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?
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