Conversion to Judaism can feel like a process designed to keep you uncertain. You may spend months (maybe even years) studying, attending services, changing your daily life, and building relationships…without knowing exactly when you’ll be considered “ready.”
Some of that difficulty is unavoidable. You aren’t simply learning a set of beliefs; you’re joining a people and building a Jewish life that has to exist beyond the mikvah. That kind of transformation takes time.
But difficulty is not the same as mistreatment. Moving goalposts, humiliation, inappropriate behavior, and being deliberately ignored are not legitimate tests of your sincerity. In this video, we’ll talk about why conversion is intentionally challenging, what healthy progress can look like, and when something has crossed the line.
If the process has you questioning whether you’ll ever be Jewish enough, download my free “Jewish Enough” Self-Talk Toolkit to help you answer those thoughts with more confidence and compassion.
And if you’re building your Jewish life without enough support, learn more about Bayit Builders, my online community for converts, conversion candidates, and others finding their way into Jewish life.
Transcript below.
Transcript:
If you’ve looked into converting to Judaism, you might have figured out that Judaism doesn’t exactly roll out the red carpet.
Conversion takes at least a year, sometimes several years. You may have to take classes, attend services, learn Hebrew, change the way you eat, celebrate holidays, build relationships in an in-person Jewish community. And after all that, you still might not exactly be sure when your conversion will be done.
So why? Why is Jewish conversion so difficult?
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 I actually converted twice. First a Conservative conversion, and then later a stricter Orthodox conversion.
My process was longer than most people’s because I wasn’t sure whether I was ready to commit or not for a long time. So for me, the full scale of my conversions took seven years.
And even after you convert, you might feel like you’re never “Jewish enough” for other people or in your own mind.
So if you feel like you’re somehow doing this all wrong, I made something for you. It’s a free “Jewish Enough” Self-talk Toolkit.
It helps you to talk back to those thoughts and build your confidence in your Jewishness, no matter where you are in the conversion process. You can get it by joining my mailing list at the link down in the description below.
So why is conversion to Judaism so difficult?
Fundamentally, it all comes back to the fact that Judaism doesn’t believe you have to become Jewish.
You don’t need to be Jewish to go to heaven. You don’t need to be Jewish to be a good or moral person You can be just fine the way God made you.
So while that reason is kind of the foundation of everything else, there’s two main reasons.
One is because joining the Jewish people is a very serious decision to make. We wanna make sure that you know what you’re getting into and that you’re in here for life.
Secondly, it’s because you can’t speed run building a Jewish life. And you need to have a Jewish life in place before the conversion is over.
You can learn facts really quickly, but building relationships takes time.
Celebrating the holidays requires at least a full year. And that’s the deeper reason why conversion almost always takes at least a year.
I’ll link up here and down below to my video about how long conversion takes if you want more details.
Developing Jewish practice takes time.
Creating your Jewish home takes time.
And figuring out what all this means in your actual life takes time.
The conversion is difficult because you are fundamentally changing your life, in most aspects of your life, going deep down into your core identity.
Some things just can’t be rushed.
But as we’re gonna talk about later in this video, your difficulty should not come from being treated badly.
So first, a clarification. If you don’t already know, the Jewish religion has several movements, which is what we call denominations. The core three are Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox. There’s a lot of subgroups between those and other groups like Renewal and Reconstructionist.
Each of these large umbrella categories treats conversion a little differently. And I’ll link up here and down below to my video about how to choose the right movement for you.
So what looks “difficult” in a Reform conversion is probably very different than what looks difficult in an Orthodox conversion.
The Reform movement has a lot less requirements. So there is going to be less major things you need to change in your life. There’s still gonna be plenty to keep you busy.
But you’re probably not going to be implementing a fully kosher eating, which decides where you can eat out. It can make it much harder to eat food prepared by your parents. It may mean you can’t participate in the office birthday cake.
You’re gonna have a lot more hard conversations if you go fully kosher.
And that’s just one example from an Orthodox conversion.
But again, even within the Orthodox movement, you’re gonna find a wide variety of practices, some stricter or more lenient than others.
Being ultra-Orthodox is going to be a more difficult conversion than modern Orthodox, for example.
