The story of Ruth 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 Bethlehem, Judah, to go to Moab 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 Ruth, who had ­married her son Maĥlon, insists on going with her. There, in Bethlehem, in a field at harvest time, Ruth meets a relative of Naomi’s, Boaz, who acts kindly toward her. Later at Naomi’s suggestion, Ruth asks him to act the part of a kinsman-redeemer. Boaz does so, and he and Ruth 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.

The book itself is a literary masterpiece. It owes much of its ­vividness to the fact that of all books of the Hebrew Bible, it has the highest proportion of direct speech to descriptive narrative: fifty-five of its eighty-five verses are in dialogue form. Its four chapters are structured as a chiasmus, a mirror-image symmetry, so that, for example, the end with its account of births and genealogies mirrors the beginning with its recitation of deaths and childlessness. It is held together by a series of key words and recurring themes, among them “return,” “redemption” and “blessing.” Seven times people bless one another in the book, sustaining the sense that divine providence is at work beneath the surface of events. Not always but often, good things happen to good people, even if they take time.

The practice of reading a megilla on a festival began with the book of Esther on Purim, despite the fact that the book itself was one of the last to be canonized. The reason is that without it, there would be no festival. The book records the events the festival commemorates as well as explaining its basic practices. The talmudic tractate dealing with the day is called not Purim but Megilla. During the mishnaic and talmudic period, if you used the word “megilla,” you meant the book of Esther. Also early was the custom of reading Lamentations on Tisha B’Av: the book of grief on the day of grief.

The custom of reading the Song of Songs on Pesaĥ, Ruth on Shavuot and Kohelet on Sukkot came later – first mentioned in the tractate of Soferim (14:16), dating to the seventh or eighth century. The commentators make two primary connections between Ruth 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. Ruth 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 commands: what the Israelites did when they accepted the Torah on the first Shavuot.

There is, though, a deeper dimension. Reading a megilla on the three pilgrimage festivals sets up a field of tensions and associations that function as a profound commentary on the festival itself. They add depth and drama to the day.

All 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. The Song of Songs, read on Pesaĥ, 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 freighted 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.

Kohelet 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 King Solomon, the man who married seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines (I Kings 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” (Eccl. 7:26). A thousand wives will not bring you happiness. Faithfulness to one will.

Ruth 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. Ruth 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 Ruth 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 Ruth. The root a-h-v, “love,” which appears eighteen times in the Song of Songs, appears in Ruth only once. By contrast, the words ĥesed, loving-kindness, and the verb g-a-l, “to redeem,” do not appear at all in the Song of Songs, but figure in Ruth respectively three and twenty-four times.

The megillot are framing devices that force us into seeing the ­festivals themselves in a new light. When we read the Song of Songs on Pesaĥ 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. The book reminds us of the Exodus as Jeremiah saw it when he said, “I remember of you the kindness of your youth, your love when you were a bride; how you walked after Me in the desert, through a land not sown” (Jer. 2:2).

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 Solomon, 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: “the shallowest breath, it is all but breath” (1:2). 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.

Ruth 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. That is how the prophets saw it.

Ezekiel does so using an image drawn from the book of Ruth itself. Ruth, at night, lying at Boaz’s feet, asks him to spread his mantle over her (Ruth 3:9). That, says Ezekiel, is what God did for Israel: “Later I passed by, and when I looked at you and saw that you were old enough for love, I spread the corner of My garment over you and covered your nakedness. I gave you My solemn oath and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Sovereign Lord, and you became Mine” (Ezek. 16:8).

It fell to the prophet Hosea to retell the story of the covenant as an act of love and marriage in wondrous words that Jewish men say each weekday morning as they put on the strap of the tefillin:

I will betroth you to Me forever; I will betroth you to Me in righteousness and justice, loving-kindness and compassion; I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness; and you shall know the Lord. (Hos. 2:21–22)

The covenant at Sinai was a bond of love whose closest analogue in Tanakh is the relationship between Boaz and Ruth.

One 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 Ruth, 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 (Deut. 6:5); loving our neighbor as ourselves (Lev. 19:18); and loving the stranger because we know what it feels like to be a stranger (Deut. 10:19).

Judaism 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 Ruth: 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.

I. The Personal and the Political

About two biblical books, the sages asked, why were they written? One is Ruth, about which Rabbi Zeira said: “This scroll contains no laws about impurity or purity, forbidden or permitted. Why then was it written? To show how great is the reward of those who perform acts of kindness” (Ruth Raba 2:14). The other is Genesis. Rashi begins his Commentary to the Torah with almost the same question. Why, if the Torah is a book of law, does it begin with creation and the early history of humankind? It should begin with the first law given to the Israelites, which does not appear until the twelfth chapter of Exodus.

