“Where you stay” – The Australian Jewish News

Are you Jewish?

No, I don’t mean “Are you Jewish?”

Jewish can be something conditional, an identity that is part of you to a certain point, such as vegetarian, Labor voter or St Kilda fan.

It’s something that may or may not be important to you, depending on how you’re feeling at the time.

But instead try saying, “I’m Jewish.”

Sounds a lot harder in your mouth, doesn’t it?

I think for many of us, October 7th turned us from Jews into Jews.

It hit me particularly hard for two very specific reasons.

One is now about eight months old, cute, drools slightly and is starting to crawl.

On October 7th, my wife and I enjoyed our last vacation before our daughter was born.

Seeing on TV and the internet what was done to women, children and babies that day; And then realizing that we were about to bring a Jewish child into the world was a shocking and sobering experience.

Our child, our precious, longed-for daughter, would live her life with a target on her back for the crime of being Jewish.

If something were to happen to her because of this, how could we live with ourselves? Would she blame us?

Like most of you, I was fortunate to live in a golden age of freedom, prosperity and acceptance of Jews.

Will that change soon?

The second reason October 7th hit me hard is because I am a convert.

What, the Goyishe name didn’t give it away?

I remember meeting the rabbi of Wellington’s Temple Sinai, Ed Rosenthal, during the conversion process in the 1980s.

He told me that I had to weigh my decision very seriously because there were very real risks involved in becoming part of the Jewish people.

“Maybe anti-Semitism doesn’t affect you, but history shows us that your children or their children will ultimately suffer because of what you do,” he told me.

With all the insouciance of youth, I lightly informed him that anti-Semitism was dead and would never come back.

I told Rabbi Ed that the fact of the Holocaust was the stone rolled over the grave of anti-Semitism.

I apologize that I may have mixed up my religious metaphors.

Ed, who wasn’t much older than me, looked at me with eyes that suddenly had three and a half thousand years behind them and said flatly, “You’re wrong.”

I was wrong and he was right.

Anti-Semitism has risen from its grave and it is clear that it never really went away.

Becoming part of this people means so much more than just a change of religion, and fathering a Jewish child has strengthened me in this.

I cannot see photos of the Bibas children Kfir and Ariel, who were held captive in Gaza all this time, without thinking of my own daughter.

Her Hebrew name is Nechama.

There is a tradition of naming babies born nearby after Tisha b’Av Nechama or Menachem, meaning “comforter.”

And every day for the past year has felt like Tisha b’Av.

One of the figures in the Tanach most identified with converts is, of course, Ruth the Moabite, an ancestor of King David.

She famously says to her mother-in-law Naomi, “Ask me not to leave you or turn back from following you. For wherever you go, I will go; and where thou dwellest, there will I dwell: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”

The word “lodge” is “ןול” in Hebrew and means “to stay overnight”.

We can understand this as Ruth’s promise to be part of the Jewish people, not only in good times, but also in the dark nights that our people have so often experienced.

A dark night has surely fallen upon all of us now, it is nothing theoretical, of an old book or a black and white newsreel or dirges read while we sit on the floor in the dark.

Because the potential costs of living as a Jew are now very real, I have decided not to deviate from the decision I made in my twenties.

A decision that then made me a Jew.

A decision that now leads me to say, with real knowledge of the possible costs: “I am Jewish.”

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