You can love Judaism and hate converting.
Conversion can be one of the most meaningful choices you’ll ever make…and still include parts you resent, grieve, or simply don’t enjoy.
But converts are often expected to be endlessly joyful and grateful. If we admit that something is difficult, people may question our sincerity. Eventually, we start questioning it ourselves.
That pressure doesn’t create stronger converts. It teaches people to hide ordinary human emotions until frustration becomes shame, resentment, or burnout.
In this video, I’m challenging the expectation that converts must perform constant happiness to prove that we truly belong – and talking about why difficult feelings can sometimes tell us something important.
If every difficult feeling immediately becomes “Maybe I’m not sincere enough” or “Maybe I’ll never be Jewish enough,” join my mailing list and download the free “Jewish Enough” Self-Talk Toolkit. It will help you recognize those thoughts, answer them honestly, and stop treating every struggle as evidence that you don’t belong.
Transcript below.
Transcript:
A sincere Jewish convert should never find the conversion process difficult. It should be a joy.” I got this comment on my last video about why Jewish conversion is difficult.
It sounds encouraging, right? But it creates an impossible test.
If conversion feels difficult, then maybe you’re not cut out for it. Maybe you’re not sincere enough.
And a lot of conversion candidates already fear exactly that.
If you struggle with conversion, does that mean you shouldn’t be converting? Does it mean you’re a bad Jew?
Saying conversion should never feel difficult is a form of toxic positivity. It makes joy the only acceptable emotion. And treats ordinary frustration, grief, or resentment as evidence that you’re not sincere.
And it can become spiritual bypassing when every painful experience is forced to be reframed as a test from Hashem or a necessary part of the conversion process.
Sometimes something is difficult because growth is difficult. But sometimes a conversion is difficult because the situation is unhealthy. We need to be able to tell the difference.
And when we don’t allow people to process perfectly normal negative emotions, they get shoved down and build into resentment or just gather and gather until they explode.
You know who was created to feel unmitigated joy? Angels.
Humans were created to feel the full range of human emotions, and that includes “negative” emotions. Most of our battles as humans is learning how to engage productively with our emotions. And the first step to engaging with an emotion is admitting what it really is, not trying to convince yourself that it’s something completely different.
Hi, I’m Kochava. I’m a Jewish convert, and I’ve been helping people convert to Judaism since 2010 through my blog, BuildingaJewishLife.com.
And if every difficult feeling you have immediately turns into, “Maybe I’m not sincere enough.” Or “maybe I’m doing conversion wrong,” you should download my “Jewish Enough” Self-Talk Toolkit. It’ll help you recognize those thoughts and answer them without pretending that the difficult parts aren’t real. You can get it for free by joining my mailing list at the link down in the description below.
So here’s the fundamental truth: joy and difficulty are not mutually exclusive. They’re also not opposites. Something can be good and painful.
It can be chosen and still involve sacrifice.
It can be worthwhile while still being occasionally miserable.
It can feel meaningful without feeling meaningful every day. And it can feel joyful overall, even if every part isn’t joyful.
And this isn’t limited to conversion. I mean, the first thing that pops out at me is parenthood.
Like having children is one of my favorite things I’ve ever done, but was it also painful and difficult? Heck yeah.
But it’s not just parenting. This is true in marriage. It’s true in caregiving for the elderly or the disabled.
It’s also true about things we choose in our life, like moving to a new city, or whether or not you go to college. And it definitely applies to your job.
In all these other areas of our life, we can understand this idea that you can love and hate something at the same time.
Something can be really important and meaningful for you while the actual mechanisms of it suck.
But when converts struggle, both before and after they become Jewish, suddenly people treat that difficulty as ungratefulness and like they don’t really want it.
But this is a double standard. Born Jews are allowed to say that learning Hebrew is boring.
They’re allowed to say that a service was boring.
That keeping kosher is inconvenient. Especially when it happens that your favorite holiday meal is honey baked ham, as mine is.
And Shabbat creates all kinds of logistical problems. Born Jews are allowed to complain about how the High holidays has so many days taken off of work, and they’re worried about using all their vacation days or getting in trouble with the boss.
They can talk on Instagram about how exhausting a holiday was.
And they can tell a friend that they don’t particularly connect with a certain mitzvah.
No one responds to born Jews saying those things by questioning whether they’re really Jewish or not.
Converts are often expected to be more enthusiastic than born Jews about every aspect of Judaism, and that’s just unrealistic.
And if you enforce it on people, it turns their Judaism into a performance. When they feel like their belonging hinges on always talking about how beautiful and joyful everything is, you’re not getting to know the real them. And you’re forcing them to live a lie.
And then are we surprised when eventually enough years of that builds up, people lose it and walk away altogether? How shocking! Maybe if we had treated human beings as human beings before with our failings and with our challenges, maybe we could have addressed problems when they were much smaller before they explode and blow up everything.
And yes, the judgment from people inside the community is bad, but what’s worse is that we turn it against ourselves. So many conversion candidates and converts have internalized this idea, and they judge themselves for failing, which they will inevitably fail at this.
This is one of the main reasons why people struggle to feel “Jewish enough” long after they convert.
If you were meant to be Jewish, this would all come naturally.
If I resent what this is costing me, maybe I’m making a huge mistake.
If I was sincere, I would enjoy every mitzvah because I would be serving G-d.
