c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ First time visitors to Israel are always impressed with”tels,”the Hebrew word for the tall mounds of earth dotting so much of the countryside. As archeologists dig through the tels’ many layers, the ancient mounds offer up exciting secrets from past millennia, including pottery, coins, stone inscriptions, statues, household utensils and weapons. The late James Michener based his best-selling book”The Source”on a well-known Israeli tel.

Biblical books are like tels; the more readers dig into the text, the more they discover about its contents. And none is more layered than the Book of Ruth, which will be read in synagogues during the two-day Shavuot holiday May 31-June 1.

The spring festival of Shavuot _ the Hebrew means”weeks”_ comes seven weeks and a day after Passover. The holiday commemorates the extraordinary moment in time when Moses received the Bible from God on Mt. Sinai, creating the permanent covenant between the Jewish people and God.

The traditional explanation for reading Ruth is that Shavuot comes during the harvest season in Israel and Ruth is the story of a woman who harvests crops in the fields.

But that’s only the first layer of Ruth. Dig deeper and we encounter the poignant story of an Israelite woman, Naomi, living for years as a widow in Moab, an alien land across the Jordan River and away from her family and people who reside near Bethlehem.

Sadly, her two sons have also died leaving behind Moabite daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth. Neither young widow has children and Naomi desperately yearns for them to become mothers.

But that’s just the second layer.

Dig some more and readers discover another level. Like today’s Israelis, the ancient Israelites did not live in a hermetically sealed community, cut off from their neighbors. Indeed, the opposite was true. The Book of Ruth describes Naomi living amidst the Moabites, Israel’s hated adversaries. And worse still, her widowed daughters-in-law are members of the enemy tribe.

Dig more into the story and we are surprised to discover Orpah and Ruth deeply love their Israelite mother-in-law. Both young women are presented in positive terms, and not as negative stereotypes. Even though the Bible is filled with what we today call interreligious and inter-ethnic hatred and warfare, the Book of Ruth is different.

Is the Bible trying to tell us that women have the unique ability to transcend hostile borders and intense group loyalties?

Dig some more into the characters of Orpah and Ruth and the reader comes upon two distinct types of people. Naomi urges her daughters-in-law to return to their Moabite families:”Turn back, each of you to her mother’s house … turn back my daughters! Why should you go back with me (to the Israelites near Bethlehem)? Have I any more sons in my body who might be husbands for you? … do not disqualify yourselves from marriage.” Orpah chooses to follow Naomi’s admonition and returns to her native Moabite tribe. The gifted novelist Cynthia Ozick writes that Orpah”… is no one’s heroine. Her mark is erased from history; there is no Book of Orpah. And yet Orpah is history … she is the majority of humankind living out its usualness on home ground … So Orpah goes home; or, more to the point she goes nowhere.” But it is Ruth, the other Moabite daughter-in-law, who utters words that”have set thirty centuries to trembling.”Ruth tells Naomi:”Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” And the two women return to Bethlehem where this complex story ends on a happy note. Ruth marries the Israelite Boaz, and they become parents of Obed. The Book of Ruth ends with these laconic words:”Obed begot Jesse, and Jesse begot David.” In this off-hand way, the Bible conveys some incredible news. King David, the great Israelite warrior and author of the sublime Book of Psalms, had a Moabite great-grandmother. At its deepest level, the Book of Ruth is a powerful refutation of narrow tribalism and parochial ethnic pride. King David himself traces his roots to a non-Israelite woman.

Orpah, the ordinary person goes home to the Moabites and is quickly forgotten. But Ruth, an extraordinary person, permanently enters history by linking her life and faith to Naomi’s people, and her great grandson becomes a king.

And the entire Book of Ruth is just 85 verses in length; a clear case of less is more.

DEA END RUDIN