Why become a Jew?

New Yorkers don't trust something (or someone) they don't have to pay for. I read this in a piece in The New Yorker about a young woman whose passion is to install baby's car seats safely and properly. She started off as a do-gooder, but begun charging 45 dollars per seat because people wouldn't take up on her offers to help if no payment was required.

This worries me a little. I have been working here for free for almost two months. They have just started advertising the position I have a "good chance" of getting according to the man in charge of the project. I may have undersold myself by volunteering, but I really do not have a choice right now and I presumed that this would show "commitment". I might be totally off and not get a job... What I did get is a babysitting job for 13 bucks an hour. I get to go and take care of my colleague Cynthia's kids for a couple of hours while she is in her"jew class", as my office mate and (other) new best friend, Romy, calls it.

C. is a divorced, slightly neurotic, thirty-six-year-old, a strict Catholic by birth and upbringing (which she hated), who has decided to convert to judaism recently. That is no easy task and she has no apparent reason to be doing it. Unlike Charlotte in S & C, she is not marrying some rich Jewish lawyer, although that transpired to be the ultimate goal. She is very devoted, learning to bake latkes and other Jewish specialties I never even heard of; going to her classes every week; volunteering at a Jewish soup kitchen; hanging out with old Jewish ladies at the synagogue. Initially, I was puzzled at this. Where I come from, you don't want to become Jewish and you cannot choose not to be Jewish. Then she told me how, through her class, she got invited to a wealthy couple's Sabbath dinner a couple of weeks ago. She was describing the Fifth Avenue penthouse, the expensive china and the fabulous catering with such excitement that I understood that she just wants to belong. Yes, she might want a Jewish guy to marry, but, more importantly, she feels that it is nice to be part of a culture, tradition, group and Jews are almost the majority in this town. (To say the least, they are the majority in these non-profit, human rights circles for sure...) I am fascinated by this desire to belong to something that is not naturally yours. I don't think I ever desired that because I am satisfied with what I have. On second thought, I am not really sure what it is exactly that I have in this area...