Exactly one year ago, I had the great privilege of completing the study of the Book of Ruth with my eldest daughter, Ma'an, who requested to study the Megillah in honor of her Bat Mitzvah that occurred during the Shavuot holiday. In addition to recommending that every father conduct such a study session on Shabbat night [one of the most enjoyable things there is], I gained an important insight into the central theme of the Megillah, namely the issue of conversion, which is associated with another central motif - namely, grace.
Ruth's statement "Your people are my people, and your God is my God," which establishes the ways of joining the eternal people, is known to be loaded with many halachic details. Much has been written about how and when it is permissible to convert Gentiles, and in halachic literature and case law, different approaches to the issue of conversion have developed over the generations.
Halakhic questions resurface every now and then, even today, turning the question of conversion into a watershed line with different camps at either end. I am aware of the fact that in Haredi circles there is a clear tendency to examine the merits of absolute loyalty to the burden of the commandments, whether mild or severe, and I am also aware that the origin of this perception is the pure intention of protecting the camp from those who want to convert for foreign, social, or even economic reasons (as was raised in the columns of Rabbi Menachem Brod and Miri Schneerson).
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At the same time, it sometimes seems that part of the conversion controversy has spilled over from a dispute for the sake of God into a battleground between the various streams of Orthodox Judaism. For example, the desire to wholesale cancel conversion certificates that have long been issued seems to be an attempt (even a blatant one) by Dayan to delegitimize a conversion system that is not in line with his halakhic worldview. Is this a dispute for the sake of God? Wasn't there room to single out the war on non-Orthodox streams that seek to legitimize their conversion process as another layer of their desire to fight the Orthodox religious establishment in all its guises?
I am not qualified to be a rabbi, and of course not a deacon, and hence I have no pretensions to set any standards for conversion of one kind or another, and yet an examination of the sources reveals a complex picture of what the ultra-Orthodox rabbinical establishment sometimes seeks to present.
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The greatest rabbi in the United States, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, zt"l, was called upon to consider a case in which the convert did not observe a commandment after the conversion process, the man she sought to marry was a desecrator of Shabbat, and moreover, she herself believed that keeping the Shabbat, which the dayanim spoke of, was nothing more than a "sloppy arrangement." Rabbi Feinstein's opinion, as emerges from the reply, is not comfortable with this type of conversion, and yet the rabbi believes that from the moment she converted in an Orthodox court, she must be accepted as a Jew [Agrom, 1, Yod, 32].
The Chief Rabbi Ben-Zion Meir Chai also notes in his famous book 'Mishpatei Uziel' [Yod"d, 6' Noach] that "a stranger who accepts the mitzvot and their punishment even though it is known that he will not keep them, accepts him after he has been informed of the minor and major mitzvot, their punishment and reward." For even if he sins and is punished in any way, the Rabbi believes that "he has the right to be entitled to those mitzvot that he will keep, and because of the dilemma, he will produce from them a seed from above.".
These brief excerpts are not a substitute for a Torah treatise that is certainly worthy of being written in such cases, and as I have said, I do not propose to substitute myself for the great Torah scholars. However, these few quotations raise an important insight relevant to the days of Shavuot: Rabbis who deal with public needs should not ignore those rich sources of [authorized] halakhic solutions that can be adapted to the situation of the people in our time, even if they do not always match the wind blowing on the street and in a particular media outlet at that given time.
The Book of Ruth presents to us, "Your people are my people, and your God is my God," with a view of mercy. Not with flexibility in halakhic law, without magic solutions, but with a genuine desire and a compassionate heart to find, as much as possible, authoritative halakhic solutions to help the unfortunate soul of the stranger.
