Shavuot: The Book of Ruth and Hesed

In the Tanakh there are five scrolls in all, five megillot, distributed across different events of the year. The Song of Songs, Shir HaShirim, we read on Pesach. On Shavuot we read Ruth. On Sukkot we read Kohelet. Purim has the Megillah of Esther. And Eichah belongs to Tishah be-Av: the prophet Yirmiyahu composed an elegy for the destruction of the Temple. Now, whereas with the other scrolls the connection between the event and the megillah is evident, the relation between the Book of Ruth and Shavuot is somewhat — let us say — disparate. But together we will try to draw out certain points from Ruth, and we will see how the story of Ruth sheds important light on the revelation of the Torah at Mount Sinai.

Excuse me? Everyone can hear, yes? The microphone is here; on my side it is free. — We hear you, we hear you. — In the Midrash Rabbah, Rabbi Ze’ira said that this megillah contains neither prohibition nor recommendation — neither forbidden things nor permitted things, neither impurity nor purity. Why, then, was it written by the prophet Shmuel? Solely for the middah of kindness that emerges throughout this story. And yet, paradoxically, the story of Ruth begins with an absence of kindness. “In the days of the judges,” as it is translated — but in reality it means the time when the judges were judged. This has no connection with the event of the day, but that era of the judges was characterized by the fact that everyone did as he pleased.

Each was free to make whatever decisions he wished, to submit to an authority or to refuse it; there was no king in Israel, and the succession of power was very difficult, bitterly contested within the people, and at that point there was indeed a drift. […] Let us say the drift was such that Elimelech, at a time of economic crisis — and of course there are always economic crises in a country that lacks a leader able to bring it safely to harbor, and above all when justice is corrupt, for then there is no equitable distribution within society.

There is famine in the land. And he was a well-placed man. […] His was the house where bread could be distributed, for he was a rich man who could have fed the population for some ten years — and he prefers to leave the land, taking advantage of the famine that struck, in order to go to the fields of Moav. So secretly does this man act at first that the text does not name him; it will name him only in the second verse, because the people who used to knock at his door and ask him for help do not find him — what has happened? Elimelech has left the land with his children, his two sons Machlon and Kilyon, and with his wife Naomi. And indeed the question arises: why did he leave the land? You surely know that there are three things for which one may leave the land — I mean the Land of Israel: to seek a wife; to go to a teacher and study Torah; and there is a third possibility — if one cannot find one’s livelihood. If one cannot manage to earn one’s bread, then one leaves the land.

That is permitted, and we have seen that for Avraham, leaving the land was a trial that was even rewarded. For Avraham went to the Promised Land at G-d’s command, and then: “And there was a famine in the land, and Avram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was heavy in the land” (Bereshit 12:10) — there was nothing to eat. This happens as well: there are ten famines that are, paradoxically, foreordained. And there is an economic crisis awaiting us on the eve of the messianic era. I do not know whether it has begun or not yet, but in any case it is foreordained. The point is that with Avraham it is accepted that he leaves the land to go to Egypt. With Yaakov it is even encouraged, since G-d Himself says to Yaakov: “Do not fear to go down to Egypt… and I will surely bring you up again” (Bereshit 46:3–4). With Elimelech it is punished. So much so that — this is the risk one runs when bringing one’s family to a remote corner of the exile — in the end not only does spiritual death await us, but afterwards the children’s upbringing is such that they go and seek wives, foreign wives; the family crumbles, degenerates. And that is what happens to Elimelech: nothing remains of him.

But how is this different from Avraham and from Yaakov, for example — since these are situations we know? Quite simply, because there is a term that expresses going to the land and leaving the land. Either one makes aliyah, that is, one’s elevation — going up to Israel means caring about one’s spiritual elevation — or one leaves Israel, which means disregarding that elevation and undergoing a yeridah, a descent. So when there is no justification, and one goes to another country without considering aliyah or yeridah… Aliyah means this: if I am aware that going to Israel is an aliyah and that leaving it is a yeridah, I will make every effort, at any cost —

— afterwards to come back to the place I left. It was the crisis that forced me; it will be temporary, and one day or another I will return. But if it is not “he went down” — if I simply travel, I go somewhere, I do not say “I am going down” — […] then I head toward other horizons, and whether I will one day return is uncertain; and that is the whole problem. With Elimelech it is not said “he went down”; with Avraham it is — he is aware of his descent. Therefore, one day or another, he will return. With Elimelech, no: “they came to the fields of Moav” (Ruth 1:2). He settles there permanently: “and they were there.” Their whole existence they invested there. That is a sin.

Do you know why it is a sin? Because the Torah itself — all the commandments of the Torah — have their full meaning only in Israel. The Torah is complete in its observance, and has meaning in its observance, only in Israel. Elsewhere […] it is only a GPS, a Waze: it shows us the way, it reminds us of the order, and we are there to preserve the unity of the Jewish people. We practice all the mitzvot of the Torah because that is my way of identifying with my people; it is the way of communing with my people. So with Elimelech, the desertion of Beit Lechem Yehudah is considered a sin, and it has the consequences we know. That is the first lesson: the Torah was given at Sinai to a collective, not to an individual, not to individuals, isn’t that so? One can observe the Torah only communally, as a whole. And each person, in observing what he observes — the letter he holds in the Torah joins the one the other brings to light, the mitzvah the other puts into practice, and so on. Now there is a second meaning. The second important meaning is that the Torah was given in a domain […] — in the midbar, the desert, as we have already seen.

It is the place of speech, the place of direction; it is the place where the Little Prince seeks to be tamed or to tame; it is the place of the communion of being with the Absolute. And the Torah is not a product — although it is bound to a land, it is not the product of the land, it is not the product of a condition. One needs a minimum: to be free, to be emancipated, in order to reach the teaching of the Torah, and that is in fact the principle of the Torah’s universality. The Torah — of course “Who chose us from all the nations” — but it was offered to all the other nations, not only to the people of Israel; the other nations did not accept it because they were not sufficiently ready. And the Torah demands that one pass through yissurim, through continual trials; it is then that a person’s spiritual identity is forged. And the Jewish people forged this spiritual identity, sadly, in the labor camps, in the death camps; and those who managed to pass beyond that forge, to come out of those camps, were granted an extraordinary revelation — a revelation that no one denies, so evident was it: an entire people received the Torah at Mount Sinai. The Torah came to the measure of each, and each perceived the Torah according to his capacities. Now, in Moav there is something particular. Moav, as you know, is the people which — like the mamzer, the child of adultery — “An Ammonite or a Moabite shall not enter the congregation of the L-rd” (Devarim 23:4): the Torah decreed that no national of Moav or of Ammon may be admitted into the Jewish community, even to the tenth generation.

For the Egyptians the Torah decreed no such thing. Why? What is the reason given in the Torah? “Because they did not meet you with bread and with water on the way when you came out of Egypt” (Devarim 23:5) — they refused to serve you water and bread which you were ready to pay for, and this on the eve of your entry into the Promised Land; they already wanted to bar your way. For this reason — this anti-hesed, the contrary, the opposite of Avraham. You know very well that Avraham is hesed, that is, love. And when Moshe presented himself at Mount Sinai to receive the Torah, all the angels began to protest […]: what is he doing here? “What is one born of woman doing among us?” (Shabbat 88b) — this son of man among us.

And the answer: the Holy One, blessed be He, clothed Moshe with the countenance of Avraham, and said to them: How can you refuse him? He opened his door to you when you were disguised as Arabs; he served you, you ate at his table — and today you contest him? That is ingratitude toward this man. That is to say, the hallmark of the Torah is first of all hesed. Or rather: “the Torah of kindness is on her tongue” (Mishlei 31:26). Whoever seeks in the Torah only […] strict justice, only strict halachah, has not penetrated the full, deep meaning of the Torah. And that is why our sages went so far as to say: “It is the halachah, but we do not rule so” — yes, it may be the rule, but we do not teach it that way. Why? Because “a judge has only what his own eyes see” (Bava Batra 131a): the dayan (judge) must consider each situation and not compare one case to another. Each time it changes, and this must be taken into account. What matters is hesed. For the Torah is middat ha-din, the measure of justice — that is true. For the collective, middat ha-din is needed. But for the individual, for communal life, middat ha-hesed is needed; and that is why, when middat ha-hesed is lacking, middat ha-rachamim intervenes. What is middat ha-rachamim? The word rachamim comes from […] — well, one must remake, one must re-create the person, one must re-create the person. And that is what was said at the Exodus from Egypt.

“This month shall be for you the head of months” (Shemot 12:2): it is the first, it is rosh — but why the repetition of rosh? […] because there must truly be a re-creation of being. Renewal is not simply a matter of doing shiputzim, renovations, on the old — restoring, restoring, restoring — but of re-creating the being. And that is why the ger, the convert who has accepted to join the Jewish people, is regarded as though he were a newly born being. He has re-created himself: this notion of hitchadshut, renewal, which makes the being an entirely new being. It could truly be lived only by a person foreign to the Jewish people — the person of Ruth. And Ruth is the image of […] — she is the mother of royalty, of messianic royalty: it is David who descends from Ruth […]. But what are her origins? Naomi’s sons take Moabite wives, Ruth and Orpah; and paradoxically, even when the sons die, these two women remain attached to their mother-in-law.

That is rare — to find daughters-in-law so attached to their mother-in-law, when they themselves were princesses. They were princesses, daughters of the kings of Moav […]; and how, in the end, would one come to terms with this situation, in which we find Naomi on the edge of the abyss, abandoned and alone? And she takes it upon herself — and not only does she take it upon herself: Naomi is aware of the descent from the Land of Israel into exile, and she considers it her duty now to return to her cradle, to find her land again, where spirituality is far denser and her identity is whole. Now, we know that Naomi merited this Ruth because her ways were pleasant: she was very gentle, very agreeable in her bearing, her conduct, her behavior. And Ruth — she is a Moabite; where does she come from?

She comes — her origins go back to Lot. Lot, who followed Avraham in his wanderings of his own free will, and who afterwards went off on a tangent and chose Sodom, because life was good in Sodom. And in Sodom a justice had been established: acts of charity and acts of kindness were unknown. People had to make it on their own — “by the sweat of your brow you shall eat” — that was the law. Lot’s daughters were about to be thrown to the population of Sodom, to tell them: why are you demonstrating? Why are you protesting against the presence of these malachim, these angels, who came to announce the destruction of Sodom and whom Lot had taken in? Because he had inherited that trait from Avraham. And that is why he remained, already in Sodom — not inside the city of Sodom, but at the entrance of the city of Sodom. Nonetheless one is carried away by the environment.

Look: “Behold, I have two daughters… let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you see fit” (Bereshit 19:8). When these two young women find themselves with their father, they say: we are now in a small town; “and there is no man in the land to come to us” (Bereshit 19:31) — there is no man who can know us, and we want to found a family. We want to marry, we want to found a family. What do they do? They take their father — we know the story — and from the union of the elder with her father on the first night comes Moav; from the union of the younger with her father on the second night comes Ammon. Now, this is hesed that is zimmah — hesed that is an abominable act, because hesed must have limits, that is true; otherwise it is zimmah, lewdness. That is what happens with Lot’s daughters. But the intention […] is submerged — submerged in such a way that now, after filtering upon filtering through the generations, we find, do we not, an Ammon and a Moav who owe much to their forebears. For that is how one must understand ma’aseh avot siman la-banim.

What does ma’aseh avot siman la-banim mean? It is generally translated: what the fathers do, one finds somewhere in the children, no? Well, it is avot: what the fathers do determines the conduct and the behavior of the children. We are responsible for our children, and as a result, what we have allowed ourselves, even surreptitiously, in secret, and so on — we will mark our descendants somewhere […]. But beware: never is an act good in itself entirely lost, and it will manage to find its graft one day or another. That is the case of Ruth — Ruth, who is the ancestress of David, and a renewal of sorts: the phenomenon of conversion that the Jewish people underwent at Mount Sinai, and which opened the way for every volunteer who would wish to join the ranks of the Jewish people — even one to whom entry had been entirely forbidden […]; a way will be found to integrate him. And our sages will rule: “An Ammonite, but not an Ammonitess; a Moabite, but not a Moabitess” (Yevamot 76b). It is the man and not the woman who is meant; consequently the man may not enter the congregation of Israel, but the feminine — yes, the door can be opened to her. How did our sages permit themselves to do this?

Because before this, there is the matter of “A mamzer shall not enter the congregation of the L-rd” (Devarim 23:3) — forever. The mamzer, the child of adultery — the Torah forbade him entry into the Jewish people forever. He may be a talmid chacham, a Torah scholar, but he does not have […] the mitzvah of “be fruitful and multiply” — he cannot fulfill it, that is, unite with a Jewish woman and found a family and so on, according to the rules. No, he cannot. And yet our sages opened the door and said: “Mamzerim are destined to be purified” (Kiddushin 72b). For mamzerim too there is a way out, an emergency exit — a purification; a filtering is possible — above all once the family nitme’ah, once it has been absorbed, submerged, dissipated, and so forth.

