Your Co-Conspirator

that is, who's behind this project

yes, hi, that's approximately what I look like. My pronouns are she/her, more or less. (Image of a white person with grey hair that used to be brown, with glasses, hoop earrings, lipstick, and a lapis necklace on a ball chain because Xer fashion dies hard ok)

Who's behind this project, anyway?

Hi, I'm Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg. 👋

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 was longlisted for the UK's prestigious 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.)

My work for change has taken many forms. Sometimes that's happened in a more formal role–I worked to mobilize the broader Jewish community around economic justice during Trump 1.0 and organized 2500 Jewish clergy around abortion justice during the years leading up to and beyond the fall of Roe.

And more often, my organizing and activism has been an extension of, or in addition to, other things. It's included everything 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.

(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.

And yes, I believe there is beauty in my tradition that can transform everyone, religious or not, just as reading about Julian of Norwich and Muhammad were instrumental to me at various points on my long, weird, winding path.*

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.

**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!)

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Danya teaching, brown bangs, grey cardigan, black tank top, chunky silver necklace, caught talking with her hands and a smile on her face — yes, I talk with my hands (Image of a white person with brown bangs back in a bun, with glasses, in a grey sweater and black shirt smiling as she teaches in a very... animated way, as she doesn't really know how else to do it.)

If you want even more background about the person behind most of this writing:

Here's the tl;dr version of my story (I wrote even more about all this 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. (We were doing abortion clinic defense and wound up getting an amazing activist education being mentored by the local Queer Nation/ACT-UP folks who were part of this universe, too. That's really the beginning of my political story.)

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.

Anyway, creating a space where there are more benches in the beit midrash (study house) 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.

❤️

Here's something of a manifesto, if you want to get a sense of things around here: