Rabbi Mónica Gomery: The Remnant of Remnants: Starting the Year at the End of the World
Yom Kippur 5786
Oct 2, 2025
Watch
Seven thousand years ago, the world ended.
The earth’s orbit tilted, and sea levels rose over four hundred feet. The waters crept up over the land, devouring shorelines and villages, driving the people far from their homes.
Two thousand years ago, the world ended.
A holy city was starved and broken beneath the iron heel of empire. The Temple was set ablaze and torn apart stone by stone– the priests silenced, the altar destroyed.
Five hundred years ago, the world ended.
The invaders arrived bearing gunpowder and steel, carrying scriptures that named the land empty even as it teemed with nations, cities and intricate knowledge systems. Sacred landscapes were burned; people uprooted and shackled, forced across oceans in bondage.
Forty four years ago, the world ended.
A generation of the young and radiant were struck down in their prime, their laughter and music replaced by fevers and lesions. Fear spread faster than the virus, governments looked away. Love burned fierce and grief became uprising. But countless worlds were unmade.
The world is ending today.
Life in the 2020s is not for the faint of heart. [1]
I grew up around countless dystopian and post-apocalyptic narratives as a child of the 80s and 90s: A Clockwork Orange, The Matrix, The Handmaid’s Tale, Blade Runner, Parable of the Sower. Growing up inside of these narratives, I knew apocalypses were coming, but I am still adapting to the reality that they are here. I look out around me, and I know that as close as ten, twenty, or thirty years from now, the world as I’ve come to know it will be unrecognizable, and I can no longer clearly picture in my mind’s eye …our future.
In the midrashic collection Bireishit Rabba, Rabbi Yehudah bar Shimon taught: [the story of creation] does not say, ‘It was evening,’ יְהִי עֶרֶב, but ‘And it was evening,’ וַיְהִי עֶרֶב . From this we derive that there was a time-system before this one.’ [2]
The world has ended and begun many, many times.
And in this way, it just might be good news in disguise.
We have been here before.
Environmental catastrophe, tyranny and authoritarianism, societal breakdown and collapse. The specifics are unique to our time, but world-ending calamity is not. Human origins begin, over and over again, “in the calamitous world-ending events of the past.” [3]
- - -
Over millenia, the word apocalypse has meant many things– a religious judgement day, a natural or nuclear disaster, the decimation of modern society by hordes of hungry zombies or killer robots. The apocalypse holds a powerful grip on the imagination of both the Right and the Left; of organizers, sci fi geeks, evangelicals, climate activists, archeologists, preppers, theologians, and poets. Across vast political differences and wide-ranging disciplines, we are thinking a lot these days about the end of the world.
Science writer Lizzie Wade defines an apocalypse as “a rapid, collective loss that fundamentally changes a society’s way of life and sense of identity… Sometimes an apocalypse plays out within [one] person’s lifetime. Sometimes [it] causes grandparents and grandchildren to grow up in fundamentally different worlds.” [4]
My grandmother Ely was born in Romania in 1919, and died at 101 years old in 2020. She saw the world around her end– concentration camps, mass death, the erasure of a whole Jewish civilization. And she lived to see what came after, worlds beginning anew– immigration, relocation, the next generation. She died six months into Covid, yet another cycle of societal collapse. In her final years, I’d sit in her apartment just staring into her weathered, elegant, oak tree face, marveling at the living archive of her. How much loss and change she had born witness to and survived.
Apocalypses happen again and again.
The Greek word apocalypse comes from the Book of Revelation, a core text in the Christian canon that imagines the complete and final destruction of the world, the triumph of good over evil, and the establishment of a new heaven and earth.
If you’re feeling uncomfortable about an exploration of a Christian idea in shul on Yom Kippur, I assure you, the Christians got it from us. This belief that everything will get much worse, which will spark a crisis in which everything will be solved forever, comes, in fact, from Jewish roots.
We have a whole web of ideas– including olam haba, t’chiyat hameitim, Tzion and y’mot hamoshiach– which come together to imagine that an “anointed one” will usher us into a messianic age.
Crucially, Jews believe that moshiach has not yet arrived, but when moshiach does come to redeem us, there will be, in the words of the Rambam, “no hunger or war, no jealousy or rivalry. Good will flow in abundance, and all delights will be as free and available as dust.” [5]
Judaism has an end times. And the path to it is dramatic. Our prophetic texts envision divine warfare, empires falling, plagues and droughts, and of course, the resurrection of the dead.
