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.
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