There are many theories as to why we read Megillah Ruth, the Book of Ruth, for the festival of Shavuot. This year, as I sit a week after Mother’s Day and just weeks before my son’s 6th grade graduation from Wise School, I am thinking about the lessons that Ruth and her story have to offer us about not just community, but about “the village,” the web of people who make family life possible. The Book of Ruth begins with loss and displacement, but it unfolds through acts of caregiving. Ruth accompanies Naomi. Boaz notices Ruth. The neighboring women notice Naomi. Redemption emerges not through miracles, but through people refusing to let one another carry suffering alone.
And after all the dramatic moments in the story — death and famine, loyalty and risk, threshing floors and city gates, even birth and redemption — the book ends with an intimate and surprising detail: “And the neighboring women named him…” (Ruth 4:17).
Dirshuni: Contemporary Women’s Midrash is a groundbreaking collection of modern midrashim written by Israeli women that reinterprets sacred Jewish texts through a feminist lens, focusing on the stories and experiences of biblical women. And in their section on Ruth, they stop at this verse and ask: Why the neighboring women? Why not the elders at the city gate?
The midrash goes on to explain that the elders, sitting at the city gate, were witnesses to the various legal proceedings surrounding Boaz and Ruth. But the neighboring women witnessed something else entirely. They saw Ruth coming and going from Naomi’s house. They knew who had stayed beside whom in grief and in birth. They noticed the slow, daily labor of sustaining another human being. Before redemption was declared publicly, they had already recognized it unfolding quietly in ordinary life. Their wisdom does not emerge from formal authority, but from the intimacy of paying attention. And maybe that, too, is Torah.
I think we often imagine Torah as something that happens in explicitly sacred spaces: at Sinai, in the sanctuary, in the study hall. The story of revelation is one of awe and wonder, of crashing thunder and blaring shofarot. But the rabbis remind us that revelation was not a moment, but an ongoing, unfolding process. And, Shavuot also reminds us that revelation happens in community. We gather together to hear Torah. We stay up learning together. We inherit wisdom both from the official channels of our tradition and through generations of relationship and conversation.
Because the work of building and sustaining the village is itself Torah.
Who notices when someone stops showing up?
Who helps hold the ordinary weight of being human — meals, carpools, celebrations, illness, exhaustion, transition — so that no one has to carry life alone?
Who helps carry children, and their parents, from one stage of life to another?
The work of caring for one another is not ancillary to Jewish life. It is not separate from Torah. It is Torah itself.
I think that may be one of the deepest spiritual truths of this season: we encounter Torah not only in sacred texts or mountaintop moments, but in the people with whom we experience those moments and everything in between. Maybe that is why we read Ruth on Shavuot: to remind ourselves what kind of community revelation is meant to create — one where people are seen, supported, accompanied through change, and where no one has to carry life alone. And that, definitely, is Torah.
– Rabbi Sari Laufer