This has been an exceptional week around here, so we’re going to take a little break from our exploration of the Psalms of the Tikkun HaClali. Keep an eye out for Psalm 90 next week.

Tonight marks the beginning of Shavuot, a wonderful holiday which is distinguished, among other ways, by the eating of cheesecake and the reading of the Book of Ruth.

I’m going to focus on Ruth because the centrality and holiness of cheesecake is self-evident and thus needs no further explanation. Ruth, one of the major characters of the Torah, is destitute, widowed, and virtually abandoned when we meet her. She is saved from poverty by the Torah’s requirement that farmers leave the edges of the field, forgotten sheaves of grain, and the gleanings of the harvest for the poor and the stranger to eat.

These laws allow Ruth to live many years and birth the line that leads to King David. Moreover, since Ruth is seen as the first convert, they also become the centerpiece of the education that any prospective convert to Judaism is supposed to receive. (BT Yevamot 47a)

Whenever I have the honor of helping people become Jews, among the things I tell them is that in accordance with these laws, they are now obligated to feed the hungry of the world. They are not invited to feed the hungry, they are not welcome to feed the hungry - they are obligated to feed the hungry.

We are obligated to turn outward, beyond ourselves, and when we do, we arrive at the essence of Judaism. We arrive at the one thing that every Jew must know - if you stand for yourself alone, you are nothing.

Wellness and illness are not fixed states; they are snapshots of a moment, points in time. Nobody can truly say, “I am well”; we can only accurately say “I am well now.”

Spiritually traditional Jews will often preface statements about the future with the phrase, “בעזרת השם/b’ezrat haShem,” or “with the help of the Holy One,” as in “b’ezrat HaShem, I’ll get married next week,” or even, “b’ezrat Hashem, I’ll go to school tomorrow.” In other words, I know what I have planned for tomorrow or next month, but who can really say what will happen?

Like so many of us, the Psalmist knows that situations which seem stable are not. In Psalm 59, the fifth of Rabbi Nachman's Tikkun HaKlali “[Troubles] lie in wait for my soul; Mighty troops gather against me” (Ps 59:4; translation Norman Fischer). The circumstances that can move us from healthy to ill, from rich to poor are always present.

Necessarily, wonderfully, we live with the assumption that the blessings of today will, in fact, be present tomorrow. If we didn’t, we could never prepare for the future. We couldn’t learn, we couldn’t grow, we couldn’t raise children. And yet, we are caught up short when we are reminded that there is no guarantee of tomorrow. We are devastated when reminded of our mortality, as if it hadn’t been there all along.

The world offers us the reasonable hope of tomorrow, the space for the mundane hope of another day, but no guarantee of tomorrow.