On Sunday night we begin the Jewish festival of Shavuot, known in English as Pentecost. For us it’s the anniversary of the giving of the law at Mount Sinai, when the Israelites received their constitution as a nation under the sovereignty of G-d.

But it’s also the time when we read the story of Ruth, one of the gentlest and loveliest books of the Bible. It’s about two women: Naomi an Israelite, and her daughter in law Ruth, a Moabite. Naomi’s husband and two sons have died, leaving her and Ruth as childless widows. Naomi tells Ruth that they should now part and rebuild their separate lives. But Ruth refuses to leave Naomi on her own. She accompanies her on her journey home, and there a distant relative, Boaz, helps them and then marries Ruth. From that marriage, three generations later, David was born, Israel’s greatest king.

The whole story is about what we call chessed, usually translated as loving kindness, and one of the reasons we read it on the anniversary of the giving of the law is to remind us that we cannot live by law alone. A society needs chessed, kindness, that unlegislated prompting of the heart that makes us sensitive to the needs of others. Ruth is about what Tennessee Williams called the kindness of strangers.

Yesterday the government unveiled its bill to ban incitement to religious hatred. And hatred is dangerous wherever it appears. Sadly it still scars the human landscape in conflict zones throughout the world. Even here in Britain, one of the pioneers of tolerance in the modern world, there are still racial and religious tensions.

And so we try, through law, to strike a balance between conflicting freedoms: freedom of expression on the one hand, freedom from assault on our most basic identity on the other. Law matters. It’s the architecture of a just and gracious social order, which is why, in Judaism, we celebrate Shavuot, the festival of the giving of the law.

But the book of Ruth tells the other side of the story: that law alone is not enough. In ancient times the Israelites and Moabites were enemies. What brought Naomi the Israelite and Ruth the Moabite together was something other and deeper than law. It was chessed, the generosity of imagination that allows us to recognise and respect the image of God in the face of a stranger, whose culture and history is different than ours. We still need it today.

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