The convert & the Land of Israel – Ki Tavo
One of Nehama Leibowitz’s essays on this week’s Torah reading is headed “Eretz Israel: Proselyte’s Homeland”.
Examining the verse which tells the Israelite to bring the first fruits to the Temple and make a declaration, “I have come into the land which the Lord promised our fathers to give us” (Deut. 26:12-3), she cites Maimonides’ Code, “A proselyte brings the first fruits and recites the declaration” (Bikkurim 4:3).
The halachic issue was whether a convert to Judaism could call HaShem “The God our fathers”, when his or her fathers were not Israelites.
The answer, spelled out further in Maimonides’ famous “Epistle to Ovadiah the Proselyte”, is that a person who becomes Jewish not only adopts the Jewish people but the Jewish people adopt them.
A convert thus becomes a spiritual child of Abraham and can therefore say, “Our God and God of our fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob”.
Part of the package as it were is also the adoption of and by the Jewish homeland promised by God to Abraham and his descendants. In modern terms we could say that a convert becomes a Jew and a Zionist at one and the same moment.
A dayyan once said to me that a convert has to learn to talk like a Jew.
They must also learn to dream like a Jew, to agonise when the Jewish people are in pain, to rejoice when they feel joy, and to participate thoroughly in the Jewish destiny, especially in Israel.
