I sent an Orthodox Jewish friend a link to my appearance on a Sabbath panel at Loma Linda University ten days ago.
“You looked very rabbinic,” she said. “From the way you sat to the way you spoke, you seemed like a rabbi. From the way you slumped to the way you sat up straight, from the way you looked out at the audience to the way you spoke to them, you seemed like a rabbi.”
“I felt the power of 4,000 years of tradition,” I responded. “For a convert, I feel like I have a good grasp of the Jewish basics and I feel confident I can articulate them.”
“I watched the video and I clicked around the Loma Linda University website,” she said. “Everyone seemed so nice, so unreally nice, I didn’t trust them. They seemed fake.”
