hair dryers. I was early, so I sat down to wait on a bench next to these silent machines. Judaism, I told myself, as I waited nervously for the three rabbis to arrive, pays little attention to those aesthetic concerns which, especially on solemn occasions, inform the practice of some more “spiritual” religions. I knew this in theory; now this utterly functional setting brought the idea home to me. A mikveh is a place used routinely by observant Jews—for example, by women for their monthly acts of cleansing and purification; hence the hair dryers. This was indeed the place where I would be pronounced a Jew. The appearance of the mikveh, however, matched the events that followed, some of which were indeed prosaic in character.
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All three rabbis of the court or Beth Din arrived together. The head of the Beth Din, whom I had already met twice, greeted me. One of his colleagues was a large untidy-looking man with glasses—quite old; the other was a younger fellow much brisker in manner and appearance. The rabbis set about their business without delay. The younger one was a mohel, someone authorized to perform circumcisions. The circumcision I had undergone in England a couple of weeks earlier had not, it seemed, been done in point of Jewish law to the rabbis’ satisfaction. Another symbolic circumcision had therefore been deemed necessary: the drawing out of a small amount of blood from the tip of my penis. The door of the mikveh was locked and, without ceremony, I was told to lie down on the very bench where I had been sitting, and to open my trousers. Amid some praying a small needle was inserted humanely, almost imperceptibly, into the correct place. All three rabbis watched this operation closely. Suddenly an animated scene broke out.
The elderly rabbi with the glasses was not sure that blood had been drawn. “It’s there,” said the mohel impatiently, “look, it’s there.” The bespectacled rabbi examined the end of the needle again, but shook his head, still unsure. The mohel raised his voice. “Gimme some Kleenex,” he demanded. He found some and rubbed the needle against it. He then moved over, taking the other two rabbis with him, to a position beneath an electric light bulb. Lying in some discomfort on the narrow bench, my pants still undone, I craned my neck up and sideways at the three rabbis as they all peered closely at the piece of Kleenex. For a moment the three intent faces, hats pushed back, were framed together sharply against the light. “I see it,” said the one with the glasses, “I see it.”
I was then taken—almost in escort—to the changing rooms where I was given a loose white gown of some linen-like material. Clad only in this, I made my way to a small tiled bath, and under the direction of the rabbis descended its steps and immersed myself three times in its waters. The rabbis stood in front of me on the side of the bath looking down at my actions with close interest. As my head rose out of the water for the third time, I could see from their gestures that a discussion had broken out, though from its vehemence, and in those acoustics, it sounded a bit like a fight. I looked up at them, fearful that something had gone badly wrong, and that my enterprise was in trouble even at this late stage.
“You touched the side,” one of them at last explained brusquely. “We think you touched the side the last time, so you’ll have to do it again.” I did it again, this time satisfactorily. And then, or perhaps it was earlier (for the chronology of some of these events is now confused and dreamlike), I stood with the waters of the mikveh up to my middle, and repeated in Hebrew after the presiding rabbi some of the prayers which my future wife had taught me by heart in the preceding weeks.
I was told to get dressed. I scrambled into my clothes. My hands were trembling. There was a mirror in the changing room and I looked at myself briefly with disbelief. I hurried back past the hair dryers and the large notice to where the rabbis were waiting. I opened my briefcase. A prayer shawl was placed on my shoulders, and somebody put the blue velvet yarmulke on my head. I saw that its style was a matter of indifference to them; it served. My head and left arm were now bound with phylacteries.
“You never laid tefillin before?” asked the old one incredulously, as he watched my nervous and muddled efforts to put them on in the prescribed manner. I had practiced several times the night before, but I lied (gratuitously, I am sure), mumbling something sanctimonious about not being sure that I had been entitled to do so—I was afraid of being exposed as the impostor I felt myself to be. Help was provided. The proceedings continued with more prayers, which I repeated adequately, conscious, though, of my English accent and again of the deep improbability of my appearance and situation. Suddenly I found myself being congratulated. It was all over.
But not quite. There was a small additional scene, or coda. In the haste and social awkwardness of my departure, I realized as I was leaving that I had forgotten to take the phylacteries. Reluctantly, I returned to get them. The rabbis were chatting together as they too packed up to go.
“Hey, you forgot your tefillin,” said the old one with the glasses, whose manner I had found attractive in spite of the earlier difficulty he had caused; there had been something straight and ingenuous about him. He was now holding the soft bag embossed with the Star of David, in which the tefillin were contained. Nor, I realized, would he let it go.
“But do you know what you did? You know? You realize what you did?”
I shook my head, smiling foolishly, eager to get away again. He too smiled, broadly and with warmth.
“You did,” he said, “exactly what the children of Israel did when they were given the Torah. That’s what you did. You did what they did.”
He kept me waiting a second or two before explaining.
