Conversion (giyur) גיור

"Where you go I will go, your people are my people and your God my God." Ruth's words are not a rite, but the heart of the matter is learned from them: one enters not a faith alone and not a nation alone, but both at once.

The order. The Talmud in Yevamot describes it thus: the one who comes is asked why he wants this—"do you not know that Israel today is persecuted and abased?"; if he holds firm, some of the lighter commandments and some of the heavier are explained to him, with their punishments and their rewards; then circumcision and immersion in a mikveh, and all of it before a court of three. The discouraging is not for show: one who enters takes on a yoke, and it is better not to take it than to take it and throw it off.

And afterwards. "You shall not wrong a stranger nor oppress him" says the Torah, and the sages held that the Torah warns about this more often than about anything else. To remind a convert who his parents were is forbidden expressly. Onkelos, whose translation of the Torah is still printed beside the text, was a convert; and he was not the only one.

Why there is always a quarrel here. Because conversion is the only door, and everything a community thinks about itself shows in how strictly it is kept. The argument over the measure of strictness has run without a break since Hillel and Shammai, to whom, in the story in Shabbat, the same man came—and one drove him away and the other received him.