[Avodah] Would Ruth's conversion be rejected today?

Zev Sero zev at sero.name
Thu May 31 19:43:33 PDT 2012


On 31/05/2012 8:56 PM, kennethgmiller at juno.com wrote:
> And if Ruth was still a non-Jew when Machlon died, then Boaz was not a
> real relative, and not a real go'el [...] I've heard the argument that
> Boaz was not halachically obligated to Ruth, but acted as her goel
> merely as a chesed.

Let's clear something up: Boaz did not act as Ruth's go'el, but as
Machlon's.  His Torah obligation to Machlon was to buy back Machlon's
land -- the land was never Ruth's, and would never have been hers no
matter how Jewish she was.   And that's what go'el means; the one who
must buy back the land.  His ethical obligation was to settle Machlon's
debts as well, which included his moral debt to Ruth.


> at that point in history, Yibum was not only a halacha, but a social
> practice as well,

Yibum is irrelevant since he wasn't a brother anyway.  And he'd probably
have felt obligated to marry her even if she had children.  Perhaps
*especially* if she had children (who converted with her).


> I'd think that a tzadik like Boaz would much sooner have sat shiva over
> Machlon's intermarriage


He may well have done so at the time, and if Machlon were alive he might
have treated him as a rasha; but Machlon wasn't alive, and someone had to
wind up his affairs.  One of his debts was to Ruth.  Suppose someone
marries out and then does teshuvah; he must leave his wife, but does he
not have an ethical obligation to look after her?  And suppose she
converts and demands that he make an honest woman of her, does he not
have an ethical obligation to do so?


> and not been so quick to support his widow.

After he discovered what a tzadekes she was, why not?  Whatever she did
before her giyur had no bearing on her current status.


> My Shulchan Aruch says that if a convert does aveiros, even avoda zara,
> the Jewishness is never lost.

Nor is it, provided he was ever Jewish in the first place.  If it turns
out that he never abandoned AZ in the first place, and his whole adherence
to halacha was a sham, then there was never any giyur and he remains what
he was before.  Consider the Kuthim: for centuries (!) they were regarded
as bad Jews, but Jews nonetheless; then Chazal found out that they had
always been secretly worshipping AZ, so they retroactively annulled the
giyur of their distant ancestors, and thus all the current Kuthim turned
out to have always been goyim.  Note that this would have included any
Kuthi who did teshuvah and had been living as an honest Jew; if his many-
times-great-grandmother's giyur was fake then he suddenly needed to be
megayer.  Or the children and grandchildren of a Kuthit who had done
teshuvah many years earlier; same story.  So one *could* say that Naomi
gave Orpah the opportunity to say whether her original conversion had ever
been sincere, and she revealed that it had been a charade she (and perhaps
Kilyon) had played for her in-laws' benefit.


> "Would Ruth's conversion be rejected today?" is an important question.
> But it must be taken hand-in-hand with "Would Orpah's conversion be
> accepted today?"

If she ever had one, it surely would not be accepted today.  It probably
wasn't accepted then either.

-- 
Zev Sero        "Natural resources are not finite in any meaningful
zev at sero.name    economic sense, mind-boggling though this assertion
                  may be. The stocks of them are not fixed but rather
		 are expanding through human ingenuity."
		                            - Julian Simon



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