Rav Avi: Welcome to Responsa Radio, where you ask and we answer questions of Jewish law in modern times. I'm Rabbi Avi Killip, speaking with Rabbi Ethan Tucker, Rosh Yeshiva at Mechon Hadar, a center for higher Jewish learning based in New York City. Alright, how are you today?
Rav Eitan: I'm doing great, how are you, Avi?
Rav Avi: I'm also doing well! So here's a question I think many, many Jews have wondered about, and it's something that we see all the time, and frequently ask is this actually okay? So I'm excited to delve into it on a deeper level. The question is: "Can a person convert to Judaism for the purposes of marrying a Jew? How does such a conversion differ from one that is not for the purpose of marriage?"
Rav Eitan: Really old question, not a new issue to grapple with. There's basically three ways of thinking about this, I want to lay them out and then we can sort of poke at them and see how they play out. We're talking here more broadly about motivation, about ulterior motive, about converting to Judaism for some reason other than I decided I wanted to be a Jew, or combined with that there's some other motivator. And the question is, does that added or competing parallel motivation have any effect on the conversion process? And there's essentially three ways of thinking about it.
The first is to think yes it does, and it invalidates the conversion. This is a position that's cited in the Talmud, you find it in Masekhet Geirim, which is a small tractate not in the Mishnah which deals with various laws around conversion, and it says in that text anyone who converts -- here we're addressing a male convert -- for the sake of a woman, for the sake of love, which seems to be, you know, platonic love, not for the context of marriage, in the context of fear -- right, they're afraid of the Jews -- they're simply not a convert. And you have, you know, voices who subscribe to this view saying, you know, that passage in the Megillah where it says that all kinds of people were seemingly becoming Jews in the time of Esther, because they were very afraid of the Jews? This view says those people went through some kind of conversion process, but it didn't count. And in that sense, motivation is a total sine qua non for this view of what it is to convert. It's sort of implausible in the first place that you could become a Jew, but if you're going to, it must be because you want to do it because you simply want to be a Jew for its own sake. That's one approach.
Rav Avi: That's interesting. It feels pretty extreme.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, or it's, I mean, it's on one end of the spectrum here, in that it's insisting let's take conversion seriously as something that has to be of someone's free will, because they want to seek out this specific pathway to G-d. And if they don't have that, or if that's not the dominant thing or the exclusive thing, then we can't possibly view that conversion as actually having been effective. The second position is to say no, motivations don't matter at all. Right? It just shouldn't make a difference. And you have a whole bunch of stories in the Talmud that actually seem to reflect that, the story of one woman who converts because she wants to marry a certain Torah scholar who she became attracted to. And the famous stories about Hillel and the converts who come to him who don't seem to have any noble intentions whatsoever and seem only wanting to convert on the condition that he teaches everything on one foot and that they get to pick what they'll be committed to and what they won't be, and a whole set of stories like that that don't seem to have any concern whatsoever about the motivations.
And for them, I think the process that you see is saying look, becoming a Jew is becoming a Jew. People might have all kinds of reasons they might want to do that; what matters is, do they go through the process, the bodily process, to the extent there's a kind of informing of and commitment to mitzvot -- as long as they sign up for that, that's what it is, and we don't investigate too much of anything beyond that. A third approach, as you might imagine, is a hybrid, which is to say motivations matter a lot, and we don't let people in willingly with motivations that are improper, and to the extent there's a rabbinic court or anyone else who has any kind of say about who gets to convert, they should turn such people away.
But if such people in fact convert, the conversion is certainly valid. So the way you can sometimes construct this is, you know, if rabbinic courts are not really the ones administering the conversions, there's, you know, ad hoc batei din, ad hoc panels of three people who are conducting various processes of conversion, so, you know, it sort of flew under the institutional radar, that may mean that there were candidates that, you know, got through the process that you wouldn't ideally have accepted. But nonetheless, you recognize that at the end of the day they went through a process, met all the requirements, they're now Jewish.
Rav Avi: That third opinion feels to me very important in the way that we're gonna end up treating all converts, because we now don't have to be suspicious of them, there is no such thing as a second guessing, well, should you ever have been allowed to convert in the first place? You just get to accept them once you know they've converted.
Rav Eitan: That's right. It creates this space where the road in may be actually considerably difficult, it may not be a very welcoming and encouraging process in that sense. And it may be quite a bit of questions and investigation during the process, but once the process has been complete, it says that at least with respect to motivational issues, that's done. And we don't go back and revisit that. And that is in fact what becomes the dominant position, which is to say motivation certainly matters for any process that wants to see itself as having integrity, as being about adopting a religious framework for life based on, you know, a kind of discovery of what G-d has to say to you through that framework, has gotta be done out of pure motivation, should be done out of pure motivation, butu that the mechanism of conversion has a power beyond the motivations of the individual people who go through it, and at the end of the day it is more on some level like joining a people or once you've gotten through the bodily process and committed to their history and to their practices, you're on the other side of that divide.
Rav Avi: Great.
