Some of the most moving moments we have witnessed in shul happen without fanfare. A man rises for his aliyah, kisses the mantel with unmistakable tenderness, and returns to his seat. Only later do you learn that he was not born into this world. He chose it, fought for it, rebuilt his life around it. He is a Ger Tzedek, a righteous convert, and the Torah speaks of him with a frequency and urgency we rarely match in practice.
Forty-six times the Torah commands us concerning the ger, more than almost any other subject. “You shall love him as yourself.” “You shall have one law for the stranger and for the citizen.” “You shall not oppress him.” The Sages explain that the Ger Tzedek is especially precious to Hashem precisely because he saw the truth from afar and came close of his own free will. Ruth, Onkelos, the ancestors of Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Meir; our greatest stories and our greatest teachers are inseparable from the Ger.
And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, most of us sense a quiet gap between the Torah’s passion and our communal reality. It is not malice. It is the gentle drift that happens when something becomes familiar. We do not mean to overlook. We simply have not yet discovered how naturally beautiful it would feel to do the opposite.
Imagine how a small shift in habit could change everything.
What if the gabbai, after the usual aliyot, added with genuine warmth: “And now, with gratitude to Hashem for bringing him close, we call Yaakov ben Avraham Avinu, our Ger Tzedek”? The congregation would smile, the Ger would feel seen, and the Torah’s words would come alive in that instant.
What if, when a fine young Ger or Giyoret appears on a shidduch résumé, the first reaction was quiet wonder: “This is someone who already proved with his whole life that Torah is worth everything. What greater recommendation could there be?” After all, David Hamelech’s lineage began exactly that way.
What if on Simchat Torah we invited the Ger to carry a sefer Torah during the first hakafah, not out of obligation, but because who better understands the joy of being redeemed and chosen?
What if a few families decided that this Shabbat they would invite the Ger who always sits alone, and next Shabbat another few families did the same, until solitude in our shuls became the exception rather than the quiet norm?
These are not revolutionary ideas. They are the gentle, everyday implications of a mitzvah our Sages already described as equal in weight to the entire Torah. The Rambam writes that we draw the Ger close “with two hands,” meaning warmth from the heart and honor in action. The Sifrei teaches that loving the Ger is loving Hashem Himself, because the Ger came for His sake alone.
In ancient Jerusalem, when two witnesses arrived to testify that they had seen the new moon, the Sanhedrin welcomed them with honor, fed them a festive meal, and seated them beside the greatest sages. Those witnesses renewed the Jewish calendar. The Ger Tzedek is doing something no less momentous: he is renewing the Jewish people, one soul at a time.
We do not need new programs or budgets. We need only to let the Torah’s love for the Ger become our love for the Ger. When that happens, slowly, naturally, joyfully, our shuls will feel warmer. Our young people will see that Yiddishkeit is so beautiful that people still cross oceans to reach it. And the Ger himself will feel what the Torah promised: that he is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.
Hashem keeps bringing us these precious souls. All that remains is for us to celebrate them.
To celebrate means to call their name with pride when the Torah is read. To celebrate means to seat them at our Shabbat tables and at the head table of our hearts. To celebrate means to dance with them first on Simchat Torah and to trust them with our children’s futures. To celebrate means to look at every Ger Tzedek and say, quietly but out loud, “Baruch Hashem that you came. Now the family is complete.”
May we merit to turn “celebrate” from a mere idea into a daily reality, and may the light these holy souls bring illuminate us all.
