ר מ ע ה ת ר י פ
ס Counting the Omer
Why Did Ruth Immigrate to Judah?
Dr. Ed Greenstein
Immigration is typically motivated by selfinterest. The Hebrews, Jacob and his family, moved to“ sojourn”( gur), to spend time as foreigners, in the land of Egypt. The Hebrews emigrated from Egypt to gain their freedom and reclaim their foothold in the land of Canaan. Three dozen times the Torah commands us to treat the“ sojourner”( ger), the foreigner in our midst, with care and concern because we were“ sojourners”( gerim) in the land of Egypt.
Seven weeks after Pesaḥ, on the festival of Shavu’ ot(“ Weeks”) we read the book of Ruth, Megillat Rut. The plot of the deceptively simple narrative makes its first turnaround in an ironic change of direction in a family’ s migration. A Judean from Bethlehem, Elimelech, takes his family— his wife Naomi and their two sons— eastward, across the Jordan River, to the land of Moab. There was a famine in Bethlehem, literally“ the House of Bread.” But there was no mass migration of Judeans to Moab. It seems that only Elimelech and his family took that( selfish?) course of action. The sons had to marry Moabite women, so we may surmise that there were no
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