One rabbinic tradition imagines God slaying the mythic sea creature Leviathan, salting its body and serving its flesh as a feast on a banquet table. Yes, that’s right, when the Jewish imagination pictures the end of the world and the battle of good over evil, we picture salted, or better yet, smoked, fish. [6]
Another rabbinic imagining is that Elijah the prophet, before revealing the messiah to us in the eleventh hour of worldly history, will first act as Talmudic referee and settle all unresolved disputes and confusions in matters of halakha, Jewish law. Just picture Elijah descending from his heavenly chariot, pushing his glasses up the base of his nose, and saying, “Well actually…”
As much as I love ruminating on pickled herring or Talmud study at the end of the world, what I want us to notice is that the apocalypse exists in Jewish religion. But we almost never talk about it.
Rabbi Yitz Greenberg was once giving a lecture about the messianic resurrection of the dead, t’chiat hametim, and said that despite the utterly canonical nature of the doctrine, in his life as an Orthodox Jew he had only been to one shiur on the topic, and it was the one he was giving.
So too for me, right now.
Contemporary Jews don’t seem to care that much about apocalyptic theology. It’s is a dead end for us. The offer of salvation is no comfort. It gives us no pathway through our confusing and complicated lives, our complicated moment, here at the end of this version of the world.
So what happens when we drop the eschatology, that sense of the one and ultimate impending end, and consider instead that the world ends again and again?
This is not a sermon about how new societies are born out of crashing ones. You can read a lot of stuff, Jewish and otherwise, on how the collapse could be a blessing in disguise and give birth to the new. I agree with that, and I do hope that a thousand years from now, human beings, if we’re still around, will look back and talk about this time as the Great Turning, a generative one. But that doesn’t tell us how to navigate these overwhelming, excruciating, days.
“What unites those past apocalypses,” writes Wade, “is survival. Not only have people already confronted almost every possible apocalypse, they have lived through them.” [7] And they have lived through them in unexpected ways.
Maybe this seasonal ritual of turning the wheel of the year––the birthday of the world on Rosh Hashanah and the ritualized enactment of our own deaths and rebirths on Yom Kippur–– is meant to attune us to the cycle of a world that falls apart and comes back together again and again. To the fact that we end and begin again and again.
This sermon is about how our ancestors survived in the face of collapse, and how we might show up during this, our, apocalypse.
- - -
There isn’t a synonym in ancient Hebrew for the Greek word apocalypse, but there are countless stories of people who survive and keep going. There’s the flood, of course, and the Tower of Babel, but I want to look somewhere else. I’ve always understood the Book of Ruth as a post-apocalyptic story, one more appropriate to the collapse we’re living through now. Let me tell you how it begins.
Ruth opens in the time of the Shoftim. The entire society is unravelling with moral and social decay. [8] A famine overtakes the land, and a Jewish family migrates from Canaan to Moab for food and survival. The patriarch of the family is Elimelech, his wife is Naomi. Their two sons, Machlon and Chilion, each marry a Moabite woman, Orpah and Ruth. The world is burning around them. Midrash elaborates: famine, financial ruin, the spread of uncontrollable disease, corrupt government. It sounds all too familiar to me. [9]
The family is struck by tragedy. First Naomi’s husband dies; then their camels and cattle die; and finally, Naomi’s sons also die.
Another truth of apocalypse– not everyone survives. It’s terrifying, how vulnerable we are; the most vulnerable among us being those with the least access to resources. It is devastating. It is happening now. And there is no silver lining to injustice and loss.
Half of Naomi’s family perishes; in particular, the male half. The death of the men represents a world utterly transformed, in a society where widowed women are especially vulnerable. The text says, וַתִּשָּׁאֵר הִיא, Naomi was left, [10] twice: left without her husband, left without her sons. She has no societal value or worth. On this, midrash elaborates: “She is left as the remnant of remnants.” [11]
Naomi starts out with her daughters-in-law to return to Bethlehem in search of better conditions. Vatelachna baderech lashuv, וַתֵּלַכְנָה בַדֶּרֶךְ לָשׁוּב, the text says: and they went on the road of return, written in that rare, beautiful plural feminine form not often seen in Biblical morphology, as Torah has a tendency not to pass the Bechdel test.
Naomi tries to send her daughters-in-law away. Turn back, she tells them. Go and find yourselves security in the house of a new husband. I can’t protect you, I can offer you nothing.
They weep, they argue, and the daughters-in-law say no, we will stay by your side.
Scholars make note here that according to Biblical law, these women owe Naomi nothing. They are Moabites and she is a Jew from Canaan. The men that bound them to each other are gone. They stay with her, but not because they have to.
“When all the ordinary divides and patterns are shattered,” writes Rebecca Solnit, “people step up– not all, but the great preponderance– to become [each other’s] keepers.” [12]
Solnit spent years studying crises and disasters for her book A Paradise Built in Hell, collecting surprising stories about survival–
Turn-of-the century San Francisco after the earthquake that leveled the city– residents make-shifting soup kitchens in Golden Gate park to feed their displaced neighbors.
