Her spark was ignited and a Jewish soul found

We live in interesting times that witness murder as state policy and also brazen and often violent religious intolerance.

These are also times, by contrast, of religious tolerance in many quarters between Judaism and Christianity, a spiritual give and take that would have been unheard of just a century ago.

Several years ago, I met in Jerusalem with two authors, both converts to Judaism, Michaela Lawson and Ashirah Yosefah. Their joint work, “Spark Ignited” (Menorah Books), hits a raw spiritual nerve sensed by any reader sensitive enough to appreciate the sacrifice these women went through in their spiritual journey to our faith.

In her essay in this book, Ashirah shares with us the following that I found timely to the calendar at this time of year. This is just a hint as to her thinking on so sensitive a matter as change of faith. Consider this:

There is a saying in Hebrew, “Ein mikreh, ha’col mi Hashem,” which translates as, “There are no coincidences, everything is from Hashem.” And so it was that, in 1995, I happened to meet the Orthodox rabbi of my hometown, where I was working. … This rabbi was frequently ‘out and about,’ active in interfaith dialogue, yet for some reason we had never met once during the previous 40 years of my life. Forty. What an amazing number in Torah: Transformation, maturation, change.

For the next few years, our paths were constantly crossing. As marketing director [for the Downtown development agency], I developed all the seasonal promotions for the downtown business community.

In 1995, Christmas and Chanukah were very close to each other, so I decided to use my thrice-weekly column in the local newspaper to do a two-part feature on Chanukah. I went off to the library to do research, wrote my articles, then called up Rabbi Spiro to share with him what I wanted to do and ask if he would read the articles I had written, and tell me whether they were accurate and appropriate for publication. He agreed. And suddenly we seemed to be bumping into each other everywhere, and nearly every week.

The author goes into some detail as to how this experience with this rabbi’s help hastened her continuing spiritual journey from Christianity to Judaism.

She adds, “My quest to know the true nature of Christianity was expedited by my rapidly growing hunger to learn about Torah.”

In the decade to come, Ashirah was to eventually convert to Orthodox Judaism in Israel under the authority of the Rabbinical Council of America (Jerusalem branch) and a Beit Din of the Rabbanut Yerushalayim. Fifty years exactly from the Hebrew date upon which she was born, Ashirah entered the waters of a mikvah and emerged a Jew, her own personal yovel. She made aliyah four months later.

Adapted from a column published in 2015. To reach Alan Gerber, write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com