We do not go back to the origins to see whether or not there was […] a doubt about an incestuous relationship at the origin of this child’s birth. So, once again, the second meaning the Torah intends through Ruth, the message it conveys through Ruth, is this openness of the Torah to the world of hesed. That is the second point we find in Ruth. But note well: it is always the presence of the feminine that steers this history of the [Jewish] people — whether it be Sarah, Rivkah, Rachel or Leah. And here too we find it […] in the midwives in Egypt.

There are many cases; we will not enumerate them now. But here it is a complete stranger, from the Moabite people, condemned never to enter the people of Israel — and nonetheless she forces the door. And who does it? Boaz. Boaz — as his name indicates, it is a name of boldness: bo oz, “in him is strength.” He is not someone who, like a little sheep, will cling to the letter of the law, but to the spirit of the law, because […]. For Ruth it was a sacrifice. She, coming from Moav, knows very well in advance that she will not be admitted into the Jewish people. They will not allow her — look how long it takes her before she can enter Boaz’s property. And Boaz, who is a respectable man […], says: “Whose girl is this?” (Ruth 2:5).

Now, who is Boaz? You know that at the end [of the book], when Ruth’s son is born of the union of Ruth and Boaz, he is unique, is he not — the only child whom the whole community names […] — Oved, that true servant of G-d. Now, do you know who Boaz is? Boaz is a descendant of Peretz. Who is Peretz? Peretz is the son of Tamar. Tamar — who is Tamar? The daughter-in-law of Yehudah. She was married; there was a problem. In those days the family was sacred: when a woman entered the family, it was to give the family greater scope and to try, in a sense, to develop and flourish within that family. And there was a yibbum — not as we know it today, the levirate, but something else — within the family this union took place when one of them died: he left his property, and the property served as the means of acquiring the widow left childless. One had to try to fulfill the wishes of that unfortunate man who had died without leaving descendants, and give him a name in the family.

But Tamar failed with her first marriage; the second marriage did not work either, because the brother would in no way provide descendants for his brother. As for the third son, Yehudah, the father, says: Careful, this woman is a devourer of men; I will not give her yet another son to die at her side. But she is so attached to Yehudah’s family that she disguises herself […] and unites with Yehudah in order to have a place in Yehudah’s family. Here too Peretz was born of an incestuous relationship — Peretz, the two children — and the descendant of Peretz is Boaz. Boaz already carries this spirit within him, since Yehudah acknowledged “She is more righteous than I” (Bereshit 38:26): she was right, and her intention was pure. At first the child — little by little he regained his place in the lineage; and what a place: that of the messianic line. Now, we are told at the end of Ruth how important Ruth’s path was: her union with Boaz opened the way to the messianic line.

What does this mean? First, it is the ya’ad, the goal, that determines everything. This ya’ad is the end. What is the last word of the Tanakh? The last word of the Tanakh is ve-ya’al — “and let him go up” (II Divrei HaYamim 36:23). When one has finished the Tanakh, one must still undertake an ascent of being; that is how one enters the sphere of the Torah, that world of the infinite. And the Torah — without its messianic dimensions, as without its national dimensions, as without its social dimensions, as without its universal dimension — has no reason to exist. Why was the Temple destroyed? Because they applied themselves to taking the Torah only in its restrictive sense and not in its most generous, broadest sense — that of the Torah of hesed.

So the reading of Ruth, of course, speaks of a conversion of a world foreign to the people, taking place little by little. What the Jewish people did collectively is done individually within the other nations; and we know very well that without this dimension of the outside world, no messianism is possible. It is said that Moshe, who received the Torah, reached only the forty-nine levels, but Rabbi Akiva reached the fiftieth level — so much so that when Moshe ascended to the heavenly realm and heard Rabbi Akiva placing crowns, and explaining the meaning of each crown on each letter of the Torah, he no longer understood anything. Yes, the fiftieth level: it is Rabbi Akiva who would be able to attain it, because he was ben gerim, the son of converts. He came from a foreign world.