Rav Eitan: So as I said, there's Talmudic evidence for each of these different three models, retroactive invalidation of a conversion based on improper motives, kind of having a gatekeeper recognizing that they're in once they're in, and it doesn't have any retroactive effect, and the third model being maybe motivations don't matter at all. And the interesting piece then is as this consensus position emerges that we ideally police motivations on the front end, filter them out, but we don't in the end retroactively judge conversions based on motivation, it's interesting to watch different authorities try to account for the Talmudic evidence that doesn't quite work with that model. In particular, these stories where you have rabbis converting people, seemingly knowing that there's a very clear other motivation on the table such as marriage, and going ahead and converting them anyway.
So, like, the Hillel stories, where Hillel is converting a man who does not seem to have pure heavenly intentions to live up to all aspects of the Jewish covenant and just to be there because this seems like the right religious path, the question is why did Hillel convert him? Why did he allow that? And the Tosafot and some other sources say, well, Hillel had kind of like a sixth sense that basically there was going to be a good outcome here. At the end of the day, he assessed that though the motivations on the way in were complex, this would eventually be a successful conversion story also from the perspective of motivation.
Rav Avi: So that sounds like it gives some subjective decision-making power to the beit din, where we say if the beit din decided it was okay, we can trust them with Hillel as the model there.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, tremendously so, in that you have this really fascinating summary statement by the Beit Yosef, by Rav Yosef Karo, who cites this Tosafot -- it's a really interesting case, it's a man who says he wants to convert under Hillel because I want to become the high priest. I mean, this is a completely absurd thing, that someone who converts could become the high priest, you know, it sounds like a joke. And, you know, the Tosafot say you know in the end he would sort of be able to convert him for pure motivations, not for that reason, and the Beit Yosef says from here we learn that when talking about motivations, everything depends on the court's discretion. And there's this sort of sense that motivations do matter, but they're very unstable. And they're very slippery in the person's own mind and their own experience, and therefore there has to be a certain degree of basically pastoral leeway in making a judgement call as to where this person's journey is going to take them.
Rav Avi: I want to go back and ask one clarifying question, which is it sounds like the different examples you're bringing are all to help us understand whether or not motivation counts, but that the underlying assumption in all three options remains that love, that converting for marriage is not an ideal motivation. And then the question is just whether motivation counts?
Rav Eitan: Yeah, I think that's right. And I think if I hear the implied question behind the question, this I think is very counterintuitive to many people, because in some ways I think some people feel, well, conversion for love and in order to be with someone and to spend the rest of your life with them, what could be a sort of more for-keeps commitment than that? Wouldn't that actually be the path in that would feel like it's more solid? I want to loop back to that in a minute, but yes, you are correct that in these earlier sources, the assumption is the ideal pathway to becoming a Jew is one in which one is really thinking about simply one's religious commitments and framework in a way that is almost devoid of any kind of social context or relationships.
Rav Avi: It's so interesting to me, because most people who are born Jewish don't think of their Judaism totally devoid of the social interest and relationships, so it feels like a tall order to me to ask of our converts.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. Well, and it's really putting things very much in religious terms, in a way that I think when you think back to the story of Rut and the way that kind of gets repurposed and retold as a conversion story in rabbinic sources, it's very striking there where even before Rut says your G-d is my G-d, she of course says your people is my people. And there's a sense there of Rut really wanting to be with Naomi and her people and wanting to be a part of that group. But when that's really distilled in rabbinic tradition and the conversion process in general, to be focusing on what it is to come from one nation to another and to take on another set of religious practices, then that becomes much more the emphasis. I will say though, look -- I think it's fair to say this: that third model that I mentioned, where the motivations don't matter at all, you can imagine within that model saying well, since motivations don't corrupt the conversion at all, then maybe there is something positive to someone doing this for love, but that won't be because it's sort of a necessary condition for converting.
In other words, no one thinks that the relationship piece is a necessary piece, but in the model where it's neutral, then sure, someone could think that's also a positive feature of it. So, moving forward, where things really get tricky is in the modern period. The challenge in the modern period is that when Jews are emancipated in Europe and there emerges a civil marriage system whereby Jews can marry people who are not Jewish, without the approval of either Christian or Jewish authorities, it suddenly completely changes the entire calculus of how the dynamic of marriage and conversion works. If you live in a world where two people of different religions can't really get married or live in public in their respective religious communities, and there's no kind of mechanism for them to do that without one of them converting to the faith of the other, well, then conversion for the sake of marriage is just that. It's really for the sake of marriage, which will be impossible without going through those kinds of motions. And therefore you have a concern about the motivations being way off and completely unrelated to what the person is actually doing, because there's a very specific outcome that they want to achieve, namely marriage and having some kind of public life with this person, which they cannot possibly do without going through this conversion process.
