Things You Should Know Before You Convert From Judaism

Brief Overview

• Converting from Judaism to Catholicism is not simply adding Jesus to your existing faith; it means accepting that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah whom the Hebrew prophets foretold, that he is fully divine, and that his death and resurrection fulfill and complete the covenant relationship that God established with Israel.
• The Catholic Church holds the Jewish people in a unique and specific theological relationship unlike any other religion, recognizing the irrevocable nature of God’s covenant with Israel, while also teaching clearly that Christ is the fulfillment of what that covenant pointed toward.
• Your Jewish family and community will almost certainly regard your conversion as an act of communal betrayal, not merely a personal religious choice, because Jewish identity, history, and religious practice are so thoroughly intertwined that leaving for Catholicism carries a weight that leaving for another secular path often does not.
• The history of Catholic antisemitism, forced conversions, the Inquisition, and the Church’s failures before and during the Holocaust are real, documented, and something you have every right to raise honestly and directly with your OCIA director before you commit.
• You will not lose your Jewish identity as an ethnic or cultural reality when you are baptized, but you will be accepting a faith that the Jewish community generally regards as incompatible with authentic Jewish life, and that social and familial tension is real and lasting.
• The richness of Jewish prayer, Scripture, and liturgical tradition is not something Catholicism asks you to abandon; the Church sees itself as the continuation and fulfillment of that tradition, and the depth of your Jewish formation is a genuine asset in Catholic life.

What the Church Actually Teaches About Judaism and the Jewish People

Before you take a single step toward the OCIA process, you need to understand clearly what the Catholic Church officially teaches about the Jewish people and their relationship to the faith you are entering. This matters for your own intellectual honesty and for how you understand the significance of what you are doing. The Catechism states directly that the Church’s relationship with the Jewish people is unlike her relationship with any other non-Christian religion, because the Jewish faith is already a response to God’s revelation in what Christians call the Old Covenant (CCC 839). The gifts and promises God gave to Israel, including the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the law, the worship, and the promises, belong to the Jewish people in a way that the Church explicitly affirms as irrevocable (CCC 839). The Church teaches that God’s covenant with Israel has not been abrogated or cancelled but rather completed and fulfilled in Jesus Christ, who is himself a Jew, born of a Jewish mother, shaped by Jewish Scripture, and the fulfillment of Jewish messianic hope (CCC 840). This means the Church does not regard Judaism as a false religion or as merely a failed precursor to Christianity. It regards Judaism as the root from which Christianity grew, and it maintains a specific bond with the Jewish people that shapes how it understands its own identity. Second Vatican Council’s declaration Nostra Aetate, promulgated in 1965, formally repudiated the charge that the Jewish people as a whole bear collective responsibility for the death of Jesus, a teaching that had fueled centuries of Catholic antisemitism. Understanding this theological background does not remove the genuine and serious differences between Judaism and Catholicism. But it does give you an accurate picture of the relationship you are entering, which is not one of simple replacement or dismissal but of completion and fulfillment as the Church understands it.

The History of Catholic Antisemitism Is Real and You Have Every Right to Confront It

This section demands complete honesty, because any Catholic who asks a Jewish person to enter the Church without acknowledging the history of the Church’s treatment of the Jewish people is not acting in good faith. The history of Catholic antisemitism is documented, extensive, and serious. The Church’s theological teaching that Jews were collectively responsible for the death of Jesus, a charge formally called deicide, was used for centuries to justify persecution, forced conversions, expulsions, and violence against Jewish communities across Europe. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 required Jews to wear distinguishing clothing, restricted their participation in public life, and facilitated their marginalization. The Spanish Inquisition targeted Jewish converts to Christianity, called conversos, with particular intensity, interrogating and punishing those suspected of maintaining Jewish practices in secret. The expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 was carried out by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella with the support of Church institutions. During the Holocaust, the response of the institutional Catholic Church, and particularly of Pope Pius XII, has been a subject of serious historical debate and genuine moral criticism. Nostra Aetate in 1965 marked a formal turning point, repudiating the deicide charge and condemning antisemitism explicitly. Pope John Paul II made formal apologies for the Church’s failures toward the Jewish people, visited the Great Synagogue of Rome in 1986, and visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, in 2000. These steps were genuine and significant, and they reflect a real change in how the Church officially understands and teaches its relationship with Jews. But they do not erase the history, and you are entitled to bring that history into your formation conversations directly and to receive honest answers rather than defensive minimization.

