Hi. Welcome. ❤️ 🌱
I’m Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg. I’ll be your cruise director.
Life is a Sacred Text offers liberation-forward nourishment for your heart, soul, and noggin; it's for readers of any, and no, spiritual or religious inclination.
LiST uses ancient stories to help illuminate our lives and to help us to see ourselves and the moment in which we live more clearly.
This is a place where ancient wisdom and historical scholarship can teach us to become our best selves; to do better at the messy business of community care; and learn crucial lessons from those who've defied Empire before us.
And there are occasional side-quests to other intersections around history, culture, Cool Weird Stuff, and deep meaning.
This for everyone—for Jews and non-Jews, for people who believe in God, people who don’t, and people who are kind of *shrug emoji* on the subject.
This is a place to see ourselves more clearly, to illuminate what might have been hard to discern.
Your life is a sacred text.
It can be read in so many ways.
This, maybe, is one of them.
As for me, I’m the award-winning author of eight books, most recently On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in An Unapologetic World, which is a National Jewish Book Award winner, an American Library Association Sophie Brody Honor Medal winner, and has been longlisted for the UK's prestegious Wingate Prize. It's about the work of accountability and transformation in our personal lives, the public square, in institutions and on the national level, and, has been called "A must-read for anyone navigating the work of justice and healing" by Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley.
I was once a Sunday Washington Post crossword clue (83 Down).
I’ve written for outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Newsweek, Time and others, and have doing work fighting for a more just world for over three decades. (Here's something of a manifesto about that.)
Sometimes that's happened in a more formal role–I served as rabbi in an org focusing on economic justice during Trump 1.0 and was deep in the trenches of the world of abortion justice during the years leading up to and beyond the fall of Roe.
My work for change has taken many forms, from anonymous work behind the scenes to preaching from a protest megaphone, from the White House to the holding cell after civil disobedience. My North Star is the belief that we have a moral and religious obligation to care for one another, and to fight for a more just world. My pronouns are she/her.
(I've also won the Lives of Commitment Award from Auburn Seminary, and the Rabbinic Human Rights Hero Award from the human rights organization T’ruah, was named by Newsweek as a “rabbi to watch,” and as a “faith leader to watch” by the Center for American Progress, and all sorts of other nice things.)
A longer (but still condensed) version of my story is at the bottom of this page, if you want more background on who I am, exactly.
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Thanks for being here. Shine big.
If you want a bit more background about the person behind most of this writing:
Here's the tl;dr version of my story (I wrote the whole thing out in a book on taking on a spiritual practice called Surprised By God, if you want the extended dance remix.):
I'm agonizingly Gen X, born mid-70s. I was raised in classic American suburban 1980s Jewry– synagogue a couple of times a year, strong cultural identity. I decided I was an atheist at age 13, the same year (1988) I discovered punk rock. I spent high school reading philosophy and going to shows (which happened at half the time in the cramped basement of some friends' friends). I also cofounded my high school's first GSA/safer sex/abortion rights club with my friend Nicole.
I came out as queer roughly 15 minutes after getting to college. I somehow wound up majoring in Religious Studies, which was like philosophy, but with history and literature smooshed in, too. My mom died when I was in college; as a result, I found myself back in synagogue saying the Mourner's Prayer, but this time, after reading lots of ritual theory in class, it was... different. I could see things in the service that I'd never noticed before. Also, while I was mourning, things got weird, spiritually. A lot of new questions and experiences began to start coming up that were, uh, kind of confusing.
I moved to San Francisco after college because I could, because it was the late '90s and the city hadn't been broken yet; I had a delightful time doing my early 20s in a place where queerness and gender–and spirituality–were doing all sorts of expansive, incredible things. My yearning for a place to continue the Jewish conversation I had begun with myself landed me, almost by accident, in Rabbi Alan Lew's synagogue; five years of following him around developed my burgeoning Jewish spiritual questions into a practice that had both heft and depth. The choice to move from freelance writing to rabbinical school was both complicated and easy, even as it made me the outlier among my motley crew of friends.
My move into the intensive Jewish culture of rabbinical school was strange because I didn't go to Jewish youth group or camp, I didn't go to day school; I definitely did not come to seminary knowing all the tunes for all of the songs that everyone seemed to know, etc. Let's just say that I come honestly by my commitment to make things accessible to people who don't know all the Hebrew terms and so forth.
And I believe there is beauty in my tradition that can transform everyone, just as reading about Julian of Norwich and Muhammad were instrumental to me at various points on my long, weird, winding path.
To clarify: I don't believe in the buffet model of spiritual practice (aka pick a bit from Column A, appropriate a bit from Column B, oh, and here's a Jewy thing that I can do or an Indigenous practice that I can appropriate that seems cool...)– that is, I think you should have a spiritual path that is your path and do that thing only (but, notably, investigating conversion is not the same as stealing someone's stuff to just add to your practice!)
But I do think that we should all read widely, and learn broadly. It only makes us better and wiser and more capable of understanding our own life and our sacred texts (whatever our tradition or culture*) in a more thoughtful way. There's no downside.
*And yes, eg Joy Harjo, Mary Oliver, James Baldwin, Patti Smith and Faith Ringgold -- for starters, I could be here all day-- are sacred texts, I dare anyone to try to argue otherwise. Everyone, I would argue, has sacred texts, whether or not they consciously frame them as such.Anyway, creating a space where there are more benches in the beit midrash is an ongoing process, one that demands that I continue to work to get over and beyond my own biases and the oppressive perspectives I have internalized from our oppressive society. It's an ongoing process, but the most important one. The treasures are here. A lot of people don't have their way in, or have been barred from the door. I'm just trying to serve as the access point, in so many ways. (Also I have a lot of weird ideas, and some of them are pretty good, I think.)
Welcome. I'm so thrilled to have you here.
Whoever you are, wherever you're from, and whatever perspective you're bringing to the conversation.
