Laszlo Vaszar

Yom Kippur 5766

I am a Jew by Choice

I grew up in a mining town in Communist Romania in a family belonging to the Hungarian ethnic minority. While all citizens suffered from repression and economic deprivation, the ethnic and religious communities were additionally subjected to relentless campaigns of harassment and forced assimilation. My sensitivity to the nuances of life as a minority has evolved in that environment, and it was further influenced by my family’s solidarity with other ethnic and religious groups.

As a late teenager and young adult, I tried to define my identity and establish a set of values that would guide my life. After the collapse of Communism, I moved to Hungary and lived in Budapest for the next few years, continuing my quest under more favorable conditions.

I was raised as a secular humanist, and I took my first steps towards organized religion because I sensed an insufficiency, a void at the heart of secular humanism. Although appealing in its ideals, humanism is vague in regards to the ultimate source of its ethical principles and its attempts at defining a God-free morality were profoundly unsatisfying to me. I concluded that the source of our ethical sensibility is in a divine Creator and that fulfillment of man happens best in a religious context.

I therefore sought to find God and this search led me, with the help of Jewish friends, to discover Judaism. I first joined a Jewish congregation 11 years ago to the day, when I celebrated Yom Kippur with  “Szim Salom,” the only Reform Community in Budapest . That community was evolving as a meeting point for Hungarian Jews in various states of assimilation, who were rediscovering their roots. Not having a resident rabbi, the community was led on Holidays by Rabbis or lay educators from Leo Baeck College in London , the leading center of European Reform Judaism. My intention to convert was by then firm and received further impetus during multiple discussions with our British visitors.  After moving to the US with my wife and our infant daughter, I have completed my conversion within a Reform community in Connecticut .

I am Jewish because I believe that personal ethics require a conceptualization of God, and that the Jewish vision of God is the most spiritually exalted, intellectually sound, and practically sustainable one.                                     

I am Jewish because, in the words of the poet @the faith of Israel demands of me no abdication of the mind".  Judaism is less concerned with metaphysical speculation than with defining and applying an individual and collective program of action, which affirms life, practices compassion and promotes justice. The Jewish ideal is not to escape from this world into mystical flights of unreason but to be solidly rooted in reality, yet to relate to every situation as a possible encounter with God.

I am a Jew because I delight in and wish to share in the Jewish tradition. The wisdom, wit and commentary accrued over the generations and the life paths of our ancestors have an inherent value, which inspires me.  Ethics is an acquired taste and it is acquired precisely through an arduous multi-generational collective trek. Being Jewish means that one does not have to redraw the map of that trek in every generation. Rather, by reaching to the Jewish tradition, we rely on the experience and wisdom of preceding generations as we set out to achieve a life of virtue and excellence.

Finally, I am Jewish because I feel good in the company of Jews. I receive inspiration from the fellowship of this lively, intelligent and morally exacting community.

Thank you and may we all be inscribed in the Book of Life.