Jesus as the Messiah Is the Central Claim You Must Accept, and It Is Not Obvious

The central theological act of converting from Judaism to Catholicism is accepting the claim that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah that the Hebrew prophets foretold. This is not a small theological adjustment. It is the claim that has divided Jews from Christians for two thousand years, and it is a claim that the overwhelming majority of the Jewish people across those two thousand years have examined and rejected. The Jewish objection to Jesus as Messiah is not based on ignorance of the texts. It is based on a serious reading of what the Hebrew prophets actually said the Messiah would do. The traditional Jewish expectation of the Messiah involves the ingathering of the exiles of Israel, the rebuilding of the Temple, the establishment of universal peace, and the acknowledgment of God by all nations. None of these things happened during the lifetime of Jesus of Nazareth. The Catholic response to this objection is the doctrine of the two comings, the teaching that Jesus fulfilled the role of the suffering servant described in Isaiah 53 at his first coming and will fulfill the role of the triumphant king at his second coming. The Church also argues that the prophetic texts must be read typologically, meaning that the surface level of their fulfillment points toward a deeper and more spiritual reality that was realized in Christ. These are serious theological arguments and they deserve serious engagement. Jewish scholars have responded to them with serious counter-arguments across many centuries. If you are Jewish and considering conversion, the intellectual work of honestly engaging the messianic question, reading both the traditional Jewish objections and the Catholic responses, is not optional. You need to reach a genuine personal conviction that Jesus is who the Church says he is, not simply a warm feeling that Catholicism suits you better than your current practice.

The Divinity of Christ Will Be the Hardest Doctrine to Accept Coming From Judaism

Jewish theology is strictly and uncompromisingly monotheistic in a way that leaves no room for the Catholic claim about the divinity of Jesus. The Shema, recited daily by observant Jews, declares that God is one in a sense that most traditional Jewish thought treats as incompatible with the idea of a divine person becoming incarnate in human flesh. The Christian claim that Jesus is true God and true man, the eternal Son of God who took on human nature without ceasing to be God, is precisely the kind of claim that Jewish theology has regarded for two millennia as a form of idolatry or confusion about the nature of God. The Catholic Church teaches that the doctrine of the Trinity does not abandon strict monotheism but deepens it, holding that God is one in substance but three in persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that this understanding of God was revealed definitively in Jesus Christ (CCC 253-256). For someone formed in Jewish theology, the concept of divine persons within the one God requires a significant reconception of what monotheism means, and that reconception does not happen quickly or comfortably. The Gospel of John, which opens with the declaration that the Word was with God and the Word was God, and which identifies Jesus as that eternal Word made flesh, presents the theological case for the divinity of Christ with the greatest directness and depth of any New Testament text. The Letter to the Hebrews, written explicitly for a Jewish audience, argues at length that Jesus is the fulfillment and surpassing completion of the entire Levitical priesthood and sacrificial system. Reading these texts seriously and honestly, in light of the Jewish tradition they are in conversation with, is the necessary intellectual preparation for accepting the doctrine of the Incarnation from a Jewish background.

Your Jewish Community Will Likely Experience Your Conversion as a Loss and a Betrayal

This is the relational reality that no formation program can fully prepare you for, and it is worth stating with complete clarity before you go further. In the Jewish community, converting to Christianity, and particularly to Catholicism, is not simply a personal religious choice that others will respect even if they disagree with it. For most Jewish communities, conversion to Christianity represents an act of communal abandonment. It carries the weight of two thousand years of history in which Christian missionaries, often Catholic, attempted to convert Jews by any means available, including coercion, social pressure, legal restriction, and threat. It carries the memory of conversos who converted under duress and were then persecuted for practicing Judaism secretly. It carries the grief of assimilation and the fear of a community that has always been numerically small and historically vulnerable to dispersal and destruction. When you tell your Jewish family that you are converting to Catholicism, they will not only hear a theological statement. They will hear a statement about belonging, about loyalty, and about identity, and many of them will experience it as a kind of death, the loss of you from the Jewish people. Rabbis generally regard a Jew who converts to another religion as still ethnically Jewish but as having cut themselves off from the Jewish community in a meaningful religious sense. Family members may sit shiva, the Jewish mourning practice, symbolically treating your conversion as a death. Parents may feel profound personal failure and grief. Friendships built on shared Jewish identity may not survive the transition. None of this should be experienced as a reason to abandon a genuine conviction about the truth. But it should be understood clearly and honestly before you make the decision, because the relational cost is real and it falls not only on you but on the people who love you.

