Prelude and Fugue

We met during a youth music festival, flirting across the wind section of a large symphony orchestra. If there was an obstacle to our romance, it was not that he was Jewish and I wasn’t; it was that he played the tuba and I played the violin. There’s a reason why there are no duets for these two instruments.

Two years later, on a sweltering afternoon in his mother’s apartment in Holon, we tried to read through Handel sonatas with him playing the basso continuo—an athletic feat for the tuba. Soon he was sweating with exhaustion, and my ears rang as if my head had been stuck inside a church bell. The tuba and violin just weren’t meant to be together without the chaperone of a full orchestra. But that didn’t stop us from moving in together soon after. When he got a position with an orchestra in Jerusalem, and a job I had meant to take up in London fell through at the last minute, I moved to Israel to be with him.

Our religious difference was not an issue—at first. At age 23, he was stridently secular. He despised his Orthodox fellow Israelis for their refusal to serve in the army, their reliance on the state to support their large numbers of children, their attempts to kill any form of fun on a Friday night. Penguins, he called them, in reference to their black and white clothes. Parasites.

Like many young Israelis, he had traveled the globe and was as intrigued by other spiritual traditions as he was repelled by his own. He had been mesmerized by the ritual of a Japanese tea ceremony; meditated in a Zen monastery in San Francisco; joined in the cathartic whirl of Capoeira on an orchestra tour to Brazil.

I, on the other hand, wanted to convert to Judaism. There were Jewish roots on my father’s side, and when I first entered a synagogue in college, I had felt their tug. I wanted to learn the beautiful tunes of Erev Shabbat, the mysterious choreography of the Amidah prayer with its bows, turns, and curtsies. I played with ideas for a new, Hebrew, name.

All this was a source of amusement to him. That a 27-year-old blonde from a German Lutheran family would be smitten by the Tel Aviv bars and dust-green hills of Jerusalem was not in itself a surprise. After all, there were many more like me, scattered across kibbutzim and volunteer organizations in the country. But to choose to be Jewish and take on all those rules and prohibitions? Why not take all the joys Israel had to offer—the sunshine, the beaches—and leave it at that?

But after a year of us living together, during which I repeatedly failed to obtain a work visa, he began to talk about my conversion with hope rather than ridicule. It would make things easier with the immigration department. We would, if we ever so chose, be able to marry.

“You realize that they’ll ask about you,” I said. “When there’s a boyfriend in the picture, the rabbis want to meet him.”

“I know,” he said with a shudder. The newspapers were full of bitter debates about the Orthodox grip on conversions in Israel. “I’ll have to learn, too. I might even have to wear a kippa. It’ll kill me, but I’ll do it for you.”

He met a young oboist, a man who had recently become religious; chazar b’tshuva was the expression—he had come back with an answer. Together they went to a yeshiva. And just like that, my boyfriend was hooked. He told me how he had watched the rabbi say a blessing over his glass of water before drinking and was struck by the beauty of the gesture.

“They’re crazy, of course,” he told me with a grin. “But—” and here he made a little semicircle in the air with his index finger, like a Torah scholar introducing a counter-argument—“there’s something special there, too.”

Within a month, he was observant. He rose early for morning prayers. He blessed his food and his drink. On Friday afternoon, he flipped the switch in the fridge to stop the light from turning on automatically. I was delighted. I was now enrolled in an official conversion course and had swapped my jeans for long skirts. On Shabbat, we joined in the ecstatic chanting in a synagogue filled with young, shining faces. Peeking through the lace curtain that divided the men from the women, I thought my boyfriend looked sexy wrapped in a striped prayer shawl. I bought him a cute knitted kippa. There was something intimate about our spiritual journey.

Intimacy of the old kind, however, was over: We stopped having sex. He moved out. One day he turned his head as I reached up to kiss him, so that my lips missed his. At a friend’s wedding, he refused to dance with me. I explained to him that while there were things I was willing to give up to become Jewish, I knew my red lines. I wanted to dance with my husband at my own wedding, for instance; I would not send my children to a school that banned Anne Frank’s diary for being unchaste. He listened—by now he had taken to swaying back and forth when he thought about something—and said that he could not impose any such borders. He wanted to go all the way.

I took my cue from the vivacious young women at the synagogue, the moped-riding Australian rabbi, the raucous laughter around the Shabbat dinner tables of my modern Orthodox friends. Like the slinky long skirts I filled my closet with, I was looking for a Judaism that fit—even flattered—me.

My boyfriend’s yeshiva was strictly black-hat.

His old friends, all secular, started to call me. “You have to do something,” they said. In a country so bitterly divided between the religious and the secular, any move from one camp to the other strained relationships. No more Friday night group outings to bars, or weekend hikes in the Golan Heights. When my boyfriend called on a Friday afternoon to wish them a peaceful Shabbat, his friends heard the reproach.

Continue reading: Going all the way

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim is a music critic in New York City and a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal.