There’s a fascinating Gemara (Yevamos 47a) that prescribes how to go about attempting to dissuade a prospective convert: “We say ‘What did you see that brought you to want to convert? Don’t you know that the Jews nowadays are treated as pariahs and suffer great travail?’” And then comes this: “If he responds ‘Yes I know — and I’m not worthy’ [Rashi - ‘I’m not worthy of sharing in their pain; would that I’d merit doing so’] we accept him immediately.…”

Apparently a humble sense of unworthiness is an essential element of one’s fitness to join Klal Yisrael and share in its receipt of the Torah. Perhaps the only way to become subsumed into Hashem’s nation is to renounce the ego that prevents us from truly fusing with one another. In that primer on conversion we call Megillas Rus (3:5) we find a rare instance in which we are directed to read a word that is entirely absent from the text. It is when Naomi instructs Rus to immerse and accept the mitzvos and proceed to meet Boaz at his silo. Rus in a response evocative of Klal Yisrael’s unified declaration (Shemos 19:8) of “Everything Hashem has spoken we will do ” replies “Everything you’ve told me I will do” — except that the word “me” does not appear in the Megillah. When one — either person or nation — accepts the Torah there is no individual “me ” only a “we” that fuses into an undifferentiated “I.”

The Ohr HaChaim HaKadosh (Shemos 19:2) writes that two of the prerequisites for kabalas haTorah were Klal Yisrael’s absolute unity “as one person with one heart” and humility as signified by the desert in which they were camped. Although he doesn’t make the connection it seems reasonable that possessing the latter is what helps achieve the former. And so it is with the personal kabalas haTorah that we are capable of experiencing each day; at Shemoneh Esrei’s conclusion we ask Hashem to enable us to achieve humility followed immediately by a plea that He open our hearts in Torah. 

But there’s yet another point to be gleaned from the passage in Yevamos.  At first blush the would-be convert’s response seems so counter-intuitive as to be almost comical. It’s understandable that a sincere convert might say it’s worthwhile to become a Jew even at the cost of bearing the burden of suffering that comes with it. But to refer to the Jew’s lot of being shunned ridiculed and hated as a privilege of which he’s not worthy — he can’t be serious can he?

But serious he is indeed. He has penetrated to the deep core of what it means to be a Jew and what it is that brings forth the nations’ unremitting hated and scorn. He has understood what so many born Jews do not: that Sinai is so called because as Chazal explain the name “from there sin’ah hatred descended to the world.” We are hated because of the message of moral responsibility we carry to humanity in Hashem’s name a message that the “community of nations” desperately wants to drown out even if the only way to do so is by obliterating the messenger from upon the face of the earth.

He who understands what a singular honor it is to be spat upon for being a Jew truly deserves to able to become one.

TRANSFORMATIONS  What better way to approach the Yom Tov of the giving of the Torah than with stories that illustrate the peerless power of Torah to transform us into … people? Here are two anecdotes from among several little-known ones I heard in the course of helping to produce  Mishpacha’s special issue commemorating the 25^th yahrtzeits of Rav Yaakov Kaminetsky and Rav Moshe Feinstein ztz”l:

First one told by my rav Rav Menachem Feifer: Rav Yaakov had just been mesader kiddushin at a wedding when the chassan’s father noticed the Rosh Yeshivah putting on his coat in preparation to leave the hall. He hurried over to ask if everything was alright which Rav Yaakov assured him was the case.

The conversation continued like this: “Why then is the Rosh Yeshivah leaving?” “Tell me where am I seated?” “At the rabbanim table of course!” “Just as I thought” Rav Yaakov replied. “I have a problem you see. I’m sure the dinner fare meets high standards of kashrus. But you’re seating me with many esteemed chassidishe rabbanim and they generally don’t eat at chasunos. For me to eat while they aren’t — it’s nit shein not proper. And if I don’t eat people will notice and say I too don’t eat at chasunos. That’s gneivas daas it’s not emes — I just can’t do it.”

And one more related by my uncle Rav Eliezer Katzman: A talmid of Rav Moshe became a chassan and at the l’chayim he was chagrined to hear his future father-in-law offer the honor of siddur kiddushin to a prominent rav thus denying the chassan the opportunity to honor his own rebbi. The next day the chassan approached the Rosh Yeshivah apprehensively to inform him of the situation but Rav Moshe assured him that all would be just fine and that he’d be glad to attend just to share in the simchah.

At the wedding Rav Moshe stood nearby the chuppah to observe the proceedings as was his custom. After the chassan and kallah made their way to the yichud room following the ceremony a friend of the chassan noticed the Rosh Yeshivah approaching the room. His curiosity piqued the friend lingered in the hall only to observe the Rosh Yeshivah whispering something to the eidim stationed outside the room and then knocking on the door. The door opened and all three entered emerging just minutes later.

The friend pressed the reticent chassan for over a year for the story behind the mysterious scene he’d witnessed until the chassan reluctantly revealed what had transpired. At the chuppah the Rosh Yeshivah realized what the mesader kiddushin had not: the chassan had recited the kiddushin formula as “harei aht mikudeshes” but failed to add the crucial word “li.” To rectify the problem while yet preserving the kavod of the mesader kiddushin the Rosh Yeshivah had the chassan perform a second kiddushin in the yichud room. And so as my uncle observed the Rosh Yeshivah who was concerned only with another rav’s honor but not at all with his own indeed served as mesader kiddushin for his talmid after all.

What these and innumerable other stories of gedolei Torah illustrate is not just a rare combination of acute intelligence and foresight on the one hand and exquisite sensitivity and ethical traits on the other but something even more unique: creative intelligence employed in the service of that ethical sensitivity.       

And the existence of people like these in every generation reveals Judaism as that rarity — no singularity — among the multiplicity of life philosophies that clever creative man has devised: a tested eminently usable system for success in the enterprise of human living.

Dr. Avraham Meyer is a globe-trotting field supervisor for OU Kashrus. Born into a Scottish Presbyterian family he received a PhD in chemical engineering from MIT where he also discovered Judaism eventually becoming a Bostoner chassid. “[Conversion] seemed the logical thing to do at the time ” he says. “I used a simple engineering approach to choosing a religion. I’m an engineer.... I researched for the truth and a working system built upon it and found one.”      

“The truth and a working system built upon it.” That second element is crucial because the world stage has seen so very many ingenious thought systems and dazzling religious credos come and go.  But where they all falter is in their ability to produce consistently and in significant quantity specimens of angels on earth of the best that human beings can be within their corporeal limitations. Of this these others know not.

 It can be quite disillusioning when Judaism appears not to spare its seemingly dedicated practitioners from the foibles of sin and smallness in which the rest of humanity partakes. But then we encounter the adam gadol literally a “towering human being” walking among us and in one clarifying instant we realize that it is he not those flawed spiritually schizophrenic others who truly lives Judaism to its fullest and thus best exemplifies the transformative effects on the human heart and mind of full-strength Judaism. He is in a word proof sprung to life that Judaism contains “the truth and a working system built upon it.”