I think so. I would be careful not to approach it as another Ruby (there's a lot of overlap in the ecosystem and community) as there are a lot of things that can and should be done differently.

I'm at a basic level with Elixir (played around a little bit with Erlang first), and so far I'd say definitely - the syntax choices seem very, very good, and it's a pleasure to work with. I can now read Erlang code pretty easily because of this, the concepts and structure are often the same, but introduced in a far more understandable way, and it's felt a hell of a lot smoother than going Erlang first - YMMV of course.