Ruth and Genesis have much else in common. In both, “there was a famine in the land.” What happened to Elimelekh in the beginning of Ruth, a famine that forced him to leave home, happens four times in Genesis: twice to Abraham, once to Isaac and once to Jacob. In both books, future marriage partners meet as strangers, apparently by chance, in a public place. What happened to Ruth and Boaz happens twice in Genesis, when Abraham’s servant encounters Rebecca, and when Jacob meets Rachel.

One passage in particular drives the connection home. In their first encounter amid the alien corn, Boaz says to Ruth: “I have heard what you have done for your mother-in-law, since your husband died; of how you left your father, your mother, the land of your birth and came to a people you knew not the day before” (Ruth 2:11). The echo is unmistakable. We are immediately reminded of God’s call to Abraham, the first recorded syllables of Jewish time: “Leave your land, your birthplace and your father’s house, and go to the land that I will show you” (Gen. 12:1). Ruth is portrayed as a female equivalent of Abraham.

To be sure, there are differences. Abraham is responding to a call from God, Ruth to a moral imperative. Yet both are leaving behind all they know: their family, their friends, their country and culture, and both have the courage to journey to a place where they will be seen as strangers, outsiders, aliens. Both, too, are among the Bible’s supreme exemplars of ĥesed, love as kindness and as deed.

More substantively, both Genesis and Ruth are preludes, introductions to a new chapter in the history of Israel. The book of Ruth, in its opening and closing words, positions itself precisely within the biblical story. It begins, “Once, in the days when the judges judged.” It ends with the birth of Oved, father of Yishai, father of David, Israel’s second and greatest king. The book is a connecting link between two distinct periods of Jewish history, the era of the judges and that of kings. It functions as a preface to the first book of Samuel, which tells of how Israel’s monarchy was born. There is even a subtle verbal connection between the two. In the last chapter of Ruth, the townspeople say to Naomi that her daughter-in-law “is better to you than seven sons could be” (Ruth 4:15). In the first chapter of the book of Samuel, Elkanah says to his wife Hannah, “Am I not better to you than ten sons?” (I Sam. 1:8). The echo connects the two books.

Genesis, too, is a prelude, in this case to the story of Israel as a people, its exile and enslavement and its liberation by the hand of God. We can now state the connection between the two books. Genesis is a prelude to the birth of Israel as a nation. Ruth is a prelude to the birth of Israel as a kingdom. Together the two books make an immensely consequential statement of the primacy of the personal over the political.

The Hebrew Bible is largely about politics: kings and their battles, society and its tensions and the relationship between Israel and neighboring powers. However, Tanakh does not see politics as an end in itself. In this it differs fundamentally from the civic culture of ancient Greece and Rome. There, the polis was the embodiment of all that is best in the people. Service to it was the highest calling.

Judaism, by contrast, is skeptical about politics. It knows all too well the force of Lord Acton’s dictum that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It knows, too, the truth stated by Oliver Goldsmith: “How small, of all that human hearts endure, / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.” Politics in Judaism is a concession to necessity, not an end in itself. In Judaism, people do not exist to serve the state. The state exists to serve the people, and the people exist to serve God.

What Genesis and Ruth tell us is: do not think you can change the world or the human condition by politics and power alone. What matters is about how human beings – ordinary human beings, not just kings, courtiers and commanders – behave toward one another. An empire can have the world’s strongest army, yet if it lacks justice and compassion it will eventually crumble.

More important than politics is the way we treat our fellow humans in our day-to-day interactions – and the quality of those ­relationships will itself be the surest indicator of our relationship with God*. You cannot serve God while exploiting or oppressing your fellow humans*. That is the message of all the prophets, and it is the story of Abraham and Sarah, Ruth, Naomi and Boaz. Love of God and loving-kindness toward our fellows go hand in hand.

The book of Judges ends with the terrible story of a concubine assaulted, raped and killed in the town of Gibeah, a crime that shocks the nation and leads to civil war (Judges 19–21). The episode resembles nothing so much as the story of Sodom (Gen. 19), where the people of the town attempt sexually to assault Lot’s two guests. The message could not be more clear: everything that had happened to the Israelites – the Exodus, the wilderness years, the conquest of the land, the miracles and deliverances – did not stop the people of the covenant from lapsing into the worst conduct of their neighbors.

There is no shortcut to freedom. Neither military victories nor divine deliverance can achieve it. Without virtue, politics fails. Without habits of law-abidingness on the part of the people, even God cannot or will not save a nation. A free society depends on the character and virtues of its citizens, their willingness to sacrifice for the sake of others and to take responsibility for the weak and vulnerable, the orphan, the widow and the stranger within the gates. Abraham takes responsibility for Lot. Ruth takes responsibility for Naomi. Boaz takes responsibility for Ruth. They are their brother’s and sister’s keepers. Society is prior to the state, the family is prior to both, and what sustains them all is ĥesed, the kindness that is the mark of human greatness and the sign of those who truly understand what God wants from us.