The Eucharist Is the Theological Heart of Catholicism and Its Jewish Roots Are Both Clear and Contested

For a Jewish person entering the Catholic Church, the doctrine of the Eucharist presents a specific kind of intellectual and religious challenge. The Catholic teaching that bread and wine become the body and blood of Jesus Christ in the Mass is not only a claim about a sacrament. It is a claim that rests on the Last Supper, which was a Passover seder, and on the interpretation of that meal as the institution of a new Passover in which Christ himself is the sacrificial lamb (CCC 1339-1340). The connection between the Eucharist and the Jewish Passover is explicit in Catholic theology, and many Jewish converts to Catholicism find that their deep familiarity with the theology and practice of Passover gives them a richer and more intuitive understanding of the Eucharist than most cradle Catholics possess. The unleavened bread, the blood of the lamb on the doorposts, the liberation from slavery, the covenant meal, all of these elements are present in the Eucharistic theology of the Mass in ways that a person formed in Jewish practice can perceive with particular clarity. At the same time, the Catholic doctrine that the bread and wine truly and substantially become the body and blood of Christ, which the Church calls the Real Presence (CCC 1374), requires accepting a claim about physical and sacramental reality that has no parallel in Jewish thought. Jewish law contains specific prohibitions regarding the consumption of blood, grounded in Leviticus 17:14, and even a purely symbolic interpretation of receiving the blood of Christ would have been troubling to Jews of Jesus’ own time, as the Gospel of John makes clear when many of his disciples walk away after the bread of life discourse in John 6. Work through this doctrine carefully, with both the Jewish scriptural background and the Catholic theological tradition in view, before your reception.

The Mass Will Feel Both Familiar and Foreign, and That Dual Experience Is Worth Paying Attention To

When a Jewish person attends a Catholic Mass for the first time, the experience is often a mixture of unexpected familiarity and genuine strangeness. The familiarity comes from the deep Jewish roots of the liturgy. The Liturgy of the Word at Mass consists of readings from the Hebrew Scriptures and from the New Testament, followed by a psalm and a Gospel reading. The structure of the liturgy draws on ancient Jewish synagogue worship in ways that are historically documented and that scholars of comparative liturgy have traced in detail. The basic shape of prayer, the blessing, the reading of Scripture, the communal response, the structured form of the liturgy, are all recognizable to someone shaped by Jewish worship. The Psalms, which form the backbone of Catholic prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours and appear regularly in the Mass, are deeply familiar texts. The strangeness comes from the Eucharistic liturgy itself, particularly the language of body and blood, the theology of sacrifice, and the practice of genuflecting before the tabernacle where the consecrated hosts are reserved. For a Jewish person who has been formed in a tradition that explicitly guards against anthropomorphic thinking about God and that is deeply cautious about any form of worship that could suggest idolatry, these practices require a significant adjustment of religious sensibility. The Shema-shaped instinct that resists any suggestion of a second divine figure will be tested every time you participate in the Creed, every time you receive the Eucharist, and every time you pray to Christ directly. That tension is not a sign that you made the wrong choice. It is a sign that the theological difference between Judaism and Catholicism is real and that your formation in one tradition is genuinely present in you as you encounter the other.

Jewish Scripture Is Your Scripture Too, and the Church’s Way of Reading It Will Surprise You

