Choosing a Jewish Life, Revised and Updated: A Handbook for People Converting to Judaism and for Their Family and Friends

Becoming a Jew means choosing to enter into that covenant through which, in turn, God chooses you. It is a mutual, voluntary embrace.

People become Jewish because they love the heat and light of text study, because they want to be part of a people and history that loves justice, because they love the idea of belonging to a worldwide family, because they love Torah.

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.

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

Perhaps one reason why Judaism locates its spiritual center in the Torah is because its study is so firmly grounded in human relationships.

“God asks for the heart, and we must spell out our answer in terms of deeds.”

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.

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.”

Judaism defies definition as a religion pure and simple. Unlike other religions, Judaism also refers to a civilization and a culture. The Jews have been called a nation, a tribe, a race, a folk, an ethnic group, and the “people of the book.”