Next week we will celebrate Shavuot, the festival commemorating the giving of the Torah at Sinai. It is traditional to read the Book of Ruth on this holiday — a text that, at first glance, seems disconnected from the thunderous revelation of Exodus. Yet this pairing is no accident. Ruth offers a radical counter-narrative to the top-down model of divine revelation, presenting instead a vision of covenant rooted in interpersonal relationship, choice and the transformative power of chesed (loving-kindness).
The Exodus narrative presents revelation as divine initiative: God descends upon Sinai, proposes the Torah and Israel accepts. The relationship begins with divine courtship, often likened in rabbinic literature to a wedding. Yet this metaphor contains troubling undertones. The Talmud (Shabbat 88a) suggests that God “held the mountain over them like a basin” and declared, “If you accept the Torah, good; if not, here will be your burial place.” This initial coercive element threatens the integrity and longevity of our relationship with God.
Ruth’s story inverts this dynamic. After the death of Ruth’s husband, her mother-in-law Naomi attempts to send Ruth and her similarly widowed sister-in-law away: “Go, return each to her mother’s house” (Ruth 1:8). The Hebrew verb “return” carries legal weight, suggesting formal dissolution of relationship. Her words echo the formulaic language of divorce: she releases them from obligation, freeing them to remarry and find security elsewhere.
But Ruth refuses. Her famous declaration — “Where you go I will go, where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16) — represents not the initiation of covenant, but its preservation. This is a more mature model of relationship: not the passionate beginning, but the deliberate choice to remain connected despite any number of reasons to part ways.
With your help, My Jewish Learning can provide endless opportunities for learning, connection and discovery.
Ruth’s commitment emerges not from legal obligation, but from pure choice. As a Moabite widow, she owes Naomi nothing. The Moabites were descendants of an incestuous union between Abraham’s nephew Lot and his daughters. In the biblical imagination, they are a people fundamentally opposed to chesed, a culture in stark contrast to Abraham’s exemplary hospitality. The Torah prohibits marrying Moabites on this account. Yet Ruth, unschooled in Torah and born into an enemy tribe, intuitively grasps the Abrahamic way and thus merits to become the great-grandmother of King David.
This understanding places Ruth in sharp contrast to another biblical paradigm — the friends of Job, the supposed defenders of divine justice who wield Torah as a weapon against suffering. Both Naomi and Job experience radical loss and explicitly challenge divine justice. But where Job’s friends attempt to justify his pain, Ruth responds to Naomi’s bitterness with steadfast presence. Ruth offers an antidote to the theological violence of Job’s comforters: instead of explaining suffering, she chooses to accompany it.
The Book of Ruth unfolds during the barley and wheat harvests, which naturally connects it to the agricultural dimension of Shavuot. The story begins with famine, which forces the family to flee into exile. Famine represents society’s inability to coordinate, to share resources, to sustain life together. It is the opposite of chesed made manifest in the material world.
Naomi’s return to Bethlehem (literally, “house of bread”) signals potential restoration. That Ruth accompanies her transforms this return from mere survival into redemption. Through Ruth’s commitment to another person besides herself, bread becomes possible again. She finds herself, in turn, fed in the fields of Boaz, a wealthy landowner and a relative of Naomi’s late husband. Naomi’s literal homecoming, and Ruth’s existential homecoming, trace an arc from famine and implied selfishness to feast and implied loving-kindness.
The agricultural restoration story finds its culmination in King David, Ruth’s great-grandson. David’s anointing occurs in Bethlehem, the same place Ruth and Naomi visit upon their reintegration back into society. Ruth’s story, which is catalyzed by famine, is set in the time of Judges, a time before kingship that was notorious for its anarchy and ego-centrism. The Torah implies that Ruth’s journey through Bethlehem foreshadows a coming time, marked by the principle of malchut (sovereignty), when people would no longer starve on account of lack of trust. Kingship marks the ability of a people to identify with something larger than themselves. Ruth’s self-transcendence and generosity provide the cultural DNA for the Torah’s notion of kingship in its ideal form.
The progression from famine to harvest, from Passover’s unleavened bread to Shavuot’s wheat offering, reveals bread’s theological significance. Matzah represents haste, the inability to wait for natural processes. It speaks to crisis moments when we must act quickly, when liberation requires leaving behind the familiar. But bread requires time and patience to leaven, qualities that Ruth embodies as she walks with Naomi, unsure of where she’ll go.
This understanding transforms our relationship to both divine and human community. We become, in the language of Jewish mysticism, God’s hands in the world through daily acts of chesed that make life possible. Ruth’s story suggests that this quiet, interpersonal model of divine encounter sustains us. It is what allows us to eat our daily bread.
Reading Ruth on Shavuot thus challenges us to expand our understanding of how God meets humanity. Alongside the dramatic theophany of Exodus, we need Ruth’s model: revelation that emerges through relationship sustained across time, through choice renewed daily, through the patient work of making bread possible in a world prone to famine.
Ruth’s story suggests that Torah can come to us not just in spiritual ecstasy or public spectacle, but in acts of chesed. In this light, Shavuot becomes not just a commemoration of past revelation, but an invitation to ongoing discovery: How do we, like Ruth, intuit the sacred through relationship? How do we become partners in the divine work of bringing forth bread from the earth?
This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on May 31, 2025. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.
