Today is Shavuos, when we commemorate the giving of the Ten Commandments, the Sinai events, and also the First Fruits of summer. Wonderfully enough, we had a few ripe strawberries yesterday, so we got the First Fruits right on time. We’re still waiting for the First Vegetables (although the First Greens have been eaten, lettuce and spinach, and now that I think about it we pulled the First Radish, tho’ we haven’t eaten it yet).\n
The traditional reading for Shavuos is the Book of Ruth<\/a>. I read it last night with my Perfect Non-Reader and my parents; it’s short and full of incident, although it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, really, in a lot of ways. I don’t mean the story in terms of what happens, which is very clear, but in terms of why people want to tell the story, why it is included in Scripture, what lessons we should draw from it—I think it’s a little perplexing.\n Here’s the plot in a nutshell: Naomi and her husband Elimelech, along with their sons, move to Moab to find work (there’s a famine back home). The husband and sons die; Naomi returns home to Bethlehem, destitute, accompanied by her daughter-in-law, Ruth. Ruth engages in manual labor to support Naomi; Naomi arranges for her to be seen by one of Naomi’s wealthy relations, who falls in love with the young widow and marries her, taking care beforehand to observe the legal formalities. That’s it.\n There are a couple of points that I want to make. The first is that in a holiday that commemorates the legal framework of our religion, this story is very clearly about the ways that the people are more important than the law. Not that the law is deprecated or ignored, but that both Ruth and Boaz (Ruth’s eventual husband) go further than their legal obligations, and are rewarded for it. Ruth is not obligated to go with Naomi, and in fact Orpah (Naomi’s other daughter-in-law) goes back to her parents with Naomi’s goodwill and is not vilified because of that.\n In fact, when the Rabbis choose to vilify Orpah to make a contrast with Ruth, they add on new destructive and bestial behavior—this is typical of midrash, I’m afraid. Orpah, after kissing Naomi goodbye, is said to have that very night engaged in fornication with one hundred men and a dog<\/i>; she is also said (based, presumably, on these allegations of promiscuity) to have given birth to Goliath and to the four giant’s-sons in 2 Samuel 21:15<\/a>-22. On the other hand, these powerful children owe their might to Orpah’s kindness to Naomi; her good as well as her wickedness were rewarded. On the other other hand, you can search the actual text for Orpah’s wickedness from now to the End Times, and not come up with anything that is actually there.\n Oprah doesn’t do anything wrong, but Ruth does something right<\/i>, that is, she goes further than her obligations. Boaz more specifically goes further than his obligations: he lets Ruth (and others) glean, but then he tells his workers to (a) keep an eye on her and make sure she’s OK, (2) let her drink from their water, and (iii) leave extra barley behind to make it easier for her to glean. You have the obligations—the Ten Commandments I heard read out at synagogue today, and the rest of the Law—and then there’s doing the right thing, which is something more. In what could be, and often has been characterized as a legalistic religion, a cold scheme of laws and rituals, Ruth and Shavuos emphasize the humanity that runs through it.\n