The Door That Does Not Swing Back

The Hook

Israel entered the covenant with three acts, the Rambam writes, and then he lists them like a man reading from an inventory. Circumcision. Immersion. An offering.

Not a decision. Not a declaration of faith. Three physical acts, each one dated and located. The circumcision happened in Egypt, before the Paschal offering, because an uncircumcised man may not eat of it, and Moses did the circumcising, since every tribe but Levi had let the covenant lapse during the exile. The immersion happened in the desert, before the Giving of the Torah, when the command came to sanctify them today and tomorrow and have them wash their garments. And the offerings were brought by the young men of Israel, acting as agents for the entire people.

That is the whole of Jewish identity in three verbs. And the reason the Rambam opens a chapter this way is that he is about to tell you that nothing has changed. A gentile who wishes to enter the covenant, to take shelter under the wings of the Divine presence and accept the yoke of the Torah, does exactly what Israel did at Sinai. Circumcision, immersion, an offering. A woman converting does the two that apply to her. The proof text is one half of a verse: as it is for you, so shall it be for the convert.

Which means every conversion is a reenactment of the mountain, and that the door is a legal event with requirements, witnesses and a court. It either happened or it did not.

Movement One: The Three Acts, and What Survives the Temple

The offering is specified. A burnt offering of an animal, or two turtledoves, or two young pigeons, and in the case of the birds both are brought as burnt offerings rather than one as a sin offering. That precision matters because the Rambam immediately removes it. In the present age, with no offerings, a convert undergoes circumcision and immersion, and brings his offering when the Temple is rebuilt.

Then the sentence that governs everything after it: even before the convert brings the offering, he is a full member of the Jewish people.

The covenant was entered with three acts, one of them currently unavailable, and the Rambam does not respond by closing the gate, calling the convert provisional, or inventing a substitute. He rules that the man is wholly in, with a debt he will discharge when history permits. Entry is not withheld pending completeness.

The two remaining acts are not negotiable in the same way. Circumcised without immersion, or immersed without circumcision, and he is not a convert at all. The immersion must take place before three men, and because a court is required it may not be held on Shabbat, a festival, or at night.

And then, in a single clause, the whole chapter reveals its architecture. If they did immerse him at night, he is a convert.

Improper and effective. The court was not supposed to sit, the hour was wrong, the procedure defective, and the man is a Jew. Hold onto that sentence. The Rambam makes the same move four more times before the chapter ends, which is how you know it is not a leniency but the chapter's governing principle.

Movement Two: Who Is Believed

A minor may be immersed on the court's authority, and on coming of age he may refuse the conversion and is then a gentile. But if he accepts it at majority and regrets it later he is bound, because entering the covenant is a benefit, and a benefit may be conferred on someone who cannot yet choose. A pregnant woman who converts has converted the child with her; it needs no immersion of its own. A man who immersed alone, or before two witnesses rather than three, has not converted, because two men are not a court.

Then the hardest ruling in the chapter. A man says: I converted before the court of so and so, and they immersed me. His word is not accepted for marrying into the Jewish people unless he brings witnesses. And it gets finer. If he is already married to a Jewish woman and has fathered children and then says, I converted alone, his word is accepted to disqualify himself but not to disqualify his children, and he must immerse again before a court. A man may testify himself out of his own standing and cannot testify his sons out of theirs.

Against that, the Rambam sets a case of quiet beauty. A woman convert whom we see keeping the ways of Israel in every particular, immersing after her days of separation, taking the priestly portion from her dough. A man convert who keeps the paths of Israel and performs all the commandments. These, the Rambam says, are righteous converts, even with no witness in the world to say before whom they converted. And then, without softening it: still, if they come to marry among the Jewish people, we do not permit it until they bring witnesses or immerse in our presence. Their status was originally established as gentile.

The Rambam has written, in two consecutive rulings, that a person can be a righteous convert and still be unable to prove it, and he does not solve the second problem with the first.

One relief follows. A man who comes to us and says he was a gentile and was converted by a court is believed, because the mouth that forbade him is the mouth that permitted him; he raised the doubt and resolved it in one breath. But the Rambam limits even that: it held in the Land of Israel in the Talmudic era, when everyone present could be presumed Jewish. In the diaspora he must bring proof. And he adds that in his own day the custom is for a court to investigate before permitting a convert to marry, and then he says something a less honest jurist would have hidden. This is a stringency we have taken on, to protect the purity of our lineage. He tells you which of his rulings is the law and which is the fence. The Ra'avad, and later the Ramban and the Rashba, disagreed and would accept the convert's word anywhere.

Movement Three: The Gate and the Examination

Near the end the Rambam turns to motive, and he arrives by way of Scripture. One should not think, he writes, that Samson who saved Israel, and Solomon who is called the friend of G-d, married gentile women who had not converted.

His answer builds the gate. The mitzvah is performed properly when a prospective convert comes and we examine why. Perhaps he seeks money, or a position of authority, or comes out of fear. For a man we check whether he has set his attention on a Jewish woman; for a woman, on a Jewish man. If we find no ulterior motive, we tell them how heavy the yoke of the Torah is and how hard ordinary people find it to carry, so that they will give up the idea. If they accept that and do not withdraw, and we see they are moved by love, we receive them, as it is written of Ruth that Naomi saw she was determined to go with her and stopped speaking to her.

