The Widow, the orphan and the convert

Just before lighting candles for Shabbat a few thoughts about Megillat Rut:

On Shavuot we focus a lot on the issue of fair treatment of the ger, the convert (and with very just cause), but the story of Ruth and Naomi is also about a wealthy established family who have suffered terrible loss and tragedy, returning home to Bethlehem with their new downtrodden status plain for all to see.

"Hazot Naomi?" "Can this be Naomi?" the townspeople say when she returns. We can feel Naomi's shame bleeding through between the lines. The woman from a family used to wearing Biblical era Hermes and Balenciaga reduced to rags, bereft of her high status husband and sons, with her only remaining close family her Moabite daughter-in-law.

Instead of trying to help restore Naomi's sense of self, offer her comfort, it seems she is pretty much left to fend for herself by local people resentful of a woman of means who's family just up and left them during a time of famine, rather than staying behind and trying to help their community.

She is reduced to sending out her Moabite daughter-in-law to glean in the fields with the poorest of the poor. What a fall from grace for Naomi. Forgive me for forgetting my sources, but there are certainly those amongst Hazal who fault the townspeople for abandoning Naomi this way, and certainly Boaz for not initiating help to his kinswoman and excusing himself on the basis that there was a "goel karov mimeni", a closer kinsman who should have been responsible, absolving himself not just of the matter of yibum, but also from just taking the initiative in reaching out and caring for his bereaved and impoverished kinswoman upon her return.

It is Rut the foreigner, the stranger, who takes it upon herself to do the mitzva of tzedaka and gmilut hasadim in the most extreme way possible - by literally giving herself and her labour to to try to save Naomi from her downward spiral of depression and self-loathing in the wake of the terrible tragedies she has suffered. It is Rut the outsider who tries to pick up the pieces and set things right.

Her actions force Boaz to take responsibility and do his duty towards his kinswoman. Ruth's devotion to Naomi shows up the townspeople who do nothing to help this literal Almana and Ger, one of the mitzvot mentioned over and over again in the Torah.

How different from the town in which we live. I am very grateful and proud that we are fortunate enough live in a community full of Ruths, of gmilut hasadim, of tzedaka, of caring for our neighbours and beyond. May we merit to always be in a position to fulfill these supremely important mitzvot, to walk in the ways of Rut.

Shavuot sameah to all Am Yisrael.

If I forget thee Jerusalem

This is the SS Yerushalyim, a ship which brought thousands and thousands of immigrants to Israel in the early years of the state. It is of course named for the holy city of Jerusalem because what greater symbolism could their be for Jews returning to Zion after so many centuries of exile. 

It is also the ship that brought several family members to Israel for the first time in 1954.

The ship sailed from Marseilles and aside from my relatives, almost everyone else on board were new olim from Morocco and a small number of European Holocaust survivors. Almost every day and night there were spontaneous circles of people dancing the hora and singing Israeli folk songs and traditional Jewish prayers.

My mother told me she made good use of her French but most of her fellow passengers were anxious to practice their Hebrew and the family spent much of the time on board strengthening their Hebrew conversational skills with their fellow Jewish passengers.

My great-uncle, who was fond of declaiming the  works of Hebrew poets he'd learnt by heart in his Zionist school as a child, attracted regular audiences keen to hear his dramatic renditions of classics by Bialik and Yehuda Halevi.

During large public prayer services on the deck facing the direction of Jerusalem people teared up as they reached verses such as וְתֶחֱזֶינָה עֵינֵינוּ בְּשׁוּבְךָ לְצִיּוֹן בְּרַחֲמִים.
בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה', הַמַּחֲזִיר שְׁכִינָתוֹ לְצִיּוֹן.
And may our eyes witness Your return to Zion in compassion. Blessed are You oh Lord, who restores His Presence to Zion

In another few days they would be setting foot in Zion, they would be realising an ancient dream of returning home.

My mother, her brother and their first cousin (the two children in the photo above) were children going on their first big adventure, an entire summer in the nascent State of Israel touring the country and visiting an assortment of cousins and landsman, people who were like family because they or their parents or even grandparents had come from the same village as my grandfather and his family.

They stayed in places as diverse as kibbutz Beit Alfa, Haifa, kibbutz Hofetz Hayim and one of the original small homes that once lined Tel Aviv's beachfront Hayarkon street long before it was redeveloped with glitzy hotels and blocks of flats.

One place they couldn't visit though was the heart of sacred Jerusalem, The Old City, The Kotel and the Temple Mount. Back in 1954 these were deep in hostile territory, occupied by the Jordanian army.

I remember how on my first visit to Jerusalem, nearly 30 years later, but a world away from those times, my mother walked with me around the old Armistice lines, showing me the places where on her first visit to the city a local Jerusalem family friend took them on a walk that included rooftop lookouts, odd angles peeking out of narrow windows in private flats and a visit to Mount Zion, the closest a Jew could come to the Jordanian controlled Old City.

This was how they tried to sneak glimpses of ancient Jerusalem and the Jewish holy sites, all the time fearing trigger happy Jordanian snipers who occasionally took pot shots across the Armistice Line in to the Israeli side of the city.

Walking close to the border they were warned not to take out cameras in case soldiers on the other side decided this was reason enough to shoot. In what is today downtown Jerusalem there were streets cut off with fences and barbed wire, places where locals warned tourists to run across the street as fast as possible or walk in a crouch because that section of pavement or road was directly in firing range from Jordanian guard posts manned by snipers.

In 1954 they stood on Mount Zion looking over the walls of the Old City and praying that one day they would merit walking within those walls and going to pray at the Kotel, the Western Wall.

Nearly 30 years later my mother walked me to Mount Zion, remembering how her teenage self in 1954 had been both awed and terrified of walking so close to the Armistice line and the enemy soldiers patrolling the Old City walls.

All that had changed with the Israeli liberation of the Old City from Jordanian control in the 1967 Six Day War. Jews forced to leave the Old City as refugees in the 1948-9 War were able to return and restore the long neglected warren of ancient streets and buildings.

My uncle, the little boy in the photo below, was one of the first civilians to visit the Kotel immediately after the fighting died down, realising the dream he'd held on to all those years, the fulfillment of those prayers and tears overlooking the then forbidden walls back in 1954.



By the time of my first visit to Jerusalem in the 1980s the Jerusalem municipality was well in to a massive restoration project to clean up and rebuild all that had been damaged during the 19 years Jews had been banned from their holiest sites. Rubbish had been cleared from around the Kotel, the plaza had been expanded to accommodate thousands upon thousands of pilgrims thronging the site and the Jewish Quarter once again was home to Jewish families and Torah learning.

Hearing my mother's Jerusalem stories from the 1950s and early 1960s while walking through a city undergoing such an incredible rebirth it was no wonder we were both in tears by the time we reached the Kotel for afternoon prayers.