He had completed the fifty levels. The fiftieth level is a foreign dimension, which is the dimension of universality, and that is the reason […]. The choice of our sages fell on reading Ruth on the day of Shavuot, since it is the anniversary of David’s birth and the day of David’s death. Since when are our sages interested in birthdays, after all? We know Moshe’s birthday only through the Oral Law. But here, why did they insist at all costs on honoring David on the day of Shavuot? Because David is the man who, he too, asked himself questions about his ancestry. What did David say?

“I became a stranger to my brothers, an alien to my mother’s sons” (Tehillim 69:9). Why? There is a midrash on this. Yishai had six sons. And he had a maidservant who was very beautiful. He had separated from his wife for three years. And he proposed to the maidservant, if she wished, […]; at the time it was permitted to take a second wife. And this young maidservant went to her mistress and said to her: “Listen, it cannot go on like this; I do not intend to do it — this is what your husband is proposing to me.” And the wife said to her: “No, listen, go ahead — in any case he has abandoned me; I expect nothing more from him. […] You will prepare yourself. I too will adorn myself with my fine clothes, my jewels. I will present myself; and as soon as the lights are put out, you slip away, and I will come in.” And in this way the maidservant yielded her place to the lawful wife. But he thought that […] it was with the maidservant that he was having this relation. Not so: David was born of this relation, somewhat in the shadow of a sin. And finally, when Shmuel comes before Yishai, David’s father, Yishai presents his six sons to him, and the six sons do not answer to G-d’s will.

So [Shmuel asks]: “Are these all the lads?” (I Shmuel 16:11) — is there no other child after all? And he tells him: No — I have a child I have somewhat rejected, because I think he is not mine; my wife had him, probably with someone else. Besides, he was ruddy […]; he did not resemble his brothers. And his brothers, too, would assign him the most thankless tasks. And when he says, “Bring him to me,” and David presents himself, [Shmuel] says: “No — it is this one.” This is the one who must be anointed king. David too passed through the windings of this conversion of being, but it served the people as a whole, because, whether one likes it or not, as Rav Saadia Gaon says: “Our nation is a nation only by virtue of its Torahs.” Israel is a nation only through its Torah.

One must not think that the Torah is some supplementary […], a religion — whoever wants to learn it learns it, and whoever does not want to learn it does not. No: it is the very essence of our identity. And that is why, you see, Ruth issues this call to order to all of us on the day of Shavuot. If you have questions — with pleasure. — Thank you, Rav Benizri. [This is] Luc Reisman. First I want to thank you very much, because tonight you answered all the questions I had been carrying for quite some time. But I still have another small question that may seem a bit technical. It goes a little beyond the framework of Megillat Ruth, but it concerns Shavuot.

So: Shavuot in the Torah is the Festival of Weeks — Shavuot, as its name indicates. When we enter the Land of Israel it becomes Chag HaKatzir, the Festival of the Harvest. But from when does Shavuot become Zeman Matan Toratenu, the Time of the Giving of our Torah? — The answer is very simple. Shavuot is the closing of the festival of Pesach. That is to say, just as with Sukkot: you have the festival of Sukkot, which recalls the Jewish people’s sojourn in the desert, and then Atzeret, the intimacy of the Jewish people with […]; He tells us: stay with Me, remain with Me — you have now brought offerings for all the nations during the festival of Sukkot; now I want you in My intimacy. And that is the eighth day — here, the eighth week.

It is the eighth week that begins, counting from Pesach. Pesach is the body of the Jewish people, kneaded from the clay of Egypt, as Adam was. And the divine spirit is breathed into it through the Torah — as it was for Adam, “and He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Bereshit 2:7) — on Shavuot. Now, this nishmat chaim, this breath of life, has no fixed time; it is no longer limited in time. It has a starting point; it has no point of arrival. Its point of arrival stretches — as I told you, ve-ya’al — to infinity. We are in this permanent ascent. So it is entirely natural that for the Torah there should be no delimited time, but rather a time of maturation on the level of being, of the formation of being. And that is what we do throughout the period of the Omer […]: “On the day of the first fruits, when you bring a new meal-offering to the L-rd on your Shavuot” (Bamidbar 28:26) — the offering is entirely new, chadash; once again this word chadash, of renewal, because you are going to carry this spirit within you. From the moment you carry it, it is you who will, in sum, bear witness — because a body is alive as long as it has a neshamah, a soul.

