Naomi and Job

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Erev Rosh HaShanah 5763 -- September 6, 2002

"You don't hit him when he's down" is a basic maxim of playground ethics. It's also the approach taken by the Jewish prophets. In good times they berated the people in the strongest language, but in hard times, they spoke words of comfort and consolation.

This summer I read with special interest a sermon by Rabbi Jack Reimer, on tzebrochene neshumah's, broken souls. He found these words in Yiddish on a painting of Judy Chicago's:

"Heal the BROKEN SOULS tzebrochene neshumahs, that have no rest."

Rabbi Reimer, a Conservative rabbi, is well known for his preaching, though in this case the ideas for his sermon came from an article by Rabbi Patti Karlin-Neumann, the current chaplain at Stanford University. ("The Journey Toward Life" by Patricia Karlin Neumann, in READING RUTH, ed. By J. Kates.)

Rabbi Karlin-Neumann, my classmate at the Hebrew Union College in New York, wrote about the Book of Ruth. She argues that if you are looking for a counterpart to Job, one who can model not only suffering but also a return to a healthy and productive life, then look to the story of Naomi.

Job is struck in three ways. First by the loss of his property, then by the deaths of his children and thirdly by disease that effects his own body.

But Naomi is struck with seven calamities in the first four verses of the book of Ruth. They come at us so fast, that often when we read the book, we don't really notice. First there is the famine. From descriptions of famines in ancient time, we have a sense of how devastating that would be to live through.

Then there is exile, being an outsider in a strange land.

Then the death of her husband. She is left a widow with two children to raise on her own.

Then there are the marriages of her sons to Moabite women, Moabites being one of two peoples with whom the Israelites at that time were forbidden to intermarry. It is unlikely that this was what had she hoped for them.

Finally there follows the death of her two sons, one right after the other. It is not enough that Naomi becomes a mother forced to bury her own children, but even worse: in a society where posterity is dependent on descendants, her adult sons leave behind widows, but no children.

Because it is the book of Ruth, we usually see the turning point of the story as Ruth's stirring declaration- "whither thou goest I shall go". The main theme of the book is customarily identified as setting Ruth up as the ancestress of King David. But if we keep our eyes on Naomi, we can read this simple tale as a much more profound story of loss and recovery.

It's like Job, but it's also different.

The focus of Job is on what's happening to him and how he will respond. The troubles that come upon him are aimed at him directly. The book even begins with a preamble explaining that Satan gets the right to afflict Job but not to take his life, so that God might prove that a righteous man exists.

With Naomi it's different. We are given no explanation from the narrator about why these terrible things have happened. In addition they aren't exactly happening to Naomi, but rather she is effected by them. There is a famine in the land, and many people are suffering, presumably many suffering worse than Naomi. After all, she is the wife of a wealthy landowner and has the resources to move to a place where there is food. Naomi suffers from Elimelech's death but it is his life that is cut short. She suffers when her sons die, but they did not die to hurt her, their deaths are part of their own story.

Some of us have moments when we feel like Job, when it seems that the world, fate, God, is set against us. But usually that passes and we experience our lives more like Naomi's. The book of Ruth reflects a less self centered perspective with its recognition that while you are the one who suffers, tragedy isn't necessarily something that is directed at you.

There was a recession in the land, and that's where we happened to live. There was an errant cell, a recalcitrant gene, it wasn't anything personal against us. There were madmen and just because your loved one was on a particular plane, or working on a particular floor, or attending a breakfast meeting at a particular restaurant, life is not the same.

While people have spoken to me about dark moments, when it does feel, as Naomi expressed it, that the hand of God is struck out against them, most people don't chose to live there. They don't stay where Job lived, railing against God and protesting their innocence.

The book of Job speaks to the assumption that the bad things that happen to you in life are directed at you for a reason. Job is searching for an explanation that would allow him to hold on to his cherished beliefs. For me the Book of Ruth, is much less theological. Unlike Job, Ruth isn't interested in being right at all costs.

I heard a story recently on this theme of how we often see the world as rotating around ourselves. It concerns an event we have all experienced. A rabbi somewhere is giving a sermon, when a baby suddenly wakes up from its nap and begins to cry. The mother immediately takes the baby out of the sanctuary. After services, the rabbi magnanimously greets the mother and says: Its ok, you didn't need to leave the sanctuary, the baby wasn't bothering me.

Oh, the mother says, Thanks, but I had to take him out. He may not have been bothering you, but you were bothering him.

Once we understand it's not about us, we can move on in a different way. In the book of Job, after a long and confusing speech by God, we are told: "So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning and he had 14,000 sheep and 6,000 camels and a thousand yoke of oxen and a 1,000 donkeys. He also had seven sons and three daughters. " We are glad to hear that Job is doing well, but have no sense of how he dealt with this second reversal of fortune. From the experiences of Holocaust survivors who built second families after the war, we sense that it cannot be so simple.

In the book of Ruth, Naomi's climb out of her bitterness is the focus of the rest of the story. Thus is it more visible to us and more useful.

At first Naomi is wallowing in her pain. When Naomi returns to Israel with Ruth, her daughter in law, who has just pledged outstanding loyalty to her, she says: "Call me not Naomi but call me Marah, for the Almighty has deal very bitterly with me. I went out full and the Eternal has brought me back home empty." I remember when we talked about this in our women's study group a few years ago. One woman said, with perhaps a note of recognition, There's Naomi saying she's all alone in the world, and there's Ruth, her non-Jewish daughter-in-law making major sacrifices for her sake, and saying to herself: "So what am I, chopped liver?"