One of the genuine gifts you bring to the Catholic Church from Judaism is a serious and grounded relationship with the Hebrew Scriptures. For most Catholics, the Old Testament is a collection of texts that provides background and prophecy for the New Testament but that they engage with much less deeply and regularly than they engage with the Gospels and the letters of Paul. For a person formed in Jewish life, the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings are living texts that have shaped daily prayer, seasonal celebration, and moral formation in a way that Catholic formation rarely replicates at the same depth. The Church teaches that the Old and New Testaments together form the single, unified Scripture of the Church, and that Christ is the key to interpreting both (CCC 128-130). The method the Church uses to read the Hebrew Scriptures, called typological reading, holds that the persons, events, and institutions of the Old Testament are types, meaning prefigurations, of the realities Christ brings to completion in the New. Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac prefigures the Father offering his Son. The Passover lamb prefigures Christ as the Lamb of God. The Temple prefigures the body of Christ. Moses leading Israel through the sea prefigures baptism. For a Jewish reader formed in the peshat tradition of straightforward reading of the plain meaning of texts, this typological approach can feel like a creative imposition on texts that have their own meaning within the Jewish interpretive tradition. The Church would say that typological reading does not eliminate the plain meaning but adds a layer of fulfillment to it. Working through this methodological difference honestly, and finding a reading of the Hebrew Scriptures that honors both your Jewish formation and your Catholic faith, will be one of the most productive intellectual projects of your Catholic life.

You Will Likely Encounter Catholics Who Know Very Little About Judaism and Some Who Hold Anti-Jewish Prejudice

The Catholic parish you enter will in most cases have very limited knowledge of Judaism, very little experience with Jewish converts, and in some cases will include individuals who hold residual anti-Jewish prejudice without fully recognizing it as such. This is an uncomfortable reality but it is an honest one. Anti-Jewish stereotypes embedded in Christian culture, including assumptions about Jewish legalism, materialism, or collective guilt for the death of Christ, are not fully eradicated from the Catholic community simply because Nostra Aetate repudiated them officially in 1965. In some Catholic traditional circles, these prejudices are more openly present. In more mainstream parishes, they may surface in the form of ignorant comments about the Old Testament being harsh or obsolete, or in a general unawareness that Jesus, Mary, the apostles, and the first Christians were all Jewish. As a Jewish convert, you will likely find yourself in the position of educating fellow Catholics about the Jewish roots of the faith they practice, and that can be simultaneously rewarding and exhausting. The rewarding side is real: a Jewish convert who brings deep knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures, Jewish liturgical tradition, and the Jewish cultural context of the New Testament is an enormous asset to any parish community willing to learn from them. The exhausting side is also real, because you may encounter well-meaning ignorance, occasional insensitivity, and in some cases genuine hostility dressed up in religious language. Your OCIA director needs to know that you are coming from a Jewish background so that the formation process can be shaped accordingly, and you need to feel genuinely safe raising the history of Christian antisemitism as a subject of honest and direct discussion within your formation.

The Mosaic Law Still Has Meaning, But Its Practical Obligations Change After Baptism

As a Jewish person entering the Catholic Church, one of the practical questions you will need to address is what happens to your observance of Jewish law, the mitzvot, after your baptism. The Catholic Church teaches that Christ is the fulfillment of the Mosaic Law in the sense articulated in Matthew 5:17, where he says he came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it. This means the Church does not regard the Old Testament law as abolished or worthless, but it also teaches that the ritual and ceremonial elements of the Mosaic Law, including the dietary laws, the Temple sacrifice system, the Sabbath rules, and the circumcision requirement, were figures pointing toward Christ and have been completed and surpassed by their fulfillment in him (CCC 577-582). For a Catholic of Jewish background, this means that observing Jewish dietary laws, celebrating Jewish feasts, and practicing the ritual elements of Jewish law are not obligations of the Catholic faith. The moral law of the Old Testament, which the Church teaches is summed up in the commandment to love God and neighbor, remains fully binding because it is part of the natural law that Christ confirmed rather than replaced. The question of whether a Jewish Catholic may continue to observe Jewish practices as expressions of cultural identity and religious heritage is one that has been addressed differently by different spiritual directors over time. There is generally nothing wrong with continuing to celebrate Passover, Hanukkah, or other Jewish observances as cultural and familial traditions, provided they are understood as pointing toward Christ rather than as ongoing religious obligations. The key is working through these questions honestly with your spiritual director rather than either abandoning your Jewish heritage entirely or maintaining practices that create confusion about your Catholic commitment.

