Judaism never goes looking for converts. It also never locks the door.

In Moses’ farewell blessing the Torah is given a word that decides a great deal: morasha, an inheritance. Not a discovery to announce and not a doctrine to carry abroad — something a family receives and hands on. The Sages read the verse as the warrant for teaching every Jewish child without exception: the inheritance belongs to the whole congregation, not to a learned few. What it never becomes, here or anywhere after, is property the congregation is told to go and distribute.

Isaiah is answering people who are already drawing near on their own: the ben ha-nekhar, the foreigner, who has “attached himself” to God, and beside him in the next line the eunuch, whom the Torah’s own law kept out of the assembly. To both the prophet says the same thing — you will not be held at arm’s length. Notice what the verse does not do. It sends nobody out to fetch them. It answers a fear spoken aloud by someone already standing at the door.

This is the court’s opening script, and it is the opposite of a welcome speech: before a single commandment is explained, the hardship of belonging is put in front of him. Then comes the answer the court is listening for — not “I am ready” but “I know, and I am not worthy” — and the response to it is immediate: mekablin oto miyad, we accept him at once. The reluctance is a filter, never a wall. Two things are absent from the whole passage, and their absence is the point: any argument for joining, and anyone sent to make it.

The Sages counted the Torah’s warnings about the ger — thirty-six places, and some said forty-six — more than it attaches to almost any other obligation. In the Torah’s plain sense ger is the stranger who dwells among you; the tradition hears in the same word the one who joins, and applies the warnings to him. Rabbi Natan gives the reason as a proverb: the flaw you carry is the one you may never point out in another. Israel was a nation of strangers first, and that memory is the ground of the law — which is why reminding a convert of where he came from is itself counted among the things forbidden.

Maimonides is codifying the Talmud’s procedure a thousand years later, and these two clauses carry the whole posture between them. If he leaves, he leaves: the law provides no follow-up, no second visit, nobody assigned to try again. If he stays, there is no probation — the delay ends the moment the answer is yes. (For reasons of the code’s own structure, the laws of conversion sit inside Hilchot Issurei Biah, “Forbidden Intercourse,” chapters 13 and 14 — the section governing who may marry into Israel.)