Rabbi Janet Marder

Shavuot Yizkor 5768 - June 10, 2008

            It was a drought year in California . Months of low rainfall left the soil dry and depleted; record-setting heat waves baked the ground as the year wore on. Inside her house, the woman felt as parched as the earth. She was sad, but she couldn’t cry.  The sadness just sat there: a heaviness in her chest, an ache in her throat, a dull burning behind her eyes.

            The phone rang often, especially at the beginning. She let the machine pick up the messages, listening to the same phrases, over and over again. “I’m so sorry; I’m thinking of you; if there’s anything I can do…”

            After a while she didn’t listen anymore; she couldn’t bear to. She couldn’t bring herself to return the calls either, though she knew that she should. People meant well – she knew that, too. She could feel the earnestness in their voices; she could tell how hard they were trying. She tried, too – she really did, but it felt like such an effort to respond, and most of the time she was exhausted. There was all the paperwork to do – so many arrangements to make, forms to fill out, documents to assemble, phone calls to bureaucrats who kept you sitting on hold until you couldn’t bear it anymore.

            She lay awake at night for hours. Most days she slept late. Sometimes it was all she could do to get out of bed. By noon she was worn out, before she’d even tried to tackle all those papers piled on the dining room table.

            It was a drought year in California, and the woman felt trapped in her own personal drought, as well: baked hard as a rock and all dried up inside; no energy flowing in her veins, no tears to shed, and nothing left to give.           

            I know this woman; she belongs to Congregation Beth Am. She has different names and different stories -- all of them centered on loss and grief, and the end of life as she knew it. Sometimes she is young and sometimes old; sometimes she is not a woman but a man. Depression has many faces. Among them are the faces of family and friends who are worried, frightened, sometimes intensely frustrated, wishing they could do something to help.

            I see her face in the Book of Ruth, which we read on this second day of Shavuot: the face of a woman enduring her own internal drought; a barrenness of mind and soul and heart.

            You think, at first, that this is going to be a book about agriculture. There is so much in the story about farming and crops and the fertility or infertility of the soil. But you learn, almost at once, that the book is really about relationships between people. It focuses, especially, on the quality of chesed – generosity, kindness; on what it means to give and receive.

             “Va-yehi ra’av ba-aretz,” says the very first sentence of Ruth: “it came to pass that there was a famine in the land.” The first verse tells us that Elimelech, ish mi-beit lechem -- a man of Bethlehem in the territory of Judah – left the land of Israel because of the famine, and settled in Moab .

            A midrash comments that Elimelech was an ish – a man of standing in his home community, a leader on whom others depended – and that he left Beit-lechem, the town whose name, ironically, means “house of bread,” to flee his charitable responsibilities. “Now [with the famine] all of Israel will be coming to my door,” he thought to himself, “each one with his [empty] basket in his hand.”  Elimelech couldn’t bear the thought of all those hungry people begging him for help – so he took his wife, Naomi, and their two sons and fled from the burden of his duties to others.

            His flight does not save him; by verse three Elimelech has passed from the scene. “Vayamot Elimelech ish Naomi – “and Elimelech, husband of Naomi, died,” it says, prompting the midrash to ask: “Why does the text add “husband of Naomi”? Don’t we already know that they are married?”

            The midrash answers that this extra phrase teaches us something about widowhood. There is no pain like the pain of losing the spouse you married in your youth: no one felt Elimelech’s death more keenly than Naomi, his wife of so many years.

            Her husband was gone, says the verse, “vatisha’er hi, ushnei vaneiha – She remained, and her two sons” [1:3]. The grammar is peculiar – the verse reads as if Naomi alone remained, with her two sons tacked on as an afterthought. The midrash explains, punning on “Vatisha’er – she remained”: Naomi felt like “sh’yarei m’nachot” – like leftovers from a meal offering, like the scraps left on the table, like a heap of broken shards, insignificant and ignored. She had been focused on Elimelech and on their life together. Now he is gone. Now she is the center of nobody’s world.