“You fled,” he said. “That’s what you did, you fled, just like the children of Israel, you FLED!”
Still smiling, he handed over the tefillin, and I fled again. I had done something pertinent, but his approbation had embarrassed me, producing a tinge of guilt.
I stepped out into the sunny Brooklyn street. In my pocket was the certificate which authenticated my new status; on my still damp head was the borrowed yarmulke which bore witness to it. A block away from the mikveh, I removed the yarmulke, stuffing it along with the phylacteries into my briefcase. The letters “BBC” seemed like a comment, though one of obscure intent, as bewildering as much else that morning. Straightening up, I crossed the road to the spot where I had arranged to meet my future wife. She was relieved that my ordeal was over, and pleased with me for doing what I had done—pleased not only for her parents, but also, I realized, for herself. We took a cab to City Hall to arrange for a marriage license, as we planned to marry as soon as possible.
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In the days that followed I began to realize that the ceremony I had just been through had confronted me baldly and without false delicacy with a way of looking at the world which was fundamentally different from my own and which, on inspection, turned out to have an enviable degree of power and coherence. Of course I had done some reading in preparation for my conversion and was not completely ignorant, I thought, of the distinctive nature of Judaism. But those attitudes with which I had some modest theoretical familiarity now leaped at me. I had seen them reified in the appearance of the mikveh and witnessed them in performance in the behavior of the rabbis. The business with the Kleenex, the small crisis in the bath, and even their indifference to my fancy yarmulke—all these, it seemed to me, vividly asserted the same proposition, one which I had known intellectually but had not so far really felt: in Judaism obedience to the Law is what matters. In the weeks following the ceremony that simple idea struck me with subversive force.
Perhaps, at the time, my own understanding of this notion was itself a simple-minded one. Bemused and in turn fascinated by the way the rabbis had devoted their attention to what seemed to me to be trivial matters, it is likely that I was making too much in my own mind of the prescriptive and behavioral elements in Judaism, and doing so, furthermore, at the expense of its spiritual content, its foundation in faith. I had perhaps taken the importance Judaism attaches to obedience to the Law, and accorded it a paramountcy even greater than that which it properly enjoys. I was thus myself seeing the religion in terms which were excessively mechanistic. What is more, in focusing just on the idea of obedience to the Law, and on that idea’s psychological effects, I was scanting the Law’s concrete substance, its myriad actual duties and obligations, its content and its rationale.
Still, this perspective, in spite of its distortions and oversimplifications, provided me with a means by which I could attempt to organize and “read” the events which had taken place. With some temerity, I found myself invoking what I judged to be a “Jewish” way of looking at things as I reflected on my recent experience. At a strict theological or scholarly level what ensued in my mind, I daresay, is dubious or at least incomplete. Nevertheless, this was indeed the way in which I approached the matter. And it gave the whole business, to my own satisfaction at least, a certain coherence.
For example, the course of action I had undertaken had much about it which had seemed to me dishonest. Was I selling out? Had I compromised my integrity and been untrue to myself? Were the concessions I had made to my future wife’s family unreasonably large ones? Was my action inspired by magnanimity and tolerance, or merely by an unprincipled desire to avoid trouble, the product of my weaknesses and not of my strengths?
All nonsense: so the conversion itself, the manner in which it had taken place, seemed to be telling me. Such preoccuptions I now deemed to be non-Jewish. These inspections of my inner condition had been fruitless, since they had led to no serious outcomes in my behavior. I could have stopped the whole business at any time if I really had been deeply concerned by them, instead of trying to have it both ways. It occurred to me that my thoughts could be regarded from a behavioral point of view—and this, it seemed, was a point of view which my conversion so clearly expressed—as part of the surface noise or chatter which modern people feel obliged to emit, especially when they are uncertain of themselves, and wish to assert their uniqueness: a kind of posturing. This world, however, of which I had been given so compelling a glimpse, had no place for such fancies. It was clear and confident in its purposes—ones which I saw displayed with unaffected poise and assurance. The rabbis knew exactly what they were doing, and why. But it was not only the insidious attraction of their moral certainty that touched me. Their point of view, I realized, if I had understood it correctly, was a very intelligent one.
I began to ask myself whether my own head was filled only with the residue of a Christian education, touched up now with the cant of modern psychology and contaminated further by some overindulgence in the reading of fiction. What, for example, was the “self” to which I might or might not have been true? For most purposes the idea of being true to oneself is unhelpful, since the concept is one which conveniently lends itself to endless redefinition. “To thine own self be true”—it is an injunction for 1960’s flower children. It struck me that Judaism was perhaps wiser to stick to the clearer imperatives of the Ten Commandments, the outcomes of which were likely to be more predictable.
