This week’s Torah commentary, written by Hebrew Seminary Rosh Yeshivah Rabbi Jonah Rank, has been sponsored by Rabbi Diana Miller in honor of Rabbi Rank.
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When Edward VI was crowned King of England in 1547, he poured wine from a small cruet into a sacred chalice. This had long been standard of any British coronation ceremony, following a ritual guided by Latin text since Henry II rose to the throne in 1154. This is why when Elizabeth I became Queen in 1550, so many were shocked by what appeared to be a skimpier-than-usual ceremony lacking any wine whatsoever.*
In the eyes of nearly 400 years’ worth of British royals, the wine itself did not represent royalty. As part of the communion ceremony, the wine symbolized something sacred, not unlike wine in the observance of a wide array of Jewish rituals. Wine—or grape juice in contemporary practice for those who refrain from wine—appears at circumcisions and weddings and upon tables we set for Shabbat and holidays. In the Babylonian Talmud, Rabbi Shemu’el bar Nachmani, citing his teacher Rabbi Yonatan, questioned an apparently pervasive custom to have wine accompany Jews whenever they would sing (Berakhot 35a). Commenting on this piece of Talmud at the end of the 13th century in what is now Spain, Rabbi Shelomoh ibn Aderet qualified that his spiritual forebears sang without wine when they went to war or offered the paschal sacrifice. Nonetheless, he conceded, the ancient Levites would sing with wine at hand when they would assemble incense or decorate the Temple’s altar with blood or water. Wine was (almost) everywhere.
For the Jewish people, wine inhabits an uncomfortable afterlife once it has spoiled into vinegar—a liquid that evades the Jewish palate. Vinegar itself never pops up among the foods that fulfill Jewish obligations. Meanwhile, wine, challah, matzah, and maror constitute a significant chunk of a diet determined by mitzvot alone. In his commentary on the Babylonian Talmud, the French sage Rashi (1028–1105) suggested that, once wine has gone bad, it was no longer suitable for ritual use in the Temple (Pesachim 42b). The earliest rabbis deemed vinegar a poor substitute for wine. Unlike wine, which is elevated with a unique blessing that acknowledges God as “בורא פרי הגפן” (borei peri haggafen, “Creator of the fruit of the vine”), vinegar compels the worshipper to remember—as one does for a variety of foods with no special religious significance—“שהכל נהיה בדברו” (shehakkol nihyah bidvaro, “that everything has come into being through the word of God”) (Mishnah, Berakhot 6:1 and 6:3).
Given the poor reputation of vinegar in the Jewish appetite, when we read the Book of Ruth on Shavu’ot, the vinegar that makes a cameo appearance should give us pause. A native Moabite, the widow Ruth attached herself to her widow mother-in-law and accompanied her in journeying to Land of Israel (Ruth, chapter 1). Naomi—mother to Ruth’s deceased husband and herself an Israelite—found Boaz, a relative of her own late husband in Bethlehem (Ruth 2:1). Soon after Ruth had audaciously attempted to join the ranks of the local reapers in the harvest season, the well-off landowner Boaz got to talking to Ruth as he showed off to her his generosity and knowledge of Ruth’s backstory (Ruth 2:2–3 and 2:8–13).
After some initial chitchat, Boaz invited Ruth at mealtime to come by to eat some bread and to dip a little snack in some vinegar—before she could take a seat beside the other reapers (Ruth 2:14). This small detail—like any small detail in the Bible—has puzzled Jewish readers for thousands of years. The rabbis, who believed that the Hebrew Bible only shared details that deserve a meaningful interpretation, needed a reason to justify the mention of this vinegar. John Hodgman’s oft-repeated plea that “specificity is the soul of narrative” does not satisfyingly explain why Boaz mentions vinegar here. If telling a fleshed-out story were the sole reason the Book of Ruth names vinegar in this passing moment, we would have benefitted from knowing what food Boaz was referencing when he advised Ruth, “וְטָבַ֥לְתְּ פִּתֵּ֖ךְ בַּחֹ֑מֶץ” (vetavalt pittekh bachometz, often translated as “dip your morsel into the vinegar”). Good storytelling alone cannot be the thrust of the vinegar; something far deeper must lie at the bottom of this aged wine.
The Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 113b, recalls a few ancient teachings about this enigmatic vinegar. One Rabbi El’azar reported that the Book of Ruth offered a tip for cooling down on a hot day: dipping food in vinegar. In the 3rd–4th century, Rabbi Shemu’el bar Nachmani suggested that Boaz’s words articulated a prophecy: that the Judahite King Menasheh, a future descendant of Ruth would perform deeds as repugnant as vinegar (which matches II Kings 21’s detailing Menasheh’s idolatrous practices and perspectives). Without citing its sources, the medieval Pesiketa Zuterata offers Rabbi El’azar’s insight (but also notes that old milk does the same chilling trick) but then identifies vinegar as a symbol of suffering. Boaz, hints Pesiketa Zuterata, may have anticipated that Ruth’s alignment with the Israelite reapers and her Israelite family would displace Ruth from whatever fortunes may have awaited the descendants of the Moabites. Instead, Ruth chose the fate of the Israelites—and all the crises that have accompanied them throughout their history.