So let’s talk a little more about the idea that Judaism doesn’t require you to become Jewish. Christianity and Islam have really taught the Western world that if your religion is true, then obviously everyone needs to join it.
But Judaism doesn’t work that way.
You don’t need to become Jewish to be a good person. You don’t need to become Jewish to have a good relationship with G-d, who we call Hashem.
Judaism just doesn’t have a theological need to seek converts.
So while a church might look at you and say, “So how are we gonna get you converted?”, Judaism takes a pause and is like, “So why do you wanna become Jewish?” Because quite frankly, it’s a confusing request to the majority of Jews. In fact, my blog is now called buildingajewishlife.com, but for 15 years, its name was You’re Not Crazy: Converting to Judaism Without Losing Your Sanity.
And it was named that because every Jewish person that I told I wanted to convert said, “You’re crazy. Why would you wanna do that?”
And quite frankly, that’s a legitimate question. It is a little crazy to convert to Judaism. Have you heard of this thing called antisemitism?
You too can join a religion where your children at daycare become a terrorist target!
It’s not fun to be Jewish sometimes.
So for more on this idea, there is this myth that rabbis have to reject you three times before they will agree to convert you. It is a myth, but they will discourage you. It’s not just some, like, formula of this and that. It’s gonna be, “Have you heard of antisemitism?”
And that’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask. If you wanna go more in depth to this myth and what’s behind it, I’ll link up here and down below to my video about it.
Secondly, you’re not just agreeing with Jewish beliefs. Judaism is a people, a tribe, a civilization. This is another core misconception about religion that the Western world has because of Christianity. The idea that all you’d have to do is believe the right thing.
You pray one sentence to G-d about Jesus or Muhammad, and everything’s kosher. You are now a Christian or a Muslim. Judaism goes way beyond that.
You’re fundamentally taking on a culture. And yes, you’re also taking on some obligations. You are tying your future to the Jewish people.
And that is no small ask.
You’re not just learning Judaism as a religion. You are learning how to live life as a Jew, and that’s a very big difference.
And that brings us to three, learning to live Judaism takes time. It just does. You need to celebrate at least all of the holidays once.
It takes time to build a Shabbat practice. It takes time to develop a kosher practice, even if you’re only just giving up pork.
You also need to learn Jewish history.
And what we talk about the least is you need to build relationships with an in-person Jewish community. That’s the biggest hurdle for most people in converting to Judaism. I’ll link up here and down below to my video about whether you can convert online. The short answer is no.
You can do certain parts of your conversion online, like classes or tutoring. But every legitimate Jewish conversion, not just Reb Shloime on the internet saying that he can convert you for three easy payments of $399. Every legitimate Jewish conversion requires an in-person community.
You should be attending classes and events. You should have friends in the community. You should have a relationship with a rabbi.
You should be integrated into the Jewish people. And building those relationships takes a lot of time, especially because I find that very many Jewish converts are incredibly anxious people. We have a lot of social anxiety.
And we overcome so much to convert because we care so much, we are willing to stand up to our fears.
But that’s once you actually get into a community. Most of the struggle for most people is getting to a Jewish community. If you’re lucky, an appropriate Jewish community is just across town. If you’re unlucky, you may need to move to a new country. Which I’ve talked to a lot of you, and I’ve had to give you that bad news, and I hate giving that news.
I wish I had a better answer. But this is just the way it is, unfortunately.
So most of you are learning and practicing on your own by yourself without a community for sometimes a very significant amount of time, sometimes years before you’re able to make a move.
That is very difficult, and it’s very lonely.
So as a side note, if that is your case, lean into the online resources that are available to you. There’s Facebook groups, there’s Reddit. I also have a membership called Bayit Builders. I’ll put a link down in the description if you wanna find out more about it.
Finding other people you can talk to, both Jews and also people who are in the process of converting too, both types of people are really necessary to your conversion process.
But there is a lingering problem in many conversions: uncertainty. Almost never will you get a straight answer from a rabbi when you say, ” How long do you think it’ll be before I convert?” You will get a totally non-committal answer 90% of the time.
And generally the only times you are getting an answer is when you are a month or so away from being done. They wait until they are very sure before they are going to pin themselves down with a commitment to time.
Which I can’t blame them. I understand why they don’t wanna be held down to a specific timeline, because honestly, you’re done when you’re done. Different people grow at different speeds.
