Drawing Inspiration from Ruth
Tonight ushers in the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, “Pentecost.” In addition to reading the story of the giving of the ‘Ten Words/Sayings’ (“commandments” is a famous mistranslation), the most notable reading for the holiday is the Scroll of Ruth. If you’ve never read it before, I highly recommend it. It’s very short and is simply eye-opening that a story written 2,500 years ago can be so resonant today, and not just for its remarkable proto-feminism.
Below are links to three essays I’ve written that use literary tools and sociology to draw out lessons from the book that are profound and inspiring to contemporary readers. In particular, each essay discusses how Biblical characters— women in particular— face take action to self-actualize themselves but do so selflessly, and in circumstances where they could easily justify caring only about themselves or giving up. All three essays also show how Ruth uses extraordinarily artful literary tools to build on earlier biblical stories, with the intertextual links among them creating a whole that is much more powerful than the parts. Each essay also shows the Hebrew Bible to be a deeply insightful sociologist. And each of the essays draws on the incomparable work of Yael Ziegler. Highly recommended!
The three essays are:
Chag Sameach and gut yom tov!
Ezra