A Story of Conversion
By Debra Eckerling
Contrary to what entertainment media would have you believe – in particular, Charlotte’s road to conversion on Sex and the City – those considering converting to Judaism will not be met by slammed doors. Still, conversion is a serious and intentional process, designed to ensure commitment, learning, and genuine connection.
Kylie Ora Lobel, author of Choosing to be Chosen: From Being an Atheist Non-Jew to Becoming an Orthodox Jew, falls into that category. She was raised in a secular Christian household, her faith waning through her upbringing.
While many Orthodox converts come from another branch of Judaism, choosing a direct path to Orthodoxy from another religion is far less common. In this article, JLiving asks Kylie the questions many curious Jews wonder about converting to Orthodox Judaism—but may not even know to ask.
What were your early connections to religion?
“My family was secular Christian and just [celebrated] Christmas and Easter… When I was little, I believed in God, just in nately,” she says.
Bad experiences at a young age tainted that faith.
“For instance, I prayed that my parents wouldn’t get divorced, and then they did anyway,” Kylie explains. “Or I prayed that my grandma, who was my best friend, wouldn’t die, and then she died holding my hand.”
She prayed for these things not to happen; they happened anyway. “There must not be a God.”
“I became an atheist, and then I always had some doubts about my atheism,” Kylie admits. “Sometimes I’d see fate in my life, and I was like, ‘That is not a coincidence,’ but still, I wouldn’t admit it was God.”
Did you have any previous Jewish connections?
Her best friends in high school were the first Jews she knowingly met; she dated Jews in high school (she celebrated Passover for the first time at 16, because she was dating a Jewish boy) and continued to be drawn to them in college.
“My family was always so quiet growing up – we didn’t talk about our feelings,” she explains. “I always felt like the odd one out because I was … a very feely person; I wanted to laugh and sing and hug, and I hadn’t met people like that until I met Jews.”
Kylie remembers visiting the Holocaust Museum and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C. when she was a kid, and being so shaken up by the experience that she had nightmares. Culturally, she always loved Woody Allen movies and delis.
Why did you choose Orthodox? Or did it choose you? “
It was the second one, for sure, because my husband did not want me to convert Orthodox,” Kylie explains. “He grew up going to Orthodox school. … He was very connected to his Judaism and always believed in God, so the spirituality part he loved, but then culturally he had some bad experiences and [left] Orthodoxy.”
“We started dating in May of 2010, went to Chabad in June or July, and then a few months later, I was like, ‘Okay, I believe in God now, and I want to look into conversion,’” Kylie says. “Then I looked back at my life, and I was like, ‘Oh, this makes sense.‘“ “I think [the decision to convert] was fairly quick because … I [found] my people,” she says.
When Kylie started dating Danny, he took her to a Chabad for Friday night dinner, because that was his connection to Judaism. “He had met a Chabad rabbi who was very friendly,” she explains. “It was no pressure, and it was free food, and we were broke.
“When I went there – and I’d never experienced this feeling before – I was sitting at the table with warm challah in my stomach and listening to the rabbi and seeing all these like diverse types of Jews around the table talking and laughing, and I felt this warmth in my chest I never felt before. Suddenly I was like, ‘Oh, this feels like God.’”
The more she learned about the Torah, the more she found answers to questions she had lived with most of her life.
“It was a much more authentic relationship,” she says. “You can’t say, ‘Oh, God doesn’t exist, because bad things happen in this world, because we have free will.’ I was learning all these deep concepts, and … that kind of explained God to me. And then having these experiences with Chabad, with the community, I just felt it.”
Danny, her then-boyfriend, now husband, encouraged her to pursue a conservative conversion, since he had no experience with reform and a bad experience with Orthodoxy. This set Kylie on a circuitous journey.
The first conservative rabbi she met with – at a non-kosher restaurant, by the way – kept asking her weird questions (do you like farmer’s cheese and tongue?), and wanted to charge her $100 a class for an unlimited amount of time.
“I didn’t even have $100 in my bank account at the time, let alone for ongoing classes,” she says. “Then I found another one that I liked, and I went to synagogue there in New York on Shabbat.”
It was a nice experience. Then the rabbi asked if she was ready to get married. She was 21 and had only been dating Danny for four months. He said come back when you’re ready to get married.
“And in the meantime, [he said], ‘Go and take this introduction to Judaism class at the 92nd Street Y,’” Kylie recalls. “I had no idea at this point that there were even differences between different types of Jews … when you’re a convert, you don’t know Reform, Orthodox. Conservative, traditional; you know nothing.”
