William Blake wrote, “In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.”

The biblical Book of Ruth is one of those doors. It is an enigma. Just 85 verses long, it tells the improbable story of two widows, homeless and left with nothing but each other, who make a momentous decision that changes Judaism.

The story is simple. A family flees famine and settles in a different country. The sons marry. The father and both sons die. One daughter-in-law travels with the mother back to her home.

There, the young woman meets a wealthy landowner, marries him, and has a son. The son, Obed, has a son named Jesse. Jesse has a son named David, whom we know as King David.

Yet the seemingly simple tale is riddled with inconsistencies and unanswered questions.

Why did Ruth plead to follow Naomi? She would likely have been better off staying in her homeland. Moabite women were considered unacceptable as brides in Judea, their foremothers having seduced the men of Israel in the desert and lured them into pagan practices. (See Numbers, chapter 25.)

Why did Naomi allow Ruth to accompany her? Did she feel unbearably alone after the deaths of her husband and sons? Had she longed for a daughter? Even so, did she not worry about returning home with a stranger in tow?

Why did the people of Bethlehem accept Ruth the Moabite? Why didn’t Boaz worry about Ruth’s background? It seems odd that a man, widely respected, would risk his reputation because of a young foreign woman.

Boaz — and, it seems, everyone in the city — accepted Ruth as Naomi’s daughter, conveniently overlooking the fact that she was both a foreigner and a widow.

The story is filled with questions and riddles, impossible to answer.

But if we rename the book, the answer is clear. The heroine of the story is not Ruth. It is Naomi. And Naomi is, to my mind, the quintessential woman of valor — a role model for both women and men.

Naomi’s story is one of fortitude, resolve, compassion, and commitment.

She returns home knowing people will recognize and pity her. She knows it will be difficult, especially because she brings with her a stranger.

She willingly takes under her wing a younger woman seeking a better life, and she goes out of her way to ensure that Ruth achieves it.

Her complete acceptance of Ruth is what allows the story to unfold as it does. Boaz is a relative by marriage, a kinsman of Naomi’s deceased husband, yet he marries Ruth on Naomi’s behalf.

Ruth becomes the ancestress of King David. But it is Naomi who created the doorway into the future.

Perhaps that is why the story remains in our Bible: not only to explain where David came from, but to remind us that Judaism itself survives because someone opened the door to the outsider, the vulnerable, and the unexpected.

Naomi does exactly that. She stands at Blake’s threshold between the known and the unknown and chooses compassion over fear.

And perhaps that door still stands before us now — a door into the future of Judaism itself.