And if I miss parts of my old life, that must mean that I don’t want this new one. Which leads into the other main mistake that I see in conversion candidates of throwing away their pre-Jewish life, literally throwing away their clothing, their CDs, their movies, relationships.
And then later, they chill out and become a normal person again, and they really regret all those things that they threw away.
But that is a video for a different day.
When you have a difficult feeling around something Jewish, it’s a clue. It tells you something is off. And you can become a detective and figure out what’s going on and what you need here.
You can’t fix every negative feeling, but you can often work with it. Maybe you need more support. Maybe you need more rest. Maybe you need to slow down. Maybe you need clearer instructions or a different strategy or an honest conversation.
It does not mean that you automatically need to abandon conversion.
As I talked about in the video on why Jewish conversion is difficult, which I’ll link up here and down below, some parts of conversion are difficult. You don’t always like all of the mitzvahs as you take them on, especially the ones that are chukim, that are unexplained and we don’t know why we do them. They don’t have a rational explanation.
For instance, you’re allowed to hate throwing out your favorite outfit because it’s shatnes. It’s made with a mixture of linen and wool. It’s totally fine to hate that.
You can decide that observing the mitzvah means more to you than keeping the outfit, but still be annoyed that you’re getting rid of the outfit. You don’t need to have a transcendent spiritual experience while you throw that outfit away or gift it to a friend or thrift shop.
Kashrut can affect how you eat with the people you love. And in families, food is often a proxy for love. If you’re turning down your mother’s honey baked ham, it’s often about a lot more than the honey baked ham to them.
You might have to uproot your life and move across the country, as I did.
You might give up job opportunities, as I did as well.
Obviously, antisemitism exists, and you’re not supposed to be excited and joyful about that.
And yes, conversion includes uncertainty and limited control over the timeline, and it’s okay to not like that.
And there’s an objection that comes up every time I talk about this: ” but you chose it!” Like yeah, I also chose to go to college, and it had downsides as well as upsides.
I chose to get married, and guess what? That’s hard. I chose to be a parent. That’s also quite hard.
You can knowingly accept the consequences of your actions without enjoying every one of those consequences.
Conversion or Jewish life as a whole is not demonstrated by being happy all the time. Sometimes commitment means doing something that’s important to you even when you don’t like it.
But here’s the thing. Not all difficulties are legitimate. Some of them are unhealthy and a sign that something needs to change.
Let me be clear that the things we’re about to talk about don’t happen to the majority of people. However, it happens to more than a few.
And it’s important for us to shine light on these behaviors, first off, so that people can spot them when they happen. Because as happened to me, I just kept assuming that I was misunderstanding everything. That somehow it was my fault. And no, it was a systemic problem.
And unfortunately, it can only be cured by systemic cures which largely us as a society, not meaning just Jews, I mean all of human society, is very reluctant to impose system cures.
But most of you will have a good conversion or a, “Eh, that was fine,” conversion.
Don’t assume you’re gonna run into troubles, but also keep your eyes open. Watch for red flags, and watch my video up here and down below for red flags in the conversion process.
Some difficulty is part of growth and changing your life.
Other difficulties in conversion are caused by people behaving badly. Because the theme of our YouTube channel here is that Jews are human, rabbis are definitely human, and some rabbis are jerks. Some Jews are jerks, too.
Try not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but I get why you’d be tempted to.
There is no excuse for humiliation, discrimination, sexual harassment, sexual abuse, financial abuse, emotional abuse, bullying, refusing to explain expectations, moving the goalposts, and most common of all, deliberately ignoring someone or neglecting them in order to see how long that they will wait to see how “sincere” they are.
Like, why do people do this?
You are not required to turn mistreatment into a spiritual lesson.
I had many difficulties in my conversion process that were unacceptable, particularly bullying and sexual harassment.
There was no hidden joy or lesson that I needed to learn in these bad experiences. I did learn some lessons from them. But that doesn’t change that I hate what happened, and what happened should never have happened to someone.
It was wrong.
And another thing that makes people want to throw the baby out with the bathwater in Jewish conversion is that, especially with the Me Too movement, we have learned how little appetite that institutions have for punishing people for doing bad things. Or, I don’t know, removing them from power.
I reported my sexual harassment. That guy’s still doing conversions.
The system does not always work the way that it’s intended because it’s populated by human beings. We do the best we can with the resources we have.
And some of you might be stuck with a rabbi who’s a jerk. And you may have no alternative to that rabbi. You face a decision that I do not envy: try to make it work or leave.
I can’t know why Hashem puts us in these circumstances. I believe we’re in them for a reason. But also, humans have free will, and humans can choose to do bad things.
So let’s step back a little. There’s a better way to evaluate difficulty in the conversion process.
First, what exactly is the difficulty? And try to get down to the root cause. It may be that what’s bothering you is a symptom of a much bigger problem.
Two, is this difficulty coming from growth, logistics, sacrifice, or another person’s behavior?
Is it temporary, adjustable, or unavoidable?
What support or accommodations would make it more manageable?
And most important of all, do I still believe that this Jewish life is worth building?
You can dislike part of the process or even the entire process and still want the life that the process is helping you build.
A sincere convert is not someone who sees Jewish life as one uninterrupted joy. The best kind of convert is someone who comes in seeing Judaism honestly, seeing us in both our successes and our flaws. That person has made a true decision with true informed consent. They should really know what they’re getting into.
You are allowed to love Judaism without loving every moment of it.
And if you’re trying to determine if the difficulty that you’re dealing with is normal or something you should be more worried about, watch this video next.
