Adopting Judaism: A Programme of Adoption

Ten stages for a grown-up journey into Jewish life — for those who are choosing, and being chosen into, the Jewish people.

This workbook treats becoming Jewish not as passing an exam but as being adopted — welcomed into a family, a people, and a civilisation that is still being written. The tradition itself reaches for this language. It calls the one who converts a ger, and it says such a person is “like a new-born child,” entering the world afresh. It gives every Jew-by-choice the same second name — ben or bat Avraham v’Sarah, child of Abraham and Sarah — because the first Jews were themselves people who chose. To adopt Judaism is to be grafted, knowingly and gladly, onto an old and living tree.

These ten stages are modelled on the b’mitzvah journey a Jewish child makes, but rebuilt for an adult mind — one that wants history as well as ritual, argument as well as belonging, and honesty about belief. The programme is written in the first person, as a journey you are making yourself; but it is built so that a rabbi, sponsor, study-partner, or a whole group of adult seekers could travel it together.

You do not need to believe in order to belong. You need only to begin.

Each of the ten stages follows the same rhythm: a short essay that carries the substance of the stage; sources to sit with; reading and resources for going deeper; journal questions to write your way in; and a practice to try — something to do in the world, not only to think. This workbook describes the whole Jewish world — Orthodox, Haredi, Sephardi, Masorti, Reform, Liberal, Progressive, Reconstructionist and Humanistic — as fairly as it can, even where it does not share a given view. Nothing here is offered as a ruling; it is offered as an education and an invitation.

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Pesaḥ Guide

A guide to keeping Pesaḥ in the spirit of Spiritual Humanistic Judaism — the seder, its symbols and its meanings, reconstructed without appeal to the supernatural, and centred on liberation, memory and responsibility.