New Orleans after Katrina – an armada of boat owners from as far away as Texas, riding into the city to pull stranded people to safety.
The Twin Towers on 9/11– workers banding together to self-initiate rescue procedures before first responders could arrive on the scene.
Hundreds of stories of everyday people pulling each other out of wreckage and carnage– without ever knowing one another’s names.
The story we’re usually told about times of disaster is that human beings become the worst version of ourselves. Hollywood, the media, and the State paint us as uncontrollably selfish and cruel when the world falls apart– we stampede, steal, kill, take advantage of each other, abandon one another. And this narrative paves the way for authoritarianism– if we can’t take care of each other, then a repressive consolidation of power will have to step in and take away our rights, in order to protect us from ourselves.
But actually, in such times, human beings give. We rescue each other. We rebuild the conditions of survival.
Back in the book of Ruth, Naomi continues to urge her daughters-in-law to leave her and save themselves, and eventually one of them goes. Orpah returns to her mother’s house. Ruth, on the other hand, stays. רוּת דָּבְקָה בָּהּ, the text says, Ruth clung to Naomi.
Some people will tell you that Ruth and Naomi were lovers. The story is open to interpretation. I’ve done it! I too have written my fan fiction novella in which Naomi and Ruth are lesbian girlfriends. But what really matters to me isn’t whether or not Ruth and Naomi were in romantic love. What matters is the way Ruth’s act of cleaving undermines the selfishness and individualism of her time. [13]
And here she makes the most incredible declaration of solidarity and commitment:
כִּי אֶל־אֲשֶׁר תֵּלְכִי אֵלֵךְ
וּבַאֲשֶׁר תָּלִינִי אָלִין
עַמֵּךְ עַמִּי וֵאלֹהַיִךְ אֱלֹהָי
For where you go, I will go.
And where you lie, I will lie.
Your people are my people.
Your divine my divine.
בַּאֲשֶׁר תָּמוּתִי אָמוּת
וְשָׁם אֶקָּבֵר
Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried.
In her book, Rebecca Solnit tells the story of Maria Lopez Zambrano, a Colombian immigrant to the US who was sixty years old and blind and running her newsstand in uptown NY when she felt the earth shaking beneath her, as one tower fell. “Two women, strangers to each other and to her, each took one of her arms and walked her north to safety in Greenwich Village and then paused. One lived in New Jersey, the other in Connecticut, and they were torn between their desire to get home and their reluctance to abandon Zambrano. [Telling the story, Zambrano remembered:] ‘They say: ‘No, I don’t let you go by yourself. We still here together. We help you.’” [14]
Where you go, I will go.
And where you lie, I will lie.
Your people are my people.
Your divine my divine.
When our lives are disrupted, we care for each other, in ways we couldn’t have imagined before the disruption.
“Calamity makes cousins of us all,” writes the poet Saul Williams. [15]
The story of Ruth and Naomi could have ended right there. It’s a Torah mic drop.
But there’s so much more.
The women return to Bethlehem. They stick together. Ruth becomes a gleaner in the open fields, so she and Naomi can eat. And one day a land owner named Boaz notices her. He’s moved by her story, her dedication to her mother-in-law.
Eventually, Boaz and Ruth get married, but Ruth is clear at every turn that she goes nowhere without Naomi. [16]
Ruth and Boaz have a child, and the chorus of women in Bethlehem bless Naomi, saying to her, May your grandchild renew you and sustain your old age, for he is born of your daughter in law, who loved you back to life. Naomi takes the child and, incredibly, the text tells us she places him to her breast, possibly nursing him, and becomes his omenet, his other mother. [17]
Like Mordechai, who the rabbis imagine nursed Esther from his own body. Like Yocheved, who stays in baby Moses’s life as his wet nurse, and in this way co-raises him with Pharaoh’s daughter. Again and again we see unconventional combinations of people who create chosen family at the margins of the normative, who choose to be their best selves together.
At the end of the story, we’re told that Obed, the baby raised in this triad of parents, will one day become the father of Jesse, who will one day be the father of King David, and from King David’s line, one day, the moshiach will come.
Whatever the messianic age is, however ambivalent Jews are about it, our texts locate it here– born from this story of Ruth and Naomi. Like Moses, who also emerges from a lineage of brave, rebellious women protecting life, David too will be born from a lineage of women who banded together under the scariest, most precarious of conditions to create new allegiances and affinities.
This is the Torah of apocalypse. Of showing up in ways you couldn’t have dreamed.
