Avraham the OG (Original Ger)

This week’s Torah portion begins with Avraham being called by God: Lech lecha, go forth. According to the midrash, Avraham was born into a family of idol-worshippers in Ur Kasdim, and he found his way to God through a searching that the tradition remembers as one of the most radical acts of individual conscience in human history.[1] He left his land, his birthplace, and his father’s house, and he went toward something he could not yet name.

The portion ends in Genesis 17 with a covenant ratified through circumcision and a renaming. Avram becomes Avraham, and Sarai becomes Sarah. The Talmud treats the old name with such seriousness that it says whoever calls Avraham “Avram” transgresses a positive commandment (Berakhot 13a). The new name is not a nickname. It is who he is.

Because his story parallels that of a convert to Judaism, the tradition gives converts his name as their patronymic: ben Avraham Avinu, bat Avraham Avinu. They are children of Avraham, not by blood but by the same act of choosing.[2] The tradition is telling us something about where we come from.

Avraham was not the only ger to shape the Jewish story. Ruth, a Moabite, became the great-grandmother of King David.[3] Onkelos, a Roman nobleman, converted in the Tannaitic era and produced the Aramaic translation of the Torah that is still printed alongside the Hebrew text today.[4] Shemaya and Avtalyon, teachers of Hillel himself, were descendants of converts.[5] The tradition does not hide this or deride it. It celebrates it, and the Torah commands us to love the ger thirty-six times, more than almost any other commandment.[6]

To this day, when someone comes before a rabbinic court and says I am a Jew in my soul, the rabbis do not laugh. They also do not simply say yes. Tradition asks the court to discourage the candidate, to test their resolve and to make sure they understand the weight of the obligations they are taking on.[7] But the rabbis take the claim seriously. They probe it and examine its sincerity. If they find that the person means it, that this is not a whim or a performance but the truest thing the person knows about themselves, they begin a process of transition.

That transition is marked by ritual. For a man, there is brit milah, which, like Avraham’s, is a permanent physical sign of a new identity. Every convert, man or woman, immerses in a mikveh, which the Talmud describes as becoming “like a newborn child,” a rebirth.[8] The convert takes a new Hebrew name, the name they will be called to the Torah, in prayer, in life, and in death.

The convert’s old life ends at the water’s edge, and a new life begins on the other side. They are no longer defined by the name they carried, the community they belonged to, or the identity the world had assigned them. The person who emerges from the mikveh is finally themselves, a fully recognized Jew. And the community is bound by a law of speech: to remind the convert of their former deeds or past in order to shame them is a Torah violation of ona’at devarim, causing pain through words.[9] The new identity is protected, and the old one is not to be thrown in their face.

Now read that again.

A person has always known that their inner identity does not match the one the world assigned them. They come forward and say: this is who I am. They mark the transition with a ceremony, a moment of emergence in which the old self is shed and the new one is witnessed by others. For some, that includes a permanent physical mark on the body, the outer self consecrated to match the inner. They take a new name and ask only that the old one be left behind. They want the community to see them as they are, and not as they were.

Now consider trans.

We translate ger as “convert,” but the biblical word tells a richer story. A ger is a sojourner, a stranger, a newcomer with no inherited place, someone who lives among a people that is not, by birth, their own. Avraham called himself one at Hebron: ger v’toshav anochi imachem.[10] Moses named his son Gershom, “I have been a stranger in a foreign land,” from the same root. And God tells all of Israel, “You are gerim and toshavim with Me” (Lev. 25:23). Even the insiders, in the right light, are outsiders.

There is something quietly queer in each of these definitions. To be queer is, in some sense, to be a ger: to hold no inherited place, to cross a boundary others take for granted, to ask to be seen not as the world first knew you but as you know yourself, and to choose to belong to something that was not given at birth.

We know that the ger has always been among us. We have a system for receiving them, built on the recognition that transformation is real and that the community’s obligation is to meet the person who has arrived, not the person who left.

We have the tools. The question is whether we will use them.

Notes

1. The idol-worshipping family and Avraham’s search are from midrash (Bereishit Rabbah 38), not the biblical text.
2. Convert’s patronymic: see Mishnah Bikkurim 1:4, Rambam, Hilchot Bikkurim 4:3, and Shulchan Aruch YD 268:2. Rambam’s responsum to Ovadiah the Proselyte affirms that converts share fully in Avraham’s spiritual lineage. Please verify these citations before publishing, including the Issurei Biah reference from the original draft.
3. Ruth 1:16; 4:13–22.
4. Avodah Zarah 11a; Megillah 3a. Onkelos’s exact dating and identity are debated by scholars.
5. Gittin 57b traces Shemaya and Avtalyon to Sennacherib’s descendants, and Sanhedrin 96b says Sisera’s descendants taught children Torah in Jerusalem.
6. Bava Metzia 59b.
7. Yevamot 47a, drawing on Ruth.
8. Yevamot 22a, 48b.
9. Exodus 22:20; Bava Metzia 58b. The prohibition concerns reminding a convert of past deeds or lineage to cause shame. It does not bar all mention of the former name. Check the Chofetz Chaim source before attributing a ruling to him.
10. Genesis 23:4. Also Ex. 2:22; Ps. 39:13 (singular); 1 Chron. 29:15 (“we are gerim before You”). The word ger occurs many dozens of times in the Bible.