Funny story or not, depending on your sense of humor.
I couldn’t make it to Shabbat services this morning so I went for services and Havdalah this evening. There was a couple there, a couple that I’d seen around shul a few times and around the neighborhood, they live one street over from our current house. Casually seeing them around wasn’t my first introduction to them. I “knew” them a lifetime ago.
One of the jobs I had in college was as a pharmacy tech. The pharmacy had one particularly crotchety customer who for whatever reason, was chatty with me. I don’t remember why we discussed his religion and that of his wife but he told me that he was a Jew married to a non-Jewish woman but they were raising their son Jewish. I think he told me his wife was studying to convert but I’m not 100% sure on that memory.
I cannot recall how the conversation came up but one day, and this would have been 11 or 12 years ago, we spoke about my conversion. I’m pretty sure he’s the first person I ever mentioned, oh so casually, the possibility of converting to. I’m sure I said something like “if I was going to be religious I would want to convert to Judaism.” He quickly and firmly counseled me against it. The process was too long, being Jewish was too difficult, there’s no benefit in converting, etc, etc. I had long forgotten that conversation until tonight when I overheard a friend chatting with the couple about the wife’s recent conversion.
Clearly I must misremember her studying to convert all those years ago. Having been through the process, trust me, it doesn’t take 12 years. She mentioned to my friend the date she converted and I had a bad tv-movie-like flashback to her husband advising me not to even investigate the possibility of converting.
Perhaps he was just playing the traditional role of turning the potential convert away but there is something….I don’t know, ironic? funny? sad? about the fact that I didn’t think about conversion again for quite sometime after that conversation and yet I still converted before his wife took the big dunk. I’m not saying her path was wrong, far from it, I’m just wondering if my spiritual path would have been different if a conversation with a pharmacy customer ayears ago had gone a little bit differently.
No sense crying over 12 years of missed Shabbatot and holidays but reliving that brief moment in time certainly is a bit bittersweet.
In the less bitter and more sweet memory department I’ll mention that my rabbi and his wife were occasional customers in the drug store as well. They were both incredibly nice. The memory of that niceness stuck with me. So when I made the decision that I absolutely could not put off investigating conversion any longer the memory of that niceness is why he was the rabbi I chose to contact. And that was truly excellent decision on my part.
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