I want to read the story of my ancestors Ruth and Naomi every day if I have to in 5786, and reclaim this ancient truth in my bones– that in the face of devastating loss we are wired to take care of each other. That we are called upon in those moments to be our best selves, and that most of us answer that call with Hineni. Here I am.
- - -
We cannot control that the world ends and begins.
And we actually can’t prevent it.
As unstable as it sounds, apocalypse is in the DNA of our world.
It’s understandable, as things grow worse all around us, to think our actions don’t matter. But they do. Because what we can control is who we will be in the face of collapse.
New worlds are forged by the choices we accordingly make. Those who believe that humans are violent and selfish literally create the conditions on earth for violence and selfishness. And those who believe in the goodness of others are able to rescue, collaborate, support, and rebuild.
This is, of course, why we are here together. A spiritual community is a place to practice being the best version of ourselves, because the more we practice showing up with integrity, generosity, courage and care, the more possible it becomes for us to do it again. And again. And again.
- - -
Fine. But maybe, maybe there’s a still-small voice in you saying– what if. What if I don’t trust, really, that I will be that version of myself in the worst of times? What if that’s not who I’ve been, in the worst of times?
Hashemesh yavo v’yifneh, the liturgy reads, the sun is setting and ebbing away. In a matter of hours, we will rise to our feet in a dark room and cry out, Ptach lanu sh’arecha, please, Holy One, throw open your gates for us. Your gates of teshuva. Your gates of slicha.
I always pictured these gates out in front of us somewhere, or up above. Gates to the heavenly realm of lovingkindness, to the realm of teshuva, and some divine gatekeeper needs to let me in.
This year, I think I understand something new. I think the gate is in here.
That when we call out– please, please, let us in– we are calling inward. Not to be let in, but to be released. For the gates of our hearts to open, p’tach libi, and set free the parts of us that rush forward in dangerous, perilous times, to reach for each other in the face of collapse, to say Where you go, I go.
We can’t know now the way that each of us will be called to act as our best selves in the year to come, but we will be called– to choose the next right thing, in a world full of so much wrong.
So, Holy One, please, make us kind. Make us wise. Aseh imanu tzedakah vachesed, help us choose compassion and justice. We are begging. We are pleading. Make us brave. Throw open our hearts, shatter us into a million pieces if you have to. There is no other way to survive.
We come here on Yom Kippur to practice ending. So that we can begin again.
End again. Begin again.
In the words of Kohenet Dori Midnight, [18]
… Bless our hearts, cracked open in pain
Bless what we have lost and what remains
Bless our weeping, bless our grief
Bless our fasting, bless our feasts
Bless the uncertainty and bless the collapse
Bless the fragments and bless the scraps
… Bless the margins, bless the center
Bless the way we fall apart, together
Bless the breaking, bless the fall
Holy One of Blessing
Bless it all
G’mar chatima tova, may you each be inscribed in the Book of Life.
Rachel and Aly sing Summons, by Ahlay Blakely, based on a poem by Aurora Levins Morales . [19] [20]
Footnotes
[1] The structure of this introduction, as well as this quote, and numerous other framing elements of this sermon, owe an enormous debt to Lizzie Wade’s Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures.[2] Bireishit Rabbah, 3:7
[3] Choi, “Franny Choi Believes in a Future After the Apocalypse,” interview in Catapult.
[4] Wade, 5
[5] Mishneh Torah, Kings and Wars, 12:5
[6] Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra 74b
[7] Wade, 4
[8] Judges 21:25, Ruth Rabbah 1:1
[9] Rashi on Ruth 1:5
[10] All quotes and verses from Ruth in this section come from the book of Ruth, chapter 1
[11] Ruth Rabbah 2:10
[12] Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell, 3
[13] Dr. Yael Ziegler, Ruth: From Alienation to Monarchy: “Ruth’s action is “an important step in beginning the renovation of society so sorely needed at this juncture...[Davkah] connotes an all-encompassing connection, a relationship characterized by identification, in which one party embraces the totality of the Other, totally and completely.”
[14] Solnit, 189
[15] Saul Williams, She, p. 22
[16] Ruth 3:5
[17] All quotes from the end of the story: Ruth chapter 4
[18] Dori Midnight’s poem can be found in In Times Such as These, by R’ Jessica Rosenberg and R’ Ariana Katz
[19] https://ayinpress.org/summons
[20] Deep gratitude to Jon Argaman, for coaching me, and so many rabbis, toward our Torah in these world-ending times. Thank you to Rabbi Ari Lev Fornai, Rabbi Lizzie Horne-Mozes, Rabbi Alex Weissman, and Jess Benjamin, for editing with patience and love. Thank you to Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, Rabbi Faryn Borella, and Rabbi Dr. Koach Baruch Frazier for being my apocalypse chevrutas.