It goes without saying that Judaism is grounded in the idea of a transcendental God, an idea which the Jews were indeed the first in history to promulgate and champion. But as a religious system, Judaism, I was convinced, is on the whole a matter more of law than of faith. Certainly in every tiny respect the conduct of my conversion seemed designed to fix this truth in my mind. Since obedience to the God-given Law is the first requirement, it follows that motives are of secondary importance, and so too is inwardness. Right behavior might lead to a desirable inner state, but it is anyway virtuous in itself.
The utility of this point of view made an impression on me. It was more theoretically elegant than, though very different from, some of the ideas on which I myself had been brought up. I thought, for example, of the Christian concept of pride—T.S. Eliot’s characterization of Thomas à Becket, agonizing about doing the right thing for the wrong reason. So far as I could tell, Judaism was mercifully free of this kind of agonizing.
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My conversion was free of other things I was happy to dispense with, notably of any serious effort that I could detect on the part of the rabbis to imbue it with meanings beyond those which inhered in its procedures. They stuck to the Law, fulfilling but not embroidering its requirements. Blood was drawn, but the specified minimum sufficed. No avoidable or punitive mortification of the flesh was called for. From the seriousness with which these two matters were approached, I inferred that immersion and circumcision were the two most important requirements. On these two material points there could be no compromise. Evidently, however, compromises were in effect made elsewhere: precisely in the immaterial or “spiritual” domain where my own anxieties lay. My “sincerity” was more or less taken for granted. No one asked me directly, for example, whether I believed in God.
This surprised me, for I was brought up as a Welsh Nonconformist. In our chapel “sincerity” was held in such high esteem that it was often affected; people broke down theatrically in the midst of eloquent extempore prayer. Some of the attitudes of that form of religion were still embedded in me, for I was faintly shocked to find that the nature of my motives in converting was dealt with in such a relatively perfunctory way. It was touched on, of course, as it had to be, but formally and without emotion. This, I concluded, was also sensible. The rabbinical authorities know that most proselytes in these times are not driven by overwhelming conviction. Within the Law these people accommodated themselves to this fact.
Yet keeping within the Law had posed a problem for the head of the Beth Din, one which he resolved with skill, the product of much experience. In itself the desire to marry a Jew—the most common reason for conversion nowadays—is deemed to be unacceptable grounds for a conversion. I had therefore been warned by my friends on no account to mention my intended marriage. In most cases the rabbinical authorities can reasonably surmise that this is the proselyte’s main concern, and the head of the Beth Din with whom I dealt in fact knew that in my case a wedding was in the offing. Nevertheless, neither he nor I mentioned the subject throughout our two long conversations. The convention that I had been seized in middle age by the universal truth of Judasim was scrupulously maintained, and by both of us.
“Why do you wish to become a Jew?” I cannot remember the details of the reply I gave to his no doubt obligatory question. But I do remember that my words sounded both pretentious and banal, though in fairness to myself, it is not a question to which a brief and convincing answer is easily imaginable. The rabbi listened to my effort impassively, and we moved on to safer, factual ground (my knowledge of the dietary laws), leaving the real reason for my presence there hovering almost palpably in the space between us. And yet, ten days later, when the ceremony in the mikveh was barely over, and the ink on my certificate hardly dry, the rabbi casually raised the forbidden subject. “When’s the wedding?” he asked amiably.
I was astonished by this sudden change of tack. Why had he chosen to bring this embarrassing subject into the open? It was explained to me later that this was because the conversion was over, a fait acompli. The contract had been made; the “deed” had been done. Our earlier pretense had, therefore, been rendered obsolete.
I found out later, too, that even conversions entered into for ulterior reasons can be recognized in Jewish law a posteriori. The rabbi’s remark was indeed after the event, if only by less than a minute. The rabbi had stayed within the Law—but only just, and, yet again, it seemed to me, conceding to it no more than it required, as though his relationship with God were an ingenious battle of wits.
I guessed too that the words I had uttered in the mikveh were deemed to be what the English philosopher J.L. Austin calls “performative” ones. They possessed a kind of magical autonomy, and their efficacy, I supposed, was not dependent on whether or not I “meant” them. Nor for that matter did the rabbi’s private knowledge of those motives appear to alter the factuality or validity of what had taken place. I was out of my depth here. Where did the omniscient God of my childhood figure in all this? “He didn’t tell me he was getting married, did he?,” I imagined the rabbi expostulating to the Almighty, in his own defense.
All this was new to me, and for obvious reasons interesting. Some of my interest was, so to speak, anthropological in character. But it was also more than this. Everything that happened seemed to me to have a coherent and intelligible subtext. Motives, for example, it was surely implied, were not entities to be weighed and measured or inspected on a piece of Kleenex. No human art can decipher them, for they can be dissembled, and even the dissembler does not necessarily know what he is really doing. Judgments about motives, therefore, were not the prerogative of human beings. With decent modesty the rabbis seemed to be telling me that their competence lay in humbler spheres, and it was here that their zeal—to me it seemed like passion—could appropriately be directed. Was there blood on the needle? Did he touch the sides?
