Rights and Obligations

None of us, I don’t think, would begrudge Ruth had she chosen to walk away when given the opportunity. A Moabite by birth, Ruth had married the Israelite son of Naomi, her marriage cut short by the tragic passing of her young husband. Naomi, also widowed, and now bereft of children, has understandably decided to return to her Israelite kinsmen, and she urges her newly widowed young daughters-in-law Ruth and Orpah to return to their Moabite homes, remarry, and rebuild their lives. Her sons are gone, her people are not their people, and she is without means. Naomi urges them to go do as they please – granting them freedom to turn away, a path that Ruth’s sister-in-law Orpah justifiably chooses. But it is not, as we know, the path that Ruth chooses.

In words as famous as they are poetic, Ruth declares to her mother-in-law:

“Do not urge me to leave you.
Wherever you go, I will go;
wherever you lodge, I will lodge;
your people shall be my people,
your God, my God.”

The power of Ruth’s pledge is not merely its lyrical quality nor that she becomes the paradigm for a righteous convert to Judaism. Ruth's words and deeds capture the human imagination because she does something that does not come naturally to humans. Granted freedom, she chooses responsibility. Conferred autonomy, she opts for commitment. Given the opportunity to put herself first, she does just the opposite – putting duty to others above all else. It is a theme that frames not just the opening scene but the entire book of Ruth. Ruth’s hesed in her loyalty to Naomi. Naomi’s hesed to Ruth in taking her in. Boaz’s hesed to Ruth in allowing her to glean from his field, and Ruth’s hesed to Boaz in choosing him over younger, perhaps more suitable, suitors. Far more than a quaint pastoral idyll or an inspiring tale of a gentile woman entering the covenant of the Jewish people, the story of Ruth stands as a powerful commentary on the human condition. It is the story of a person, and people, forging community by elevating their concerns for each other over their individual concerns, the quiet heroism of folk forgoing aspects of their own freedom in order to maintain and sustain the needs of the people as a whole.

All of which is why, I believe, we read the book of Ruth on the festival of Shavuot, which begins this evening. Another name for Shavuot is hag matan torateinu, the festival of the giving of the Torah, when the children of Israel stood at the base of Mount Sinai to affirm a covenant, a brit, with God. Seven weeks ago to the day, we observed Passover, our festival of freedom, when the children of Israel broke away from the yoke of Pharoah’s bondage, liberated as free men and women. For seven weeks of seven days, we have counted the Omer, a temporal and physical journey from the Sea to Mount Sinai, which – unlike the Jubilee year – culminates not with a declaration of freedom, but with Shavuot’s message of law and commitment. A newly emancipated people granted the freedom to do as they please, to wander the midbar, the desert about which we read this morning, who nevertheless choose to direct their freedom toward establishing a covenanted community. If Passover is the fulfillment of God’s command to “Let my people go,” then Shavuot signals the fulfillment of the second half of that same verse, “so that they may serve me.” Liberty in the service of law, personal autonomy directed to communal commitment, self-determination hand-in-hand with duty and obligation. Why do we read Ruth on Shavuot? Because when we stood at Sinai declaring, “We will do and we will listen,” Israel did as a nation the very thing that Ruth would later do as an individual, the thing that is far from the most natural thing to do: They leveraged and limited their freedom in service of the needs of the greater whole. The story of Ruth, the story of Shavuot, is that community is neither formed nor sustained by way of liberty alone. Our rights and freedoms are made acceptable, made meaningful, and made sacred only insofar as they are expressed in dialogue with the needs of the wider community of individuals with whom we live.

You may or may not know the story of Ruth, and you may or may not observe the festival of Shavuot, but if there has ever been a moment in which we must speak openly about negotiating our rights and freedoms as individuals with the duties that we have to the community in which we live, then this is that moment. Take nearly any issue on the public docket: COVID, the environment, free speech, reproductive autonomy, or, most recently, gun control. Each and every one of these conversations involves the balancing act between the libertarian impulse to do as we please and the knowledge that the well-being of the community depends on establishing safeguards to those very liberties. Let’s start with the First Amendment. Most of us would identify free speech as a fundamental right, and yet we would all concede that that right does not grant us permission to shout “fire” in a crowded theater. Take the environment. We in this room may hold different opinions on aspects of our global climate crisis, but we can all agree, I hope, that our own behaviors make us contributors to the condition of the world in which we live. I know that there are a range of views in the community regarding masks, boosters, and other public health measures meant to mitigate the spread and severity of COVID, but I imagine we all intuitively understand that the choices we make as individuals impact the health of the community at large. And yes, while there may be folk who differ on the right of private citizens to own guns, in light of the continued carnage of gun violence across the country, I hope that we can all agree that that right must go hand-in-hand with precautions ensuring public safety. And – uncomfortable as it may be for many in this room, myself included – for reasons of intellectual probity, let’s be mature enough to acknowledge that these questions cut both ways. Those of us who would fight for the right of women to assert sovereignty over their bodily autonomy must at least acknowledge the counter question of society’s obligations to the rights of the unborn. Different as these issues are, each one is somehow situated on the question and the tension between our individual freedoms and our obligations to one another.