In three steps Naomi, returns to herself, to her name, which in Hebrew means pleasantness, Naomi, naim, like hineh mah tov umah naim. The first step is when Naomi becomes attached to Ruth, so much so that at the end of the harvest season, she takes the initiative for the first time in the book and worries about Ruth's future. The second is when Boaz acts kindly toward her and towards her daughter-in-law and Naomi begins to trust that there is still kindness in the world. The third is when the grandchild comes, Oved, literally work, who gives her life a new purpose. We have textual evidence that Boaz and Ruth never lack for a babysitter.

In Job, God steps in directly and restores Job's fortunes, but in the book of Ruth, Naomi recovers in relation to these three people and the actions she herself takes.

Some years the role of the rabbi is to afflict the comfortable (and there'll be time for that tomorrow and on Yom Kippur) but this year I felt strongly the obligation to also comfort the afflicted. Many members of the congregation have suffered a hard year, some in very direct ways and others with fears and worries that loom at the edge of their consciousness. I don't need to tell you about the economy, but I am distressed that we have a longer list of unemployed members and friends of the congregation than we did in 1993.

Some of us have struggled this year with serious illness, our own or that of a loved one. However much we may think we are rationalists, serious, neshamah breaking illness, also attacks our spiritual certainties.

The events of September 11th which will be endlessly discussed next week, are with us not just in our explicit references to the attack, but also in the layer of unease that exists still beneath the surface. Then there is Israel and the state of world Jewry, which Arthur discussed earlier and which I will talk about tomorrow morning.

I said that the book of Ruth was less theological but I wouldn't want to leave the impression that God is absent completely. God appears in Naomi's three step recovery program, Rabbi Karlin-Newman notes, not obviously but very subtly.

Ruth is the first step in Naomi's program, the first attachment that Naomi makes after her loss, the attachment that prompts her to act selflessly for the first time after a period of self-centeredness. About Ruth our text says, Rut DAVKA ba, Ruth cleaved to her. Davka , cleave, is not a common word. The Bible uses it to describe our relationship to God, veatem hadveikim baAdonai eloheichem, chayim kulchem hayom.

Cleaving is actually a good word though for what a good friend or family member may need to do. Sometimes in being with someone who is mourning, who is ill, who is angry, you have to hang on as you would on a rocking bronco. Ruth stuck it out with Naomi even though at first she wasn't appreciated. She stuck it out even though Naomi was rude, even if she felt her being there wasn't helping. I remember in Brooklyn, when I really didn't hit it off with one of the shut-ins I visited monthly. There was no conflict, it's just we didn't jell, we had no common interests, no shared way of seeing the world. But I didn't cross her off my list, even though I wondered if my visiting was of any benefit at all. I ended up visiting her for years, and in the end when I moved away, we both cried. Through constancy we had gained a regard for each other and built a relationship.

Boaz is the second step. From Boaz, Naomi gains trust and a sense of the existence of goodness. In the book of Ruth, the word 'ga'al', which means to redeem, appears twenty-one times, always in the mouth of Boaz. Again this is a word used usually in reference to God, as in our prayer, Baruch atah adonai, ga'al Yisrael. Blessed are you o God Redeemer of Israel.

Through her relationship with Ruth, Naomi begins to look outside herself. From Boaz she regains a sense of gratitude. After cursing God in the beginning of the book, she praises God, Baruch HaShem, she says, thanks be to God that someone like Boaz exists. When we are Boaz, we enable other people to see the good in our world, in that way we are sanctifiers of God name.

And finally, Baby Oved is termed, Meyshiv Nefesh, as the one who restores the soul, something which usually only God can do. The Torah we are told also restores the soul: for some people it can provide a sense of purpose. I may have lost a lot, but I can still do mitzvoth. Someone dear to me is gone, but I can still find meaning in learning. I may not be the person I once was, but I can still treat my neighbor with kindness.

Perhaps God is not only in the whirlwind as God appears to Job, not only in theological discourse, in the 129 difficult to understand verses from the four chapters at the conclusion of the book of Job. Perhaps God is also in the friends who come to help us in our troubled times, in the service we are to our friends and neighbors as God's hands in our world, and in the meaning we find in our lives by helping another person.

As the new year begins, we affirm that healing is possible, and we step up to the plate to assume our responsibilities as those who help others find connection, believe in goodness, and experience a sense of purpose.

For Naomi, the way back to life, vitality, and restoration cannot be directly through faith because her estrangement from God is critical to her understanding of herself as Mara [bitterness]. Instead, it is through human acts that she is ultimately restored, and the language of the Book of Ruth reflects that. Words that are usually associated with God are, in the Book of Ruth, associated with people. In Ruth 1:14, Ruth clings to Naomi (V'Rut davka bah). In 2:8, Boaz tells Ruth to cling to his girls (devekut). The root dvk, meaning "to be close to" or "to cling" in Ruth, is used throughout Deuteronomy to refer to the experience of cleaving to God: "But you that cleave unto the Lord your God this day..." (Deuteronomy 4:4). The concept of devekut (cleaving to God) became central in Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism. Those familiar with the mystical tradition hear in the verb (davak) the implied object God, even as they recognize that the clinging here is to people.

Similarly, in Ruth 2:12, Boaz, praising Ruth for what she has done for Naomi says, "May you have a full recompense from the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have sought refuge." The phrase "under the wings" is used in rabbinic literature with reference to those asking for God's shelter. The wings are divine wings. But when, in Ruth 3:9, Ruth uses the phrase "Spread your wings over your handmaid," she is addressing Boaz. In choosing this image to seek the protection of a human being, Ruth symbolically seeks a promise of commitment not only from Boaz, but from God through Boaz.