If you’re preparing for your first meeting with a rabbi about a Jewish conversion, you’re probably spiraling a little. I know I did.
I was convinced I had to show up with all the right answers, a list of mitzvot I was already keeping, and zero mistakes. Spoiler: I was wrong.
In this video, I’m sharing what I wish someone had told me before that first meeting — the emotional stuff no one talks about, what rabbis are actually looking for, and the first mistake most people make (don’t let it be you).
Whether you’re just starting your Jewish journey or already deep in the process, this will help you show up as your real self — a little less panicked, a lot more prepared.
👇 Watch below and let me know in the comments: what’s your biggest worry about meeting a rabbi?
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Transcript below, as always.
Transcript:
You’re not walking into a courtroom, you’re starting a conversation. Here’s how to show up as your real self.
Before I met with a rabbi, I spiraled for weeks, and that was before I even sent the email asking for a meeting.
I thought I needed all the right answers. I didn’t. Here’s what actually matters.
No one tells you how emotional this meeting can be.
I wish someone had told me, so now I’m telling you.
This one conversation can feel huge and it kind of is.
What if I said the wrong thing? What if they told me I wasn’t ready? What if I offended him?
If you’re preparing for your first meeting with a rabbi you’re probably feeling nervous, or totally unsure what to expect.
I thought I had to walk into this first meeting and have all the right answers and a list of the mitzvot I was already observing.
I was so wrong.
If I could sit down next to you before your first rabbi meeting, this is what I’d tell you,
not just the logistics. But also the logistics.
And the emotional part that no one talks about. Let’s talk.
I want you to walk into that meeting more grounded, more clear.
Definitely more confident
and a little less like you’re being interviewed by God themself.
If you join my mailing list at Building a Jewish Life.com, link down below. I have a free resource called the Rabbi Meeting Prep Sheet that’ll kind of walk you through these questions and a few more to help you prepare for your first meeting with a rabbi or any meeting after that.
It’s completely reusable for every meeting you have with the rabbi. And probably best to go in with a plan in in every meeting.
What I thought it would be like was frightening. Quite frankly. I was terrified.
I felt like this one random dude that I had never met before and might never meet again, held so much power over my life that he could say yay or nay, and that would determine the course of my life. And when you’re 19 or 20, that is huge.
Thankfully, he turned out to be a very nice man, not particularly interested in what I had to say, but open to it and happy to help me as much as he could, but obviously a busy guy talking to a college student who might or might not ever step foot in that synagogue again.
It was pretty mundane.
Because remember, rabbis are just humans with some more schooling.
And quite frankly, they don’t have to pass any pastoral tests to become a rabbi in most cases.
Getting the stamp of approval of being a rabbi just means you know a lot of stuff. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you know how to interact with other people like a normal human being. So sometimes rabbis are rude, sometimes they’re hungry and it becomes hangry. Sometimes they just got off the phone with their kid’s school because their kid got in a fight.
They’re a real whole person and you need to remember that whatever the outcome of this meeting is, if it’s negative, it probably has very little to do with you. It’s probably not personal.
Sometimes that’s small comfort, but I don’t want you to be as hurt as I sometimes was in my interactions with rabbis who just really were not in the right space to be talking to a person like me at that time.
But let me reassure you, for the grand majority of you, this meeting is going to be boring, mundane, and probably pretty short.
I want you to take the perfectionism and the fear and put it on the shelf.
Save the perfectionism and the fear for when you really need it.
If you struggle with that perfectionism and being afraid that people are gonna find out that you’re actually secretly a horrible person, you might have imposter syndrome.
I’ll put a link up there and down below to a video about how to deal with imposter syndrome in Jewish conversion.
And let me tell you about the first mistake that most people make in their Jewish conversions. It’s not usually the biggest mistake and it’s usually not a major mistake, but it is usually the first mistake that they make: waiting too long to call a rabbi. You should call a rabbi and set up a meeting before you feel ready, because I can guarantee you, if you are a normal human being,
you will never feel ready enough. It is always gonna be nerve wracking. So get it over with. Pull off the bandaid.
