There Are Many Reasons Why People Change Religions

People in Abrahamic religions switch their birth religions for many different reasons. Eighteen months after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 2023, 31 percent of Jews say they’ve become more involved in the Jewish community since October 7, according to a new survey from the Jewish Federations of North America.

Some Christians insist on taking verses such as “Verily, We: it is We Who have sent down the Dhikr (the Quran 15:9) as a proof of divine plurality, Muslims can refute this by claiming and quoting clear and unambiguous verses as: “And your god is One God, there is none who has the right to be worshipped but He, (Quran 2:163) and “Say: He is Allah, the One” (Quran 112:1)

And some Muslims claim that in the Gospel of Matthew when Jesus was resurrected after the Roman soldiers crucified him, what happened to the dead that came out of their tombs and were seen in town by people? The Jewish author of Matthew’s Gospel testified about the many resurrected cadavers in his Gospel at Matthew 27:52–53 so their appearance in such numbers meant that the resurrection of Jesus would be a very special but not unique event. “…the tombs also were opened, and many bodies of saints (very Jewish people) who had fallen asleep (died) were raised, and coming out of their tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city (Jerusalem) and appeared to many (relatives and friends)” (Matthew 27:52).

For example, Jeannie Suk Gersen wrote in the New Yorker Magazine (12/2/2024) “I was raised in a Korean American evangelical church, where people spoke in tongues as the Holy Spirit moved them. My Bible teacher referred to me as “devil’s spawn” because I had a habit of picking arguments with Scripture. (Eve’s lust for knowledge wasn’t sinful, I remember declaring; God’s curse on humankind was an overreaction.) By the time I reached adulthood, I’d developed an emphatically rationalist world view, which for a while I thought precluded religion.

But I knew the first books of the Old Testament cold, and I still sometimes prayed to God. I also nurtured a nascent affinity for Judaism, born of both disposition and circumstance. My father, a physician, did his medical residency at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, where his department chief was an Orthodox Jew, and he’d occasionally serve as a “Shabbos goy,” turning on lights for the religious doctor on the Sabbath. Like many devout Christians, my mother was fascinated with Israel, and she visited the country often.

In 2023, on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, my friend Rabbi Angela Warnick Buchdahl of Central Synagogue, a Reform congregation in New York City, gave a sermon focussed on atoning for the “sin of passing judgment,” and in particular judgment of intermarriage. Rabbi Buchdahl has a Jewish American father and a Korean Buddhist mother.

I’ve known her since we attended college together, in the nineteen-nineties, when she already seemed poised to become the first East Asian American Jew ordained as a rabbi. She reached that milestone in 2001, and has built a robust following within her congregation and beyond.

Rabbi Buchdahl drew a contrast between the Bible’s Ezra, who promoted the idea of a Jewish “holy seed,” and Ruth, a Biblical model of conversion. A Gentile by birth, Ruth married an Israelite and, when she was later widowed, told her mother-in-law, Naomi, “Wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you stay, I will stay. Your people are my people, your God, my God.” Ruth became the great-grandmother of King David, an ancestor of the future Jewish Messiah. As Buchdahl later put it to me, “We’ve been a mixed multitude all along.”

Plus, in her experience—contra fears about conversion “diluting” Judaism—those who join the faith often “make their Jewish spouses more Jewish.” Buchdahl invoked Rabbi Alexander Schindler, a former leader of the American Reform movement, who made the front page of the Times in 1978, when he pressed Jews to seek converts.

Proselytizing is often understood to be anathema to Judaism, but Buchdahl told congregants, “Throughout Jewish history, you should know, whenever Jews felt safe, we sought new adherents. This moment in America should be such a time.”

Two weeks later came October 7th. Hamas invaded Israel, massacring some twelve hundred people and kidnapping two hundred and fifty more. Israel, in turn, launched a devastating war in Gaza that has killed approximately forty-five thousand people. Around the world, anti-Israel protests erupted, and antisemitism spiked; many Jews faced a fresh reckoning with the relationship between Israel and Jewish identity.

It was a time of fear and dread and painful fractures within the Jewish community—it was no longer, as Rabbi Buchdahl had suggested, a moment when Jews widely felt at ease. Yet rabbis from a broad range of Jewish institutions observed something they hadn’t anticipated: a surge of interest in Judaism.

Elliot Cosgrove, a Conservative rabbi and the author of the new book “For Such a Time as This: On Being Jewish Today,” told me that since October 7th he’s seen engagement from “within and beyond the boundaries of the conventional Jewish community” at a level he’s never before witnessed.

This has included increased synagogue membership, expanded enrollment in Hebrew-school programs, full houses at Shabbat services—and oversubscribed courses for people interested in becoming Jewish.

Suddenly, my own halting path to conversion was meeting a larger movement. At Central Synagogue, another rabbi, Lisa Rubin, runs the Center for Exploring Judaism, which educates and guides Jewish-curious newcomers. Since October 7th, the program’s courses have enrolled double the usual number of students and accrued a seven-month waiting list. Rabbi Rubin told me that she has warned potential converts that “this is not a great time to be stepping into Judaism.” Still, as she put it, “They’re running toward the house on fire.”

Judaism is not only a faith but a tribe, a culture, and a life style, and the motivations behind conversion are as varied as Jewishness itself. I spoke to converts who had always suspected that they had Jewish ancestry. Deb Kroll, a woman in her early seventies, grew up in the Bible Belt with parents who became Pentecostal leaders, but when she was a child her Christian grandmother told stories of her family fleeing at night from a county where the Ku Klux Klan was active, soon after the lynching of Leo Frank. Kroll remembers thinking, I’m a little Jewish girl who’s been born into the wrong family.

For most of her life, she didn’t realize that it was even possible to convert to Judaism. Then, in recent years, Kroll said, DNA testing of relatives suggested that she had significant Jewish ancestry on both sides. She was studying in Rubin’s program online from her home, in Georgia, when the events of October 7th occurred. “I thought, Well, I’m not going to stop my Jewish journey out of fear,” she recalled, adding, “I throw in my lot with the Jewish people.”

I would add that this willingness to become Jewish in a time of danger goes back to the Exodus when non-Jews (a mixed multitude) joined those Jews who were leaving Egypt for the desert and then the Land of Israel. According to most Kabbalist (mystics) Rabbis all true converts have Jewish ancestors.

The Kabalistic (mystical) book Sha’ar HaGilgulim written by Rabbi Chaim Vital Calabrese states that when Josef was in charge of distribution of grain, millions of Egyptians converted to the faith of Josef’s father Jacob-Israel. These people, who would come to be called the erev rav (a mixed multitude), lived in Israelite villages and followed Israelite practices. Many Israelite souls were included among these Egyptian people, including – most significantly – the soul of the Messiah (Ben Joseph).

According to Rabbi Isaac Luria, Eliezer, the servant of Abraham was a Canaanite who due to his righteousness, merited to be reincarnated in the days of Moses within the tribe of Yehuda. Eliezer reincarnated as Caleb Ben Yefuneh. His soul later incarnated higher and higher until he became a High Priest (Zecharia, the High Priest) and many centuries later a Master Kabbalist (Rabbi Moshe Cordevero). (See Sha’ar HaPesukim of the Ari’)

Also in Persia, as the Book of Esther recorded: “Many people of other nationalities became Jews because awe of the Jews had seized them.” (Esther 8:17)