The simplicity and tenderness of the book of Ruth should not deceive us. Its message is blunt and basic. What would matter in the end about David, whose name is the last word of the book, would not be his military genius or his political vision but the quality of his personal morality. That is a complex story in its own right, but what reverberates across the centuries is the simple fact that Abraham, great-grandfather of the children of Israel, and Ruth, great-grandmother of their greatest king, ruled no nation, performed no miracles and held no formal office. It was their ĥesed, their loving-kindness, that ultimately transformed the world.

II. A Tale of Two Women

As the book of Ruth hastens to its conclusion, there is a surprise in store. Their child, Oved, turns out to be the grandfather of King David. However, to those with an attentive ear, there is a far greater surprise. When the townspeople congratulate Boaz and Ruth on their marriage, they say “May your house be like that of Peretz, whom Tamar bore to Judah growing from the seed that the Lord will give you from this young woman” (4:12).

What have Peretz and Tamar to do with Ruth? They have played no part in the narrative. Yet when David’s genealogy is set out at the end of the book it begins with Peretz, Boaz’s distant ancestor. It is then that the attentive reader goes back to reread the story of Tamar and makes a remarkable discovery. It has so many parallels to that of Ruth that the similarity cannot be accidental.

The story of Tamar is told in Genesis 38. In the previous chapter, Judah had persuaded his brothers to sell Joseph as a slave. He then leaves his brothers and marries a Canaanite woman with whom he has three sons, Er, Onan and Shelah. When Er grows up, Judah finds him a wife, Tamar. Tragedy strikes. Er dies. Judah – practicing a pre-Mosaic form of levirate marriage – tells his second son Onan that he must marry his brother’s widow so that she can bear a child in memory of her dead husband. Onan resents the fact that the child would be regarded as his brother’s, and he “spills his seed.” For this he is punished, and he too dies.

Judah tells Tamar that she must “live like a widow” until Shelah is old enough to marry her. But he delays, fearing that his third son too may die. This places Tamar in a situation of living widowhood, unable to marry anyone else because she is bound to her remaining brother-in-law, unable to marry him because of Judah’s fear.

Taking destiny into her own hands, she seizes the opportunity when she hears Judah is on his way to Timnah to shear his sheep. Covering her face with a veil, she dresses as a prostitute and positions herself on the route she knows her father-in-law will take. Judah approaches her and sleeps with her. She returns home and removes the disguise. She becomes pregnant. Three months later, her condition is apparent. People tell Judah, who is indignant. She must, he reasons, be guilty of adultery since she is bound to Shelah, whom Judah has kept from her. He orders: “Bring her out and have her burned.”

Tamar, however, had prepared for this eventuality. During her deception, she had insisted on a pledge against payment: Judah’s seal, cord and staff. By the time Judah sent a messenger to pay her and reclaim the pledge, she had disappeared. Now she produces the items and sends them to Judah with the words, “I am pregnant by the man who owns these.” It is a masterly stroke. She has established her innocence without shaming Judah. Judah admits his error. He says, “She is more righteous than me.” Eventually she gives birth to twins whom she names Peretz and Zeraĥ.

The stories of Tamar and Ruth are very different. But they have a number of striking similarities.

In both cases the story begins with a “going down,” the separation of a key character – Judah in Genesis, Elimelekh in Ruth – from the rest of his family or people.

In both cases the journey is a questionable one. Judah lives among the Canaanites and marries a local woman, despite the fact that Abraham had told his servant to ensure that Isaac, Judah’s grandfather, did not do so: “I want you to swear by the Lord, the God of heaven and the God of earth, that you will not get a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I am living” (Gen. 24:3). Elimelekh goes to Moab, where his children marry local women despite the apparent biblical prohibition: “No Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendants may enter the assembly of the Lord, not even in the tenth ­generation…. Do not seek a treaty of friendship with them as long as you live” (Deut. 23:3, 6).

In both stories two sons die: Er and Onan in the case of Judah; Maĥlon and Kilyon in that of Elimelekh. In each case their names ­prefigure their fate. Er means “childless,” Onan signifies “mourning,” Maĥlon means “sickness” and Kilyon “destruction.”

Tamar and Ruth are both childless widows. Both are concerned to have a child out of a sense of duty to “to raise the name of the dead.”

In both cases there are clear obstacles to their doing so. Judah refuses to allow Tamar to marry his third son, Shelah, the natural candidate for levirate marriage (the marriage of a childless widow to her brother-in-law). Naomi tells Ruth there is no chance she will have another child; therefore, she has no chance of marrying within the family.

