Ray Bradbury said, ""

Violation of the Law and my conversion

If a convert to Judaism intentionally violates a commandment, his conversion becomes false. He is not a bad Jewish convert, for he never really converted. Every minyan he entered was an invalid minyan; every ceremony in which he engaged is cast into doubt and its validity diminished. A single violation annuls a life-time of study, and will affect everything and everyone a man has touched. This single violation propagates, affecting the lives of his children and hence entire nations.

What does it mean, to contrast an intentional violation with an unintentional violation? What is an intentional violation? What is an unintentional violation?

A law which is not known, cannot be obeyed, and its violation must be unintentional. Now, a Jew by birth is assumed to have had his study of the Law reinforced by tradition. He may not fully understand a commandment, but tradition warns him, guides him. He obeys the laws out of an understanding developed through study and through the habits he has developed. No one could hold within his mind the entire body of knowledge within the field of the Law, no one is omniscient. To some degree, everyone is ignorant of the Law. Tradition enables a man to obey a law, even if he does not fully understand it. He may know and obey a law on a largely habitual level, as a behavior learned in childhood. A Jew by birth can be assumed to obey many laws on a largely habitual basis. A Jew by birth may refrain from cursing more from his upbringing, than from a thorough understanding of the prohibition against cursing. If he slips up and curses, one could assume that his action was the result of a rival pernicious habit, something which his education cannot fully control. Such a violation occurs on a habitual level- his abiding habit momentarily yields to a pernicious habit, something over which the strongest will power has difficulty and in which his understanding of the law plays little part. Such a violation is unintentional. If his violation occured without the sway of a pernicious habit, on a conscious rejection of the law, then it is an intentional violation.

A Jew by conversion has not been raised into the Jewish traditions: his understanding of the Law and his actions under it are fully dependant on his education. He refrains from eating treif foods not because his parents carefully guided his diet as a child, but from study of the halachic laws regarding diet. His obedience to the laws occurs not on a habitual basis, but on an overtly conscious level. He has no habit reinforcing his obedience to the law, but most of his habits will tend toward violations of the Law. His is not a weighing of habit against habit. It is a weighing of a conscious decision versus a habit. For him, each action must be consciously evaluated and scrutinized. If he curses, unless because of an uncontrollable pathological impulse such as Tourette's Syndrome, he does so because he has by definition chosen a habit over his intellectual understanding of the prohibition. Every violation of a law he has studied, except for pathological behaviors, must be intentional. His only excuse can be ignorance, that he has not yet learned the relevant law and hence cannot have followed it.

This brings up the question: is the ignorance of the Law by a convert intentional or unintentional? A convert necessarily begins his journey through Judaism from scratch. Everything he knows about it, he must acquire through conscious effort. He cannot rely upon the upbringing which introduces every Jewish child to his place in the Law. He is necessarily starting out with a higher degree of ignorance than a child who so far is guided in the Law by habit only. He can remedy this ignorance by study; necessarily he will be initially ignorant of much. His education is constrained by the nature of his existence: he must sleep, he fatigues, he has to earn a living, etc. To the extent his circumstances limit his education, there is nothing that can be done about an area of the Law of which he remains ignorant; he is not omniscient. He can only continue studying within these limits imposed on him until he reaches that area of knowledge. Within these limits, there exists a further limit whose boundary consists of a a voluntary choice to remain ignorant. A man cannot help that he must sleep, or spend time working rather than studying, but he can decide whether to spend an hour studying or an hour playing cards. To choose the latter is a voluntary concession to ignorance.

Now, the apportionment of the ignorance of a law cannot be measured. How much of my ignorance of a law is due to my having to eventually stop studying and fall asleep, versus the time I have spent playing with my kittens? Ignorance of a law is ignorance; it cannot be determined whether it exists intentionally or unintentionally. If all ignorance of the Law by a convert were treated as unintentional, there could be no such thing as conversion. A convert could always insist, truthfully, that circumstances prevented him from studying the law he has just violated, even though those circumstances were of his own making. He could theoretically be a Jew, and not know anything about Judaism at all, so long as it could be argued he has simply not yet learned. If all ignorance of the Law by a convert were treated as intentional, there could be no such thing as conversion, because the convert would quickly die in trying to deny the limits of his own nature such as the need for sleep and the need to earn a living. Some degree of both must be attributed to a convert. How much, then? To say that a man's ignorance is mostly unintentional, is to grant him leniency; it could be stated in the case of a devoted student that his ignorance is almost entirely unintentional. To say that a man's ignorance is mostly intentional, is to hold him to a stricter standard; it could be stated in the case of a slacker that his ignorance is almost entirely intentional. Yet, such a case by case analysis is trivial. What is the just proportion to which all humans are to be held? Are most people constrained more by their need to sleep and work, than by their conscious past-times? Or are people equally constrained by the requirements of survival and play? Is there another factor at work? To merely add up the average number of hours a week people spend sleeping, versus the hours spent watching sit-coms, would be to ignore the fundamental difference between the two: choice. A man can only choose within narrow limits how much sleep he gets, he has total control over his television viewing. Since humans are defined by their reason, their ability to weigh the various means to attain their ends and to select that which is most efficient, I adjudge choice to be a more weighty element. A man's ignorance should be attributed more to his own choices than his very nature. Ignorance of the law is therefore mostly a matter of choice, it is intentional. A convert's appeal to ignorance therefore must dealt with strictly: he has chosen not to learn that law, more than he has simply not been able to get to it yet.

What does this mean, then, that a convert cannot fully appeal to ignorance? How much of the Law must a potential convert learn, before converting, in order to be able to claim that his knowledge is limited more by the nature of his existence than by his choices? No one is omniscient, he cannot learn the entire body of the Law in all its complexity. And simultaneously, a convert must be held to some minimum standard of knowledge, to preserve the meaning of Judaism. This minimum standard can be determined by a probationary period during his study, and tests. But who decides what he is tested on? A test fit only for a rabbi would prevent conversion, a test fit only for a small child would destroy the very essence of Judaism. How is this to be resolved?

This is the problem that confronts me in my decision to convert. At what point can I consider myself learned enough to convert? It is up to me to accept a low standard if I wished; people can convert after only five years of study. But to do so would be to reject the very soul of Judaism. It would introduce a sickness to Judaism that in the course of hundreds generations would cripple it. I will only err on the side of over-zealousness, rather than risk entering Judaism prematurely. To what standard must I hold myself? I don't know.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at July 09, 2005 09:24 EST | Permalink | comments |
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