Uncharted Territory
all of us, together, crayon in hand
This is Life as a Sacred Text 🌱, an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives. It‘s run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:
TW: Heavy Mortality Feelings
We're entering, together, a chapter of Life is a Sacred Text– and a chapter of my life– that is beyond anything I could have ever anticipated.
I'm so honored to have you on this wild ride with me. And, well, I, and we, will just need to feel my– our– way into the next part.
On the personal level? OK, let's get personal: Tomorrow, I turn 51.
The 30th anniversary of my mother's death from cancer is both this weekend and next week (ie both Jewish and Gregorian dates). She died a couple of weeks after her 51st birthday, after an initial diagnosis a couple of years earlier.
Intellectually, I get that she and I are different people, that there's no reason that our paths should meet here when they have diverged in so many other places, but as Hope Edelman observed in Motherless Daughters, when kids who've lost parents hit the age that their parents were when they died, they tend to get a bit squirrelly. Especially if there's gender overlap and/or other kinds of identification.
(It's possible that I spent some of last year having some Squirrelly Feelings.)
It's not that I ever consciously thought that I'd be gone by now– it's just that, well, the possibility of things happening has been so deeply carved into the grooves of my trauma (and I can articulate this because of decades of therapy, OK) that... I just never pictured myself reaching this age, necessarily?
Anyway, I hit 50 last year with some surprise, and a crafting party (as one does).
This one feels a bit like the year of Harold and the Purple Crayon.
That is to say: For my first decade and a half after ordination, I did a bunch of things a good rabbi was supposed to do–and loved doing them, mostly. Then, two years ago it became clear that my heart, energy, and passion were in this project, which had begun as a side lark in 2021 (even then, somewhat against my own better judgement. Intuition FTW– always tune to the Divine Radio Station.)
We've finished the Torah. Four and a half years of voyaging through, (much of which was mapped out at the beginning of each Book) with room for digressions between Books and as urgent matters emerged, but so often letting the structure of the Books drive our journey.
Even as someone whose primary means of – processing, existing, whatever – is words, I find that I'm at something of a loss when it comes to communicating just how much it means to me that there are so many of you here, on this journey with me.
Where everything is unwritten.
Where there's no plan, other than the one we decide to create together.
Where (oh, let's just own this metaphor) as someone who's never particularly thrived in spaces in which I was expected to color inside the lines, the trust, opportunity and freedom that this community enables is both daunting and so, so exhilarating. 💜
Now, we get to wander in and out of the prophetic books, allowing their truth-telling and calls for collective responsibility to light our way in a time of burnout, moral rot and despair.
Now, we can draw from all the pots– from U.S. history, mystical thought, the news, the Talmud, wherever we want– to help us get where we need to go.
Now maybe I'll have a chance to write everything I wish more people knew based on my last few decades of organizing and activism – whether spiritual frameworks or practical skills– so more of us can thrive and mobilize.
Now we also have time to just, like, goof around with ideas, practice connection and joy even in this still-broken world. (We all need some of that, too, yeah?)
Now, together, we can make this project even bigger and more expansive, allow it to serve even more people, use this space to build a movement for collective liberation while we all navigate the daily work of becoming.
If you're in?
As it turns out, thank God, I don't have anywhere else I need to be.
And hey, apropos of everything, Monday was Tu BiShvat, the New Year of the Trees. Kind of fits: The beginning of a season of blooming, of things coming to fruition.
I'm so thrilled to have you in this community, and looking forward to creating this new space together with you:
Let me know in the comments what you want this next iteration of LiST to look like?
And hey, if there's someone that you think might dig the new–prophetic and beyond– chapter of Life is a Sacred Text, will you send this to them? I want to make sure that everybody who might want to be at this party is here. ❤️
xoxo
RDR
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Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg
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