In both cases, it is the women themselves who take the initiative in ensuring that nonetheless a child will be born, and that the father will be someone from their husband’s family.

In both cases they do so by a daring act open to misinterpretation. Tamar dresses as a prostitute and positions herself to be seen by Judah. Ruth goes at night to Boaz, uncovers his cloak and sleeps at his feet. In both cases, care is taken so that the men concerned will not be exposed to shame. Tamar, by taking a pledge from Judah, is able to convince him he is the father of her child without anyone else becoming aware of the fact. Ruth takes care not to be seen going to or from Boaz at night.

In both cases, a non-normative form of levirate marriage is involved. Neither Judah nor Boaz is a brother-in-law. In both cases there is a closer relative to whom the duty applies: Shelah and the anonymous “Such-and-such.” Both times, it is the woman who shows the deepest loyalty to her late husband’s family and name – more so than Judah or Naomi’s anonymous relative.

The family tree lists ten generations from Peretz to the birth of David. A ten-generation genealogy is a highly charged phenomenon in the Bible. There are ten generations from Adam to Noah, and ten from Noah to Abraham. The ten generations from Peretz to David carry the same sense of preordained destiny. The beginning of such a family tree is significant. So too is the seventh, the number associated with holiness. David’s family tree begins with Peretz, the son born to Judah and Tamar. The seventh generation is Oved, the son born to Ruth and Boaz. The key progenitors of Israel’s great and future king are Tamar and Ruth. Theirs are in fact the only stories told in any detail about David’s female forebears.

This is astonishing. The heroes in David’s background are two women who stand at the very edge of Israelite society. In the biblical era there were no more vulnerable individuals than childless widows. But Tamar and Ruth were in a far worse situation still. They came from groups traditionally despised by the Israelites: the Canaanites and the Moabites. They had no natural place in the society in which they found themselves. It was these two women, Tamar and Ruth, whose loyalty and steadfastness were the key factors in giving birth eventually to King David, the man who became king of Israel, united the nation, initiated the plans for building the Temple and wrote some of the finest poetry in the ­religious history of humankind.

This is worthy of serious reflection. Otto Rank, in his classic The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, points out that there are common ­elements in the stories told about the heroes of myth. Though raised by lowly adoptive parents, they are of noble birth. They have royal blood or are descended from the gods. The story of David turns this convention on its head. David has the kind of family background most people would seek to hide.

It is exceptionally moving that the Bible should cast in these heroic roles two figures at the extreme margins of Israelite society: women, childless widows, outsiders, aliens. Tamar and Ruth, powerless except for their moral courage, wrote their names into Jewish history as role models who gave birth to royalty – to remind us, in case we ever forget, that true royalty lies in love and faithfulness, and that greatness often exists where we expect it least.

III. Healing an Ancient Wound

The word tikkun, as in tikkun olam, “mending the world,” and tikkun leil Shavuot, the custom of staying up and studying Torah all night on the first night of the festival, has a curious history. In mishnaic Hebrew, that is, until the third century, it meant no more than social order, the rules that made society a safe and predictable place (see ­Gittin, ch. 4 and 5). In Jewish mysticism it came to mean something more metaphysical: mending the fractures in the universe that made life on earth so full of suffering and injustice, chief symbol of which was the Jewish condition in exile.

According to Rabbi Isaac Luria, the great mystic of the sixteenth century, this had to do with the fact that something had gone wrong with creation itself. The divine light of the first day of creation had proved too intense for the physical vehicles meant to contain it. The vessels had shattered, leaving debris and fragments of light scattered everywhere. Ours, said the mystics, is a broken world, and the fractures are so deep that they affect the Divine Being Itself. Exile is not just a human phenomenon. It represents a rift between God as He is in Himself – the Infinite, the Ein Sof, the Without-End – and the Shekhina, the Divine Presence, God as He is among us. When Jews went into exile, the Shekhina went with them. So we, by our mystical endeavors, have to help heal the fractures in the Divine. Every religious act, if done with sufficient intensity of mind and soul, does something to reunite Kudsha Berikh Hu, the Holy One, blessed be He, and Shekhintei, His immanent Presence.

There is, though, a third sense of tikkun that is not mystical at all but makes powerful sense in terms of the Jewish vision of the world. Bad things happen between people. The innocent are harmed. There is envy, jealousy, anger, resentment. There is injustice, oppression, exploitation. The human world is full of tears. If you believe, as polytheists did in the ancient world and some atheists do today, that life is essentially conflict, a Darwinian struggle to survive, then there is nothing odd about a world full of pain. That is how it is. There is no right; only might. Justice is whatever serves the interests of the strong. History is written by the victors. The victims are mere collateral damage of the fight to impose our will on the world or, in the language of the neo-Darwinians, to hand on our genes to the next generation.

