GEN1190 People appeal to us all the time to trust them, hoping that we won’t dig too deeply to discover why we shouldn’t. So many scam artists abound in today’s world that we are more likely to suspect someone who comes right out and says “trust me,” then to grant that person our confidence. In most cases we base our judgment on our estimate of that person’s general character. The final arbiter often is no more sound then “gut instinct.” The Bible provides two cases of women whose wise judgment led them to put their lives in another’s trust.   Abraham’s servant Eliezer wants Rebecca to accompany him to Canaan to marry Isaac, a cousin she’s never met.   Her father Bethuel and her brother Laban want Rebecca to stay with them a while longer, so they “call the maiden and ask her to speak for herself.” In response to their question, “Will you go with this man?” Rebecca replies, “I will go” [this verse]. Rebecca thus relies on an indefinable intuition and judges Eliezer so trustworthy that she leaves her family to go with him, traveling for several hundred miles to begin a new life in an unknown land. After Naomi’s husband and two sons die in Moab, she decides to return to her people in Israel. Naomi urges her Moabite daughters-in-law to return to their father’s homes.   Orpah obeys, but Ruth will not abandon her mother-in-law: “Entreat me not to leave you or turn back   from following you. For where you go, I will go; and where you lodge, I will lodge.  Your people will be my people, and your God, my God. Where you die, there will I die, and there will why be buried. Let Adonai do what He wants with me if anything but death parts me from you” Ruth 1:16 – 17 Trusting Naomi, Ruth offers to her this classic gift of self. We can’t explain why; the biblical authors provide these stories to show us that sometimes we must give ourselves to that component of emunah we call faith, as Rebecca and Ruth did. And we hope to become the kind person who deserves such trust. We can’t program ourselves with a specific set of behaviors to elicit such feelings, yet we sense that, if our basic characters are worthy enough, they will shine through and speak for themselves, as Eliezer’s and Naomi’s did.   BOROJMV 30-31