As we come to the season of Teshuva, the concept of spiritual heroism deserves to be explored. Here is a quote from Cynthia Ozick about the contrast between Ruth and Orpah.
Cynthia Ozick, a noted observant Jewish American writer wrote an insightful essay on Ruth. Here, as she writes about Orpah is how she expresses this very thought:
” Her prototype abounds. She has fine impulses but she is not an iconoclast. She can push against convention to a generous degree, but it is out of generosity of her temperament, not out of some large metaphysical idea… She is certainly not a philosopher, but neither is she after ten years with Naomi, an ordinary Moabite. Not that she has altogether absorbed the Hebrew vision… she is somewhere in between. In this we may suppose her to be one of us: a modern, no longer a full fledged member of the pagan world, but always with one foot warming in the seductive bath of those colorful, comfortable, often beautiful old lies (they can console, but because they are lies they can also hurt and kill); not yet given over to the Covenant and its determination to train us away from lies, however, warm, colorful, beautiful and consoling lies… So Orpah goes home; or more to the point, she goes nowhere. She is never to be blamed for it. If she is not extraordinary, she is also normal… it is not the fault of the normal that it does not or cannot aspire to the extraordinary. What Orpah gains by staying home with her own people is what she always deserved: family happiness. She is young and fertile; soon she will marry a Moabite husband and have a Moabite child.
What Orpah loses is three thousand years of history. Israel continues; Moab has not. Still for Oprah…(it) may not be a loss at all. Orpah has her husband, her cradle, her little time. She once loved her oddly foreign mother-in-law. And why shouldn’t open-hearted Orpah, in her little time, also love her Moabite mother-in-law, who is like her own mother, and who will also call her “daughter”…. Normality is not visionary. Normality’s appetite stops at satisfaction” (Ruth, in Reading Ruth…: ed .J. Kates and G.Twersy-Rimer, Ballantine, 1994).
Comments