Oct 2, 2025
Watch
Seven thousand years ago, the world ended.
The earth’s orbit tilted, and sea levels rose over four hundred feet. The waters crept up over the land, devouring shorelines and villages, driving the people far from their homes.
Two thousand years ago, the world ended.
A holy city was starved and broken beneath the iron heel of empire. The Temple was set ablaze and torn apart stone by stone– the priests silenced, the altar destroyed.
Five hundred years ago, the world ended.
The invaders arrived bearing gunpowder and steel, carrying scriptures that named the land empty even as it teemed with nations, cities and intricate knowledge systems. Sacred landscapes were burned; people uprooted and shackled, forced across oceans in bondage.
Forty four years ago, the world ended.
A generation of the young and radiant were struck down in their prime, their laughter and music replaced by fevers and lesions. Fear spread faster than the virus, governments looked away. Love burned fierce and grief became uprising. But countless worlds were unmade.
The world is ending today.
Life in the 2020s is not for the faint of heart. [1]
I grew up around countless dystopian and post-apocalyptic narratives as a child of the 80s and 90s: A Clockwork Orange, The Matrix, The Handmaid’s Tale, Blade Runner, Parable of the Sower. Growing up inside of these narratives, I knew apocalypses were coming, but I am still adapting to the reality that they are here. I look out around me, and I know that as close as ten, twenty, or thirty years from now, the world as I’ve come to know it will be unrecognizable, and I can no longer clearly picture in my mind’s eye …our future.
In the midrashic collection Bireishit Rabba, Rabbi Yehudah bar Shimon taught: [the story of creation] does not say, ‘It was evening,’ יְהִי עֶרֶב, but ‘And it was evening,’ וַיְהִי עֶרֶב . From this we derive that there was a time-system before this one.’ [2]
The world has ended and begun many, many times.
And in this way, it just might be good news in disguise.
We have been here before.
Environmental catastrophe, tyranny and authoritarianism, societal breakdown and collapse. The specifics are unique to our time, but world-ending calamity is not. Human origins begin, over and over again, “in the calamitous world-ending events of the past.” [3]
- - -
Over millenia, the word apocalypse has meant many things– a religious judgement day, a natural or nuclear disaster, the decimation of modern society by hordes of hungry zombies or killer robots. The apocalypse holds a powerful grip on the imagination of both the Right and the Left; of organizers, sci fi geeks, evangelicals, climate activists, archeologists, preppers, theologians, and poets. Across vast political differences and wide-ranging disciplines, we are thinking a lot these days about the end of the world.
Science writer Lizzie Wade defines an apocalypse as “a rapid, collective loss that fundamentally changes a society’s way of life and sense of identity… Sometimes an apocalypse plays out within [one] person’s lifetime. Sometimes [it] causes grandparents and grandchildren to grow up in fundamentally different worlds.” [4]
My grandmother Ely was born in Romania in 1919, and died at 101 years old in 2020. She saw the world around her end– concentration camps, mass death, the erasure of a whole Jewish civilization. And she lived to see what came after, worlds beginning anew– immigration, relocation, the next generation. She died six months into Covid, yet another cycle of societal collapse. In her final years, I’d sit in her apartment just staring into her weathered, elegant, oak tree face, marveling at the living archive of her. How much loss and change she had born witness to and survived.
Apocalypses happen again and again.
The Greek word apocalypse comes from the Book of Revelation, a core text in the Christian canon that imagines the complete and final destruction of the world, the triumph of good over evil, and the establishment of a new heaven and earth.
If you’re feeling uncomfortable about an exploration of a Christian idea in shul on Yom Kippur, I assure you, the Christians got it from us. This belief that everything will get much worse, which will spark a crisis in which everything will be solved forever, comes, in fact, from Jewish roots.
We have a whole web of ideas– including olam haba, t’chiyat hameitim, Tzion and y’mot hamoshiach– which come together to imagine that an “anointed one” will usher us into a messianic age.
Crucially, Jews believe that moshiach has not yet arrived, but when moshiach does come to redeem us, there will be, in the words of the Rambam, “no hunger or war, no jealousy or rivalry. Good will flow in abundance, and all delights will be as free and available as dust.” [5]
Judaism has an end times. And the path to it is dramatic. Our prophetic texts envision divine warfare, empires falling, plagues and droughts, and of course, the resurrection of the dead.