That is why, the Rambam continues, no converts were accepted throughout the reigns of David and Solomon. In David's time the courts suspected fear; in Solomon's, the attraction of a kingdom at its height. A gentile who converts because of the vanities of this world is not a righteous convert. Many converted anyway, before ordinary men who did not know better, and the Great Sanhedrin treated them with suspicion: since they had immersed it would not reject them, but it would not draw them close until it saw what became of them.

And then the chapter makes its move for the last time, and now with full force. Where a court failed to examine the man's background, failed to inform him of the commandments and the consequences of neglecting them, and he was circumcised and immersed before three ordinary men, he is a convert. Even if it later emerges that he converted for an ulterior motive, he has left the category of gentile. We watch him with suspicion until his righteousness shows itself, and he is a Jew. Even if he goes on to worship idols he is an apostate Jew, which means his betrothal of a Jewish woman is valid and it is a mitzvah to return his lost property. Since he immersed, he became a Jew.

The gate is guarded with real severity. The door, once a man is through it, does not swing back.

The Unifying Principle

Read the chapter twice and you notice the Rambam has written two documents at once and refused to collapse them.

One is a procedure, and it is strict. Three judges, daylight, a weekday, a mikveh fit for a woman after her days of separation, with nothing intervening between the water and the flesh. Motives examined. Discouragement offered on purpose. Witnesses demanded before a marriage. The other is a ruling about what has become of a human being, and it is almost unbudgeable. Immersed at night, he is in. Immersed before three ordinary men who asked him nothing, he is in. Converted for money or for a post, and later proven to have meant none of it, he is in.

Both are true, and the Rambam needs both. The procedure answers what a court must do. The ruling answers what a soul has become. A court can be negligent. A status cannot be half conferred.

The Chassidic masters took that second document and made it their foundation. The Alter Rebbe writes in Tanya that every Jew possesses a soul that is literally a part of the Divine above, not earned by conduct and not forfeited by it, which is why he can write that even a Jew who has sinned grievously remains a Jew. The Rambam's ruling is that teaching in its legal form: once he immersed, he became a Jew, and therefore even an idolater's betrothal binds. The Baal Shem Tov built a life's work on the proposition that nobody is outside, that the plain Jew who can barely read is not a lesser arrival. And the Lubavitcher Rebbe spent decades drawing the conclusion from both, insisting that a Jew with no knowledge and no observance is not a prospect to be recruited but a Jew, already inside, who needs only to be told.

It is worth knowing what the Rambam did with the harsh saying that closes the chapter, that converts are as hard for Israel to bear as a scab, because most convert for ulterior motives and later lead Jews astray, as the mixed multitude did at the Golden Calf. In his letter to Ovadiah, a convert who had written to him in distress, the Rambam answered that native-born Jews trace their connection to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, while the convert's connection is to the One who spoke and made the world. He recorded the warning as law. He did not let it be used against a man.

Modern Application

Begin where the chapter is most uncomfortable. The Rambam instructs a court to try to talk a sincere person out of it. We tend to read that as gatekeeping, and some of it is. But notice what it assumes: that a commitment agreed to without knowing its weight is not yet a commitment, and that the loving thing is to let someone discover the cost while they can still walk away. Every serious undertaking works this way. The marriage, the vow, the business taken on with a friend, the care of an aging parent. Say the cost out loud first. Someone who stays after hearing it has given you something no enthusiasm can match.

Then take the rule that a court's negligence does not undo a status. This cuts against a favorite escape. We like to believe that because the process was flawed we were never really committed: nobody explained what marriage would ask, nobody told us what the job involved. The Rambam agrees the room was badly run and holds you anyway. You went into the water. What you are now is not determined by how well the people around you handled the paperwork.

Then the other side of the same coin, which is the harder discipline. Someone else's entry may have been defective and it is not yours to annul. The person whose commitment began for the wrong reasons, whose standing you could embarrass with one well-aimed question, whose belonging you privately rank below your own, is in. We watch him until his righteousness shows itself, the Rambam says, and the watching is permitted. The ranking is not. A convert who has sinned is a Jew who has sinned, and his lost property must be returned to him like anyone's, which is the law's way of saying you owe him the ordinary decencies you owe your own.

And when a sincere person cannot prove his standing, the chapter is honest rather than comforting. A righteous convert may still be told to bring witnesses. The Rambam does not tell him the pain is imaginary. He tells him which part of it is the law and which part is a fence we built ourselves. That honesty is the model for every institution that must sometimes say no to someone who deserves yes.

The Closing

Israel entered the covenant with three acts, we are short one of them, and the Rambam does not blink. The convert is wholly in now and will bring his offering when there is an altar.

That is the chapter, and it is addressed to you as much as to any convert. Your own entry was managed by people who may have explained nothing. Nobody examined your motives. Nobody asked whether you understood the weight of what was being placed on you, and if they had, you were an infant and could not have answered. You went into the covenant anyway, you are wholly in, and the paperwork of your belonging will not be reopened. Which leaves only the question the Great Sanhedrin asked about its own doubtful converts, and waited patiently to answer. Not whether you are in. What you have done since.