Three Days In

On Tuesday afternoon, I stood before a beit din in Atlanta and answered questions about what I believed and how I planned to live.

Three rabbis. A small room. A conversation that was somehow exceedingly significant, nerve wracking, and an ordinary moment of my life, all at the same time.

Then the mikveh. Then the brachot. Then singing and dancing. And, of course, paperwork. Then the drive home in traffic, Jewish for about forty minutes and already late for something.

This is the first installment of "Finding the Joy" — a weekly column that takes the week's Torah portion and looks for what's actually worth smiling about in Jewish life.

If you're here because you found a rubber duck somewhere and got curious, welcome. If you're here because you know exactly what a parsha is and want to see what a brand-new Jew makes of one, also welcome. We'll figure this out together.

The parsha this Shabbat is Emor — "Speak" — and it contains one of the most remarkable chapters in the Torah. Leviticus 23 is the calendar. Not a metaphorical calendar. The actual schedule. God tells Moses to tell the people of Israel: here are your appointments.

דַּבֵּ֞ר אֶל־בְּנֵ֤י יִשְׂרָאֵל֙ וְאָמַרְתָּ֣ אֲלֵהֶ֔ם מוֹעֲדֵ֣י יְהֹוָ֔ה אֲשֶׁר־תִּקְרְא֥וּ אֹתָ֖ם מִקְרָאֵ֣י קֹ֑דֶשׁ אֵ֥לֶּה הֵ֖ם מוֹעֲדָֽי׃

Speak to the Israelite people and say to them: These are My fixed times, the fixed times of GOD, that you shall proclaim as sacred occasions.

— Vayikra 23:2

Moadim. Fixed times. The word comes from the same root as ohel moed — the Tent of Meeting. These aren't obligations dropped on you from above. They're meetings. Times when you show up because someone is expecting you.

And the chapter keeps going. Shabbat. Pesach. The counting of the Omer — you'll count forty-nine days from Pesach to Shavuot, one by one, marking each night. Then Rosh Hashanah. Yom Kippur. Sukkot. A full year of showing up, laid out in a single chapter of Torah. I read it again Tuesday night, a few hours after the mikveh, sitting on my couch with both a chumash and a siddur I'd owned for a year but now owned differently. The whole calendar, right there. My calendar now.

There's a detail in Emor I keep returning to. Right in the middle of the festival laws — between the instructions for Shavuot and Rosh Hashanah — the Torah drops in something unexpected:

וּֽבְקֻצְרְכֶ֞ם אֶת־קְצִ֣יר אַרְצְכֶ֗ם לֹֽא־תְכַלֶּ֞ה פְּאַ֤ת שָֽׂדְךָ֙ בְּקֻצְרֶ֔ךָ וְלֶ֥קֶט קְצִירְךָ֖ לֹ֣א תְלַקֵּ֑ט לֶֽעָנִ֤י וְלַגֵּר֙ תַּעֲזֹ֣ב אֹתָ֔ם אֲנִ֖י יְהֹוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֵיכֶֽם׃ {פ}

And when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger: I the ETERNAL am your God.

— Vayikra 23:22

The stranger — the ger. Right in the middle of the party invitation list. You're laying out the festivals, the appointed times, the full calendar of celebration, and you pause to say: leave room at the edges. Someone is going to show up who wasn't born into this. Make sure there's something left for them.

I am three days into being a Jew, and the parsha already mentioned me.

On Monday — the day before my beit din — Edan Alexander came home. Nineteen years old when Hamas took him on October 7th, twenty-one when he hugged his mother at the base in Re'im. Five hundred and eighty-four days in captivity. His grandmother said she'd barely slept and had baked his favorite foods.

Alexander's homecoming and my conversion have nothing in common in scale. One moved nations. The other happened in a small room in Atlanta with three rabbis and a few prayers. But they landed in the same week, and something in the overlap stays with me. He came back to a family that never stopped counting the days he was gone. I walked into a people who've been counting days for thousands of years. The moadim are how you mark time when time matters — not the empty kind that just passes, but the kind you build toward.

Today is Lag B'Omer — day thirty-three of the Omer count. Bonfires went up last night across the Jewish world, from Meron in the Galilee to patches of dirt in Brooklyn. In Israel, Lag B'Omer is also the day for saluting the IDF reserves — a detail that landed harder this year than most, with fifty-eight hostages still in Gaza and a soldier just home. The Omer period is semi-mourning — we count the days between Pesach and Shavuot in memory of a plague that killed thousands of Rabbi Akiva's students — and Lag B'Omer is the day the plague stopped. Joy inserted into the count. A pause for breath in the middle of grief, like a verse about the stranger planted in the middle of the festival laws.

Tuesday — four days from now — I fly to Israel. Only my second trip. The first was two years ago with my husband. A birthday week in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv for me and for him? Exploring his roots. This time I will land as a Jew. I'm going to buy tefillin. I'm going to put them on for the first time at the Kotel. I am aware that this sounds like the third act of a movie nobody greenlit, and I am aware that life is not a movie, and I am also aware that sometimes the truest things sound the most scripted. So it goes.

Emor hands you the whole calendar and says: these are the appointments. Pesach in the spring. Shavuot seven weeks later. Count the days. Sukkot when the harvest comes in. Show up. The joy isn't in the obligation — it's in the specificity. You have somewhere to be. Someone is expecting you.

I showed up on Tuesday. The calendar goes from here.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham