That comment left me speechless. But what really stupefied me was when Karen started casually schmoozing with me one day about a number of geirim she knew. I have no idea why she chose that topic; she certainly knew nothing about my mother. I felt the blood draining from my face as she ranted and raved. “I tell you, geirim have bad blood. I’ve known a few of them, and I see that they usually revert to their old lifestyle.” She went on and on, bringing examples to prove her ridiculous accusations. I stood rooted to the spot, not believing my ears.

I didn’t know how to respond. Should I tell Karen that my own mother had converted several decades earlier and was showing no signs of reverting? That would certainly shock her.

As I considered my options, Karen continued her diatribe, recounting various stories she knew or had been involved in with geirim and emphasizing her negative opinion of them.

Much as I wanted to poke a hole in Karen’s ugly assessment of converts, I was afraid that revealing my mother’s background would change her perception of me and her feelings about my working in the organization. So I kept my mouth shut.

All along, I had known that Karen belonged to a certain community that has a longstanding takanah not to accept geirim into its ranks, as a safeguard against the scourge of intermarriage that had at one time threatened the community’s intergrity. Not having any connection to this community, I had never given much thought to this particular policy, but hearing Karen rail against converts, I thought I understood where her prejudice stemmed from, and felt a sudden pang of hostility toward that community.

Working for Karen continued to be a miserable experience, and after another few months of ongoing abuse, I decided to leave the job. I walked away from the organization with a boatload of bad feelings toward Karen, and, by association, her community. As the child of a giyores, I bristled at what I thought was a community-wide rejection of all geirim. Didn’t the Torah command Jews to love the ger? Wasn’t this policy — as epitomized in Karen’s loathsome attitude — the diametric opposite of what the Torah expected?

Yet at the same time, I was bothered by the resentment I was harboring. Perhaps Karen and her kinsmen were remiss in loving converts, but that didn’t excuse me from my obligation to love every Jew. I knew I was guilty of sinas chinam, but I couldn’t banish the antipathy.

Shortly after I quit my job in the organization, I had to speak to a rav about a particular issue, and my nightmare experience working under Karen happened to come up tangentially in the conversation. Hearing this, the rav hastened to assure me that the experience was not a reflection of me. He knew Karen and her family well, he said, and she was a difficult person with a long history of interpersonal woes.

Throughout my stint in Karen’s organization, I had taken her censure to heart, and by the time I left the organization my confidence in my professional abilities had been greatly shaken. Hearing from the rav that I was far from the only person who had suffered at her hands was a significant consolation, although it did leave me to wonder how such an unkind person had made it to the top of a chesed organization.

I moved on to a different job where I was treated like a human being and accorded professional respect, and my unpleasant memories of working under Karen receded to the recesses of my memory. My negative feelings about her community festered, however, surfacing any time I encountered a member of that community. Once, I entered a shul belonging to that community and discovered a proclamation on the wall about the ban on accepting converts. I felt a surge of anger and pain course through me.

Several years after I left Karen’s organization, my mother joined an e-mail forum of women who were working on strengthening their appreciation for Hashem’s many kindnesses, as a zechus for a refuah sheleimah for a gravely ill person.

My mother found the group very meaningful. She encouraged me to join, explaining that the members of the group were constantly mechazek each other and developed real connections and friendships. When I joined the group, I discovered, to my surprise, that most of the women in the group belonged to the same community as Karen, my former employer.

How ironic that my mother is part of this group, I thought. They’d probably throw her out if they found out she’s a giyores. But the group itself was indeed a powerful spiritual resource, and I found that it did a lot to bolster my awareness of Hashem’s gifts to me. I also found myself becoming fast friends with an incredibly warm and spiritually oriented group of women, and as I was welcomed and embraced by these newfound friends, my perception of their community began to shift.

One day, one of the group members sent out a post expressing how grateful she was to have been born a Jew. This came on the heels of a post that mentioned a gadol who had been instrumental in my mother’s geirus. In response, my mother posted that she is where she is today because of that gadol, and she recounted in brief the story of her conversion. She ended the post by noting that the anniversary of her geirus was that week and thanking Hashem for it.

I was horrified when I saw this post. My mother’s status was still not known to her new friends, and I knew how much she cherished their camaraderie. To go public with her status in this forum — she had no idea what she had done! I was afraid her post would confer pariah status on her, and on me by extension.

