This is a story of two people who have never met yet are forever linked. It begins with a farmer who loves his family and loves his land and has to choose.

There is hunger in the land. For a third year in a row the winter months bring no rain. The farmer looks at his empty fields, the parched earth, the barren trees, and the carcasses of starving animals. There is little to eat, and the farmer’s relatives who in ordinary times would be generous and giving, now hide the little food they have.

Old crops have been consumed, the markets are empty; there is no work anywhere, merchants have little to sell and few can afford to buy.

The farmer’s name is Elimelech, meaning ‘my God is king,’ and he revers God. In the midst of the terrible famine in Bethlehem in Judah the farmer Elimelech hears that in Moab the fields are yielding an abundance of wheat and barley. In times of famine, news of work spread quickly. When Elimelech who is an owner of many dry empty fields hears the news he decides to go to Moab to find work as a laborer, to feed his beloved Naomi and his two sons.

The decision to migrate for work is not one that Elimelech makes lightly. He discusses hunger and dashed hoped for rain with neighbors and with Bethlehem elders; he wrestles with the thought of migration in sleepless hot nights and finally turns to his wife Naomi, telling her that in Moab the fields are rich with crop and they are hiring foreign workers to reap the wheat and barley.

“God would not want us to die here,” Elimelech tells Naomi. They take their two sons, their meager possessions and on an early Sunday morning, they are ready to go. They look around their empty home. “There is nothing here to steal,” says Naomi, “those who want to squat, will break down the door, better that we leave the house unlocked.” They plan to return as soon as God will remember the people and give them food. They hope that it wouldn’t be long in coming.

Elimelech and Naomi leave the homeland they love, the place of their birth and wealth, a place where the family had prospered and where it followed the Israelite law to feed the poor, the widow, and the orphan.

Now they are about to become poor strangers, Israelite gerim once again, this time in the land of Moab the descendants of former sworn enemies; in both their traditions, however, they still remember the ancestral connection between Abraham and his nephew Lot.

The Moabites recognize them as foreign workers, Israelites from Bethlehem and employ Elimelech who could now feed his family. Yet Naomi knows that the man Elimelech once wealthy and generous now has a broken heart because leaving a beloved place could destroy the human spirit.

As the months go by and there is no word, nor sign that God had remembered the people, Elimelech’s soul begins to slowly leave him. Naomi holds him tight at night, she kisses his tired hands, she pleads with his spirit to stay. “Soon,” she whispers, “we will go back to our land.”

One night Elimelech tells Naomi, “should something happen to me, our sons, now grown up would be able to support you and save you from the sorrows of poverty.” And Naomi wakes up in the morning and the man who captured her young heart, the one she sang to, “My beloved is mine, and I am his,” is not breathing. Gone is the husband who was an elder at the gates, who was brave enough to go to work in other people’s fields to keep his family alive.

The loss of her cherished husband provokes Naomi to rename herself Mara, Bitter.

The sons who used to go with their father to work, forming a small family unit of hardworking Israelite males, now miss the laughter of love that infused their house; they are looking to create a family for themselves and for their grief-stricken mother.

The sons tell Naomi that they plan to marry. Naomi says to her sons, “we are strangers here, migrant people and we never forgot who we are, nor did we forget God who one day will remember the Covenant.” The sons tell her that they would only marry women who would choose to love them. They would know if the future brides are suitable if they would agree, when the time comes, to return with them to the land of Bethlehem. The women who would say ‘yes,’ would be the right brides.

Orpah chooses to marry Kilayon and Ruth chooses to marry Mahalon and this is how Ruth who has never met Elimelech enters his family’s chronicle.

The weddings are modest, the Moabite families are courteous, and the brides are beautiful free spirits. Naomi blesses the couples and prays for a return to the homeland of Judah. She knows that God hears women’s prayers under the holy canopy of their children’s wedding ceremony.

Yet, Naomi’s hope for new love in her house is not to be. Her two sons die suddenly on the same day and she becomes a bereaved mother. Her daughters in law are familiar with local funeral customs and take on burial arrangements and sit with the bereaved Naomi all the days of mourning. They cannot comfort her. She wishes that God had taken her instead.

In the midst of her grief Naomi hears that God has finally remembered her people, the famine in Judah is over, the rain has brought abundant crops, and she decides to go back to Bethlehem. With her on the road are her daughters in law, the two independent women who married Israelite men and never forgot the promise they made to their deceased husbands. Naomi is doing her best to dissuade them from becoming Moabite migrants in Judah; she warns them, “people will always treat you as Moabite women,” and tells them to go back to their mothers’ houses. Orpah finally chooses to return to her native home.

Ruth, like Elimelech, faced with a choice between love for the place of her birth and the love she promised as a bride chooses the latter. When she joins Naomi she repeats the very words of love that she offered her husband as a bride, “Where you go I will go.” The road between Bethlehem and Moab becomes for Naomi a family journey, Elimelech her husband brought her to Moab and Ruth the Moabite, her daughter in law is travelling with her back to Bethlehem.

In the official record* Ruth becomes known in Bethlehem as “the Moabite girl the one who returned with Naomi from the fields of Moab.”

In the fields of Bethlehem it is harvest time, yet there is no food in the house of Naomi. Ruth decides to join the poor of Bethlehem to go gleaning, to follow the harvesters in the fields and gather what ever falls from their hands. She had heard about the Israelite law of gleaning from her deceased husband and she is determined that she and Naomi are not going to starve. The recorded history of the family narrates hunger in the midst of abundance, “Ruth the Moabite said to Naomi, ‘Let me go out the field and glean among the ears of grain.” It is as a migrant gleaner in the spring that Ruth meets a legal redeemer who would become her husband. His name is Boaz, meaning, ‘come the strong one.’

It is possible that strength was the quality that made Ruth love Boaz. Yet, the official family record gives its own version of why Ruth chose to love him. The account says that, “at mealtime Boaz said to her, ‘Come over here and partake of the bread, and dip your morsel in the vinegar.’ So she sat beside the harvesters. He handed her parched grain, and she ate and was satisfied, and had some left over.” And when she went back to Naomi, “she took out and gave her what she had left over after eating her fill.” The family lore recounts that Ruth comes to love Boaz because he respects what she needs most at the moment: she is very hungry and Boaz feeds her and gives her enough to take home for Naomi.

In the official document Boaz demonstrates his legal commitment to a marriage that entails property, “I have bought all that was Elimelech’s.” At this legal moment Elimelech and Ruth, two people who have never met become formally enjoyed. On the record Boaz says, “I have also acquired the right to marry Ruth the Moabite, the wife of Mahalon, as my wife.”

Off the record Boaz acknowledges that Ruth chose to marry him because he captured her heart by feeding her when she was hungry and gave her more than she needed so that she could feed Naomi.

Family lore teaches its members that feeding, like love, has no gender and knows no borders. Years later Ruth, the free spirited Moabite tells her children how famished she had been and how Boaz the Israelite man gave her food and she ate until her stomach was fully grateful and there was enough food left to bring home for the hungry Naomi. Ruth’s children keep telling their children and down the generations, that feeding the hungry is love and that love means honoring the other person’s needs.
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*The official document is the Book of Ruth. The rest is a love allegory, another Midrash.