It was John Stuart Mill, the father of libertarianism, who coined what he called “The Harm Principle,” meaning that while individuals may be free do as they please, they can do so only insofar as their actions do not cause harm to other individuals. We have the right to drive, but that right comes with a requirement to be licensed, and to stop at stoplights. Doctors have the right to prescribe narcotics, but that right comes only with proper training, licensing, and protection against the abuse of that right. I could go on, but the point is one and the same. As individuals, we may have all sorts of rights and freedoms. As a community of imperfect humans – as fellow citizens of a nation – we coexist only because those freedoms are governed by agreed-upon statutes and laws. As either Madison or Hamilton wrote in the gendered language of the Federalist No. 51:

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

It is not either/or. There are freedoms well worth establishing and defending, and there are protections, limitations, and safeguards – sometimes self-imposed, sometimes imposed by others – worthy of the same defense.

It is this negotiation between our individual rights and our shared obligations one to another that is the central tension not just in the public debates of our time, not just in the foundational documents of western culture from the Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights, but at the very heart of our Jewish tradition. From the very beginning, in the Garden of Eden, God welcomes Adam and Eve with a freedom extended and then delimited: “Of every tree of the garden you are free to eat – except for one.” Freedoms and limitations on those freedoms, throughout Torah law. If you want to build a home, God bless – just build a parapet around the roof to make it safe. If you want to own an ox, you should be well – but take precautions that your ox is not a “goring ox” that puts another individual or society as a whole at risk. If you want to plant a farm, field, or orchard, by all means – but be sure to designate a percentage of your harvest to the poor. And while these obligations may seem to be limitations on human freedom, most of the time – if not all the time – these limitations are in truth expressions of our freedom.

At risk of stating the obvious or restating the fourth commandment: a slave cannot take a sabbath. Only a free person can abstain from their labors – a limitation that in truth is an expression of freedom. To eat anything and everything that is set before us is not freedom; to exercise discretion in what we consume is to freely assert our humanity to the world. Seeing limitations on our actions as expressions of freedom is not the only way to understand the underpinnings of Jewish law – why we keep Shabbat, kashrut, and other laws – but I find it to be a compelling one. For Jews, self-expression and self-restraint, freedom and obligation, rights and duties are not opposites; they are interdependent – two sides of the same coin. We fight for our freedoms and for the limitations on those freedoms, knowing that both fights are necessary to keep society functioning and to make life worth living. At this moment – when our country is searching for the vocabulary to heal a society polarized on the question of rights vs. obligation – it should occur to us here that our tradition, Judaism, has been negotiating this tension – fruitfully, I would add – since its very beginning.

I am reminded of the wisdom of the great sage Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, who tells the parable of a group of people traveling in a boat. One passenger begins to drill a hole beneath his seat.

“Why are you doing this?” asks a fellow traveler.

“Do not concern yourself,” the first man replies. “I am only drilling under my seat.”

“Maybe so,” the second passenger responds, “but when the water enters – we will all drown.”

Ours is a dark hour. Our nation is in pain – lives lost, families devastated, communities traumatized – and it is only a matter of time until more pain is inflicted. Like Ruth returning in grief following loss, we arrive in synagogue seeking solace and comfort, wondering whether our tradition speaks with relevance and urgency to the issues of the day. It is a question that we answer with an unequivocal “yes.” Our tradition demands that private desire yield to public good. Our tradition knows that for civil society to be upheld, we must allow that society to make claims upon us. Our tradition believes that expressions of obligation toward other individuals and the community at large are not infringements on our freedom but rather the greatest expressions of our freedom.

Not just on Shavuot, but year-round, our tradition urges us to leverage our freedoms toward building a society in which we freely accept our obligations one to another. Liberty without limits is not a freedom that can or should be preserved. If we keep punching holes beneath our seats, this ship will sink. Like the hero of the season – Ruth – may our pledges to ourselves and each other reflect the very best of our tradition, a nation of “we the people for the people,” in which “your people shall be my people,” ever striving to form a more perfect union – one act of hesed at a time.