QUESTION
Today when we hear about intermarriage they say that’s the worst thing that could happen to the Jewish people. Yet it seems to infer from the story of Rus that we could get a great prize; that’s how we got malchus Beis Dovid?
ANSWER
If someone will dive off a boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean during a hurricane, let’s say, and he'd be submerged for a minute or two and then he'd come up holding a casket of jewels, so therefore would you say that there's any virtue of diving off the liner in the middle of a hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean? No. It's just his dumb luck. That's all. You don't dive off to look for jewels in the middle of a raging ocean! And anybody who would be happy with an intermarriage because of the hope that it will bring back a jewel, probably will bring up an oyster.
And so in this case it was min haShamayim. It was rigged up. It was one of the mysteries of history that Hakadosh Baruch Hu had planned and that's why it's written in Megillas Rus. But nobody else should attempt to emulate Machlon v’Chilyon because what happened to them will happen to him; and if he won't be destroyed in this world, he'll be destroyed in the World to Come. He's much better off if he's destroyed in this world. At least he'll have the Next World. And anybody who even countenance that – it means if he's even friendly to a relative who has an intermarriage among his children chalilah – then that person who is friendly towards them is also an accomplice and is going to lose out. The only way to deal with such a situation is the way Naomi dealt with it while her sons were still alive. That's hostility and opposition.