By concentrating their energies on such matters, they left my “self” alone, allowing me an area of privacy, and the effect of this was humane and civilized. Had they probed my state of mind in a similarly meticulous way, this would only have raised the level of dissimulation I anyway practiced, pushing up the stakes in a game whose outcome had already been, in effect, determined. Their approach, I judged, was a pragmatic one. A deal was being made. Was not the conversion a contractual event in every sense? At bottom the interests the rabbis served were ones calculated to help in the preservation of Jewishness; my different interests were equally respectable, and they could be reconciled with theirs. So, in much of what happened, and in what I surmised to be its meaning, there was something I chose to see as common sense. Nobody is perfect. Things are not always as they should be. Actions speak louder than words. Talk is indeed cheap. But an immersion is an immersion and a circumcision, a circumcision. This last in itself, I reflected, voluntarily endured in midde age, could reasonably be taken to bespeak the presence of at least some serious purpose.
I learned, and not only on an intellectual level, that Judaism is a rich and complex culture, and that its law is a subtle and refined and infinitely exacting one, based on an immense body of thought and experience. In the life of an observant Jew, obedience to the Law is an all-consuming, a transforming, commitment, and in its intensity it can make the “sincerity” of a Welsh Nonconformist look pale by comparison. All obvious enough, I suppose, but somehow my seeing it at work and lovingly handled in that obscure bathhouse—this is what made the impression.
Of course, my thoughts about what was happening to me were less charitable then than they are now. Whatever truth or validity they might contain (like that of my conversion itself) have been acquired a posteriori. Deeds first; inwardness later. The Jewish belief that this is the way things often work was nicely reflected in the pattern of my own feelings, so giving to that view of the world a further and disarming vindication.
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A few days after the events I have described, the marriage took place. It was a Jewish wedding, performed by a Conservative rabbi—a representative of another large branch of contemporary Judaism. As a friend of the family he knew both of the rapidity of my conversion and my motives for it; he too, I suppose, applied the a posteriori principle in judging its validity.
On the Kelubah, or marriage contract, my new Jewish name, “David ben Abraham,” was inscribed. Traditionally a proselyte, to symbolize his rebirth as a Jew, is required to take a new name, and his full entry into the body of the Jewish people is marked by his being called son of Abraham (or, in the case of a woman, daughter of Sarah). I had chosen the name “David,” not for its biblical associations, but after my compatriot David Lloyd-George, something of a hero in my own Welsh Nonconformist family. As a child I had seen his image used on postcards, as though it were a landscape.
My gesture had been a tiny—albeit private—affirmation of my own tribal loyalties, amid the buffetings they were receiving. But the choice of name now seems an apposite one in other ways. Lloyd-George was adept in the art of compromise and not given to dogmatic or even firm adherence to principle. So this in itself made him a suitable figure after whom to name myself. His actions, on the other hand, it occurred to me, had impinged positively on the history of the Jews. His was the government which in 1917 issued (for all sorts of motives) the Balfour Declaration, and his was the policy—his personal commitment to Allenby’s Palestine campaign in World War I—which rendered that document meaningful. There is a small street in Jerusalem, where we now live, named in Lloyd George’s honor, and which I regularly pass when I go shopping with the small son and daughter of my second marriage.
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My own actions in Brooklyn, in their immensely smaller way, of course, also affected the real world, even though if it were a rational place they should not have done so. My wife’s parents were excessively, disproportionately, grateful for what I did there. Two or three months afterward my wife had a letter from her father. He hoped, he said, that my career in the BBC had not been jeopardized by my conversion; that my prospects there would not suffer; that I would not become the object of anti-Semitic feeling.
These thoughts were wide of the mark. My conversion, when it became known, was perhaps the cause for a short time of some amused gossip at the bar. My many Jewish colleagues, their careers not evidently damaged by anti-Semitism, looked at the matter with a mixture of curiosity and embarrassment. The most I had to endure were their facetious jokes (“Oy vey, so you’re one of us already?”). These jokes have left no scars, though they might indicate the presence of some in those who made them.
But if my late father-in-law’s observations showed some misapprehensions about the nature of the country I lived in and the organization I worked for, I found them all the more poignant. They came, I realized, from the heart of Central Europe, from the Hungary he and his wife had left in that fateful year 1933. His family had suffered grievously in the Holocaust. He saw my action as one that aligned me with the past sufferings of his people and as the guarantee that I would be obliged to share those sufferings in the future. In Israel where I now live (and I live there by right as a Jew, by virtue of the Law of Return), the possibility that I might be called upon to do so is real enough.
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