[Avodah] Court retroactively revokes conversions

[Zev Sero]

Richard Wolpoe wrote:

> Came Rav Parness [not RRW!} and said if the propsetive Ger  says: "I 
> accept but K know the flesh is weak and I  might or am likely to 
> sin..."  ka mashma lan it is still an OK kabbalah.
[...]
> What this Ger is saying is he accepts Mitzvos but realizes that  he is 
> subject to human frailty and  if if is for Te'avon he is OK. That is the 
> hiddush here.

But this is not a chiddush.  Every ger knows that he is likely to sin,
and probably has a good idea of which sins he's likely to have the most
difficulty with.  He's accepting the *yoke* of mitzvot, the obligation
to keep them, not guaranteeing that he will actually do so, all of the
time.  Note the language of the lecture a ger is given: "yesterday if
you broke Shabbat or ate chelev you did nothing wrong, but now if you
do so you will be punished with stoning or with karet."  This implies
that both we and he accept that he's likely to be nichshal, and what
he's accepting is that if he does so he'll be punished, just as every
Jew is.  Essentially he's choosing a Jew's Genenom over a goy's Gan
Eden, "baasher tamuti amut vesham ekaver".

There's a teshuva in IM dealing with this exact question: a woman
admitted years after her conversion that *in the mikveh* when she
was accepting the yoke of mitzvot she intended to do an avera, once.
RMF ruled that this wasn't a problem, because she knew and accepted
that what she intended to do was an avera, and that she would be
wrong to do it, and intended after that one occasion never to do it
again.

What's not acceptable is if he doesn't accept this, and thinks he
continues to have the right to do these things.  And one sign that
this might be the case is if he appears to make no effort at all to
keep them, even immediately after the conversion.  If he goes straight
from the BD to Red Lobster, it's pretty obvious that his promises were
lies.  But if he restrains himself for a while, and eventually gives
in and guiltily sneaks off to indulge his taavah, that makes him no
different than any Jew with a yetzer hara.

(OTOH if he goes directly from Red Lobster to the BD, that's a sign
that he means the promises he intends to make.  I knew a ger who on his
way to the mikveh stopped off somewhere for one last fling.)

-- 
Zev Sero               Something has gone seriously awry with this Court's
zev at sero.name          interpretation of the Constitution.
                       	                          - Clarence Thomas