I’ve had it easy in New York. There’s no other place on Earth that makes it so easy to be Jewish. Okay, there’s Israel but why are all the package labels there in Hebrew? You know how long it took me to find milk in the dairy aisle?

Anyway, when I decided to convert, all I had to do was hop on a train down from Harlem to the Upper East Side. I connected with a fantastic rabbi right off the bat. Before I knew it, I was emailing him day and night and miracle of miracles, he was responding back.

If you’re a convert and you haven’t been so lucky, then you’ve probably met a couple of rabbis and felt totally disconnected from them. You were looking for a spiritual leader but instead, you found that the meeting with your first rabbi felt a little like you’d been sent to the principal’s office to be punished. Or maybe your first meeting was about as friendly as a root canal.

A conversion should be personal. But from what I hear, for some people, it can be an administrative jungle of dealing with some cold, controlling rabbis who hold your life in the palm of your hands and most of the time, you’re praying they don’t crush the life out of you. Geez!

So why in the world do people convert to Judaism? I mean, some people fork hundreds, thousands of dollars over to do it. The sums I’ve heard are quite scandalous. My conversion was fairly cheap, reasonably priced and what I spent, I mostly spent on books, challah covers, kiddush cups and Shabbat CDs. I never, for instance, had to fly to another country to convert. I never, for instance, took a job as a maid in another country so I could attend a proper conversion school. Wow.

Honestly, I don’t think people realize how hard the conversion process is for some people. If they did, they’d stand there with their mouths open and look at us with a bit of more awe. They’d be proud that people like us would even dignify ourselves to marry into their families. (Nice people keep assuring me that I’m one of the few people they know that is 100% Jewish. I’ve got good yichus–straight back to Abraham and Sarah.) Yeah, if they only knew, they would certainly not look at us with scorn, disdain and endless suspicion about our “true” reasons for converting.

Despite how whacko the conversion process has gotten, people convert to Judaism because they love Judaism and Jews. It’s really that simple. And maybe those of us who have had to work for it, really, really, really know how to appreciate it. I think that things have to get a little more transparent. I think us converts have to bitch and moan a little about the conversion process–at least those of us who aren’t hiding in the corners afraid telling people we are converts will make them look at us differently (and they do, boy, they do). We have to tell people how hard it is turning your life upside down to be Jewish. It’s not all dancing about with Torah scrolls and ritual skinny-dipping in mikvahs. 

Okay, I’m not saying you have to give us converts a medal or anything…unless that is you already have some lying around. But forget oppressing the convert already, geez. It’s against Jewish law, not that it stops anyone from doing it. And there’s another law that says to love us, just to love us. Because, man, it hasn’t been so easy to get membership into this tribe but we’ve done it. Because we love you. We can’t imagine not spending the rest of our lives without you. And we’re so unforgivably sad that you can imagine a world without us.