And more importantly, many people get derailed by things in the rest of their lives during the conversion. Someone dies, you lose your job. There are all sorts of things that could throw a wrench in your conversion just because the rest of your life is all out of whack.
So no rabbi wants to deal with a situation where you say, “Well, you said I would be done by now.” No one wants that.
So while you aren’t going to get a straight answer on when you’ll be done, here are some things that you should expect straight answers about:
What’s expected of you?
What you should be working on right now.
What progress looks like.
If the rabbi has any concerns about your conversion.
And an approximate idea that you are making progress in the conversion or not.
And honestly, you can kinda estimate a lot based on those answers. The thing is, most people don’t ask those questions because they’re scared of them. Those are hard questions, and you might get answers you don’t like.
So in the end, a lot of this uncertainty that you feel and this feeling like your life isn’t totally in your control, that it is in the control of the rabbis… a lot of it comes from poor communication. On the rabbi’s part, for sure, 1,000%. Probably also your part, too.
But here’s what’s important. Difficulty is not the same as mistreatment. As I talk about in the video about the myth of three rejections, there is no excuse for being cruel. There is no excuse for being rude. There is no excuse for humiliation.
Let me be clear: very few people go through the things that I’m about to describe. Most people have a positive or, “Eh, that was nice,” kind of conversion.
Most people do not have a bad experience.
I personally had multiple bad experiences, and I’ve been working in conversion for 16 years. I’ve run into a lot of other people who have had bad experiences. But remember that the internet, because we don’t have good statistics for this, the internet estimates 10,000 people a year convert to Judaism.
That’s a lot of people.
And so yeah, there’s gonna be some bad apples in there, but I want you to trust that things are probably gonna be just fine for you. If they’re not, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.
The grand theme of this YouTube channel is that Jews are human. Rabbis perhaps are more human than the other humans. They make mistakes, and some of them are just jerks. And it’s unfortunate when that jerk rabbi is the only rabbi you have access to.
Most people suck it up and do the best they can with the resources they’ve got.
It’s hard to manage that feeling in yourself of wanting to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If you have a crappy rabbi, please know that they are just a crappy rabbi. You did not do anything to deserve this. This is not what Jewish law requires.
In fact, Judaism has many laws about humiliating or mistreating people. You should never deal with discrimination.
You should not deal with constantly moving goalposts. That’s when they say, ” Call me when you’ve read this book.” And then you contact them, and they say, “We’ll meet when you’ve read this other book.” And then you call again, ” You need to read this other book first.” That’s a constantly moving goalpost.
Inappropriate personal behavior. Your rabbi should not ask you out on a date, and it boggles my mind that I have to tell you that because people do it.
Your rabbi should not take you out to dinners at romantic low-lit restaurants. Your rabbi should not invite you into their home home alone.
And also, you should not be deliberately ignored as a test of your sincerity. And one of them explicitly told the person it was because they wanted to test how long that they would sit there. Who does that? Crappy people, that’s who.
So if these are the reasons why your conversion is difficult, reach out for help. It is not your fault. Unfortunately, there may be nothing that anyone can do to help you. That is an unfortunate truth of every institution in our society nowadays. We’ve learned the limits of how much people are willing to hold others accountable for bad actions. But you can get support and encouragement to help you get through it.
So now that we’ve talked about all the fun stuff, which I should also be directing you to, uh, up above and down below to my video about red flags in the conversion process. That’s a really important video for you to watch.
Fundamentally, this process should change your life. You should be a different person at the end than you were at the beginning.
Your community has changed, your calendar has changed, your view of history has changed. Your relationships have changed. Your home has changed.
And you’ll probably come to a lot of new perspectives in general. And maybe even the way you understand yourself has changed.
And as long and difficult as the conversion process can feel, there is actually no finish line. Yes, you go into the mikvah and you come out a Jew, but that just starts a new race: more building that Jewish life, continuing the work that you started during your conversion.
You should never stop growing Jewishly. You should always be learning.
You should always be refining. You should always be exploring new ways to live your Jewishness.
Your Jewish life doesn’t begin the day you step out of the mikveh. You’re building it now.
Now, if you want help working out whether the difficulty you’re going through is normal or something you should be worried about, watch this video next.