That, though, is not how Jews understand it. The natural condition of the world is harmony, like a well-ordered garden or a loving ­family or a gracious society. That is how it was in the beginning when God made the universe and saw that it was good. God, though, gave humans ­freedom, and humans often use that freedom to disobey Him. God created order. We create chaos. That is, or would be, the human tragedy if Jews believed in tragedy. But we do not. We believe in hope, and hope has the power to defeat tragedy – as we have the power to mend what we or others have broken.

That is the philosophy that lies behind the central Jewish idea of teshuva, meaning “repentance” or “return.” Through teshuva, we can heal some of the pain we or others have created. Though the concept of ­teshuva does not figure explicitly in the stories of Genesis, it is there nonetheless beneath the surface. Broken relationships are mended. ­Ishmael, Abraham’s child by the slave-woman Hagar, was sent away when he was young, yet we see him standing together with his half-brother Isaac at Abraham’s grave. Jacob and Esau, divided by Jacob’s act of ­taking Esau’s blessing, meet twenty-two years later and embrace with no evident trace of lingering resentment. Joseph forgives his brothers who sold him into slavery. Genesis ends on a note of reconciliation. There are wounds that can be healed.

Neither Tanakh nor the rabbis, nor even the mystics, called this tikkun, but that is what it is: the intensely human ability to repair damaged relationships and restore order to the social world. But what if the moment passes? What if those who did the damage and those who ­suffered it are no longer alive? Can what we do in the present mend something broken long ago, before our time? That is one of the subtexts of the book of Ruth, and it applies to two people: Ruth herself, and Boaz.

First, Ruth. She was, we are told no fewer than five times, a Moabite. This raises a powerful question not touched on in the book itself. The Torah explicitly states that “a Moabite shall not come into the congregation of the Lord even to the tenth generation” (Deut. 23:4). The rabbis solved this problem simply and ingeniously. The Hebrew for Moabite, Moavi, is masculine, not feminine. So the prohibition applies to men but not women (Yevamot 76b–77a). This, they said, was one of the rulings given “in the days when the judges judged.”

There was a reason for this. The Torah explains the original prohibition by saying, “They did not come to meet you with bread and water on your way when you came out of Egypt, and they hired Balaam son of Beor from Pethor in Aram Naharaim to pronounce a curse on you” (Deut. 23:45). The Moabites, the Torah implies, had a natural hostility to the Israelites. They were mean-spirited and worse: they had paid the pagan prophet Balaam to put a curse on them.

Why so? The Torah itself tells a story about this, early in the history of Abraham’s family. Leaving his land, birthplace and father’s house, Abraham took his nephew Lot with him. In Genesis 13, the first recorded argument within the family, we see the shepherds of Abraham and Lot arguing. They had returned from Egypt rich in sheep and cattle, and there were too many to be grazed in the same area. Abraham suggested to Lot that, rather than quarrel, they should separate, and he offers Lot the choice of where to go.

Lot, seeing the affluence of the Jordan valley, “like the garden of the Lord” (v. 10), chooses to settle there in the town of Sodom. Immediately, though, the Torah adds a warning note. The people of Sodom are “wicked and sinning greatly against the Lord” (v. 13). Soon, Lot’s life was in danger. Four neighboring kings attacked Sodom, taking many captives, including Lot. Abraham gathered a force, pursued the invading army, rescued the hostages and returned Lot to his home (Gen. 14).

Five chapters later, two strangers come to visit Lot. They are in fact angels sent to warn him that the town was about to be destroyed. That night all the inhabitants of the town crowd round Lot’s house, demanding that he bring out the visitors so that they can be assaulted. Lot refuses but does something even worse: offers them his daughters. The angels intervene. Smiting the townspeople with temporary blindness, they urge Lot to leave. Lot reports this to his sons-in-law, who treat his remarks like a joke. The angels then force Lot, his wife and daughters to leave and the area is almost immediately destroyed. Against the angels’ instructions, Lot’s wife looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt, ­leaving Lot and his two daughters as the sole survivors.

Sheltering in a cave among the mountains, Lot’s daughters, ­suspecting there is no one in the region left alive, decide to get their father drunk and sleep with him. They do so, they become pregnant, and eventually give birth. The elder calls her son Moab (“from father”). That is the Torah’s account of the origin of the Moabites. They are the outcome of an incestuous relationship, and they have acquired the characteristics of the people of Sodom. They are hostile to strangers, sexually amoral and the result of a division within the Abrahamic family – Lot’s decision to live among the people of the cities of the plain.

Turning now to the story of Ruth, we see certain similarities between it and that of Lot. In both cases there is a man and two women. There is anxiety as to whether there will be a next generation. In both cases it is the women rather than the man who take the initiative, and in both, the man has been drinking. In both, there is an encounter in the dark, at night, and in both a child is born.

