THE LORD SPOKE TO MOSES, SAYING: SPEAK TO THE ISRAELITES AND SAY TO THEM: IF ANYONE, MAN OR WOMAN, EXPLICITY UTTERS A NAZARITE'S VOW TO SET HIMSELF APART FOR THE LORD... THROUGHOUT THE TERM OF HIS VOW AS A NAZIRITE, NO RAZOR SHALL TOUCH HIS HEAD; IT SHALL REMAIN CONSECRATED UNTIL THE COMPLETION OF HIS TERM AS NAZIRITE OF THE LORD
(Bemidbar 6)
Growth of Hair As An Expression of Mourning Or A Partition Between the Nazarite and Society
"Throughout the term of his
vow as a nazirite, no razor..." Why did God command that the nazirite not shave his head? Because
shaving beautifies one, as illustrated by Yosef "And he shaved and he
changed his clothes". Letting the hair grow long is an expression of
sorrow and mourning. Therefore the Holy One, Blessed Be He, said: After this
nazirite enjoined himself from wine in order to distance himself from
indecency, let him grow his hair long so that he become unsightly and sad, lest
the evil inclination assail him; throughout the period of his vow to be a
nazirite holy to God, they are forbidden him as though they are sanctified
objects from which one may not derive pleasure, for he has sanctified them to
the name of heaven.
(Bemidbar Rabba 10:10)
"And the nazirite shall
shave" - The shaving of the hair ordered here and the placing
of it on the fire which is cooking the shelamim meal forms the most
striking expression of the meaning of naziritism just ended, and of its value
only being relative to the happy life to be lived henceforth before God. His
life as a nazirite was only to have been a preparatory provisional training. If
letting the hair grow was the sign of a sanctifying separation and withdrawal
into oneself (v. 5), the complete shaving is the expression of thenceforth
ceasing this separation and thenceforth completely re-entering the whole social
life of the community. This complete re-entry into the whole social life of the
community is not merely something permissible, it is a just mitzva, a
duty. It is a mitzva to be happy and have pleasure before God, to live a life
permeated with the spirit of the shelamim. This kind of life transcends
a life of naziritism, of renunciation and abstention, which reveals its moral
strength only in seclusion and retreat. Naziritism has no value unless it leads
to complete social integration.
(Rabbi R. S. Hirsch, Bemidbar 6:18)
Justice comes in two
varieties. Natural justice is the sense of justice inherent in every human
being, in her position as an individual living within a society based on
interrelationships. This justice may be discerned by the mind, at least in
theory.
The second variety, divine justice, cannot
be reached through thought. It is expressed in the system of laws and precepts
that God commands to mankind, through his revelation in the world.
An awareness that these two varieties of
justice can clash can be found in the Bible itself. This clash is the central
subject of a cycle of four Biblical stories: Job, Lot's daughters, Judah and
Tamar, and Ruth. In each of these stories the protagonists' instinctive sense
of natural justice conflicts with divine justice, and each protagonist finds a
different way of resolving the contradiction.
In each of these stories the central
character challenges, in one way or another, the foundation of divine justice
and seeks to undermine it. Each character does so differently, and with
different results. This essay is too short to offer a thorough examination of
each of these stories. Instead, I will concentrate on the Book of Ruth, the megilla
we read on Shavuot. Since Ruth stands at the end of this cycle, it contains the
concluding message of the cycle as a whole.
The Book of Ruth is a subversive book in
disguise. The message conveyed by the story is well-hidden behind a scrim of
ancient rural tranquility, so that a casual reader does not glimpse it. Only a
second or third reading of this pastoral novella reveals it. I should emphasize
that I am not speaking of a modern reading of the book, but of a subversive
reading that the sages themselves were well aware of and even stressed in their
glosses on the story.
The pastoral and romantic elements are
prominent. Ruth and Naomi return to the land of Judah bound to each other by a
common family tragedy. They arrive in the harvest season, as the young men and
women labor in the fields to bring in the (excellent, we may presume) harvest
granted them by God. They, under the leadership of the owner of the field,
Boaz, take care to leave the fallen and stray stalks of wheat for the poor, as
the Torah commands. They even treat Ruth, a foreigner, with respect and
generosity. Boaz takes Ruth under his protection and marries her, after taking
measures to ensure his right to do so under the law of Moses. As reward for
their righteous ways, Boaz, Ruth, and Naomi are granted the privilege of being
the forebears of King David and, by implication, to be the forefather and
foremothers of the redeemer of the end of days, the Messiah himself.
However, when one goes back and considers
the story, a number of puzzling elements present themselves. If the people of
Judah were so devoted to the Torah and its commandments, and if God is a
righteous judge, what was the cause of the famine that appears, unexplained, at
the beginning of the story? Furthermore, why are Naomi and Ruth forced to live
as beggars and indigents in Bethlehem when Naomi has close family there and
even owns a field? And how does the pastoral atmosphere that pervades the book
fit in with the picture of the same period we received from the Book of Judges,
in which the Israelites fall again and again into sin and idol worship?
