Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
Saturday 15 August 2026¹ – admission ceremony of Mark

• After a full day sitting on the beit din last year – meeting conversion candidates, speaking with them and then formally admitting them into the Jewish people – I came home on a real high and tried to explain to Omri what I’d been doing.
• “I went to London and made some people Jewish,” I said. “You see, some people are Jewish when they’re babies, but some people decide they want to be Jewish when they’re grown-ups. And then they have to come and tell three rabbis, like Daddy, why they want to be Jewish, and we give them a special certificate.”
• Omri thought about this for a moment. “So… did you take a pen and a bit of paper with you?” “Yes,” I said. “Okay,” replied Omri. “Now do you want to see me throw my elephant in the air?”
• Despite his apparent lack of interest, sitting on the beit din remains one of the absolute best, and most magical, parts of my job. People come to their appointments with extraordinary, varied and deeply moving stories of what it was that brought them to Judaism… or, sometimes, what it was that drove them to Judaism. Sometimes they’ve met and fallen in love with a Jew. Sometimes they’ve discovered some Jewish ancestry and become fascinated with it that way – those spit-in-a-bottle DNA tests are one of our best recruitment tools! – and sometimes they simply come to our people לשמה, for their own reasons, because something inside them had a yearning and found fulfilment.
• This is the beit din of Liberal Judaism, incidentally. The batei din of the old Liberal and Reform Judaism have not yet merged, though all clergy are being encouraged to observe the ‘other’ one so we can get a feel for the similarities and differences.
• So, a few weeks ago, I spent a day at the Sternberg Centre watching proceedings at the Reform beit din. Bar the presence of a black robe, it was mostly very familiar. The only significant contrast – and it was very significant indeed – was that the Reform beit din asks some exam-style questions of conversion candidates. They were asked about some details of the Hebrew calendar, and all of them were expected to have prepared a passage of Hebrew to read out. In the Liberal world, we obviously do talk with candidates about Judaism’s content and facts, but it isn’t in any sense a test and we certainly don’t ask for a performance.
• Instinctively I didn’t like the exam component. But I’m conscious of my own natural human bias towards what I’m used to. And on reflection, there are arguments in favour of the Reform approach. The expectation of learning a paragraph of Hebrew in that depth gives the candidate something to work towards, an achievement of which they can perhaps feel proud. And there’s no doubt that their Jewish knowledge was impressive.
• And yet, does that qualify someone as a Jew or just as a Hebrew-reader? After all, a lot of Catholic priests are more or less fluent in Biblical Hebrew, and any decently-trained RE teacher can speak confidently about Jewish festivals. Moreover, plenty of people in this room, who are undoubtedly Jewish through and through, might struggle to perform a public reading of הַשְׁכִּיבֵנוּ or Psalm 57.
• Ultimately, being a Jew is not about memorising information, or the display of skills. As my teacher Rabbi Dr Jackie Tabick has said, new converts must “adopt a different set of feelings and values about life and about their sense of belonging to community”.²
• What are those feelings and values? The philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues: “Religion isn’t so much about telling man that there is one God as about preventing man from thinking that he is God.”³
• That is consistent with the injunction in our Torah reading this morning that תָּמִים תִּהְיֶה עִם יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ, Whole-hearted shall you be with the Eternal One your God.⁴ There’s something unusual about the way that verse is written in the scroll: the letter ת at the beginning is massive. As with most scribal oddities in the Torah, noöne is 100% sure of why. It may well be that one early scroll had a slightly oversized ת, and that became treated as authoritative.
• But, nonetheless, the commentators give us a spiritual explanation as well. The Ba’al ha-Turim, writing in the 14th-century, says that the word תָּמִים, whole-hearted, is emphasised to remind us that “if you walk whole-heartedly [with God], it is as if you have fulfilled [the entire Torah] from beginning to end”.⁵
• In other words: that’s it. That’s the one thing that the Reform beit din needs to examine. Are you going to walk whole-heartedly with God? If ‘yes’, have your certificate.
• The idea of walking with is a particularly powerful one. Walking with someone is an expression of egalitarianism. You’re not behind them, nor are you leading them. Travelling together, side-by-side, is an act of partnership. It is also a reminder that, as Taleb said, we are not gods. God is the one standing next to us. We don’t confuse ourselves with the Divine, but instead share the journey, enlivening God just as God enlivens us.
• This morning, BHPS has been privileged, once again, to welcome a new Jew into the fold. Most of us have never had to go through a beit din process, never been questioned about our beliefs and approach to life. Let us take this moment, then, to question ourselves. Do we walk whole-heartedly with our Judaism? I think, hope, that we do.
• מזל טוב to Mark – and מזל טוב to all of us.

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Shavua tov!

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Notes

1. Deuteronomy 18:9-20 ↩︎
2. Jacqueline Tabick, “Outcomes of conversion to Judaism through the Reform Movement 1952-2002” (PhD thesis, City University London, 2013) vol 1 @p68. ↩︎
3. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: philosophical and practical aphorisms (London: Penguin, 2010) @p26. ↩︎
4. Deuteronomy 18:13 ↩︎
5. Ba’al ha-Turim ad loc ↩︎