Could I convert her? There was a ceremony that couldn’t be performed there, on the stage—that is true. You needed a mikvah to perform the ceremony; there wasn’t any mikvah anywhere in sight. Even if we had a mikvah on the stage, though, I wouldn’t be allowed to perform the ceremony, but the ceremony, in the end, was mundane. In the end, when it came to Israelites, converts or otherwise, you’d either been one all along or you hadn’t. The conversion ceremony was more for the benefit of the Israelite community than it was for the convert; it announced to other Israelites that, all along, this person was being ceremonied, despite not having an Israelite mother, was born with the soul of an Israelite, and no one worth listening to disagreed about that. That’s why calling it ‘conversion’ was bad English. Because to convert something means to change it, and to convert an Israelite does not change that Israelite. To convert an Israelite means only to recognize that all along, regardless of who their mother is or how she raised them, the Israelite has always been an Israelite, and that they will continue forever to be one.