Safek is a Hebrew word meaning “question.” It is also the halakhic status of my husband, who was born to a Jewish convert whose status became questioned. He’s gone through one gerus l’chumrah, but due to a paperwork error, he’s still “questionable.”
It also seemed like a fitting blog title for our journey. Being a conversion candidate often feels like living life as an unanswered question. It’s very often a place of uncertainty. Judaism is a religion of very specific laws and those laws require some assurance of what category a person falls into. It’s not a system that deals well with gray areas and a big part of the conversion process is to try to eliminate or at least make much clearer who is what. Being a safek or even just a regular conversion candidate…requires a person to live in a gray area, somewhere between Jew and non-Jew, never really knowing where you fit or fall and what applies to you. It’s even a difficult area for Rabbi’s, men who study Jewish law for a lifetime.
Our case is particularly complicated and life has made it moreso, so we’ve lived in this state longer than most do. I like to think it’s all for a reason and that we’ve learned a lot from living life as the embodiment of a question. This blog is all about exploring that journey and what we’ve learned along the way, so naming it “safek” seemed profoundly appropriate.
