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Were the secular scholars revolutionaries like the sages of the Mishnah and the Talmud, they would not have abandoned the rituals and symbols of the Jewish culture to the Orthodox, nor the laws of personal relations and of joining the Jewish nation (conversion).
The holiday of the giving of the Torah is the day on which, according to Chazal (Keritot 9a) the people of Israel converted and entered into a covenant with the Lord. Conversion is not, according to them, an act of joining a nation or people, it is entering into a covenant with G-d. The people of Israel functioned as a nation even before the giving of the Torah. That means that from the time of Chazal onward the center of national gravity -- territory, language, dress, and culture -- was abandoned in favor of fulfilling the covenant with G-d. As Rabbi Saadiah Goan expressed it, "Our nation is no nation except through its teachings." Even though in the Scripture "G-d" never demanded a physical act for entering the covenant -- the very acceptance was the covenant -- Chazal used the written text as a axe to entrench their understanding of reality and preserve the Jewish people.
Chazal, by distorting the text, explained that the people of Israel converted by doing three things: circumcision, immersion in a ritual bath, and sacrifice (Keritot 9a), and this process of conversion, this entering into the covenant, was also required of gentiles who wished to join. (I am specifically not writing "to join the Jewish nation," because according to Chazal conversion is for the purpose of joining the covenant with G-d.) Maimonides wrote: "When a gentile wishes to join the covenant and be gathered under the wings of the Schechina and accept upon himself the yoke of commandments, he must be circumcised, immerse in the ritual bath, and make a sacrificial offering (Laws of Forbidden Intercourse 13:4).
The Jewish nation, as is the way of humans, has changed form over the eras, and in the modern age it abandoned the "covenant with G-d" and returned to a nationalistic affinity, as other nations have. But they did not breathe new life into the cultural rituals and symbols which matches enlightened values. If before the process of conversion had a religious significance of entering into a covenant with G-d, "conversion" is now simply the process of joining the Jewish people. This is so funny it is sad: today we try to straddle the fence and on the one hand announce that there is freedom of religion and conscience in our national home and on the other demand a covenant with Gd if one wishes to join the Jewish people. This demands all that follows: fulfilling the 613 commandments, immersing in a ritual bath, and circumcision. This contradiction, both moral and logical, is a mark of shame for the secular outlook -- Judaism in general ignores the democratic nature of the country and specifically ignores its value system. Without a serious investigation of the new Jewish identity in all fields of life -- marriage, divorce, Sabbaths, holidays, conversion…we turn ourselves into laughing stocks, lacking backbone, needing the services of the isolationist cult of Charedim to set our ceremonies and symbols and to run our private lives. What is worse, they are determining how the Jewish nation will look and who may join it.
To illustrate the absurdity and contradiction I will relate an incident which occurred: my friend, a new immigrant from the former Soviet Union, has a gentile mother and a Jewish father. She was educated, in her Israeli home, to feel an affinity with the Jewish people as a Jewish girl, as were her Jewish friends at school. When she grew up, her nationality was listed, in her national identity papers, as "Russian." … For reasons that are clear, she decided that she wanted her identity papers to read "Jewish," so she was required to "convert." After studying religion and the prayers for a year, she was supposed to go to a conversion court for immersion in a ritual bath and acceptance of the commandments. There they would tell her "Know that before you entered the religion, had you violated the Sabbath your punishment would have been karet, but now, after you convert, if you violate the Sabbath your punishment will be death by stoning." Then she would have to immerse in a bath in front of three male judges.
The Jewish nation, in our era, must make its own determination of the conditions for joining the Jewish people and of Israeli citizenship. Those who require the inspiration of the holy texts can learn from Ruth the Moabite's entrance into the Jewish people. Ruth married Kilyon the Jew while still a gentile, and after her husband died she decided to join the Jewish people and said to her mother-in-law, Naomi, "Where you go, I will follow, where you sleep, I will sleep; your people are my people…where you died I shall die, and there will I be buried."
Daat Emet
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