It ceases to live when the neshamah has departed, when there is no more spirit. A neshamah, on the other hand, can live without its body; it is not limited in time. That is the meaning of Shavuot, and that is why it was not desired to limit Shavuot as a day of the giving of the Torah. In fact, we do not know whether it was the sixth, the fifth or the seventh; we are always in a fog as to when the giving of the Torah took place — but it is intended. Because “every single day they should be in your eyes as new”: the words of the Torah must each day be as though newly acquired. Let us say that the liberation from Egypt we were able to move beyond; from the Torah one is never freed. — Rav Benizri? — Yes.

— Shalom aleichem, this is Gabriel Elarach, Casablanca. — Gabriel, how are you? — Thank you. It is always wonderful, extraordinary, to listen to you; it is a delight. — From Casablanca? — Yes, Casablanca. — There you are. — Thank you […]. I follow you often, whenever possible, and it is always a great pleasure to listen to you. It’s funny, because I was speaking of you recently; I was saying that once, when you came, we had a lecture on Ruth while you were there — but each time there is something new. I simply wanted to ask you — may I? — Yes. — I have a question about your approach. When you speak of the contribution of universalism, and of not contenting ourselves with “they based their judgments on the strict law of the Torah” (Bava Metzia 30b), I have trouble understanding who will set the parameters, who will filter the contribution of the notion of a certain universal morality that we would integrate into our Torah.

Isn’t that an open door to a thousand and one things, among others to a kind of reformism? Who will filter? Who will stop the influx? Here one has the impression that it is G-d who, in the shadows, integrates exceptional figures — fine. But as far as we are concerned, what would allow us to know how to filter? — Good. There are two aspects to your question. You know that giyur, conversion, for example, today falls under an authority: everyone is fighting over the authority to convert, and there is an institution fighting for exclusivity. By what right? Is this institution, which claims exclusivity to verify every case, truly sure that the candidate will not return to his former ways, that he will not go back to his old practices?

Who guarantees what? In reality, you know, every rav in his town — “Yiftach in his generation is like Shmuel in his generation” (Rosh Hashanah 25b). Who is Yiftach? Compared with Shmuel he is an am ha-aretz, an unlearned man. And yet he holds that authority: “in his generation, like Shmuel in his generation.” And we are bound to say that the face of the generation […]. And consequently there have been approaches throughout the history of the Jewish people, with ups and downs. Because the Torah — regarding the stranger who came to dwell among us — did not give us the laws of a conversion institution. We do not know them. There are, indeed, three requirements: the mikveh, milah (circumcision) for men, and so on; and there was a korban, a sacrifice that the candidate for conversion had to bring.

Today the korban has been abolished — there is no more korban. And today it is a problem, a problem in Israel of course; you know it very well and you are well placed to know it, because each community has its own parameters, and that does not mean it is lost relative to others. There is no […] in one’s way of practicing one’s Judaism, of identifying. You know, when Rabbi Akiva said, “‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ — this is a great principle of the Torah,” what did he mean? If you want to judge a master of Torah, if you want to know what he is, then judge the love he bears his neighbor. If he is truly animated by this love of his neighbor, and he will seek to resolve the other’s problems in whatever way possible, in order to bring him closer, to integrate him, to allow him to advance — that is a gadol ba-Torah, a great man in Torah.

But if it is a person who, on the contrary, rules in such a way that what happened […] — you know very well — to that young woman who came and wished to convert in the house of Avraham and was sent away […], and, as her name indicates, she had in her a love, a desire to join that worthy family, and she was pushed away. That takes its revenge on us. Now, having said this — and this is something I never dare to say, and if I say it today, do not take it too seriously — we are not, after all, on a level where one can decide alone and rule on the Jewishness of this person or that. And as long as one can leave the door open, to allow a person to taste little by little, one must keep it open. […] But one must know how to approach the discussion with us. It is easy to close the door. That is my answer, and I assure you I have discussed it — but I recognize that there are authorities whose rulings have force of law in relation to me; who am I? Yet it pains me sometimes when I see certain people run into purely administrative difficulties, people acting in good faith — while others, because they used connections here and there, and so on —

— reach their goal. But in reality it is like a university diploma, isn’t it — nowadays such things are sold, at least. So I prefer not to go there. It is really too […]. — […] Thank you. And I was happy to see you, even through the screen. […] — Ah, that’s kind. […] — May I ask you another question, Mr. Benizri, or not? — Yes, if […] permits — with pleasure. […] How are you? — Good evening, thank you very much; chodesh tov, a good month. Mr. Benizri, I wanted to know: I thought that the fiftieth stage of wisdom is a stage that even Moshe, who included all the souls of Israel, could not attain, even after his death.