The differences, though, are immense. Sodom is a place of ­hostility to strangers. Ruth’s is a story of kindness to strangers. Lot separated from Abraham; Ruth refused to be separated from Naomi. Lot’s daughters are licentious. Ruth, alone with Boaz, is chaste. Sodom is a symbol of the absence of ĥesed; Ruth is a symbol of its presence.

Ruth, in her life and by her example, performs a tikkun. Though there is no element of teshuva involved, the verb shuv, in the sense of “return,” appears thirteen times in the book. Something has been healed. By her conduct and character, she shows that not all Moabites lack kindness. They, too, ultimately come from the same family, that of Teraĥ, as Abraham himself. Ruth has redeemed something of the past. Reuniting two long-separated branches of the family, her great-grandson became the person who united the nation. That is tikkun. By our acts in the present we can heal some of the wounds in the past.

IV. Boaz and Judah

There is another tikkun in the book of Ruth.

There can be no doubt as to why the book was written and included in Tanakh. It ends with the birth of David and a genealogy ­tracing his descent. Heavily emphasized throughout is its setting in Bethlehem, Judah. Despite the prominence of Joseph in the book of Genesis, and the tribe of Levi – in the form of Moses, Aaron and Miriam – in the rest of the Pentateuch, the kings of Israel descended not from them but from Jacob’s fourth son, Judah.

Yet Genesis raises real doubts about Judah’s character. Like Elimelekh at the beginning of Ruth, Judah left his brothers, in his case to live among the Canaanites. He married a Canaanite woman. He later used the services of what he took to be a prostitute. He was willing to have his daughter-in-law sentenced to death for a sin she had not committed. Most fundamentally, however, it was Judah who was responsible for selling Joseph into slavery in Egypt. The brothers initially proposed killing him. Reuben, planning later to rescue Joseph, suggested that they threw him in a pit and left him to die. But it was Judah who said the chilling words:

“What will we gain if we kill our brother and cover up his blood? Come, let’s sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay our hands on him; after all, he is our brother, our own flesh and blood.” (Gen. 37:26–27)

Note, first, that he did not say, “It is wrong to kill our brother.” He said, “What will we gain?” if we kill him. This is the language not of principle but pragmatism. Second, he proposed selling Joseph as a slave at the very moment he recognized that “he is our brother, our own flesh and blood.” It is as if Judah were echoing Cain when he said, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

To be sure, after his encounter with a righteous woman, Tamar, Judah appears as a changed character. He became, de facto, the leader of the remaining brothers. He was their spokesman in their last great dialogue with the viceroy of Egypt. Faced with the opportunity to repeat the earlier sin, by leaving his brother Benjamin as a slave, he showed that he had changed. He offered himself as a slave, so that Benjamin could go free.

He had repented, but in highly unusual circumstances. ­Unbeknown to the brothers, the viceroy was in fact Joseph himself, who had been ­putting them through a series of trials to see if they ­acknowledged their guilt and had changed. Was this sufficient to establish that the descendants of Judah would not also share his moral weaknesses, above all his failure to act as his brother’s guardian, surely the first requirement of a leader?

One of the powerful techniques of biblical literature is its intertextuality, its use of literary devices to connect one passage with another. This prompts the listener or reader to ask, “Now where have I heard those words before?” We make connections between one text and another, and slowly begin to realize that they are part of a single story, that the later passage is a commentary on the earlier one. There is a dramatic instance in the book of Ruth.

It happens at the first encounter between Ruth and Boaz. Ruth has gone to gather grain in a field belonging to one of Naomi’s relatives. We know this because the text tells us so, but Ruth, at this point, does not. He is simply a local landowner, clearly a man of substance but not someone she knows. Boaz, seeing her, asks the overseer of the field who she is, and he tells him that she is a Moabite who came with Naomi. Boaz then goes to speak to her, showing her great kindness and sensitivity. She is profoundly moved, prostrates herself “low, to the ground,” and says: “Why is it that I have found favor in your eyes, that you give me recognition [hakireini] such as this, when I am a stranger [nokhriya]?” (2:10).

What makes this a most unusual sentence is a detail lost in translation. There is a very rare linguistic phenomenon known as a contronym, a word with two meanings that are diametrically opposed. One example in English is “cleave,” which means both to split apart and to cling together. Another is “sanction,” which means to permit, and the opposite, to forbid and punish. The Hebrew verb n-kh-r in some forms means “to recognize,” and in others, the opposite, “to be, or act as, a stranger,” that is, someone not recognized. The appearance in a single sentence of the word in both meanings is arresting and very rare.

