The Before and the After

The Before and The After: Shavuot 5786
By Rabbi Rachael Houser

Once upon a time, a woman left her homeland with her husband and two sons. They gambled on an uncertain future in a new country. When they arrived, the woman’s husband died, leaving her dependent on her two sons. Her sons married women from this new country, and for ten years, all was well.

Then the woman’s sons died, and the woman was left utterly alone.

This is the beginning of the Book of Ruth, read during the holiday of Shavuot, which we find ourselves in tonight. The Book of Ruth is the Bible’s own Cinderella story, but this woman—called Naomi—does not take center stage. Instead, she plays fairy godmother to Ruth, an outsider from the land of Moab. When Ruth’s husband dies, she chooses to follow his mother Naomi back to her homeland of Bethlehem, pledging her loyalty to her mother-in-law with a beautiful speech that couples still use today in wedding vows and Jews by choice use in their conversion speeches. Ruth lives with Naomi in poverty, picking up the scraps of grain left behind in the fields to feed them.

But their luck turns. Ruth catches the eye of a relative of Naomi’s: the wealthy, generous, and kind Boaz. Naomi orchestrates a match between the two, and Ruth is remarried and integrated into the Israelite community, safe and secure within her marriage to Boaz. Even Naomi gets a second chance at motherhood, becoming the foster mother of the child of Ruth and Boaz, who will one day be King David’s grandfather.

Everything about the book seems like a fairytale. Pastoral imagery of Israel from days gone by, fruitful in its harvest season with plenty to spare. A poor, good-hearted maiden who wins love and riches. An older woman who gets a second lease on life.

And yet Naomi does not let us forget that the reason we have this story is because of the devastating losses she experiences that the book gives us in the opening verses.

Naomi’s husband dies. The story doesn’t tell us how. It only tells us that all she has left are her sons.

Naomi’s sons die. The story doesn’t tell us how. It only tells us that she is left alone.

When Naomi arrives in Bethlehem at the beginning of the story, her pain makes her unrecognizable to her old neighbors. “Can this be Naomi?” they ask.

Her pain makes her unrecognizable to herself. “Do not call me Naomi,” she orders them. “Call me Mara, for God has made my life so bitter.” The name she was born with—Naomi—means pleasant, an adjective she no longer feels applies to her life. The name she wants—Mara—means bitterness, a better fit for her new life as a widow and a mother with no living children.

She recognizes that there was a Before in her life, a time she felt her pleasant name fit her better, and now there is an After, and that After is so excruciating and has changed her so completely that she embodies bitterness.

Reading this made me think of the recently published memoir by Rachel Goldberg-Polin, When We See You Again. Rachel divides the book into The Before, a so-called “regular and beige life” with her husband Jon and her three children, and The After, when her son Hersh was kidnapped by Hamas on October 7th and held captive until his murder 328 days later. The book is an agonizing account of a family torn apart by loss, of a woman set completely adrift by pain that can never be subdued.

“The Before Me comes to comfort The After me,” she writes of her fractured identity. “Rounder, darker hair, straighter teeth, smoother skin, stronger heart, easier sleeper, wearing her hair down, has on a little makeup and earrings, smiley, ready to talk and be funny. I think. I think I was funny. But maybe only I thought that. And Hersh, he thought it. But The Before me didn’t know this brand of suffering, so perhaps she couldn’t help me.”

Naomi and Mara. Before and After. Rachel even changes her last name from Goldberg to Goldberg-Polin, she tells us, so she shares a surname with the son she lost and whom she loves so brightly that the pages of her memoir practically singe your fingertips.

We may think the Book of Ruth has a happy ending. But if we ask Naomi, her version of a happy ending might look very different. Perhaps her happy ending would not have taken place in Bethlehem but in faraway Moab, where Naomi had never lost her sons. Where her life would have gone unrecorded, “regular and beige” and unremarkable. Where there had never been a reason for a Book of Ruth at all.

Many of us have stories that we would have preferred to go unwritten. Losses that have left us shattered, that could never be adequately described in five verses. But they are the stories we have. So how do we go on?

After all, though Naomi also bifurcates her life, those who know her continue to call her Naomi. Perhaps she hated this, but it makes me think of another quote from Rachel’s book: “Some chapters [from the Before] are anchored securely and forever in the harbor of my being. They will stay with me. With us. Part of our foundational tale of who we once were. I will explain to my great-grandchildren, when my teeth have long since fallen out, vignettes from The Before.” The Naomi who lived in Moab, who loved her husband and her sons, who created room in her family for two beloved daughters-in-law, is still part of Mara who lives in Bethlehem.

Rachel tells us, “I can be in pain and be able to laugh. I can grieve for my son and be proud of my daughters. I can suffer with every inhale and feel blessed with every exhale. And that expansive capacity, that artful woven-ness, is the utter quintessence of being human.” Naomi can grieve her sons while holding her foster son close. She can mourn her husband and celebrate the wedding of Ruth and Boaz.

Like Naomi, after our own losses, we might never be whole again. We may struggle the rest of our lives with the balance: Naomi and Mara, Before and After. We may be forever split, forever broken. But Rachel Goldberg-Polin says of the Broken, many of whom walk among us or sit in the pews tonight, “We Broken go through This World in a state of longing. On the way, we live. And laugh and love and do and unravel and build and breathe and keep going… I am on a quest to find out how to live and thrive with this forever hunger wrapped around my body, encasing me. That is the map I am seeking. I am realizing I may have to sketch it for myself. Now I’ll force myself to go out and find what else is out there in the world. I’ll be a cartographer and also make my own itinerary. This is not me. This is me now.”

From another Naomi who suffered her own senseless loss—Rabbi Naomi Levy in her book To Begin Again—I offer up her words in prayer:

“My wounds may heal, God, but my scars may never fade.

Help me to embrace them, not despise them.

Teach me how to live with my broken pieces, how to tend to them, how to learn from them.

Remind me that I possess the power to turn my curses into blessings, my shame into pride, my sadness into strength, my pain into compassion. Amen."