(RNS) — Vanessa Bloom recalls her rabbi gently reminding her that she still had time to walk away. But she felt compelled toward the Jewish faith.
“I knew my fate was already tied to the Jewish people,” she told RNS.
Bloom, a Jewish day school teacher in Los Angeles, was raised in a multifaith family, threw herself into Jewish life at college and co-led local gatherings of the Asian-Jewish Lunar Collective. She’d completed a comprehensive modern Orthodox conversion program study course.
Now the final decision was hers.
So, she stepped into the mikvah, a ritual bath, and chanted blessings that sealed her commitment to God, the Torah and its teachings.
On Thursday (May 21), like millions of Jews around the world, Bloom will celebrate the spring festival of Shavuot, which commemorates the pivotal moment in the Jewish story when God gave the Torah to the Israelites at Mount Sinai, offering a covenant of protection and intimacy, alongside the responsibility of commandments. It’s the culmination seven weeks after Passover that represents spiritual liberation through God’s laws and teachings, after the Israelites’ physical liberation from slavery in Egypt.
For many converts, or “Jews by choice” like Bloom, Shavuot resonates deeply.
Rabbi Mira Rivera. (Photo courtesy of Lunar Collective)
“If you’re born Jewish, you’re Jewish no matter how observant you are,” Bloom said. Born in China, Bloom was adopted by an American Jewish mother and Catholic father. “But if you’re like me, as an adoptee, I actively chose it.”
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