The other thing you have in that world is you have a significant amount of control to actually stop those marriages from happening if you refuse to allow the conversion. And in that kind of setting, it actually makes a lot of sense, right, you can sort of understand the coherence of having a very tough line on the motivational question, because you are both concerned that the person's kind of incentive to do so has been dramatically skewed, because there's something they want really badly and they can't get it without this, and also to the extent you just say no, you may end up preventing what will ultimately be some kind of problematic or dysfunctional relationship in the community. This is the kind of dynamic we still see today around immigration and the ways in which, let's say, getting a green card when it's connected to marriage raises all kinds of flags about phony marriages in order to get some kind of green card. That's sort of the reverse thing, right -- it's not conversion for the sake of marriage, it's marriage for the sake of conversion or immigration. And whenever you've got that kind of difficult relationship, the police authority, their antennae go up.
Rav Avi: Yeah, that helps. That's an important distinction.
Rav Eitan: So the question is, what do you do in a world in which, well, at the end of the day they can ignore you? They don't need your approval to basically live the life they want to live, but there's a desire to convert for one reason or another. And two important lines of thinking come along that essentially in practice virtually eviscerate the earlier ban on converting someone with motivations for marriage. The first is the notion that these people are already married, they're going to be married anyway, and therefore the only choice the rabbinic court has at that point is whether they would rather this be an intermarriage between a Jew and someone who's not Jewish, or a coherently fully Jewish couple.
And many courts have sort of invoked a case, a famous case of the Rambam back in the Middle Ages where he dealt with this in the case of an emancipated slave, it was not quite a conversion case, but similar kind of forbidden relationship where the people normally should not have been allowed to stay together, but the Rambam essentially says recognizing that in this particular case this couple was going to remain together no matter what, this was a woman who was an emancipated slave in her former master's house, and unless there was basically a rabbinic way to permit and sanction this relationship, they would just be living in flagrant violation of communal norms. And therefore better to kind of launder the case as it were, violate the normal procedural restrictions on approving it in order to get to a bottom line that everyone recognizes was better in terms of personal status. So you'll have all kinds of rabbis in the modern period who will say my choice is basically to refuse to convert this person and to end up with then a Jewish partner and a non-Jewish partner, or to find a way to kind of lower my procedural standards but to end up with a better outcome.
Now here, I just want to say on this, I had a kind of mind-blowing exchange once, sitting at a board of rabbis meeting in a certain American city where I'd been invited to teach. And it was this incredible exchange between the orthodox and the Reform rabbi in this city, where the orthodox rabbi was kind of talking through the issue the way I just did of saying yeah, you know, there are all kinds of conversions that I do all the time that, you know, it's either someone is about to get married or sometimes has already been in intermarriage, and I feel that, you know, my choice is either an intermarriage or to do a non-ideal, you know, mixed-motivation conversion but get to the place where I need to be.
And the Reform rabbi responded to him, oh, I would never do a conversion like that! And he was sort of shocked, and her response was coming from a place where essentially she was not as freaked out as he was by having an intermarried couple in the congregation, and therefore as a result, she said, because that's not of primary concern to me, that I make sure there's not a single intermarried couple in the shul, I'm not gonna lower my standards, and until this person is ready to believe in G-d and sign up for the Jewish people and their mission, they'll just be in the community as someone who's not Jewish. I thought that was a fascinating example of kind of the interaction of one's sort of standards or protocols with conversion interacting very deeply with what facts on the ground one is or is not prepared to accept.
Rav Avi: Yeah, it's an interesting story. I want to go back to the way you even framed the question when you got to the modern period, which is you said now that we're in a place where people don't have to listen to you, I wonder why or if that doesn't lead people in a different direction, which is to say the fact that they're even approaching or asking to convert, you now no longer could see that as purely for the motivation of marriage, because they don't need it in order to get married. Therefore merely asking should imply that there's other deeper somewhat religious motivations.
Rav Eitan: You exactly hit upon what many other great modern rabbinic authorities say. That's the other really interesting strand here, and in some ways it's a brilliant move and it's exactly what you articulated. In a world in which people don't really have to listen to rabbinic authority, or put more directly, rabbis don't really have power, some rabbis have therefore argued that this entire category of conversion for the sake of marriage has actually disappeared, because the only reason that someone would come forward in the modern world and seek to convert in the context of a marriage is because they're deeply attracted to and connected to their spouse's heritage, religion, way of life, being considered a kind of fully integrated part of that person's family and their family's religious life.
And in that world, say many of these poskim, there's just no sense in talking about for the sake of marriage, because the marriage can happen anyway. And therefore, not just by way of sort of cleaning up the books as in the first, you know, kind of line of thought here, but in a deeper way saying actually the motivations are more religious and are more pure because even if they're happening in the context of the relationship of marriage, they're clearly not happening in order to facilitate marriage. And so you have all sorts of authorities, including Rav Ovadia Yosef and others, who routinely in various cases deploy that logic and perform conversions of people who are already intermarried or people who are looking to get married, because of exactly the consideration you suggested.
Rav Avi: Great. I really appreciate that this question is both deeply personal and meaningful for individuals who find themselves in these marriages or related to people who have converted starting with this motivation, and at the same time is a really interesting example of looking at the halakhic process, the legal process, and how which values we uphold are gonna lead us down different paths, even if all of those paths might get us from A to B.
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