The Fall of the House of Orpah
According to the Sages, Ruth and Orpah were sisters, descendents of Eglon
and Balak, kings of Moab. The burden of this inheritance both informed and
influenced the choices that these sisters made. We will discuss how
Providence and human choice interacts to shape the history on individuals
and nations, God willing, next week. For now it suffices to say that as
soon as Orpah stepped off the stage of History she fell and fell far.
Naomi understood that bereft of her guidance Orpah might slip. When Naomi
initially sent her daughters-in-law back, she kissed them. As Ruth Rabbah
to this verse points out, this kiss was not a mere expression of emotion
but constituted a ritual. Naomi breathed into Orpah something of her own
spirit that would accompany her in her sojourn among the idols of Moab.
When Orpah did ultimately leave she gave that kiss back for she no longer
wanted Naomi or her God. She was going back and it will be for her a new
life. Yet, what she had learned in the house of thse Judeans refused to be
forgotten; you might say it pursued her, it did not let her sleep. We can
only imagine what feelings of frustration, anger and self-loathing Orpah
experienced when she returned to the environment in which she grew up but
which now felt foreign, which now disgusted and revolted her. Yet, she
could not go back; her choice was final and could not be undone. To put it
differently she experienced a profound failure. It is not uncommon for
people in such situations to feel such an overwhelming sense of defeat,
such contempt for what they have done that they thrust themselves into the
very depths of degradation, to punish and castigate themselves at the
same time as they vainly attempt to assert the rightness of their actions
before themselves and others. They down the bitter cup to its last dregs.
“The night that Orpah parted from her mother-in-law she was mixed with a
hundred men from a hundred nations. R. Tanchum said: also by one dog, as
it says, ”The Pelishti (Goliath) said to David, Am I a dog?” (Ruth Rabbah
It is crucial at such times to break one’s fall. To what may this be
compared? To a mountain climber who loses his footings and slides down
the steep incline. If he manages to grab onto a branch or an outcropping
of rock and break his fall, there is hope. He may yet reverse his course
and retake the heights that were surrendered. If not, he is truly lost and
falls to the deepest depths.
R. Chaim Shmulevitz used this thought to explain a strange episode
involving the prophet Samuel and King Saul. When Samuel informed Saul that
God rejected him from being the king over Israel, Saul reacted in a truly
perplexing fashion. Instead of arguing, or at the very least begging
forgiveness and beseeching the prophet’s intercession to reverse the
decree, he asks that Samuel join him at a public meal “to honor me in the
eyes of the elders”. Of what ultimate significance is this honor when it
is not destined to last? What purpose, what end would be served by
Samuel’s participation in this empty charade, and yet, he agrees.
“Saul has just been humiliated in an unprecedented way. He had been the
hope of Israel, the chosen and anointed one. He was now totally rejected,
a bitter disappointment, a discarded relic in the course of history. God
has become “disgusted” with him. If he remained in that state of
disappointment, he could never recover and all hopes of a comeback would
be gone. He pleaded with Samuel, “Give me some dignity so that I may break
my fall, so that I may continue and perhaps salvage something of my life
(Reb Chaim’s Discourses, ArtScroll,1998, p. 16)”.
Oprah did not do so. In relating to us what happened to her that night,
the Sages not only present Orpah and Ruth as a metaphysical parable of
good and evil and reveal a view of history as a process of Redemption,
they also take an opportunity to teach an important psychological and
moral insight. The hundred men from a hundred nations represent one
direction in which humanity has traveled ever since Sinai – toward
rebellion against the Almighty and his onerous rules. The addition of the
dog to the parable points out to us that this direction leads not to the
romantic Byronian rebels, revolutions against injustice, individual
against tyranny, even if the tyranny is that of God’s law. No, this
rebellion leads to the loss of the Image of God, to the generation
whose “face if the face of a dog”. It leads man away from what is finest
in humanity, straight down into inner recesses of degradation, and not as
Romantic imagined to full expression of man’s grandeur as man.
The ultimate outcome of Oprah’s failure of nerve was that she joined the
forces of evil.
She returned to the fields of Moab but because she was wanton, they did
not accept her. She went to the land of Philistines where she bore six
bastards. All of them fell by the hand of David, the descendent of Ruth
(Zohar Chadash, Ruth 81b).
In reward of the four tears that Orpah shed over Naomi, the punishment of
her son Goliath was suspended forty days (Ruth Rabbah 20:2)
The exegetical basis for these statements seem to be identification of
Orpah with Haruphah in the book of Samuel II, 21:15-22 which speaks of the
four mighty warriors who fought against David, Goliath among them (R. M.
Eisemann, A Pearl in the Sand, Reflections on Shavuos, Ruth and Davidic
The sons of the “kissed one” fell before the sons of the “one who clung
The power of Naomi’s kiss did not help Orpah. Instead it was returned and
misdirected into a course that opposed Hashem’s plan for humankind. Orpah
did not simply fade into obscurity. She produced the worst enemies of
Israel. She could not longer access redemption and the only promise that
the future held for her was that of utter destruction in the course of
Text Copyright © 2005 by Rabbi Dr. Meir Levin and Torah.org.