About half a year ago, I went on a Livnot 3-day hike with a bunch of young adults who had never been privy to the kind of thought-provoking exposure to Judaism and the Land of Israel that Livnot provides (G-d bless 'em all). These folks, mostly post-college Americans, had obviously never been exposed to the sort of male-female segregation that yeshiva life demands; I, on the other hand, with a long, shaggy beard and long, swinging tzitzit, had been learning in yeshiva for two years, almost completely cut-off from non-male, non-religious, non-Torah-learning human contact, subject to the all-too-familiar sense of self-righteousness and judgement that can all-too-easily accompany the insularity of yeshiva life. So imagine my surprise, while climbing one or another mountain up in the north, to be accompanied by several young female Yidden who taught me the deepest Torah I'd learned all year.
"Hey, what's your name?" "Janelle, what's yours?" "Jerry." "Jerry -- that's my dad's name! It's short for Jerald." "Wow, cool… mine's actually short for Jerome, but my Hebrew name is Yermiyahu. What's your Hebrew name?" "Well, my middle name is Naomi, isn't that a Jewish name?" "Yeah, yeah… that's the name of a character in the book of Ruth, sure…" At this point, I blanked. It had been almost 9 months since the previous Shavuos, so I hadn't read the book of Ruth in at least that much time, but wanted to share with my new friend some sort of yeshiva-learned insight about her name, and was simply coming up blank. I silently continued climbing the mountain, hoping for someone else to pick up my lagging train of thought, to fill-in my uncomfortable silence…
"Naomi, she was Ruth's mother-in-law," chimed-in Shula, Janelle's friend, another hiker. "Naomi and her husband and two sons left the land of Israel because of a famine, but her husband and two sons died, so she was left with her son's wives, both of whom were Moabites. Orpah, the first daughter, decided to stay in Moab, but Ruth decided to convert to Judaism and come back to Israel with Naomi, and she eventually married Boaz, and became the great-grandmother of King David!" I was flabbergasted, speechless… I mean, here I was, Mr. LongBeard-And-Tzitzit, Mr. 2-Years-In-Yeshiva- So-I- Obviously-Know-Everything-You'd-Need-To-Know, Mr. Self-Proclaimed Wizard-Of-The-Dvar- Torah, having the fundamental story of the foundation of Jewish kingship explained to me by a young, non-religious American-Jewish woman in shorts and a tank-top!!!
"So, Shula," I asked, any trace of my self-righteousness or ego now dead, mortified and well-buried deeply along the hillside, "why do we read the Book of Ruth on Shavuos? What does Shavuos have to do with Ruth? I mean, on Shavuos, the Jewish people have basically come out of Egypt with full, G-d-granted freedom, and voluntarily choose to accept the Torah that G-d brings down to them at Mt. Sinai. How does that connect with Ruth?"
"I don't really know," Shula answered, "but I guess Ruth also came out of a foreign land, a place of impurity, with full freedom from her husband, and from her homeplace. She basically could choose anything that she wanted to do -- she could have returned, she could have remarried, she could have become a Gypsy and wandered the earth -- but she chose to follow Naomi and to connect herself to the Jewish people, to the Torah, to G-d and the Land of Israel, and to purify herself. Maybe that's why we read it on Shavuos." And with that thought, we reached the top of the mountain, and gazed down on the Sea of Galilee together, breathless, enthralled with what we had just brought-down together.
I'm not saying this to promote any ideology or further any system of belief -- I'm saying it from a place of personal conviction, grounded in experience: we Jews are holy, no matter what clothes we wear, where we live geographically, what language we speak, whether or not we shuckle with fervent devotion in prayer, whether or not we actively participate in the construction of our economic or social infrastructure, whether or not we consciously acknowledge it or even have subconscious awareness of it -- we are holy, we can and should all learn from one another, and we can all purify ourselves no matter what. Perhaps that's what "receiving the Torah on Shavuos" is all about -- realizing that just as our forefathers left Egypt, just as Ruth left Moab -- we can leave our own impurities, our own sense of self-righteousness and judgement and come to a purer, more pristine place of viewing ourselves and our fellow human beings without the entanglements of ego or the accoutrements of past experiences -- and perhaps this is the only place from which we can begin to truly serve Hashem.
Jerry Silverman
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Jerry Silverman is a former student of Yeshivat Bat Ayin. He is working in new media, designing and managing media projects. He lives in Riverdale, NY with his wife Sarah and their two children. |