Love in the Shadow of Death: The Story of Ruth

All of life is a footnote to love and death. These two poles of existence overshadow everything else; love creates life and death takes it away, filling our lives with joy and sorrow in unending succession.

It is easiest to consider love and death separately, as two very different chapters of life – and emotionally, they are worlds apart. Halacha reflects this instinct, treating mourning and celebration as irreconcilable opposites. Mourners don’t attend celebrations, and the joy of the holidays terminates shiva. The heart cannot accommodate both joy and grief simultaneously, because both inspire intense, all-encompassing emotions.

Love is intoxicating. Shir HaShirim portrays its exceptional power, with couples who are “lovesick” and unable to act rationally. This reality repeats itself throughout history. When Ya’akov falls in love with Rachel, he dramatically overpays for her, offering to work seven full years for her hand – yet imagines he is getting a bargain, so great is his love. Ya’akov is blinded by love. William Blake captured this mindless blindness in verse: “Love to faults is always blind, always is to joy inclin’d, lawless, wing’d and unconfin’d, and breaks all chains from every mind.” Lovers are oblivious to reality, living in their own two-person universe, like Adam and Chava in the Garden of Eden.

Death brings a blindness of its own. When King Shlomo writes Kohelet, he opens with a lament about the pointlessness of life. As Rashi puts it, “The author of Kohelet issues a complaint against the seven days of creation, that the world is all a vanity of vanities.” Death, the question without an answer, confounds him. What purpose does life have, Kohelet asks, if the righteous man meets the same end as the wicked, and the wise man has the same fate as an animal? The bitter, skeptical tone of Kohelet seems out of place in the Tanach; perhaps its purpose is to expose us to our own bitterness and cynicism, to show us that hope will disintegrate without faith.

Franz Rosenzweig observed that life stands perpetually in death’s shadow, and “all that is mortal lives in fear of death… each newly born waits with fear and trembling for the day of its passage into the dark… every new birth multiplies the fear of death, for it multiplies that which is mortal.” When one enters the realm of death, a cold cynicism descends, choking off any experience of joy.

Shir HaShirim and Kohelet each deserve their own book; they faithfully explore the experiences of passion and despair. Because joy and grief are opposites, we assume love and death are utterly incompatible. But they are not.

A third biblical book, the Book of Ruth, brings death and love together. A family moves from Israel to Moav, where the sons take Moabite wives. In short succession, the father and both sons die young. Alone and impoverished, one daughter-in-law, Ruth, returns with her mother-in-law Naomi to Israel, abandoning her homeland rather than leave her beloved Naomi behind. She persists despite discrimination and desperation, insisting on perpetuating her husband’s family’s legacy – and in the end, she does exactly that. She marries a relative of her husband’s, Boaz, and the family continues; their great-grandson is King David.

The Book of Ruth is not simply a book of love and death; it is a book about love in the shadow of death. After the family’s tragedies, Naomi succumbs to cynicism, suggesting she should rename herself “bitter.” Ruth refuses this path. She battles the angel of death and teaches us how to pursue redemption in the valley of the shadow of death.

The Hebrew root for redemption, ga’al, appears multiple times in the Book of Ruth, because that is what the book is about. By remarrying and bringing grandchildren to Naomi, Ruth redeems and rebuilds a once-broken family. Her descendant King David becomes the very symbol of Messianic redemption, bringing deliverance to the nation as a whole.

Ordinarily, death erases life and destroys all that love has built. In redemption, love gets the final word, staying one step ahead in a cosmic wrestling match. When you continue to love after tragedy – when you courageously pour your broken heart into rebuilding a broken world – you have taken the first steps on the road to redemption.

The very foundation of Jewish history is this story: a people who, despite every reason to be bitter and cynical, continued to rebuild and repair. This has never been more evident than in the past century. Crushed by the Holocaust, it would have made sense for the Jewish people to give up. Instead, following Ruth’s example, they built the State of Israel – a modern miracle of redemption.

Last year I joined the Ramaz Upper School mission to Israel, together with nearly 500 students and teachers. Israel is filled with stories of redemption, both large and small. At Tel-a-Saki, the site of one of the fiercest battles of the Yom Kippur War, we heard about the heroism of the soldiers who fought there. Three tanks, commanded by Yoav Yakir, held off hundreds of Syrian tanks for nearly two days, giving the army precious time to reinforce their defenses on the Golan Heights. Even after it became clear they could no longer hold the line, Yoav chose to fight as long as possible – and fell in battle. After the war, a member of Yoav’s unit, Yitzchak Nagarker – a war hero in his own right, with his own incredible story of courage – had a baby boy. At the bris, Yitzchak invited Yoav’s father to be the sandak, and named his firstborn Yoav in honor of his fallen comrade. “Love is as strong as death” – and Yoav’s legacy lives on in Yitzchak’s son.

Our mission prayed at the Kotel on Friday night, just a day before Yom Yerushalayim. Through centuries of exile, the Jewish people’s passion for Jerusalem never wavered. We continued to dream of this place, to declare “l’shana haba’ah biYerushalayim, next year in Jerusalem.” On June 7, 1967, for the first time in 1,900 years, that dream came true. An Israeli flag was raised over the Kotel; with tears in their eyes, the exiles had returned to Zion. The Kotel is the ultimate monument to redemption, its stones whispering Am Yisrael Chai – the Jewish people live on.

After Friday night davening, the Ramaz students gathered in the plaza – and then something remarkable happened. They formed one large circle and sang Jewish songs for half an hour, other visitors drawn over to watch this moment of inspiration. At that moment, the students were making Ruth’s legacy their own, singing the song of redemption and continuing an undying love story that has lasted for thousands of years.

Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz is the Senior Rabbi of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.