They’re a normal human. You’re probably a normal human. It’ll be fine.
But this is a choke point. You cannot pass Go if you do not start talking to a rabbi. And to a degree, some of the things that you’re doing don’t quite count unless there is a rabbi involved that is seeing this progress being made. Don’t take too long to get them involved. The earlier the better. Even though it’s gonna be scary as hell, you’ll be all right.
Come on, we’re doing this together.
So what are rabbis really looking for? Honestly, the first thing that they’re looking for is whether you’re a raving lunatic.
So you know that there is a number of people in this world who have legitimate mental health crises around spirituality.
But I’ll tell you what the rabbi is not looking for: perfection. They know you’re a beginner. Like you can’t hide that.
They know you’re gonna mispronounce words. They know that you’re gonna say the wrong word. They know that you’re gonna stumble over your words and you’re gonna say, “um, um, what’s it called?” They know. They deal with beginners all the time. Part of a rabbi’s job is teaching people who are newer to Judaism, and converts are not the only people who are new to Judaism.
There are so many Jews who are new to Judaism.
So do not worry about looking like a fool, looking like a tourist, looking like an idiot.
They’ve seen it all before.
If they treat you like crap based on that, that says more about them than it does you, and it probably has nothing to do with you at all.
What they are looking for: sincerity, curiosity, and a readiness to build a relationship with the Jewish people, Hashem, and the Torah, and also the community, including that rabbi.
When you’re dealing with this rabbi, remember that in the back of their mind, if you continue to show up, you become sort of their responsibility, whether they want it or not if you’re showing up in the pews, week after week.
They want to be friendly with you, at least in, again, 95% of the cases.
And yes, they may discourage you. It is required for a rabbi to discourage a potential convert, but there are rules around how to do that. This is Judaism. We got rules for everything.
And at the root of those rules are respect. Because every person, Jewish or not, is made Betzelem Elokim, in the image of God. And it is no coincidence that that is my username on all my social media profiles. I feel a little strongly about this concept.
The rules around discouraging the potential convert are meant to still be respectful. They should not be cruel. They should not be mean. They should not be petty. And again, if what you experience is those things, that is a rabbi problem, not a Judaism problem.
There are texts that are given as samples for discouraging the convert. I remember, that it was read to me verbatim. I should have looked it up before I started this video, but it’s basically a list of tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people and is like, “do you really wanna join this? What’s wrong with you?”
I mean, the “what’s wrong with you” is not in there, but it’s a little implied.
And it’s not wrong. It is a little crazy to wanna become Jewish, especially in the current political climate. That’s why my blog for so many years was titled “You’re Not Crazy.” Because literally every Jew I told that I was converting said, “you are crazy. Why are you doing that?”
You will get lots of discouragement. Very little of it is meant personally, and very little of it has anything to do with you.
It’s a reasonable question: why? And that’s basically what you’re meeting with a rabbi is gonna come down to: why? Why is your butt in this chair at this point in time? What happened in your life to lead you here? What is your religious history?
What draws you to Judaism of all things? How did you even find it? So few people even know that you can convert to Judaism. My comment section is full all the time with people saying, “You can’t convert to Judaism. That’s not real.”
So out of all the people on this earth, why are you here sitting across that desk from them? That’s probably gonna be the majority of your conversation.
So if you are seeing red flags in this meeting, I’m gonna link above and down below to my video about red flags in the Jewish conversion process. Abusers exist. Rabbis who are having mental health crises exist. If bad things are happening, don’t write them off completely.
Think through whether this is a real red flag or just a person with a bad day. That video will help you separate out the two a little bit,
but it’s an imperfect art.
But remember, this foundation, it goes back to Betzelem Elokim again. Hashem wants you treated with dignity and respect.
You do not deserve disrespect. If you were being treated that way, that is not what God wants from you.
It is okay to prioritize self-care and to get yourself out of a bad situation. I didn’t because I didn’t think that I had other options and I might not have had other options, quite frankly. I knew that I needed to convert and I knew that I had to go through these rabbis to do it, and so I dealt with bullying and I dealt with sexual harassment, and none of that was God’s will.
