Lessons from God
My girlfriend plans to convert to Judaism, and I can't tell you how thrilled I am.
The conversion program she's doing, which I'm doing with her, includes a few support group meetings to deal with issues like helping family cope with conversion, what to do about holidays, and stuff like that. This past weekend we went to our second such meeting, having missed our originally scheduled session. There was a lesbian couple there, too.
One of the women was Jewish and the other was not, and the non-Jewish partner is preparing to convert. Looking at them, I caught myself thinking "Why is she doing that? They're not going to get married or have children anyway."
You will immediately realize, as I did, that this is a foolish thought. They won't be getting married in a legal sense (not yet, at least), but that's likely to change someday, and probably soon. As for children, gay and lesbian couples adopt or use surrogates and artificial insemination all the time. But the point, obviously, has nothing to do with marriage and children; this woman, I hope, is planning to convert because she wants to be Jewish.
She may want to be Jewish because of her love and commitment for her partner, or because she loves Judaism and wants to make herself part of it, or any one of a number of other things, but whatever the reason, I hope that she and any other convert goes through conversion because they want to be Jewish.
Now, the issue of gay marriage troubles me. I'm not one of those who thinks that gay marriage injures heterosexual marriage (a very strange idea indeed), nor do I believe that gay couples should have no rights as couples (any long-term committed relationship is worthy of some acknowledgement, I should think), but I still don't think legalizing gay "marriage" is a good idea. (Dennis Prager covered the issue pretty well a few years ago.) And I think of myself as a fairly enlightened man (yeah, I'm a liberal - could you tell?). Nevertheless, looking at that couple in the support group, I found I still had some mental adjusting to do.
Once I did that, I could see that those two were kind of sweet together. So at least now I know why God allowed my girlfriend and me to miss our original session; apparently I needed to see this.
Benshlomo says, God moves in mysterious ways, and he also has a heck of a sense of humor.
The conversion program she's doing, which I'm doing with her, includes a few support group meetings to deal with issues like helping family cope with conversion, what to do about holidays, and stuff like that. This past weekend we went to our second such meeting, having missed our originally scheduled session. There was a lesbian couple there, too.
One of the women was Jewish and the other was not, and the non-Jewish partner is preparing to convert. Looking at them, I caught myself thinking "Why is she doing that? They're not going to get married or have children anyway."
You will immediately realize, as I did, that this is a foolish thought. They won't be getting married in a legal sense (not yet, at least), but that's likely to change someday, and probably soon. As for children, gay and lesbian couples adopt or use surrogates and artificial insemination all the time. But the point, obviously, has nothing to do with marriage and children; this woman, I hope, is planning to convert because she wants to be Jewish.
She may want to be Jewish because of her love and commitment for her partner, or because she loves Judaism and wants to make herself part of it, or any one of a number of other things, but whatever the reason, I hope that she and any other convert goes through conversion because they want to be Jewish.
Now, the issue of gay marriage troubles me. I'm not one of those who thinks that gay marriage injures heterosexual marriage (a very strange idea indeed), nor do I believe that gay couples should have no rights as couples (any long-term committed relationship is worthy of some acknowledgement, I should think), but I still don't think legalizing gay "marriage" is a good idea. (Dennis Prager covered the issue pretty well a few years ago.) And I think of myself as a fairly enlightened man (yeah, I'm a liberal - could you tell?). Nevertheless, looking at that couple in the support group, I found I still had some mental adjusting to do.
Once I did that, I could see that those two were kind of sweet together. So at least now I know why God allowed my girlfriend and me to miss our original session; apparently I needed to see this.
Benshlomo says, God moves in mysterious ways, and he also has a heck of a sense of humor.
posted by benshlomo at 10:47 AM
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