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Shavuot, Ruth and Me
Do not urge me to leave you, to turn back, and not follow you. For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge, your people shall be my people, and your G-d my G-d. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. Thus and more may the Lord do to me if anything but death parts me from you. –Ruth, 1:16
When I became ill with cancer a couple of years ago, my close Jewish friends asked me if I had a Hebrew name, which
would have been given to me when I was a newborn. I seemed to remember learning that I had a Hebrew name, but I don’t remember what it was. My Jewish friends felt that their prayers for me to G-d would be more powerful if they prayed using my Hebrew name, so I asked my friend @iwe if anything could be done regarding my lack of a Hebrew name, and he consulted his rabbi. It turns out that if a person doesn’t have a Hebrew name, he or she may choose one. On hearing this information, I knew immediately that I wanted to take the name of Ruth.
“It was my duty to shoot the enemy, and I don’t regret it. My regrets are for the people I couldn’t save: Marines, soldiers, buddies. I’m not naive, and I don’t romanticize war. The worst moments of my life have come as a SEAL. But I can stand before God with a clear conscience about doing my job.” – Chris Kyle
I started writing this in the hours after American gymnast Simone Biles withdrew from the Olympic women’s team competition. Then I let it sit to see what the rest of the story might be. From the beginning, I found that Simone Biles, at age 24, was on track to be the second oldest women’s all-around Olympic champion. This naturally led to the oldest modern Olympic women’s all-around gymnastics champion, who won at the age of 26 in Mexico in 1968. The Czechoslovakian Věra Čáslavská, one of only two two-time all-around Olympic champions in women’s gymnastics, performed under far more real pressure, with far more real courage, facing far more real consequences than any athlete in Tokyo.
Republican governors all over the country are taking care of their states regarding Covid-19 to mixed reviews. At least most of them aren’t crippling their economies or insisting on lockdowns. I can’t help bragging about Florida’s governor, however, because he does whatever he thinks is necessary—and he’s faced an irate CDC and has been denounced by the media.
So many of you have inspired me with your posts of the people, companies, and organizations fighting back against cancel culture. In some ways, the number of people who speak out seems small; every time I see a new person, I keep wishing there were more; I’ve decided I want to have one place I can go and periodically review a list of them, to remind myself there are many more than I’ve realized.
One of the reasons I like the occasional music posts on Ricochet is that I’ve spent most of my life quite disconnected from whatever was going on in the contemporary entertainment world, and the posts give me a window into what I might have missed (and whether or not I’m glad I did). Although we moved to the United States only a couple of months before The Beatles took the “Ed Sullivan Show” by storm, I never owned a Beatles album. And while The Rolling Stones were hot during my years at British boarding school, we weren’t allowed to listen to them; Mick Jagger’s hips and lips being (in the opinion of the good ladies running The Abbey School) a bridge too far, even for the radio.