Your Ethnic Jewish Identity Does Not Disappear After Baptism

This is a point that many Jewish people considering conversion worry about and that deserves a clear and honest answer. Being Jewish has both a religious dimension and an ethnic and cultural dimension, and the two do not map onto each other with perfect precision. Baptism makes you Catholic in the religious sense, incorporating you into the Church and conferring the sacramental mark that cannot be removed (CCC 1272). It does not make you ethnically or culturally non-Jewish. If you are Jewish by birth, that ancestral and cultural identity remains a real part of who you are after baptism. The Church recognizes that Jewish Christians, sometimes called Hebrew Catholics, carry a unique vocation within the Church by virtue of their Jewish identity, and there are formal organizations of Hebrew Catholics recognized by the Church that seek to maintain elements of Jewish cultural expression within Catholic life. The great Jewish converts to Catholicism in the Church’s history, including Edith Stein, who became a Carmelite nun and died at Auschwitz, and Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris, who famously insisted that becoming Catholic did not make him less Jewish, are honored by the Church precisely as Jewish Catholics rather than as people who shed their Jewish identity at the baptismal font. Cardinal Lustiger is perhaps the most prominent modern example of this, having maintained throughout his life that his baptism was the fulfillment of his Jewish identity rather than its abandonment. How you live that dual identity, how you balance your Jewish cultural heritage with your Catholic faith, is a question worth working through carefully with a spiritual director who understands both traditions.

The History Between the Church and Jews Includes Saints Who Were Jewish Converts

One of the genuine consolations for a Jewish person entering the Catholic Church is the discovery that the list of Catholic saints includes a significant number of people who were Jewish by birth and who found in Catholicism the fulfillment of their Jewish faith rather than its betrayal. Edith Stein, now canonized as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, was born into a devout Jewish family, became a philosopher under Edmund Husserl, converted to Catholicism after reading the autobiography of Teresa of Avila, became a Carmelite nun, and died in Auschwitz. She is now recognized as a martyr and as a co-patron of Europe. Her writing explicitly connects her Jewish heritage with her Catholic faith, treating her conversion as the deepest expression of what Judaism pointed toward rather than as a rejection of it. Alphonse Ratisbonne was a French Jewish man who experienced a vision of the Virgin Mary in a Roman church in 1842, converted on the spot, and spent the rest of his life as a Jesuit priest working for Jewish-Christian understanding. The nineteenth-century cardinal John Henry Newman, though not himself Jewish, emphasized that Christianity is the fulfillment of Judaism in a way that treats the relationship between the two faiths with a depth and seriousness that is instructive for Jewish converts. More recently, Roy Schoeman, a Jewish convert who wrote the book Salvation Is From the Jews, has articulated a theology of Jewish conversion that treats it explicitly as a fulfillment of rather than a departure from the Jewish covenant relationship with God. These are not isolated examples but a consistent thread in the Church’s history of Jewish converts who found their path into the Church as a completion of their Jewish identity. Knowing their stories will help you understand what kind of Catholic you are being called to be.

The Richness of Jewish Prayer Is a Preparation for Catholic Prayer, Not a Rival to It

Many Jewish people entering the Catholic Church assume they will need to entirely replace their Jewish prayer life with Catholic forms, and the transition from structured Hebrew liturgical prayer to Catholic worship can feel like a loss of a deeply beloved practice. The honest truth is that the Catholic tradition of prayer is extraordinarily rich and, for a person formed in Jewish liturgical prayer, surprisingly familiar in its basic structure and sensibility. The Liturgy of the Hours, the Church’s official daily prayer, is built primarily on the Psalms, which are of course the central text of Jewish liturgical prayer. The structure of morning prayer, afternoon prayer, and evening prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours mirrors the traditional Jewish pattern of Shacharit, Mincha, and Ma’ariv with an intentionality that is historically rooted. The theology of blessing, the blessing of God before meals, before significant actions, and at significant moments of the day, which is so central to Jewish religious practice, finds direct continuation in the Catholic tradition of grace before meals, blessings of objects and places, and the general theology of sanctifying daily life through prayer. The rosary, despite its Catholic distinctiveness, involves a deeply meditative engagement with scriptural scenes from the life of Christ and Mary that draws on the Jewish tradition of remembering and re-entering the great events of sacred history. A person formed in serious Jewish prayer is not coming to Catholic prayer as an empty vessel. They are bringing a disciplined, Scripture-rooted, God-directed prayer life that will find genuine resonance in the Catholic tradition and that will serve them well in every form of Catholic prayer they encounter.