In section two of Midrash Ruth Rabba, the
rabbis show that they are aware of the problematic nature of the story. They
read the ideal picture presented in the book as being, in fact, a condemnation
of the people of Judah.
Does the agricultural labor of the people of
Judah seem ideal and pastoral to us, a memory of a golden and innocent age of
long ago? Not at all, the midrash tells us, by quoting a verse from the book of
Joshua (24:13): "And I have given you land for which you did not labor,
and cities which you did not build, and you dwell in them; of vineyards and
oliveyards which you did not plant, do you eat." Joshua then goes on to
warn the Israelites against the worship of foreign gods. The implication is
that working the land is not an innocent activity - in fact, it can be a source
of and temptation to the worship of strange gods. Agricultural labor, Joshua
implies, can lead the Israelites to forget the Torah's commandments.
Suddenly the famine, and the people of
Judah's treatment of Naomi and Ruth, appear in a different light. Despite the
silence of the text, the famine may not have arrived for no reason at all. It
may well have been a reaction to the people of Judah's preoccupation with
working the land, to their utter devotion to the daily routine that such labor
requires. This view gains additional support when we see how the people of
Judah react to Naomi's reappearance among them. After expressing astonishment
at how sad and decrepit she looks, they return to their work without arranging
either shelter or sustenance for their returning neighbor and relative.
Ruth herself stands out against this Judean
attachment to routine. In Moab, Ruth rebelled against convention when she
refused to return to her mother's house, as Orpah did in accordance with local
practice (see Judah's command to the widow Tamar to return to her father's
house). Ruth does not act as society expects her to act. Instead, she chooses
her own independent path.
Naomi also responds to her plight by going
beyond the accepted. When she learns that Ruth was in Boaz's field, she
initiates an action aimed at bringing Boaz to offer marriage to Ruth. Naomi and
Ruth establish a fact by having Ruth spend an entire night alone with Boaz.
Even had Boaz had no interest in marrying Ruth, he would have been unable to
send her away after this night.
Boaz's actions, like those of the unnamed
kinsman of Naomi, stand out in adhering precisely to law and custom. Boaz sees
to it that his laborers observe the agricultural laws of leaving gleanings for
the poor, and enters into detailed legal proceedings with Naomi's kinsman in
order to arrange the technicalities that stand in the way of his marrying Ruth.
This adherence to law and order is quite different from the actions of Ruth and
Naomi, which come close to crossing over the boundary of what is permitted.
This is precisely Naomi's and Ruth's
strategy. They are domestic subversives, radicals who rebel against the
boundaries set by the law. They do not, it should be emphasized, deny the
validity of the law, do not break through its boundaries, but they stretch the
law to the very limit of its flexibility in order to achieve goals that they
view as just and necessary. Their consciences do not lead them to refuse to
obey the law but rather to an much more difficult and complex attempt to
achieve their goals in the framework of the law that the people around them owe
allegiance to.
In this their actions are quite different
from those of the central characters in the other stories in the cycle. Unlike
Job, Naomi and Ruth do not just lament their bitter fate - they act in order to
repair the world they live in. They do not enter into a disputation with God,
but rather act within the framework of the law and of a society based on the
Torah.
Unlike Lot's daughters, they correctly
analyze the state of the world around them. Lot's daughters are incorrect in
their assessment of what has happened to the world, and this brings them to the
sin of incest.
Tamar, Judah's twice-widowed daughter-in-law,
correctly analyzes her situation and decides to act in order to achieve
justice. Her devotion to justice is so overwhelming that it brings her, too, to
an act of illicit sexual union - she disguises herself as a prostitute and lies
with her father-in-law. Even though Judah in the end recognizes the justice of
what she has done, a sense of sin remains attached to her. Ruth's modesty, even
while alone with Boaz, stands out in comparison to Tamar's brazenness.
The famine at the beginning of the Book of
Ruth is, in fact, a symbol of life lived in strict accordance with the letter
of Torah law, without any attempt to act beyond that letter in accordance with
natural justice. The people of Judah are not literally worshippers of foreign
gods - they have not adopted as their own the gods of the nations around them.
But their devotion to the routine of their life and to the dray law of the
Torah has brought a spiritual famine upon them. This spiritual famine is the
same one that pervades Job's friends, Lot's daughters, and the people of Judah
in the story of Tamar.