One rabbinic tradition imagines God slaying the mythic sea creature Leviathan, salting its body and serving its flesh as a feast on a banquet table. Yes, that’s right, when the Jewish imagination pictures the end of the world and the battle of good over evil, we picture salted, or better yet, smoked, fish. [6]
Another rabbinic imagining is that Elijah the prophet, before revealing the messiah to us in the eleventh hour of worldly history, will first act as Talmudic referee and settle all unresolved disputes and confusions in matters of halakha, Jewish law. Just picture Elijah descending from his heavenly chariot, pushing his glasses up the base of his nose, and saying, “Well actually…”
As much as I love ruminating on pickled herring or Talmud study at the end of the world, what I want us to notice is that the apocalypse exists in Jewish religion. But we almost never talk about it.
Rabbi Yitz Greenberg was once giving a lecture about the messianic resurrection of the dead, t’chiat hametim, and said that despite the utterly canonical nature of the doctrine, in his life as an Orthodox Jew he had only been to one shiur on the topic, and it was the one he was giving.
So too for me, right now.
Contemporary Jews don’t seem to care that much about apocalyptic theology. It’s is a dead end for us. The offer of salvation is no comfort. It gives us no pathway through our confusing and complicated lives, our complicated moment, here at the end of this version of the world.
So what happens when we drop the eschatology, that sense of the one and ultimate impending end, and consider instead that the world ends again and again?
This is not a sermon about how new societies are born out of crashing ones. You can read a lot of stuff, Jewish and otherwise, on how the collapse could be a blessing in disguise and give birth to the new. I agree with that, and I do hope that a thousand years from now, human beings, if we’re still around, will look back and talk about this time as the Great Turning, a generative one. But that doesn’t tell us how to navigate these overwhelming, excruciating, days.
“What unites those past apocalypses,” writes Wade, “is survival. Not only have people already confronted almost every possible apocalypse, they have lived through them.” [7] And they have lived through them in unexpected ways.
Maybe this seasonal ritual of turning the wheel of the year––the birthday of the world on Rosh Hashanah and the ritualized enactment of our own deaths and rebirths on Yom Kippur–– is meant to attune us to the cycle of a world that falls apart and comes back together again and again. To the fact that we end and begin again and again.
This sermon is about how our ancestors survived in the face of collapse, and how we might show up during this, our, apocalypse.
- - -
There isn’t a synonym in ancient Hebrew for the Greek word apocalypse, but there are countless stories of people who survive and keep going. There’s the flood, of course, and the Tower of Babel, but I want to look somewhere else. I’ve always understood the Book of Ruth as a post-apocalyptic story, one more appropriate to the collapse we’re living through now. Let me tell you how it begins.
Ruth opens in the time of the Shoftim. The entire society is unravelling with moral and social decay. [8] A famine overtakes the land, and a Jewish family migrates from Canaan to Moab for food and survival. The patriarch of the family is Elimelech, his wife is Naomi. Their two sons, Machlon and Chilion, each marry a Moabite woman, Orpah and Ruth. The world is burning around them. Midrash elaborates: famine, financial ruin, the spread of uncontrollable disease, corrupt government. It sounds all too familiar to me. [9]
The family is struck by tragedy. First Naomi’s husband dies; then their camels and cattle die; and finally, Naomi’s sons also die.
Another truth of apocalypse– not everyone survives. It’s terrifying, how vulnerable we are; the most vulnerable among us being those with the least access to resources. It is devastating. It is happening now. And there is no silver lining to injustice and loss.
Half of Naomi’s family perishes; in particular, the male half. The death of the men represents a world utterly transformed, in a society where widowed women are especially vulnerable. The text says, וַתִּשָּׁאֵר הִיא, Naomi was left, [10] twice: left without her husband, left without her sons. She has no societal value or worth. On this, midrash elaborates: “She is left as the remnant of remnants.” [11]
Naomi starts out with her daughters-in-law to return to Bethlehem in search of better conditions. Vatelachna baderech lashuv, וַתֵּלַכְנָה בַדֶּרֶךְ לָשׁוּב, the text says: and they went on the road of return, written in that rare, beautiful plural feminine form not often seen in Biblical morphology, as Torah has a tendency not to pass the Bechdel test.
Naomi tries to send her daughters-in-law away. Turn back, she tells them. Go and find yourselves security in the house of a new husband. I can’t protect you, I can offer you nothing.
They weep, they argue, and the daughters-in-law say no, we will stay by your side.
Scholars make note here that according to Biblical law, these women owe Naomi nothing. They are Moabites and she is a Jew from Canaan. The men that bound them to each other are gone. They stay with her, but not because they have to.
“When all the ordinary divides and patterns are shattered,” writes Rebecca Solnit, “people step up– not all, but the great preponderance– to become [each other’s] keepers.” [12]
Solnit spent years studying crises and disasters for her book A Paradise Built in Hell, collecting surprising stories about survival–
Turn-of-the century San Francisco after the earthquake that leveled the city– residents make-shifting soup kitchens in Golden Gate park to feed their displaced neighbors.
