Why Do Mormons Treat Their Converts So Much Better Than Jews Do?
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Bethany Mandel July 2, 2018
One of my best friends growing up, Sarah, converted to Mormonism when we were in our late teens. Soon after her conversion, she married her high school sweetheart from one of the most prominent Mormon families in town. He exposed her to the Mormon community and theology, and soon she decided she wanted to build a life with him within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. As it is wont to do, life didn’t go according to plan, and ten years into their union they split, thanks to heartbreaking infidelity on the part of her supposedly religious husband.
I watched their divorce play out in horror, and wondered what would happen to her relationship with Mormonism and the community she grew to love on the heels of their split. She was always committed to both, and clearly didn’t just convert in order to get married, so, unsurprisingly, after their split she remained steadfastly devout.
I wondered, however, if the community would take sides. On one hand, there was this scion of a prominent and established family, and on the other, a relatively recent convert, a single mother of three young children.
Would the community quietly decide to ignore the split and disregard my friend as an inconvenient casualty? Would they somehow find her at fault? I was horrified at the idea of my friend losing everything — her husband, her faith, her community — in one fell swoop.
That was not how it all ended up playing out; far from it. My friend’s now ex-husband faced severe disciplinary action from the Church, barely escaping excommunication. Her community (called a ward) rallied around her, offering help with chores around the house, babysitting, and more. If anything negative can be said about how the community responded, it’s that they may have been too enthusiastic in their desire to help her.
Why was it I automatically feared and assumed the convert in the relationship would be cast aside? I was projecting, based on my thoughts about how, were a similar scenario to play out in my own Jewish community, the convert would fare. Given my past experiences as a convert in a community not particularly keen on welcoming us, despite clear Torah proclamations to do so, I wouldn’t have high hopes.
Two of the most overlooked and disregarded populations within Jewish communities are divorceés and converts. While families get together for Shabbat meals and holidays, divorcées and converts are left to eat alone or depend on the charity of others to invite them to their tables. We aren’t particularly good at dealing with individuals who fall outside the mold, and they fall through the cracks as a result.
Were Sarah’s situation to happen to me personally, as a convert in the Jewish community, I don’t believe I would be cast aside maliciously, though the combination of not having family within the community to begin with, and then finding myself divorced, would likely lead to extreme social isolation.
I thought of this all recently while visiting Mormon historical sites with Sarah and our kids in tow. Everywhere we went, missionaries enthusiastically asked us who we were, and why we were there. We explained we were good friends from childhood who took drastically different paths on our religious conversions, me to Orthodox Judaism and Sarah to Mormonism.
The young women asked Sarah why she chose to convert, and she explained the whole sordid tale. I expected a reflexive wince and an awkward separation, with the missionary trying to extract herself from hearing something so negative about a member of her Church who committed such egregious wrong-doing. Instead, each young woman Sarah told remained incredibly warm, welcoming and sympathetic to what Sarah and their children had experienced. Without bordering on nosy, they asked how the family had been faring, shifting the conversation to how the community has enriched Sarah’s life, both before and after the divorce. It was a level of adeptness one normally wouldn’t anticipate from a young woman in her early 20s.
Thinking back on the encounter, and the last few years of Sarah’s life filled me with regret and sadness about some of my own choices.
I don’t regret being Jewish; as the daughter of a Jewish father, I always felt I had a Jewish soul. I never felt I truly converted to Judaism. My conversion felt merely like a bureaucratic affirmation of an identity I always held.
Nevertheless, experiencing the stigma of also being a convert, despite clear Torah prohibitions, has been one of the most disenfranchising parts of my adult Jewish life.
The story of my conversion rabbi, who was arrested for placing a secret camera in the mikvah (the ritual bath), is by now a well-known one. But weeks before that, my husband and I attempted to join a local synagogue. We were asked to come to a meeting with the rabbi; we were told it was standard practice. But when we asked around, other members of the synagogue who joined around the same time as us told us our meeting was unique.
My husband was schmoozed for half an hour, before the casual conversation turned into what felt like an interrogation about my conversion: Why I did it, who I did it with, where I stood religiously now. It was as intense as a beit din meeting, and ended with the rabbi asking me to send him my paperwork to prove I had completed the conversion, despite the fact that I had had an Orthodox marriage officiated by an extremely religious and well-respected rabbi in the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Lakewood several years prior.
Our membership bid to join the synagogue was approved, but we declined to join after the meeting. And we discovered every other house of worship in our town had similar policies of asking for conversion documents before accepting converts as members.
This double standard, where my born-Jewish husband has the welcome mat rolled out while I’m viewed with distrust, is an experience I felt from Jewish institutions and individuals more times than I can count over the years.
Seeing how Sarah has been treated as a convert in the Church of Latter Day Saints didn’t make me want to become Mormon, though their cookbooks and mommy blogs are delightful; but it did make me see how far my own community has to go to uphold a similar level of love and support for our convert community.
I’m a strong believer in treating religion as a bit of a buffet, taking some of the best practices (note: not theology) from each community and faith tradition to strengthen our own. On convert-relations, we should be learning from the love and acceptance we see from our Christian friends, but in particular, from Mormon communities.
Bethany Mandel is a columnist for the Forward.
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