There is only one other place in Tanakh where it occurs: when Jacob’s sons go to Egypt to buy food during a famine. They come before the viceroy, who is, unknown to them, their brother Joseph:

When Joseph saw his brothers, he recognized them [vayakirem], but he pretended to be a stranger [vayitnaker] and spoke harshly to them. “Where do you come from?” he asked. “From the land of Canaan,” they replied, “to buy food.” Joseph recognized [vayaker] his brothers; they did not recognize him [hikiruhu]. (Gen. 42:7–8)

To “recognize,” in biblical Hebrew, is a complex idea. It is cognitive: “I recognize you” means “I know who you are.” But it means something legal and moral also. It says there is kinship between us. We are part, literally or metaphorically, of the same family. I have special duties toward you that I do not have toward everyone. The Torah states, “Do not recognize faces in judgment” (Deut. 1:17). This means, do not let kinship distort the course of justice. From the negative we can infer the positive, that when it comes not to justice but compassion, then to “recognize a face” means to show the kind of care that family members should have to one another. That is why Ruth asks, “Why have I found favor in your eyes that you recognize me?” meaning, why have you shown me such special treatment?

When she goes on to say, “I am a foreigner,” the word she uses, nokhriya, is far stronger than the usual biblical word for stranger, ger. A ger in biblical times was a temporary resident without citizenship rights. Nokhri, by contrast, means “an alien, an outsider,” someone who does not belong here and would normally be viewed with suspicion and hostility. When Ruth calls herself a nokhriya, she is referring to the fact that she is a Moabite, fully aware of the historic tensions between her people and Naomi’s.

Returning to Joseph, we see that in its description of the brothers’ first encounter in Egypt, the Torah is hinting at something larger than the meeting itself. When Judah said, years earlier, “Let’s sell him…after all, he is our brother, our own flesh and blood,” he was committing a kind of contronym of the mind. He knew Joseph was his brother, but he treated him like an alien, someone with no claim to his care. What Joseph proceeds to do over the next few chapters is to force the brothers to experience what he himself suffered, to see if this role reversal will get them to understand what they had done wrong. He acts as if they are strangers, for that is how they – specifically Judah – acted toward him.

What we see in Ruth’s first encounter with Boaz – the seventh-generation descendant of Judah – is a precise reversal of that earlier scene. She really is an alien, a foreigner, a Moabite, a nokhriya. Yet he extends to her the kindness he would show to a member of his own family: he “recognizes” her. He also immediately explains why. He has heard of what she has done for his relative, Naomi. It would be perfectly understandable if he refused to treat her as a member of the family. She came, after all, from a nation distrusted by Israelites as immoral, cruel and hostile. But he immediately treats her as a full and respected member of the family.

The intertextual resonance of the verb n-kh-r in its two opposite senses tells us that a larger drama is being played out here. Boaz is repairing, redeeming, performing a tikkun toward Judah’s past. Judah treated his brother as a stranger. Boaz treats a stranger like a member of the family. That is the tikkun that had to take place before a descendant of Judah, David, could become a king of Israel.

V. Ruth and the De-Ethnicization of Judaism

Something happened at Sinai that fundamentally changed the terms of Jewish existence. Until then, God’s covenant with Abraham had been with his biological descendants. The Abrahamic family was a kinship group, a clan, a tribe. You were born into it. You could not enter it from the outside. To be sure, not every descendant of Abraham was part of it. Isaac was chosen but not Ishmael, Jacob but not Esau. But with Jacob, this ended. All of his children became tribes within the larger family of Israel. The covenant was closed to outsiders.

Hence the concern Abraham and Isaac showed that their children marry within the family. Abraham, sending his servant to find a wife for his son, made him swear that he would not take anyone from among the Canaanites but would go instead “to my country and my own family” (Gen. 24:3–4). When Esau married two Hittite women, it was “a source of grief” to Isaac and Rebecca (Gen. 26:34–35).

Yet as the story unfolds, this principle comes under ever-greater strain. Judah married a Canaanite woman. Joseph married the daughter of an Egyptian priest. Moses married the daughter of a priest of ­Midian. Each of these women, on marriage, surely adopted the religion of her husband, but there was as yet no formal conversion procedure, nor could there be. The covenant was a family heritage you were born into, not a set of commitments you could choose to adopt.

That changed with the Giving of the Torah. Judaism now had a set of commands that defined it as a way of life. In principle, conversion became possible. In some sense, what the Israelites themselves underwent at the time was a kind of conversion (Yevamot 46b; Keritot 9a). The men were circumcised in Egypt (Josh. 5:5). The people purified themselves before the revelation (Ex. 19:10). At the revelation itself, the people said, “All that the Lord has spoken, we shall perform” (ibid. 8) – essentially the same act that constitutes conversion itself: kabbalat hamitzvot, “acceptance of the commandments.” Israelite identity became a matter of assent, not just descent.

