June 18, 2006
| The Jewish holiday, Shavuos,
is approaching (tonight) and I have
been studying the Book of Ruth,
which is read and discussed each
year on this holiday. The text and
the rabbinic commentary suggest
that Ruth was a vulnerable figure:
a widow, she was not young, not
particularly pretty, she had lost
her husband, she has no children,
and she clings to her mother-in-law
and has decided to join the Jewish
people. So she is among new people
in an unfamiliar land. She does
not know what will happen to her;
all she knows is that she loves
her mother-in-law and Judaism.
When Naomi,
her mother-in-law, tries to help
her by instructing her to seduce
Boaz, a kind and generous man from
Naomi's own family, into marriage,
Ruth modestly turns the seduction
plan on its head. Without defying
her mother-in-law, she speaks directly
and poetically to the man (in the
Hebrew, the language is soft, rhythmic,
and musical), asking him to "spread
his wings" over her, to protect
her. He is moved by her modesty
(he comments on how he had noticed
that she never followed young men
around, and the commentators describe
Ruth's modest dress-- careful to
cover her legs as she gleaned barley
in the fields). Boaz is also struck
by Ruth's sweet metaphoric directness
and her famous generosity towards
her mother-in-law.
Not only does
nothing sexual happen between the
couple that night after their conversation
(and they are all alone at night
in the fields), but Boaz and Ruth
responsibly go through a few official
steps over the following days to
make sure that their marriage will
be appropriate. They go on to formally
marry, and their child is conceived
on their wedding night, a boy from
whom King David is descended.
A note: Naomi's
seduction plan is more well-meaning
than it sounds. There was a time
when a man who slept with a woman
was obligated to marry her. It would
have been unheard of for a man like
Boaz to take Ruth sexually and then
deny responsibility for her. Knowing
Boaz's goodness and kindness, Naomi
probably thought that her plan was
a natural way to help her daughter-in-law.
But Ruth's innate modesty did not
allow her to follow Naomi's advice
completely. And Boaz's modesty did
not allow him to take Ruth before
he was ready to give to her.
I asked my
Hebrew teacher how Naomi expected
that her plan could work; clearly,
Naomi would not have suggested the
plan if she had feared any major
risk, (although, as I suggest above,
we learned that the plan was not
wholesome enough for Ruth who, with
Boaz's help, transformed and deepened
the strategy both spiritually and
ethically). My teacher replied to
my question regarding Naomi's strategy:
"a man must take care of a
woman if he sleeps with her. Even
today that is a morally binding
idea." We were startled. Didn't
he know what it was like out there?!
"It's not like that anymore,"
we exclaimed. He didn't believe
us. We tried to describe the mainstream
dating culture to him. He still
didn't believe us.
Our teacher
couldn't imagine that any decent
man would deny responsibility for
a vulnerable woman who loved him
and with whom he had become so intimate.
He must think that only cads (the
Wickhams--see Pride and Prejudice)
would behave this way. What he doesn't
realize is that casual sexual intimacy
between two well-meaning people
is now standard behavior, not only
reserved for the "cads."
A "normal" man, admired
and well-liked, is expected to,
occasionally, with a woman
who hopes for more and then walk
away from her. It's just NORMAL.
Modernity has
stripped us of a forgotten mind-set,
of a whole way of understanding
men, women, and dating. At one time,
the definition of manhood was "giver"
or "protector." A non-giving
man was not considered to be a real
man (or a "mentsch").
Can the old
definitions of a man only be found
in religious communities today?
Secular girls and women with traditional
sensibilities can't seem to depend
anymore on the old-fashioned assumptions
about men and relationships.
It seems that
a woman's modesty and a man's giving
nature go hand in hand; in fact,
they might depend on each other
as the story of Ruth suggests. Now
that these values have eroded, dating
has become especially confusing
and painful for many non-religious
men and women.
Modesty
(and the qualities that go along
with it when relationships are involved,
such as obligation, responsibility,
giving) has become quaint. One day,
modesty may be studied the way Greek
mythology is analyzed: as a fascinating
ancient ideology that does not apply
to current times.
Read
the discussion on the blog
Eve
Grubin is the author of a book of
poems, Morning Prayer (The
Sheep Meadow Press, 2005), and she
lives in New York.
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