            Naomi’s depression deepens immeasurably after her two sons also die. She rises up from her mourning, and, feeling that her years in Moab have brought her only sorrow, decides to return to the land of Israel . We all know the story of her poignant conversation on the road to Judah with her two young Moabite daughters-in-law. “Turn back,” says Naomi, “turn back, each of you to her mother’s house.”

            She kisses them goodbye; the three of them weep, and Orpah goes back to Moab – her name, says the Midrash, derived from ‘oref, the back of the neck – because she turned her back on Naomi. But Ruth – in Hebrew “Rut”—“ra’ata”; she saw Naomi, saw her loneliness and despair, and so she stayed with her.

            She stays even though Naomi is, for a long time, too depressed to respond to her compassionate concern. When Naomi arrives back in the land of Israel, she speaks as if there is no Ruth in her life, saying to the Israelite women who greet her, “Do not call me Naomi [meaning “pleasant and sweet”]; call me Mara [which means “bitter”]. For I went away full, and I have come back empty” [1:20-21].

            In a poem called “The Book of Ruth and Naomi,” Marge Piercy writes:

“At the season of first fruits we recall

two travelers, co-conspirators, scavengers

making do with leftovers and mill-ends,

whose friendship was stronger than fear,

stronger than hunger, who walked together

the road of shards, hands joined.”

            The book of Ruth tells the story of Naomi, a woman like a broken shard, impoverished and empty, feeling drought and famine at the center of her soul. Its mood, dark and somber in chapter one, turns around almost immediately as the chapter reaches its conclusion. Its last verse tells us that the two women have arrived in Bethlehem just as the barley harvest begins. The land is barren no longer; the long drought has come to an end.

            The rest of the book – three brief chapters – shows us what happens when someone who is hungry, emotionally starved for love, finally allows herself to taste the fruit of human kindness. Naomi, slowly nourished by Ruth’s compassionate care, responds with kindness of her own. Life stirs in her once more. She rises up and takes action, determined to do something for Ruth, whose gentle, steadfast love has saved her life.

            Thanks to Naomi, Ruth finds a good husband in Boaz, an older man whose kindness and generosity mirror her own. Boaz promises to marry Ruth, though she is poor and humble and a stranger in the land; he pours a full measure of grain into the shawl she holds in her outstretched hands. We do not need to be a Freudian to read the promise in this scene. An older man, a man who thought his days of love were over, will have a second chance. His seed will grow in Ruth, whose newborn son will be a go’el, a redeemer, for them all.

            The women of Israel celebrate with Naomi, whose once-empty hands now hold a baby boy. “He will renew your life and sustain your old age,” they promise her. She holds the child to her bosom, as the women of Israel give him a name: Oved, “the one who serves.”

            The last sentence of the book offers a message of quiet joy. From this little boy, the one who serves, will come David, the “beloved one,” and from David, we know, will come the Messiah, bringing life and hope to all the world. Elimelech, who began our story, ran away from the ones who depended on him; Naomi, his bereaved wife, pushes away the one who tried to help. But Ruth and Boaz, who end our story, show us the beauty of love given and love received.

            It was a drought year in California , and the woman stayed in her house alone. She wondered how long it would be before all of the phone calls stopped. No more messages, no more invitations to dinner or the movies. People couldn’t keep doing that forever – how could they, without any encouragement from her? She wondered if she was ever going to feel better.

            But over time they surprised her. Her family and friends didn’t give up. They kept calling; they would not be pushed away; they did not turn their backs. And there came a time when she could finally cry, and felt the hardness inside of her melting, and felt the life force welling up once again. It seemed, astonishingly enough, that she was loved. At long last, she could feel it.  At long last, she was ready to stretch out her hands and receive.

            She picked up the phone and called someone back. It was the first step on a long road. Her world would be different from now on, but she knew that she could go on. New seeds would sprout from the ground, someday. Her hands would not be empty, and she would not walk alone.