The 92nd Street Y was very secular; the rabbi teaching the class was Orthodox. On his suggestion, she Googled to find a nearby synagogue; a woman with a kind voice answered the phone. They had a conversion class going, so perfect timing. Also, Orthodox. That’s where all the signs pointed, so Kylie stopped resisting.
“The more I learned, the idea of being Orthodox appealed the most to me: not working on Shabbat, not driving, not using my phone,” she explains. “Keeping kosher really appealed to me because I’m an animal lover, and I had a lot of pets – at the time, I had a chicken and a rooster and two dogs – and I still have a lot of pets.
“Not mixing meat and milk because you don’t want to mix life and death; all really interesting things,” she continues. “I eventually brought Danny back into it, but it was not easy.”
What did your family think about your conversion?
“My family was secular Christian – just [celebrated] Christmas and Easter, so thankfully I didn’t have super-religious parents,” Kylie says. “My mom immediately was like, ‘That makes sense; you were lonely as a kid, and you wanted community.”
Her sisters were fine with it, as was her dad, who would let her know about a Holocaust documentary or give her a menorah puzzle or Jewish artwork as a present.
Her family was from Baltimore, so they were very familiar with Jews.
“It’s like being from New York,” Kylie says. “If you’re not Jewish, you’re still a little bit Jewish, because there are so many Jews.”
The only one she didn’t tell was her Catholic grandmother, who was getting dementia at the time. Also, Kylie didn’t want to hurt her feel ings. She would ask if Kylie was going to church; she’d been going to synagogue.
“[I told her] I go every, every week, I pray all the time, I believe in God, and she was so happy for me,” Kylie recalls. “I didn’t connect to her Catholicism, but I really connected to her passion for spirituality.”
Was anyone opposed to your converting?
Only Danny and only for being Orthodox … at first.
“He’s also a comedian, and that meant he had to give up working on Shabbat,” Kylie says. “It’s changed a lot because Hollywood has changed a lot … but at the time, you could not say, ‘I’m just going to perform Saturday [night and] Sunday.
Danny was very opposed to it because of his career and because of his previous experience.
“We fought for years – we almost broke up several times – but I always [felt] something in me was just saying, ‘We have to do this,” Kylie says. “I saw how I was changing for the better.”
They both were.
“We’d go to Chabad, and I’d look over at him through the mechitza, the separator, and he looked so calm when he was praying,” she says. “And he started to remember, ‘I used to love this;’ he also started to re alize that you can have a different experience with [religion] as an adult, and you can choose.”
Danny started to remember all the things he loved about it, too.
When they moved to Los Angeles, they found the Jewish community especially welcoming.
“[It’s] so out of the box; you have Jews of all different types interacting,” Kylie explains. “Here, they shul hop, it’s called. And there’s a lot of baal teshuvahs, which is someone who becomes religious later on; there’s a lot of converts; there’s all different types of people: Israeli, Sep hardic, Persian, Ashkenazi, religious, not religious. And we all get along.
“It was all so beautiful; that really brought him back.”
Are Jews actually tough on people who want to convert?
“I was never rejected; that’s something from Sex and the City with Charlotte York Goldenblatt,” she says. “I have a podcast where I interview converts, and none of them were either.”
It’s never rejection. Rabbis just want to make sure that you actually want to do it – and are converting for the right reasons.
“You have to go in for meetings and explain your intentions, and they tell you everything you have to do,” Kylie explains.
For an Orthodox conversion, it’s a lot.
“You have to take on the commandments, 613 of them, and do the ones that are relevant today,” she continues. “We don’t have a temple, so we can’t do sacrifices, for instance, but they want to make sure that you’re going to keep Shabbat fully [and] that you’re going to keep kosher; you have to move to a Jewish community, so you’re within the Eruv, which is the way that you can push a stroller on Shabbat or carry things; and to be near ko sher restaurants, to be near a mikvah; and then you have to learn how to read prayer.”
The process takes a long time – Kylie did it over five years – because it is not something to be entered in lightly.
“A lot of baal teshuvahs and a lot of converts or converts-to-be take on things too fast, and it’s overwhelming,” she says. “It is rare, but some people [convert] because their spouse tells them to or the mother-in-law or father-in-law [says] you have to be Jewish before [marriage], but mostly it’s not like that.
Conversion is a lot.
Kylie says, “You learn a lot, it takes time, and you can’t do it quickly.”