Even though Naomi and Ruth discern the
vapidity caused by this adherence to the letter of the law, that same law which
is the embodiment of divine justice, they do not deny the authority of this law
nor its essential role as a component of complete justice. They act within the
framework of the law but do not hesitate to create, within the divine law, a necessary
place for the natural law they perceive. The way to bring the Messiah is
through subversion of the routine of divine justice - subversion aimed not at
shattering the law, but at combining the two varieties of justice, as is
written (Psalms 85:11): "Love and truth are met together; righteousness
and peace have kissed each other. Truth will spring out of the earth; and
righteousness will look down from heaven."
Haim Watzman is a member of Kehilat
Yedidya.
THE FESTIVAL OF SHAVUOT - A FESTIVAL FOR THE GOD-FEARING FROM ALL NATIONS
"Should the man not have a
redeemer... " - Exists there a man in Israel who has no redeemers? But
the subject here is the plunder of the alien; one who stole from an ger
[lit. an alien, but in Jewish law, a convert] and swore to him [falsely] and
then heard that the ger had died, and then took the money and his guilt
offering to Yerushalim, and there found the ger alive, and the
ger agreed that the monies be considered a loan, and then he [the ger]
died, he [who had originally stolen from the ger] may keep the money (According to Jewish law, a convert is disassociated
from his family - 'born anew' - and therefore his progeny are not considered
heirs with rights of inheritance) - this
is the view of Rabbi Yossi of the Galilee; Rabbi Akiva said: He has no remedy
but to relinquish the stolen property.
(Yalkut
Shimoni, Nasso, 247:431)
Said The Holy One, Blessed Be He: They
love me and I love them. Why does The Holy One, Blessed Be He, love the
righteous? They have neither clan nor family. We find that the priests are a
clan, the Levites are a clan, as is written "The House of Aharon, bless
the Lord, the House of the Levites, bless the Lord" - if one should
desire to become a priest, he cannot; to become a Levite, he cannot. Why?
Because his father was not a priest or a Levite. But should one desire to
become a tzaddik - a righteous person - this even a gentile can
become for he belongs to no clan. And therefore the psalmist said: "Those
who fear the Lord, bless the Lord" - he does not say "the
House of those who fear the Lord" - for those who fear the Lord are
not part of a clan; of their own volition they volunteered and loved The Holy
One, Blessed Be He, therefore The Holy One, Blessed Be He, loves them, and
therefore it says: "The Lord loves the righteous..."
The Lord greatly loves the converts. To what may this be compared? To a king who possessed sheep who daily went out to the field and returned at evening. Once a deer entered with the sheep. He went out to pasture with them. When the sheep entered their pens, he entered with them. When they went out to graze, he accompanied them. The king was informed: This deer accompanies the sheep, and he grazes with them, every day he goes out with them and returns with them. The King liked the deer, and when he went out to the field, he appointed a qualified shepherd who made certain that no one hit the deer; all were careful with him, and when he entered with the sheep, he told them: Give him water; he loved him greatly. They said to him: Our master, how many rams have you, how many lambs have you, how many goats have you - but you warn us only regarding this deer? Every day you charge us! Said the king to them: The sheep have no choice, this is their nature, to graze in the field every day and at eventide they come to sleep in the pen; but the deer sleep in the wild, it is not in their nature to enter human habitat. Shall we not be thankful to this deer, who leaves the great and expansive desert where all the animals live, and comes to stand in the yard? Similarly, should we not be thankful to the ger who leaves his family and his father's house and leaves his nation and all other nations of the world, and joins us?!! Therefore did He augment his protection, admonishing Israel to be careful not to harm them, saying: "You shall love the ger" and "you shall not cheat the ger, etc."
(Bemidbar
Rabba, Parasha 8)
Among the many subjects included in "Nasso" we find a short chapter on the subject of "Asham gezelot" - a guilt offering to make restitution for theft - in which we read: "If the man has no redeemer to whom restitution can be made". In such a case, the Torah obliges the penitent thief to give over the guilt restitution (i.e., the fifth added to the principal returned to the rightful owner) to the priest. In this context, one may ask, how is it possible that an Israelite not have a redeemer? Even should he have no close family (redeemers), he still has fellow members of his tribe who are close and can redeem. Even were we to assume that a redeemer, for some reason or other, is not to be found in his tribe, it is always possible to go back to the fathers of the nation, to our father Yaakov and his descendents from the other tribes, who are the relatives of this man and his redeemers. From all said above, we find that the man of whom it is said that "he has no redeemer" must be a convert, one who, upon conversion, breaks his ties with his family, and is now a Jew without a redeemer. Therefore, in the context of this parasha much has been said - both in philosophy and in Halakha - on the subject of the ger and conversion. The subject of conversion, of course, leads to matters concerning the righteous of all nations and races, those who fear the Lord.
(Y. Leibowitz: Discussions on the
Festivals of Israel and Its Appointed Times, p. 106)
Editorial Board: Pinchas Leiser (Editor), Miriam Fine (Coordinator), Itzhak Frankenthal and Dr. Menachem Klein
Translation: Kadish Goldberg
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