V'Al Geirei HaTzedek

Good morning everyone. Welcome back to Learn to Daven - Day 226.

Somewhere around the year 1160, a man named Ovadiah sat down and wrote a letter to the Rambam. Ovadiah was a convert - he had walked away from the world he was born into and joined the Jewish people - and he had a question that was eating at him. When I daven, he asked, may I say the words everyone else says? Can I say Elo-heinu vEilohei avoseinu - "our God and God of our fathers"? Because my fathers were not at Sinai. Can I say "who chose us," "who brought us out of Egypt"? Or do I have to daven from the side, in the third person, a guest in the siddur?

The Rambam's answer survives, and it is one of the most beautiful documents a posek ever wrote. Say every word, he tells Ovadiah. Say "our God and God of our fathers," because Avraham is your father. Avraham was the great convert, the first person to walk away from the world he was born into - and everyone who enters under the wings of the Shechinah in every generation is his direct spiritual descendant. There is no difference between us and you, the Rambam writes. And then he goes further: our lineage traces to Avraham; yours traces to the One who spoke and the world came into being.

Now here's what I want you to see this morning. That question - is the convert davening from the side? - was answered a thousand years before Ovadiah asked it. It was answered by the Anshei Knesses HaGedolah, and the answer is sitting in today's line.

Yesterday we watched this bracha itemize the categories of the good: the righteous, the pious, the elders, the scholars. And right there in the list, between the scholars and ourselves, stands: v'al geirei hatzedek - and upon the righteous converts.

Think about what that placement means. This is the Amidah's roll call of the people who hold the world up. And the converts are not in an appendix. They're not in a special prayer said occasionally. They are named in the daily Amidah, every single day, three times a day, in the middle of the list of the righteous - which means that for as long as Jews have been davening this prayer, no convert has ever once been left out of it, and every born Jew has been required, daily, to bless them.

And listen to the title. Not geirim - converts. Geirei hatzedek - converts of righteousness. The bracha gives them a compound name, as if to say: don't you dare file this under tolerance. The ger didn't inherit this. Everything you were handed at birth - the identity, the belonging, the Shabbos table you grew up at - the ger chose, on purpose, usually at real cost. The Torah commands v'ahavtem es hager - and the Gemara in Bava Metzia says the Torah warns about the treatment of the ger in thirty-six places. Thirty-six. No other mitzvah of sensitivity gets repeated at that frequency. It's as if the Torah knew exactly where communities would fail, and set thirty-six alarms.

And the Jewish people's debt here is not theoretical. When you learn Chumash with Targum, you're learning the translation of Onkelos - Onkelos the ger, as the Gemara in Megillah calls him. A convert wrote the translation through which a hundred generations understood the Torah. The remnant of the scholars and the geirei hatzedek stand next to each other in this bracha, and sometimes they were the same person.

Then comes the last word of the list, and after everything we've said it might be the most moving one: v'aleinu. And upon us. The bracha names the tzaddikim, the chasidim, the elders, the scholars, the converts - all of them presumably somebody else - and then quietly adds us to the end of our own list. We'll spend a whole session on that word soon. But notice today who we're standing next to. The siddur seats us with the converts - the people who chose this. Maybe to remind us, every morning, that the goal is to be Jewish the way a ger is Jewish: on purpose.

Tomorrow: what does God actually reward? The bracha's answer is surprising - V'Sein Sachar Tov, and the one thing on the list that anyone can do.