Shavuot is now behind us. The multi-dimensional holiday is simultaneously about revelation of Torah at Mt. Sinai, a harvest festival of abundant gratitude and bringing first fruits when the Temple stood in Jerusalem and a time when we pay particular attention to the needs and lives of the poor, the dispossessed and the marginalized.
One of my favorite customs of Shavuot (literally translated as the Feast of Weeks) is the reading of the Book of Ruth. This short Biblical book is at its heart a deeply relational family saga, teaching us profound lessons about the ties that bind us, what it means to be part of a family and a community when the going gets tough and perhaps most profoundly, what it means to bind your lot to others. Too often, this book gets enough time and attention paid to it as it takes to read it liturgically in synagogue. What if it were otherwise?
The reading of Ruth is purposeful. Set during the time of the Shoftim or Judges, when every man did what was pleasing in his own eyes—in other words, the book’s author deliberately places it at a time of grave social collapse. Amidst this backdrop is one very human family, navigating the direct impact of famine, relocation, and unfathomable loss. Naomi, Elimelech her husband and their two sons journey from Bethlehem to the Land of Moab due to a famine. They settle and the two sons marry Moabite women—Orpah and Ruth. This is notable because the Moabites were explicitly excluded in other ancient Israelite texts from joining the people of Israel due to their lack of hospitality when the Israelites journeyed in the wilderness. The Book of Ruth’s author is explicitly asking us, as the readers, to reexamine the logic of such exclusion, challenging it at its root. When Elimelech and his sons die, Naomi, who is understandably in the thick of grief, begs her daughters-in-law to return to their families. What more can she give them? She has no children, no husband, utterly alone and without social access in her context. Orpah does eventually return home. I am so curious about Orpah’s story. Who is she? What compels her to return home? What was her relationship with Ruth like? The narrative proceeds without Orpah after her choice to depart.
Ruth clings to Naomi, telling her in one of the book’s most poetic and memorable verses that wherever Naomi goes, she will go, where Naomi lodges, she will lodge, ETC (Ruth 1:16). She will join Naomi’s people and G-d. Jewish tradition understands much about the psycho-spiritual process of conversion to Judaism from this beautiful text. Indeed, for those who choose Judaism, this is often cited as one of the most cherished verses of the Hebrew Bible, encapsulating the journey taken.
The book is also one that in many respects centers women and their relationships. By doing so, it removes us in many respects from the dominant relational paradigm of not enough-ness, exclusion, fear, and insularity. Ruth invites us to explore the assumptions that undergird how we relate to others. Might there be a better way? How can direct personal encounter and profound acts of loving-kindness and goodness remake us? Bearing in mind that the land of Ruth’s birth is the land of Moab, a place that holds, in the Israelite imagination a great deal of hostility and distrust, the author of the book of Ruth is inviting us through beautiful storytelling to humanize those our wider culture teaches us to cast aside. We remember Ruth as a lover of kindness, a great doer of kindness. Ruth’s acts in the world are done out of that same divine spark and pure soul that lives in each and every one of us, the author seems to be teaching us. Don’t allow the culture’s loud, omnipresent conditioning and noise to distract you from the truest essence of this human being before you.
We are also being taught implicitly that we are each unique individuals, containing multitudes, and as the Mishnah in Sanhedrin 4:5 would later affirm, an entire world unto ourselves. No two of us are alike. We all, ultimately, descend from the same human ancestors.
Eventually, after marrying Naomi’s kinsman, Boaz, Ruth gives birth to a son who the book explicitly names as a descendant of the future King David, who will ultimately be a distant descendant of the Messiah in classical rabbinic understanding.
Put another way, the future messiah, who the tradition understands will ultimately bring about a redeemed world descends from two nations in conflict. That state need not be immutable, permanent, the text argues.
At a time when we are living in an increasingly insular, and fearful world, when the contents of the news cycle, our social media feeds and even our physical, offline lives condition us to believe that this state of being is immutable, permanent, unchanging and that there’s nothing we can do, might we allow Ruth’s message to live within us?
When I find myself, as so often happens in the spin cycle of despair and utter powerlessness, returning to Ruth helps me reorient and gives me just enough spiritual imagination to imagine a better tomorrow. Perhaps this is the most enduring lesson for me this year. Ruth equips us with radical, grounded spiritual imagination, rooted in the rawness and realness of human life and experience.
May we be strong and courageous enough to hold onto our spiritual imaginations as we traverse our own unknown. May we merit to be like Ruth.
Rabbi Lauren Tuchman 