The Messianic Jewish Question Is Complicated and You Need to Know Where the Church Stands

As you consider converting from Judaism to Catholicism, you will likely encounter the phenomenon of Messianic Judaism, the movement of people who accept Jesus as the Messiah while continuing to practice Jewish religious observances and maintain a Jewish religious identity rather than joining a mainstream Christian denomination. You need to understand clearly where the Catholic Church stands on this movement and why. The Church welcomes Jewish people who accept Jesus Christ into full communion through the normal process of OCIA, baptism, confirmation, and Eucharist. The Church does not endorse the creation of separate Jewish-Catholic worship communities that maintain an identity parallel to but distinct from the mainstream Catholic Church, because such arrangements can create confusion about the nature of the Church as one body in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, as Galatians 3:28 states. The traditional Jewish community, for its part, does not regard Messianic Jews as a legitimate form of Judaism and generally treats them as Christians who use Jewish cultural symbols without authentic connection to the Jewish tradition. Some Messianic Jewish communities engage in practices that Jewish scholars and the mainstream Catholic Church alike consider theologically confused, mixing elements of the two traditions in ways that serve neither properly. This does not mean that a Jewish Catholic cannot or should not maintain meaningful Jewish cultural expressions within their Catholic life. It means that the proper context for that maintenance is within the full communion of the Catholic Church, guided by a clear understanding of what Christ’s fulfillment of the Jewish covenant means, rather than in a hybrid community that blurs the theological distinctions the Church is trying to honor honestly.

Your Formation in Ethics and Justice From Judaism Is a Genuine Asset in Catholic Life

Judaism has one of the richest traditions of ethical formation and social justice reasoning in human religious history. The prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures, from Amos and Isaiah to Jeremiah and Micah, produced some of the most powerful moral literature in the world, demanding justice for the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger with an urgency and a theological grounding that has shaped both Jewish and Catholic social thought. The concept of tikkun olam, the repair of the world through human ethical action, reflects a Jewish conviction about the moral seriousness of human responsibility for the state of the world. The elaborate system of Jewish law governing treatment of workers, lending practices, care for the land, and obligations to the poor reflects a comprehensive moral framework that takes the social dimensions of religious life with full seriousness. The Catholic Church has its own rich tradition of social teaching, from Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891 through John Paul II’s social encyclicals and beyond, that addresses the same range of issues with a comparable moral seriousness and that draws on the same prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures (CCC 2401-2463). For a Jewish person entering the Catholic Church, the social and moral tradition of the Church will feel familiar in its fundamental orientations, even where specific applications differ. The Jewish instinct toward concrete care for the vulnerable, toward rigorous ethical reasoning rather than vague moral sentiment, and toward the sanctification of daily life through specific moral practices, is exactly what the Catholic tradition at its best also demands. Bring that formation with you and let it find its Catholic expression rather than feeling you must leave it at the door.

The Commitment You Are Making Has Been Made Before by Great People, and It Will Cost Something Real

Converting from Judaism to Catholicism has been done before you, by people whose intellectual and spiritual seriousness was beyond question, and knowing their stories honestly, including the cost those stories carried, will prepare you better than any reassurance could. Edith Stein was killed by the Nazis specifically because she was Jewish, even after her conversion and her life as a Carmelite nun. Cardinal Lustiger was accused by some in the French Jewish community of betrayal and by some in the Catholic community of retaining a Jewish identity that supposedly undermined his Catholic faith. Roy Schoeman and Daniel Suazo and others who have written publicly about their conversions from Judaism to Catholicism report sustained pressure from both communities, being told by Jews that they have abandoned their people and occasionally finding within Catholic communities a failure to understand or honor the Jewish dimensions of their faith. The cost of this conversion is real in ways that most other conversions are not, because the history between the two communities is so specific, so painful, and so recent. The Church asks nothing of you that it has not asked of people before you who found the weight worth bearing. The faith you are entering holds, as Christ said in Matthew 13:44, that the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field for which a person sells everything they have in order to buy that field. Coming in with clear eyes about what the purchase costs, and with genuine conviction that the treasure is worth it, is the only honest and sustainable way to make this conversion. Take the time the process requires. Ask the hardest questions. Grieve what you are leaving behind. And then make the decision from the center of your conscience and your intellect, not from social pressure in either direction.