That was crappy people being crappy.
People in power sometimes abuse that power. God willing, through making videos like this, having these conversations, we can change this and bring about real changes that improve the lives of people who are converting or becoming baal teshuvahs.
‘Cause it doesn’t have to be this way. This process could be respectful and kind . It doesn’t have to be a test of how much you’re willing to suffer.
The Jewish people have dealt with enough suffering.
Suffering will come whether we want it or not. There is no need to manufacture suffering.
Well in lighter news, let’s move on to what you can do to feel more prepared. That bird path took a turn, didn’t it?
So kind of going back to what I was saying before. It’s really important for you to think over your story. Either write out or talk out your story, maybe to a sympathetic friend, maybe recording yourself, maybe writing it down, maybe starting a journal of your Jewish journey.
I guarantee you that you will treasure that journal in future years. I wish I had done something like that.
It’s hard to put such a complicated story together on the fly. You wanna be thinking through, what’s the chronology? What was the first exposure you had to Judaism? What were your early experiences with Jewish people, Jewish holidays, Jewish portrayals in the media,
antisemitism. Have you ever witnessed antisemitism? Those are very pertinent points today.
You want that story in a way that it’s not a monologue you’ve memorized, but that it’s a story you feel comfortable telling because I can guarantee you, you’re definitely gonna be sharing it again and again.
So get comfortable with this story and the major events of it so that you aren’t fumbling for words in the moment.
But I will tell you one thing, you don’t have to overshare and if you are most people, you are gonna have a really hard time not oversharing, because you are going to want to justify your need for this conversion . You’re gonna feel like you need to give every piece of evidence to this judge so that he’ll rule in your favor, but that’s not what this is.
You don’t have to share your whole life story.
Think through ahead of time how much you think is enough. And if they don’t think it’s enough, they’ll tell you, and then you can tell them more. You don’t have to word vomit all over them. Trust me, I, I have word vomited all over many rabbis in my day. It’s awkward.
And one of the most important things I’m gonna tell you here is that you are allowed to ask questions. Quite frankly, you’re interviewing him as much as he is interviewing you. Or at least that’s how it should be. You get a say in this too.
Ask questions, find out if it’s a good fit for you, because that matters. A bad rabbinic fit sucks. You don’t always have a choice, but most of the time you have some choice.
And as always, if you don’t feel safe, I want you to get out of that situation No rabbi should make you feel ashamed because you asked questions. No rabbi should make you feel like questions are bad or discourage you from asking questions. Any rabbi who does that is a bad rabbi and quite frankly, a bad Jew. We are a religion built upon asking each other questions.
Have you heard of the Gemara?
So, as I said at the very beginning of this video, if you want a worksheet to kind of walk you through the process of preparing for a rabbi meeting, that’s something you can get for free from my website. All you have to do is go to Building a Jewish Life.com, sign up for the mailing list, and you’ll get access to the entire Resource Library, which includes the Rabbi Meeting Prep Sheet, but it also has the Shabbat Menu to help you start a Shabbat practice. It has the Jewish Experience Tracker, which is gonna be a great resource for helping you prove to that rabbi that you are learning how to live a Jewish life.
There are lots of resources there that would be really helpful to you, whether you’re converting or you’re building a Jewish life from scratch.
So check it out.
So here’s what I wish I hadn’t worried about.
Pronouncing everything right. Having the right word for everything. Knowing the holidays. Proving I was serious enough. Thinking I had to be observant already. Thinking I had to be perfect. And thinking that I had to say what I thought they wanted to hear.
Your first meeting with a rabbi doesn’t have to be perfect. It has to be real.
You’re allowed to show up with questions, nerves, and hope, and quite frankly, that’s how you should show up. That’s a good thing.
Those are the things that are going to make you a good Jew.
So I want you to drop in the comments below. Tell me what your biggest worry was before you met with a rabbi, or what you’re most worried about with meeting with a rabbi coming up.
