Shavuot

[cellio]

I didn't make it to the evening service (with confirmation), due to impractical timing, but I did go to the tikkun that followed. There is a tradition of staying up all night studying torah on Shavuot; our congregation doesn't do the entire night, but we usually go until about 1:30 or 2:00. (If that's not enough, you can always go over to Kollel where they go all night.)

We had a small but good group this year (peaked around 16-18). Three of the eight confirmation students joined us, and they had good insights and questions to offer. Another wanted to join us but lost an argument with her mother.

We always begin our tikkun studying the revelation -- from the beginning of Exodus 19 through the ten words and the people telling Moshe "you go; we can't handle this". (That is, of course, a paraphrase.) My rabbi observed this year that it's sort of like a Pesach seder: we cover the same text each year, but the discussion is always different. Good analogy.

We talked about the idea of "am segula" -- treasured or precious or, as usually translated, "chosen" people. We argued some about what it means to be chosen and isn't that kind of snooty and what should it mean for us anyway. Personally, I feel that the problem with the phrase "the chosen people" isn't "chosen" but "the". There are other peoples and they have their own relationships with God; the torah is about ours. My rabbi brought out the passage from Isaiah that covers this (the "do you think you're the only ones? all these other peoples have standing with God too, you know!"). It was a good discussion.

A detail I'd never noticed before: God commands Moshe concerning the kohanim (priests) before the priesthood has been established. The traditional answer is that the torah has no beginning or end and some things occur out of order, but from a narrative perspective it still stands out a bit.

We always study some talmud. This year is was the part of Sanhedrin that covers who has a place in the world to come. We never really got past the discussion of who is an apikorus, but that's ok.

My rabbi always intersperses niggunim (wordless melodies) and stories (midrash and/or somewhat mystical stories) throughout. He read one story (I believe by a modern author, though I don't recall the name) that goes roughly as follows (in highly-abbreviated form):

There was a Jewish community that lived under an oppressive ruler. He banned the sacred texts, but they were dedicated to Judaism and responded to this by fashioning a blank torah scroll and having a blind man recite the portion from memory each week. There was another community where the people prospered and the synagogue was empty except for Yom Kippur. The day before Yom Kippur the gabbai of the latter entered the shul to make sure everything was set up, and he saw the ark doors open and letters flying through the air. The next day, the prosperous community found a blank scroll and in the oppressed community, the blind man could now see to read the text from their newly-populated scroll.

This led someone to ask: do people need to be persecuted in order to thrive? When we're comfortable, do we just get lazy? There was a lot of argument about whether anti-semetism is necessary for a strong Jewish people. One of the confirmation students articulated well what I was thinking: anti-semetism might lead to a strong sense of peoplehood, but it's neither necessary nor sufficient for a strong sense of religion.

As has become traditional (that is, do it three times and you've created a tradition), my rabbi ended with a reading of the Kafka story "Before the Law". Even though I know the story pretty well, it still makes me shudder. But in a good way.

My rabbi and I walked home together. I don't remember what we talked about, but I always enjoy spending time with him. Odd bit: he pointed out some graffiti (on a mailbox) that said something like "I saved the whales instead of the children and now we have too many whales". Neither of us could figure out what it meant.

At morning services, after the torah and haftarah, we read the book of Ruth. I don't think I'd quite noticed before that the slacker relative, the one whose responsibility is to bail out Naomi and her family after her husband dies but who punts, doesn't even get mentioned by name. I guess some people just aren't meant to be remembered. :-)

Comments

[cellio]

And maybe we're supposed to protect from embarrassment even someone who refuses to fulfill an obligation? So it's not just that he doesn't merit, but that we shouldn't bring attention to him?

[mishtaneh.livejournal.com]

Arguably, the public ritual for refusing the duty of the levir was embarrassment enough.

[goljerp]

Contrast this, however, to the story of Judah and Tamar, where Onan (who is named) gets zotted for not fulfilling the same obligation. Of course, his method for not fulfilling is much more obnoxious...

[cellio]

It could be argued that God, who wrote the torah per tradition, gets to name whomever he wants, while the men who wrote the book of Ruth have to be more careful. :-)

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

I don't remember hearing that it has anything to do with not embarrassing the man involved. My opinion -- and this is only my opinion -- is that the book is trying to make the point that this guy missed out on more than a mitzvah. Megillas Rus is also about where King David (and, by extension, the mashiach) came from, so this guy is (arguably) missing the chance to do something big for the Jewish people.

[cellio]

Good point on how much he missed out on!

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

It's definitely mentioned in the commentaries that naming people is an important part of the book of Ruth. E.g.: "If Boaz had known he was going down in history for giving her seed to glean, he would have given her fatted calves" (paraphrase from memory). Since the story focuses on who deserves to be remembered -- who does their duty and who does not -- I think the reference to "the guy" (ploni almoni, which is definitely used elsewhere in the sources to mean "so-and-so") without his name was long understood to be significant.

[sethg]

Onan has no children (that being, well, kind of the point). Ploni Almoni, presumably, did have heirs, which implies that

1. If he had accepted levirate marriage with Ruth, then his biological children's share of his inheritance would have been diluted. By refusing the marriage, Ploni demonstrated that he had the same bad character trait as Elimelech, Naomi's late husband, who skipped out of Bethlehem and abandoned his people when times got rough.
2. Presumably the story of Ruth and Naomi was widely retold, if not written down, soon after it happened. If the story was told with Ploni's real name, then his children would bear the stigma of having such a ferbissiner for a father. If only Boaz, Ploni, Naomi, and the judges knew the guy's real name, and they all agreed to keep the details of the transaction quiet, then the children would be spared embarassment.

[cellio]

#1: that makes sense.

#2: how does this compare to the idea that the sins of the father are visited on the children? Sparing everyone the perpetual embarrassment is of course the kind thing to do; I'm just not sure the kids could really expect it. With ten witnesses (plus Boaz, Naomi, and Ruth), I suspect the children did have to live with the embarrassment -- but at least their names weren't dragged along years after everyone involved was gone.