מועדים לשיחה; מהדורה משפחתית, שבועות, צלילה לעומק מגילת רותCeremony and Celebration Family Edition, The Hagim, Shavuot, Deep Diving into Megillat Rut
א׳
1BACKGROUND
ב׳
2The story of Rut is one of the most beautiful in the Bible. It begins in dislocation and grief. Famine leads Elimelekh, together with his wife Naomi and their two sons, to leave their home in Beit Leḥem, to go to Moav to find food. There, the sons marry Moabite women, but all three men die, leaving Naomi and her two daughters-in-law childless widows. Naomi decides to return home, and Rut, who had married her son Maḥlon, insists on going with her. There, in Beit Leḥem, in a field at harvest time, Rut meets a relative of Naomi’s, Boaz, who acts kindly towards her. Later, at Naomi’s suggestion, Rut asks him to act the part of a kinsman-redeemer. Boaz does so, and he and Rut marry and have a child. The book that begins with death ends in new life. It is a story about the power of human kindness to redeem life from tragedy, and its message is that out of suffering, if transformed by love, can come new life and hope.
ג׳
3The commentators make two primary connections between Rut and Shavuot. The first is seasonal. The key events in the book are set during the barley and wheat harvests, the time of the counting of the Omer and Shavuot itself. The second is substantive. Rut became the paradigm case of a convert to Judaism, and to become a convert you have to enter the covenant of Sinai with its life of the commandments: what the Israelites did when they accepted the Torah on the first Shavuot.
ד׳
4THE BOOK OF LOYALTY AND LOVE
ה׳
5All three megillot read on the pilgrimage festivals are about love: the stages of love as we experience it in our growth from youth to maturity to old age. Shir HaShirim, read on Pesaḥ, the festival of spring, is about love in the spring: the passion between two lovers that has nothing in it of yesterday or tomorrow but lives in the overwhelming intensity of today. The book is structured as a series of duets between beloved and lover, their voices loaded with desire. There is nothing in it about courtship, marriage, home-building, and having children: the world of adult responsibilities. The lovers long simply to be together, to elope.
ו׳
6Kohelet, read on Sukkot, the festival of autumn, is about love in the autumn of life, as the heat cools, light fades, the leaves fall, and clouds begin to hide the sun. “Live well, with the woman you love,” says Kohelet (9:9). This is love as companionship, and it is rich in irony. Kohelet is written as the autobiography of Shlomo HaMelekh, the king who married seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines (I Melakhim 11:3), and in the end concluded, “And this is what I found: woman is more bitter than death, for she is all traps, with nets laid in her heart; her arms are a prison” (Kohelet 7:26). A thousand wives will not bring you happiness. Faithfulness to one will.
ז׳
7Rut is about the love at the heart of Judaism, the love of summer, when the passion of youth has been tamed and the clouds of age do not yet cover the sky. Rut is about love as loyalty, faithfulness, committing yourself to another in a bond of responsibility and grace. It is about caring for the other more than you care about yourself. It is about Rut setting her own aspirations aside to care for her mother-in-law Naomi, bereaved as she is of her husband and two sons. It is what Boaz does for Rut. The root a-h-v, “love,” which appears eighteen times in Shir HaShirim, appears in Rut only once. By contrast, the words Ḥesed, loving-kindness, and the verb g-a-l, “to redeem,” do not appear at all in Shir HaShirim, but figure in Rut respectively three and twenty-four times.
ח׳
8The megillot are framing devices that force us into seeing the festivals themselves in a new light. When we read Shir HaShirim on Pesaḥ it transforms our understanding of the Exodus from a political event, the liberation of slaves into an elopement and honeymoon, which is precisely how the prophets portray it. Kohelet turns Sukkot into a philosophical reflection on the sukka as a symbol of mortality, the body as a temporary dwelling. It is the sobering story of how Shlomo, wisest of men, sought to deny death by taking refuge in possessions, wives, servants, and worldly wisdom, yet at every step he found himself face to face with the brevity and vulnerability of life. Only at the end did he discover that joy is to be found in simple things: life itself, dignified by work and beautified by love.
ט׳
9Rut likewise invites us to reframe Shavuot, seeing the making of the covenant at Sinai not simply as a religious or political act, but as an act of love – a mutual pledge between two parties, committing themselves to one another in a bond of responsibility, dedication, and loyalty. The covenant at Sinai was a marriage between God and the children of Israel. The covenant at Sinai was a bond of love whose closest analogue in Tanakh is the relationship between Boaz and Rut.
י׳
10One of the most sustained libels in religious history was Christianity’s claim that Judaism was a religion not of love but of law; not of compassion but of justice; not of forgiveness but of retribution. The Book of Rut, read on Shavuot, is the refutation. Judaism is a religion of love, three loves: loving God with all our heart, our soul, and our might (Devarim 6:5); loving our neighbour as ourselves (Vayikra 19:18); and loving the stranger because we know what it feels like to be a stranger (Devarim 10:19).
י״א
11Judaism is, from beginning to end, the story of a love: God’s love for a small, powerless, and much afflicted people, and a people’s love – tempestuous at times to be sure – for God. That is the story of Rut: love as faithfulness, loyalty, and responsibility, and as a marriage that brings new life into the world. That is the love that was consecrated at Sinai on the first Shavuot of all.
י״ב
12❖ Points to Ponder
1. What are the thematic connections between Megillat Rut and Shavuot?
1. What are the thematic connections between Megillat Rut and Shavuot?
י״ג
132. Why is Shavuot compared to the wedding day of Israel and God?
י״ד
143. How is this connected toMegillat Rut?