It was truly the ultimate stage that set him apart at the level of total wisdom. How do you reconcile, how do you fit together, the story of Rabbi Akiva’s universalism with the fiftieth stage, which seems to me to be a stage of purity almost inaccessible in one’s lifetime — so much so that Moshe, who himself contained all the souls of Israel, including that of Rabbi Akiva, could not attain it? — Yes: quite simply because Moshe was born of Jewish parents. He was born of Amram and Yocheved. He simply grew up in the Egyptian palace. He was not like […] a man who had rubbed shoulders with every culture. Now, I have already told you that “Who chose us from all the nations” means that He placed in us the virtue and the particular quality of each people: He chose the elements of the seventy nations — the seventy nations spread out, which are the backbone of all humanity — and invested them in us.

And that is why we are Adam: we are the prototype of Adam. We carry this universality of the first Adam, and we must preserve it. But this is not a way of saying that others are worth nothing — that is false. That is false: in every fruit there is a husk, sometimes a thick one, but there is fruit inside that one can savor, and that could complete the range of flavors we already have. And everyone knows that there was an element that was altogether foul — chelbenah, galbanum — in the ketoret. And the ketoret is the whole: all that is burned and becomes airy, becomes smoke. But taken separately, it smelled bad, it reeked. Yet when it was put into the ketoret, into the incense, it activated and intensified the fragrance. So that is […] — because when he came with what he had, and integrated the values of the Torah, he gave them far more substance; but he came from a completely foreign world. And that is why I say: it is always a re-creation, a renewal; it is not a shiput, it is not a renovation. […]

[…] — Another question, then? — Yes, a short question. Ariel Karsiente, from Jerusalem — and from Casablanca too. Megillat Ruth, on the level of derech eretz, proper conduct: when we go up to the Torah, we say “Hashem be with you” and “May Hashem bless you” (Ruth 2:4); at a wedding, “May your house be like the house of Peretz, whom Tamar bore to Yehudah” (Ruth 4:12); and before beginning the ketubah, our rabbis take this from here too. I remember that in Casablanca — and even Professor Abécassis used to say — when there were servants, maids, or the “help,” in quotation marks, the one who assisted the mother at home, first of all she ate with us too. As I see here in the text with Ruth. And when food was left over, the custom was not to give her the leftovers, but to tell her she could take it home to share with her children.

So I see that in our conduct — let us say, in Morocco — an enormous amount comes from the Book of Ruth. How might we understand this? — I mean, obviously, an hour is not enough to comment on Ruth. I simply established the link. But Boaz, first of all, as we come to know him: he is a rich landowner, but one who regards his employees as true partners and respects them. And why does he come to watch over his properties? It is not to make sure that each person is doing his work. He is not supervising them, not at all; he is certain that they carry out their tasks as they should.

His only doubt, his only fear, concerns the laws of leket, gleaning, of the forgotten sheaf, of the corner that must be left for the poor in the fields — [whether they are kept] scrupulously. So he comes with “Hashem be with you”: is everything you do, done with a sense of respect for what belongs to the poor, the widow and the orphan? — then you will do it with Hashem. That is how these things are to be understood. And indeed, what does he say when he sees that Ruth, with modesty and decency, is gleaning ears of grain in his field? “Let fall some for her from the bundles” (Ruth 2:16): pretend you have forgotten, pull out sheaves and throw them down so that they can be gathered […]. And there is also a single […] when he says: “Listen, my daughter, take these six” […] — why six? Can one give six ears of grain? Six ears of grain to carry to her mother-in-law — really? Why six? So […] he said to her: Listen, my daughter, if you dared to come here, if you lowered yourself today to come — you left your royal rank to come and glean — you will have a messianic descendant who will be distinguished by six attributes. And our sages enumerated the six attributes through these six ears: there are six attributes promised to the messianic descendant. He already, let us say — he was not a prophet — but he carried this in his thought, within himself.

Let us set aside, if you like, the mystical side of the matter; let us see what it is: it was the soul of a man who believes in the other and shares with him his spiritual aspirations. There you are. — Thank you, thank you very much. Thank you so much, it was magnificent. Thank you very much, Rav Benizri. Shavua tov. — You are most welcome.