Near the beginning of the 19th century, the Chasidic Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman HaLevi Epstein inhabited a circle that believed that Gematriyyah—the calculation of words’ numeric values by assigning numbers that correspond to a word’s letters and then adding up the total—held the key to understanding God’s universe. When this Galician sage realized that the Hebrew word chometz (חמץ, “vinegar”) was equal in value to the Aramaic word חקל (chakal, “field”), he discovered that Boaz’s vinegar-dipping instructions whispered a secret invitation to Ruth: to depart the mundane fields of this world and to enter “חקל תפוחין קדישין” (chakal tappuchin kaddishin), a celestial “garden of sacred fruits.” (See Ma’or VaShemesh on Ruth, about 1/3 of the way through.)
Ruth might not have been though so high-and-mighty to accept such an invitation—at least not yet. The keenest insight into this vinegar business may rest in the 18th century Sefer HaGe’ullah, a long-lost (but recently republished) book by the Italian kabbalist Rabbi Mosheh David Valli (p. 142 of the 2009/2010 edition). He posited that Ruth, a member of the largely maligned Moabite nation (inasmuch as Moabite men were forbidden from being welcomed into the Israelite nation, as per Deuteronomy 23:4), ranked relatively high on the rungs of metaphysical impurity. In contrast, Boaz, according to Rabbi Valli, emanated a sacred sense of Divine balance called Tif’eret (תפארת, literally “Beauty”) but knew it would take a delicate dance to become a true partner to Ruth. When two people live in opposite worlds—one of immense purity and one of utter impurity—how can they meet in the middle?
Sefer HaGe’ullah turns its attention to God’s attribute of Strictness (Din, דין)—one of God’s most definitive attributes, one that many observers mistake as hurtful when Din in truth simply exhibits a less-pleasant form of holiness: the tendency to keep unbridled optimism in check, the ability to stand up for one’s self, the courage to deliver constructive feedback. Din is like a porous layer of God’s skin. Many Jewish mystics have mistakenly associated Din with evil itself, suspecting that those who have been counted out as impure or sinful in some way may in fact cling to Din, almost as if Din were one of God’s most popular doorways into sacred living. Boaz, reports Sefer HaGe’ullah, found Din hiding amidst vinegar; Boaz’s holy wine had taken a turn for the worse. Whereas Abraham’s servant had so long ago discovered Rebecca’s Chesed (חסד, “Lovingkindness,” another favorite attribute the kabbalists) by a well of water (as per Genesis 24:10–15) and found a match for Abraham’s son (Genesis 24:67), Boaz and Ruth united amidst vinegar and harsh realities.
Rabbi Valli knew that, if Ruth resided in the lowliest metaphysical planes of reality and Boaz the uppermost, the partnership that would meet at Din could not have been some “forward-facing partnership” (זיווג אל הפנים, zivvug el happenim) but some “backward-facing partnership” (זיווג אל האחור, zivvug el he’achor). It would take some time for each to get acquainted with one another. The only way for Boaz and Ruth to meet in this sort of middle would be for Boaz to catch Ruth up on lost time and a lifetime of lessons missed, and for Ruth to travel back in time. She would have to immerse herself in some backward world where vinegar ages into wine, and life’s experiences are reversible—which is not always impossible.
King David and his lineage—dating back to Ruth and Boaz (Ruth 4:13–23)—may have never been inspired by wine; the royal line traces itself back to a (literally) hot date over some not-so-fine vinegar. As Rabbi Shemu’el bar Nachmani may have surmised, wine—for those who drink it and for those who don’t—might not in fact be the essential ingredient of every life-moment. Some of real life tastes like vinegar. We have even developed a tradition that understands that life has alternatives to wine; thus, the 16th century Shulchan Arukh by Rabbi Yosef Karo in Safed lists drinks one may use instead of wine for Jewish rituals (Orach Chayyim 271).
If it is true that no wine was present at Elizabeth I’s coronation, could it be possible that Elizabeth knew that life goes on without wine? The story of Ruth captures a moment of life without wine and even a turning point marked by markedly terrible wine. Ruth bonded with Boaz over vinegar, and the vinegar may have inspired Ruth to embrace her future by reconsidering whatever joy the former-wine/now-vinegar may have galvanized. If Rabbi Valli was right, then Boaz was right too. Not only did Ruth find love after loss. Ruth and Boaz’s relationship that grows beside vinegar should remind us that it is rarely too late for something new to bloom.
*On Edward VI, see Joannis Lelandi, De Rebus Anglicanis Opuscula Varia, vol. IV, p. 327. On the history of this ceremony, see Charles Gerwien Bayne, “The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth,” in The Historical Review 22:88 (October 1907), esp. pp. 650; 657, fn. 23; and 666.
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