It Made Sense at the End

Naomi and her daughters-in-law (Chagall, 1960)

On this Sunday morning the passing of Justice Ginsburg prompts this reflection about her first name, Ruth. (I'm old enough to remember when the first name was called the Christian name, but that term has fallen out of favor.)

In the Book of Ruth Naomi and her husband and two sons left Judah for Moab to escape famine. The sons married two Moabite women, Ruth and Orpah (fun fact--Oprah Winfrey was named after the Biblical character Orpah, but Oprah changed her name due to constant mispronunciation). All three men died, and the three widows faced a bleak future.

Naomi decided to seek refuge with her relations in Judah and encouraged Orpah and Ruth to return to their families in Moab; both were young enough to find husbands and bear children. Orpah did go back to Moab after some protest, but Ruth stayed with Naomi:

But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.”--Ruth 1:16-17

Ruth's willingness to sacrifice her own future to accompany Naomi has served as a model to generations of Jews and Christians who have been confronted with a similar decision. (Spoiler alert: it works out for Ruth in the end, but it was far from certain that it would.) Ruth is a name with a virtuous antecedent, and being called "ruthless" is not a compliment.

Inspired by the birth of "Baby Ruth" to President and Mrs. Grover Cleveland in 1891, Ruth ("compassionate friend") was a popular girls' name in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In my own family my maternal grandmother and her sisters--Ruth, Esther, Sarah, Eunice, and Bertha--were all named after women in the Bible. My grand-aunt Ruth was the eldest and thus received the first choice of girls' names.

Branches of modern philosophy say that meaning does not exist but is an artifact of the human mind. That may be true, but for your humble blogger people and their names grow old together until the name becomes inextricably linked with the individual. They have meaning together.

It's difficult to imagine Ruth Bader Ginsburg--or for that matter my grand-aunt Ruth--being known by a different name. Somehow it made sense at the end.