There are several instances in Tanakh of outsiders aligning themselves with the fate of Israel, Rahab in the book of Joshua (ch. 2) for example, or Yael in the book of Judges (ch. 4). There is, though, only one episode that resembles a conversion: Ruth’s declaration to Naomi, “Wherever you walk, I shall walk; wherever you lie down, there shall I lie. Your people is my people; your God is my God.” This subsequently became the model on which conversion was based (Yevamot 47a–b). Note that it has two elements: joining both a covenant of fate (“your people is my people”) and a covenant of faith (“your God is my God”).

This possibility of joining the Jewish people through an act of choice, the voluntary acceptance of religious responsibilities, turned Judaism from an ethnicity into something broader and more open, all the more so in light of the fact that the person who became the role model for conversion came from Moab, the group whose ethnicity was among the most problematic to the Israelites.

The story of Ruth de-ethnicizes Judaism, as did the covenant at Sinai. Being Jewish ceased to be a race and became a responsibility. This has a bearing on one of the great questions of Judaism: Did God choose the Jewish people because they were special, or did they become special because God chose them? Is Jewish distinctiveness a cause or consequence of election? Are Jews intrinsically, ethnically, spiritually different, or is it living the life of the commandments that makes them so? Is Jewishness a genetic endowment, as it were, or an acquired characteristic?

There is a line of thought in Judaism that suggests that Jews are indeed different: that something special has been passed on to them by the patriarchs and matriarchs and more than a hundred generations of ancestors who kept the faith through all the hardships. We find this in some passages of the Talmud and Midrash, the Zohar and the writings of Judah HaLevi and Maharal (Rabbi Judah Loewe) of Prague. The difficulty in this view is how to understand the act of conversion itself. How can someone not ethnically Jewish become so?

Against this stands the view of Maimonides, for whom there is no ontological difference between Jews and gentiles. All humans are in the image of God. All are capable of moral and intellectual greatness. If Jews are close to God it is because of their performance of the commands and the study of Torah. The one refines our character, the other elevates our mind.

Nowhere does Maimonides make the point more emphatically than at the end of his Laws of the Sabbatical Year and the Jubilee. There he explains that the tribe of Levi had no share in the land because they were set apart to serve God and minister to Him. He then adds:

Not only the tribe of Levi but every single individual from among the inhabitants of the world whose spirit moves him and whose intelligence gives him the understanding to withdraw from the world in order to stand before God to serve and minister to Him…such an individual is consecrated to the Holy of Holies and his portion and inheritance shall be in the Lord forever and ever more. The Lord will grant him in this world whatever is sufficient for him, the same as He had granted to the priests and the Levites. (Laws of the Sabbatical Year and the Jubilee 13:13)

This is an extraordinary passage, set right at the center of ­Maimonides’ law code, the Mishneh Torah (it is the last law of the seventh of fourteen books), which also begins and ends on a universalistic note.

Maimonides’ attitude is made even more clear in his letter to Ovadia, a convert to Judaism who had written to him in some distress, apparently having been told by a rabbi that he could not say words in prayer such as “Our God and the God of our fathers,” since in his case his father was a gentile. Maimonides had no hesitation in telling him that he may say these words and all others, exactly like a born Jew. Abraham, he writes, is not only the biological “father” of the Jewish people, but also and equally the spiritual father of all who convert to Judaism. There is, says Maimonides, no difference between you and us. What is more, he says, in Egypt, “our fathers were mostly idolaters; they had mingled with the pagans in Egypt and imitated their way of life.” Therefore, “you should not consider your origin as inferior” to ours. We are both, born Jew and convert alike, descended from those who did not worship the true God. We have all been brought under the wings of the Divine Presence.

He ends the letter on a beautiful note. He quotes a line from Isaiah in which the prophet says that a day will come when “I will pour out My spirit on your offspring, and My blessing on your descendants.” At that time:

Some will say, “I belong to the Lord”; others will call themselves by the name of Jacob; still others will write on their hand, “The Lord’s,” and will take the name Israel. (Is. 44:5)

The phrase, “Some will say, ‘I belong to the Lord,’” says Maimonides, refers to converts, while “others will call themselves by the name of Jacob” refers to born Jews.¹, ed. Yitzĥak Sheilat [Hebrew and Arabic], vol. 1 (Maale Adumim: Maaliyot, 1988), 231–35. “Do not let your ancestry be a small thing in your eyes,” he concludes, “for we are descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob while you derive from Him by whose word the world was created.”

footnotes: ¹ Letters of Maimonides

Ruth stands as the eternal model of one who made the journey to join the people of the covenant. In her merit, Israel was blessed by King David and the book of Psalms, as it will be, one day, by the ­Messiah and a world at peace.