New Orleans after Katrina – an armada of boat owners from as far away as Texas, riding into the city to pull stranded people to safety.
The Twin Towers on 9/11– workers banding together to self-initiate rescue procedures before first responders could arrive on the scene.
Hundreds of stories of everyday people pulling each other out of wreckage and carnage– without ever knowing one another’s names.
The story we’re usually told about times of disaster is that human beings become the worst version of ourselves. Hollywood, the media, and the State paint us as uncontrollably selfish and cruel when the world falls apart– we stampede, steal, kill, take advantage of each other, abandon one another. And this narrative paves the way for authoritarianism– if we can’t take care of each other, then a repressive consolidation of power will have to step in and take away our rights, in order to protect us from ourselves.
But actually, in such times, human beings give. We rescue each other. We rebuild the conditions of survival.
Back in the book of Ruth, Naomi continues to urge her daughters-in-law to leave her and save themselves, and eventually one of them goes. Orpah returns to her mother’s house. Ruth, on the other hand, stays. רוּת דָּבְקָה בָּהּ, the text says, Ruth clung to Naomi.
Some people will tell you that Ruth and Naomi were lovers. The story is open to interpretation. I’ve done it! I too have written my fan fiction novella in which Naomi and Ruth are lesbian girlfriends. But what really matters to me isn’t whether or not Ruth and Naomi were in romantic love. What matters is the way Ruth’s act of cleaving undermines the selfishness and individualism of her time. [13]
And here she makes the most incredible declaration of solidarity and commitment:
כִּי אֶל־אֲשֶׁר תֵּלְכִי אֵלֵךְ
וּבַאֲשֶׁר תָּלִינִי אָלִין
עַמֵּךְ עַמִּי וֵאלֹהַיִךְ אֱלֹהָי
For where you go, I will go.
And where you lie, I will lie.
Your people are my people.
Your divine my divine.
בַּאֲשֶׁר תָּמוּתִי אָמוּת
וְשָׁם אֶקָּבֵר
Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried.
In her book, Rebecca Solnit tells the story of Maria Lopez Zambrano, a Colombian immigrant to the US who was sixty years old and blind and running her newsstand in uptown NY when she felt the earth shaking beneath her, as one tower fell. “Two women, strangers to each other and to her, each took one of her arms and walked her north to safety in Greenwich Village and then paused. One lived in New Jersey, the other in Connecticut, and they were torn between their desire to get home and their reluctance to abandon Zambrano. [Telling the story, Zambrano remembered:] ‘They say: ‘No, I don’t let you go by yourself. We still here together. We help you.’” [14]
Where you go, I will go.
And where you lie, I will lie.
Your people are my people.
Your divine my divine.
When our lives are disrupted, we care for each other, in ways we couldn’t have imagined before the disruption.
“Calamity makes cousins of us all,” writes the poet Saul Williams. [15]
The story of Ruth and Naomi could have ended right there. It’s a Torah mic drop.
But there’s so much more.
The women return to Bethlehem. They stick together. Ruth becomes a gleaner in the open fields, so she and Naomi can eat. And one day a land owner named Boaz notices her. He’s moved by her story, her dedication to her mother-in-law.
Eventually, Boaz and Ruth get married, but Ruth is clear at every turn that she goes nowhere without Naomi. [16]
Ruth and Boaz have a child, and the chorus of women in Bethlehem bless Naomi, saying to her, May your grandchild renew you and sustain your old age, for he is born of your daughter in law, who loved you back to life. Naomi takes the child and, incredibly, the text tells us she places him to her breast, possibly nursing him, and becomes his omenet, his other mother. [17]
Like Mordechai, who the rabbis imagine nursed Esther from his own body. Like Yocheved, who stays in baby Moses’s life as his wet nurse, and in this way co-raises him with Pharaoh’s daughter. Again and again we see unconventional combinations of people who create chosen family at the margins of the normative, who choose to be their best selves together.
At the end of the story, we’re told that Obed, the baby raised in this triad of parents, will one day become the father of Jesse, who will one day be the father of King David, and from King David’s line, one day, the moshiach will come.
Whatever the messianic age is, however ambivalent Jews are about it, our texts locate it here– born from this story of Ruth and Naomi. Like Moses, who also emerges from a lineage of brave, rebellious women protecting life, David too will be born from a lineage of women who banded together under the scariest, most precarious of conditions to create new allegiances and affinities.
This is the Torah of apocalypse. Of showing up in ways you couldn’t have dreamed.
