unless I live a life that is worthy of her reverence, I make it almost impossible for her to live a Jewish life.

IF YOU ARE IN THE PROCESS of becoming Jewish, clear off a bookshelf. Better yet, buy a new bookcase.

you perform a mitzvah by giving someone else the opportunity to do the mitzvah of helping you find your way.

From synagogue pulpits of every denomination, the message is repeated so often that it has become a truism: “We are all Jews by choice.”

Your very existence—both as an individual Jew-by-choice and as part of a historic influx of new Jews—challenges deeply held but unexamined assumptions about Jewish identity and about Jewishness, which is also referred to as Yiddishkeit. For those who understand Jewishness as an ethnicity, converts present an interesting dilemma.

when all Jews have access to the entire marketplace of ideas and beliefs, an authentic sense of being Jewish—of Jewishness—requires living as a Jew, doing Jewish in some way.

One uniquely Jewish approach to Torah is midrash—the imaginative process of interpreting the Bible. A variant of the Hebrew word for “search out,” midrash is not a single book but an entire literature that supplies answers to questions that the Bible does not answer, such as “Why did Cain kill Abel?” Studying midrash opens Jewish texts in wonderful

A man went looking for Rabbi Hillel and said to him, “I want to become a Jew. But only on the condition that you teach me the Torah, all of it, while I stand on one foot.” Hillel looked at this smart-aleck and said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man. That is the entire Torah—all of it. The rest is commentary. Go and study.”

A mitzvah is what Jews do in response to the divine. A mitzvah is value-in-action—a deed filled with good. Mitzvot are the praxis of Judaism.