I didn’t express my horror to my mother, because I figured it would constitute lashon hara, especially since it was too late to undo the damage. Instead, I braced myself for the reaction on the forum, fully expecting stony silence.

The response came swiftly — and was not at all what I expected.

“You are so special,” wrote one woman.

“Now I understand where your depth and love comes from,” wrote another. “It was a choice. And once you made your choice you’ve soared higher and higher.”

“Hashem loves you more than anyone else, because you are directly His child,” wrote a third.

“Where you stand no other natural-born Jew could stand,” wrote a fourth. “Your level is so much greater, and for that I envy you.”

That was but a small sampling of the responses, all of which were overwhelmingly positive.

Where were the nasty, Karenesque comments? Could this warm feedback really be genuine, or was it all a show?

As the admiring posts flew back and forth, with my mother graciously accepting the compliments and attributing them to Hashem’s kindness to her, one of the women suggested that the group hold a face-to-face get-together — with my mother as the guest speaker. Much to my surprise, the other women in the group reacted enthusiastically and began to discuss time and location. Still unsure about how this would play out, I offered to host the gathering in my house.

My mother spoke beautifully at the gathering, telling the story of the amazing Hashgachah pratis of her conversion over 40 years earlier and the events leading up to it, to the awe and open adoration of the group members. If her original post had moved people, her speech bowled them over. As one person posted after the gathering, “You are such an incredible person. There are no words, absolutely none. Your story is so inspiring. I can’t get over what a special neshamah you are and what a life accomplishment your story is.”

These reactions blew away my previous perception of the community these women belonged to. I now understood that although the community adhered to a generations-old rabbinic takanah not to accept geirim, that takanah had no bearing on their attitude toward geirim as people. Rather, the purpose of the takanah was to prevent people from converting gentiles in order to marry them, and the takanah had succeeded remarkably in that regard.

Karen’s attitude toward converts had not been typical of her community, just as her abusive treatment of me had not been typical of the way frum employers treat their workers. As the rav had told me, she was the one with the problem.

My sinas chinam for that community, born of hurt, was finally eradicated, as I realized that Karen represented no one but herself — a self that sorely lacked emotional intelligence. As for my longstanding question of how she had risen to the top of a chesed organization, I finally came up with a satisfactory answer to that, too.

In the years that had passed since I worked for Karen, I had noticed a curious phenomenon. Abrasive people like Karen are a small minority of the population, but are overrepresented in positions of power, whether in companies, schools, organizations, communal leadership, or public office. Perhaps this is because getting to the top often requires people to trample on others and ignore their feelings. Or perhaps it’s because power is addictive to people who favor control over connection.

A person like Karen measures her self-worth not in absolute terms — I have value because Hashem created me — but in relative terms: I have value because I am superior to others.

In retrospect, I realized that the hostility I felt toward Karen’s community was simply a way of assuaging the feelings of inferiority that Karen’s disdain toward geirim had triggered in me. Only when I saw that my mother was embraced and admired by Karen’s community was I able to recognize that my hostility toward them was truly baseless. Karen herself was emotionally handicapped and deserving of pity; her community was not responsible for her prejudiced views and deplorable behavior.

In the years that followed, my mother has gone more and more public with her story, even publishing articles about it, and I’ve received only positive and admiring reactions from people. Some of my children have proudly told their classmates their grandmother’s story, and they, too, have encountered only positivity in return.

If you think our experience is unusual, I can tell you that when a close friend of mine who is a giyores was asked how she handles it “when people make her feel bad,” she replied that that no one had ever made her feel bad!

Unfortunately, some people do say horrendous things to orphans, widows, baalei teshuvah, geirim, older singles, and other vulnerable individuals. You can’t always readily recognize that these hurtful people possess poor emotional intelligence, as they may be very smart in other ways and may even have risen to positions of prominence in a community or institution. But they are in no way a reflection of frum society or any subgroup thereof.

I’ve come to realize that, in general, acceptance has less to do with others than with yourself. My mother never had a problem fitting in, even among people who don’t accept geirim into their ranks, because she always accepted herself and felt comfortable in her own skin.

As for me, I’m proud to be the daughter of a giyores, and proud to call myself a friend of a wonderful group of women who might never welcome a ger into their families, but nevertheless fulfill the mitzvah of loving the convert in an exemplary fashion.

(Excerpted from Mishpacha Issue 671)