I want to read the story of my ancestors Ruth and Naomi every day if I have to in 5786, and reclaim this ancient truth in my bones– that in the face of devastating loss we are wired to take care of each other. That we are called upon in those moments to be our best selves, and that most of us answer that call with Hineni. Here I am.
- - -
We cannot control that the world ends and begins.
And we actually can’t prevent it.
As unstable as it sounds, apocalypse is in the DNA of our world.
It’s understandable, as things grow worse all around us, to think our actions don’t matter. But they do. Because what we can control is who we will be in the face of collapse.
New worlds are forged by the choices we accordingly make. Those who believe that humans are violent and selfish literally create the conditions on earth for violence and selfishness. And those who believe in the goodness of others are able to rescue, collaborate, support, and rebuild.
This is, of course, why we are here together. A spiritual community is a place to practice being the best version of ourselves, because the more we practice showing up with integrity, generosity, courage and care, the more possible it becomes for us to do it again. And again. And again.
- - -
Fine. But maybe, maybe there’s a still-small voice in you saying– what if. What if I don’t trust, really, that I will be that version of myself in the worst of times? What if that’s not who I’ve been, in the worst of times?
Hashemesh yavo v’yifneh, the liturgy reads, the sun is setting and ebbing away. In a matter of hours, we will rise to our feet in a dark room and cry out, Ptach lanu sh’arecha, please, Holy One, throw open your gates for us. Your gates of teshuva. Your gates of slicha.
I always pictured these gates out in front of us somewhere, or up above. Gates to the heavenly realm of lovingkindness, to the realm of teshuva, and some divine gatekeeper needs to let me in.
This year, I think I understand something new. I think the gate is in here.
That when we call out– please, please, let us in– we are calling inward. Not to be let in, but to be released. For the gates of our hearts to open, p’tach libi, and set free the parts of us that rush forward in dangerous, perilous times, to reach for each other in the face of collapse, to say Where you go, I go.
We can’t know now the way that each of us will be called to act as our best selves in the year to come, but we will be called– to choose the next right thing, in a world full of so much wrong.
So, Holy One, please, make us kind. Make us wise. Aseh imanu tzedakah vachesed, help us choose compassion and justice. We are begging. We are pleading. Make us brave. Throw open our hearts, shatter us into a million pieces if you have to. There is no other way to survive.
We come here on Yom Kippur to practice ending. So that we can begin again.
End again. Begin again.
In the words of Kohenet Dori Midnight, [18]
… Bless our hearts, cracked open in pain
Bless what we have lost and what remains
Bless our weeping, bless our grief
Bless our fasting, bless our feasts
Bless the uncertainty and bless the collapse
Bless the fragments and bless the scraps
… Bless the margins, bless the center
Bless the way we fall apart, together
Bless the breaking, bless the fall
Holy One of Blessing
Bless it all
G’mar chatima tova, may you each be inscribed in the Book of Life.
Rachel and Aly sing Summons, by Ahlay Blakely, based on a poem by Aurora Levins Morales . [19] [20]
Footnotes
[1] The structure of this introduction, as well as this quote, and numerous other framing elements of this sermon, owe an enormous debt to Lizzie Wade’s Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures.[2] Bireishit Rabbah, 3:7
[3] Choi, “Franny Choi Believes in a Future After the Apocalypse,” interview in Catapult.
[4] Wade, 5
[5] Mishneh Torah, Kings and Wars, 12:5
[6] Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra 74b
[7] Wade, 4
[8] Judges 21:25, Ruth Rabbah 1:1
[9] Rashi on Ruth 1:5
[10] All quotes and verses from Ruth in this section come from the book of Ruth, chapter 1
[11] Ruth Rabbah 2:10
[12] Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell, 3
[13] Dr. Yael Ziegler, Ruth: From Alienation to Monarchy: “Ruth’s action is “an important step in beginning the renovation of society so sorely needed at this juncture...[Davkah] connotes an all-encompassing connection, a relationship characterized by identification, in which one party embraces the totality of the Other, totally and completely.”
[14] Solnit, 189
[15] Saul Williams, She, p. 22
[16] Ruth 3:5
[17] All quotes from the end of the story: Ruth chapter 4
[18] Dori Midnight’s poem can be found in In Times Such as These, by R’ Jessica Rosenberg and R’ Ariana Katz
[19] https://ayinpress.org/summons
[20] Deep gratitude to Jon Argaman, for coaching me, and so many rabbis, toward our Torah in these world-ending times. Thank you to Rabbi Ari Lev Fornai, Rabbi Lizzie Horne-Mozes, Rabbi Alex Weissman, and Jess Benjamin, for editing with patience and love. Thank you to Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, Rabbi Faryn Borella, and Rabbi Dr. Koach Baruch Frazier for being my apocalypse chevrutas.