Holding fast: Ruth, covenant, and the meaning of belonging

I am often called upon to teach hospital chaplaincy students, particularly non-Jewish clergy, how to care for Jewish patients.

To readers of this paper, that may sound surprising, but many chaplains instinctively understand religious identity through the categories familiar from their own traditions: clergy, communal or personal prayer, institutional religious affiliation, and religious practice.

But Jewish identity is not quite so clear-cut.

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“What do you call a Jew who’s an atheist?” I ask with a grin. You could hear a pin drop. I offer the punch line after some very squirmy seconds: “A Jew.” That usually gets a lively conversation started.

We have long understood that someone may reject theology entirely and still remain deeply, unquestionably Jewish. Identity can be carried through memory, family, shared responsibility, humor, history, language, or simply the feeling of connection to our people.

That complexity can confuse even the best trained chaplains.

One of the central tasks of acute care chaplaincy is helping patients identify their spiritual and emotional resources so they can draw upon those strengths during their hospitalization. Chaplains are trained to listen for meaning, faith, hope and community.

But standard spiritual-assessment questions often fall flat with Jewish patients.

Imagine this conversation:

Chaplain Christopher: “Mrs. Schwartz, how are you doing today? I’m Christopher, the chaplain on this unit. I visit all the new patients and check in about how we might support you during your stay.”

Mrs. Schwartz: “What do you mean? I don’t need support. I’m fine, thank you.”

Christopher: “Well, could I make sure you’re receiving kosher food?”

Mrs. Schwartz: “Oh gross. Definitely not.”

Christopher: “Can I bring you a Bible?”

Mrs. Schwartz: “I don’t think I need that.”

Christopher: “Well … perhaps I could call your rabbi to let her know you’re here?”

Mrs. Schwartz: “My what?”

Christopher returns to his supervisor, puzzled, and suggests there may be an error in her chart.

“I don’t think Mrs. Schwartz is actually Jewish.”

That is when I teach about “The Three Bs”: Believing, Behaving and Belonging.

It feels like this model has been part of my toolbox forever, but I learned it from my teacher and friend Rabbi Dr. Naomi Kalish, who adapted it from the writings of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan.

Some Jews express their Judaism primarily through Belief: belief in God, Torah, prayer, or mitzvot.

Others through Behavior: lighting Chanukah candles, hosting a Passover seder, fasting on Yom Kippur, keeping kosher, attending synagogue, or studying Torah.

But many Jews experience Judaism primarily through Belonging: family, humor, memory, shared history, summer camp, Hadassah, mahjong groups, the speech pattern linguists describe as “high-involvement cooperative overlapping,” or just good old “Jewish geography.”

These forms of belonging are not merely cultural accessories. They are covenantal connections; social reflexes and cultural muscle memory that bind Jews to one another across generations.

A Jew may strongly identify with one of these categories, or two, or all three. Before deciding Mrs. Schwartz is “not really Jewish,” I tell the students to listen carefully for signs of one of the Bs. Somewhere in that patient’s life there is often a thread of Jewish belonging that can become a source of comfort, resilience, or meaning.

And perhaps no biblical book illustrates the power of belonging more beautifully than the Book of Ruth.

At its heart, Ruth is a story not about doctrine, but about covenantal connection.

It begins with migration and economic desperation. A family leaves home because famine makes survival impossible. They cross borders searching for security and sustenance. It is difficult to imagine a more recognizably Jewish beginning to a story.

Then tragedy compounds tragedy. Naomi loses her husband. Ruth loses hers. The family structure that once sustained them collapses completely.

What remains is relationship.

Before Ruth ever speaks about God, the text tells us something more subtle, but perhaps more important:

“וְרוּת דָּבְקָה בָּהּ” “And Ruth clung to her.” (Ruth 1:14)

The Hebrew root d-b-k, to cling or cleave, is covenantal language used repeatedly in Deuteronomy to describe Israel “holding fast” to God: “וּבוֹ תִדְבָּק” (see Deuteronomy 10:20 and 13:5).

But in the Book of Ruth, that sacred language describes the bond between two people, between Ruth and Naomi, even as Naomi insists that Ruth’s future depends on letting her go.

After this, Ruth utters her famous declaration:

“כִּי אֶל אֲשֶׁר תֵּלְכִי אֵלֵךְ… עַמֵּךְ עַמִּי וֵאלֹהָיִךְ אֱלֹהָי”
“Where you go, I will go … Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” (Ruth 1:16)

Ruth’s declaration has long been understood as the paradigm for Jewish conversion. But the order of these phrases is so meaningful. Before Ruth speaks about God, she binds herself to Naomi: to her people, her future and her fate.

Indeed, Ruth may be the most profoundly relational book in the Bible. God barely acts directly in the narrative at all. Redemption comes instead through acts of caring: accompanying one another, feeding one another, protecting one another, refusing to abandon.

The rabbis noticed this too. In the midrash Ruth Rabbah they ask why this Megillah was included in Scripture at all:

“This scroll contains no laws of purity or impurity, no prohibitions and no permissions. Why then was it written? To teach how great is the reward of those who perform acts of kindness.” (Ruth Rabbah 2:14)
The Book of Ruth’s holiness emerges not through creed or legal discourse, but through covenantal loyalty and human relatedness. Through belonging.

That is why the Book of Ruth feels so deeply relevant now.

We are living through profoundly lonely times. Many people feel untethered from institutions, neighborhoods, communities, and even their families. Increasingly, people struggle to articulate what they believe. Yet they still long desperately to belong.

But Jews, perhaps especially, have always understood belonging as sacred.

Many Jews who would struggle to explain their theology still know exactly where they belong.

We know which losses feel personal, which melodies make us tear up, who would show up with soup after surgery, whose call you would answer at 2 a.m.

And we know which stories and memories we carry as our own.

These bonds are not secondary to Jewish life. They are themselves deep expressions of covenant, and Ruth reminds us that covenant is sustained not only through mitzvah or ritual, but through the stubborn human act of refusing to let one another go.

So perhaps, this Shavuot, we might ask ourselves about our own Three Bs.

What do we believe?

What Jewish behaviors are important to us?

And most importantly:

Where and with whom do we belong? PJC

Rabbi Kara Tav serves as the rabbi of spiritual care at Congregation Beth Shalom, and as a chaplain at UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital. This column is a service of the Greater Pittsburgh Jewish Clergy Association.