Tami Simon: Hello friends. My name is Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True Podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium, transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows, including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us. Explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at Join.SoundsTrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg. Rabbi Danya serves as a scholar in residence at the National Council of Jewish Women. She’s the award-winning author of numerous books, including Surprised by God and Nurture the Wow. She was named by Newsweek and The Daily Beast as one of the top 10 rabbis to watch, and by Forward as one of the top 50 most influential women rabbis, and called “a wunderkind of Jewish feminism” by Publishers Weekly.
With Sounds True, Rabbi Danya is the author of a new eight-part audio series. It’s called Mend the World: Spiritual Tools for Healing, Repair and Justice.
Rabbi Danya is someone who speaks uncomfortable truths and this is the essence of having what she calls a prophetic voice, which is certainly a voice that we need at a time like this. Here’s my conversation with Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg.
Rabbi Danya, right here at the beginning, can you share with our listeners a bit about you and what brought you to the decision to become a rabbi?
Danya Ruttenberg: Well, I was raised in a very kind of typical American suburban Jewish household and I had a bat mitzvah, but I wasn’t taught what it meant. We went to a synagogue a couple times a year. We did a Passover Seder. By the time I was 13, I decided I was an atheist. I was interested in philosophy and by the time I got to college, I somehow stumbled into the religious studies department by accident. It was interesting, right? It was history and it was literature and it was what really happened and it’s the mysteries of what we can piece together with archeology and it’s textual analysis and living, it’s living philosophy, basically. I didn’t have to believe what the people in these texts believed. Then, when I was 21, my mother died of cancer. I had run her hospice, it’s a whole … about six-month story of finding out that the cancer had come back and being back and forth.
Then, the six weeks of her hospice. And when she died, we did the funeral Jewishly because this is how you do a funeral. People came to our house for a week and brought us food and took care of us, which is called sitting shiva, because this is what you do. I said the mourner’s prayer during these times and I kept going back to synagogue to say the mourner’s prayer because that’s what you do. Because I had spent all of this time reading books on ritual theory, I was able to open up the prayer book and kind of go, “Oh, that’s what that is.” And to see what was happening there in a new way and to understand it in a new way. At the same time in grief, I became open … just open, was broken open, in a totally … a way I had never encountered and began having what I would now call mystical experiences.
At the time, it’s just … I would have these experiences of everything kind of blurring and connecting and I didn’t know what to call them and I went looking for language. And so…
TS: Can we just pause right there on that?
DR: Yes.
TS: Can you tell me more? If we were to put it under a magnifying glass for a moment, when you say, “I was having mystical experiences and everything blurring,” what was actually happening? Because some nice people refer to these things and it’s a little vague and it’s a little … what was actually going on?
DR: Okay, so here’s the story, is I would walk around Providence, Rhode Island — which is where I was my last year of college — at night and kind of listen to checkoffs, get my Walkman and cry, and look at the moon and I’d stop and I’d look at the stop sign or the shadows on the sidewalk or whatever and suddenly, everything just first felt very sharp. It was very, very, very present and very clear in my head, in a way that I’d never been. Then, I don’t know, the lines between me and everything else just didn’t seem so clear. It just felt like there was some… that sense of where I began and everything else ends, didn’t feel so defined. It felt a little blurrier on the edges.
TS: Okay, so some kinds of unitive awareness.
DR: Yes, and later on after I began meditating seriously, I would have more extreme experiences of experiencing oneness and really feeling the oneness of all things rising and falling and just changing shape, but here it was just that fuzziness, that beginning, that understanding that the lines of myself and the lines of everything else might not be so clearly defined as it was thought of them, and a lot of this happened while I was staring at the moon and there was just this big bigness and … I know I’m condensing like a three-year process into a couple of sentences, but in my search, I eventually started using the word spirituality to describe these experiences. When I started allowing that word in, the experiences got bigger and later on, I started allowing the word God to come in.
The experiences, boom, boom, boom, boom, got way bigger. It’s like the fish that keeps growing when you give it a bigger tank. So the more space I was allowing myself to have, the further I was able to go, almost.
TS: Okay, and then, becoming a rabbi, because I think many people, especially in the contemporary world, decide “I’m spiritual but not religious and no way am I going to take on all of that ancient language that’s been passed down mostly written by men, within a certain set of constraints. No way, I’m not taking that on. There’s so much that doesn’t fit.” So how did you step into it and go, “No, this is for me.”
DR: Let us establish that by the time I got to college, I was an atheist and quickly after college, I was out as queer. I was very established in my non-patriarchal point of view, shall we say. By the time I was at all interested in Judaism — and after college I had finished saying my 11 months of mourner’s prayer, at which point, I had discovered that maybe Judaism wasn’t so stupid after all and that maybe there was some deeper knowledge and that I had something to learn there.
So I moved to San Francisco after college because I could, because it was the late 90s and why wouldn’t you? I said, “Okay, I guess I need to know what synagogue I would go to, in case I ever wanted to go to a synagogue, not that I necessarily want to, but you never know.”
I checked out many, many places. It was like a very Goldilocks experience. There are very, very many flavors of Judaism in the Bay Area and I’m glad that everybody can find the thing that is right for them and there were a lot of flavors that were not right for me. I was almost at the end of my rope and I sort of said, “Okay, I’ll check out this conservative synagogue at the end of the bus line in the Richmond.”
I walked in and I sat down and the services felt correct and then, the rabbi opened his mouth. His name was Rabbi Alan Lew, may his memory be for a blessing. He was a Gadol. He was a great, great teacher. As it happened, interesting for this community, he was a Buddhist for 20 years until he realized that he was a Jew named Alan from Brooklyn.
He sort of said he meditated down to his spiritual essence and his spiritual essence was a Jew named Alan from Brooklyn. He wound up finding his way to rabbinical school, but the Torah that he taught came from this place of intense stillness, and his message was that this book is the story of all of our unfolding spiritual experiences and relationships with the divine, right now. My mind kind of went [BOOM] and I followed him around for five years, and my relationship to things like keeping kosher and Shabbat and taking on serious Jewish practice, and understanding the Jewish practice is like a portable monastery that can change and transform you, it’s all his fault, basically.
The still small voice from within started to kind of go, “rabbinical school?” very, very soon after I got to Bet Shalom, Rabbi Lew, and I ignored it and it got louder and louder and louder and at a certain point, I had to listen.
TS: The power of a mentor, interestingly, the power of someone who’s embodying tradition and how that inspired you. Now when you mentioned him, you said, “May his memory be for a blessing,” and you said that, kind of, I guess because that’s what a rabbi says when a rabbi is referring to a deceased person, but what does that mean?
DR: So in Judaism when someone dies, we knowledge that they’re kind of still with us, that the ways that their memory and everything that they left us still offers us so many gifts, and that their physical presence is not with us anymore, but everything that we have learned from them and all of the ways that they have touched us continue to give us unfolding blessings in so many ways. So we acknowledged that with this little phrase as we mention their name.
TS: Now, Rabbi Danya, with Sounds True, you’ve created this eight-session audio series called Mend the World and you referenced in your own journey to becoming a rabbi that at certain point, the still small voice inside started talking to you. In this series towards the beginning you help people connect with their still small voice in a very interesting way. I was really surprised by this and to be honest, I was kind of shocked awake, and that, we can allow our still small voice to actually emit a scream. I wanted to understand more about why this is an important practice to you, how we do it, and how a still small voice screams?
DR: We’re talking about the Rabbi Nachman practice.
TS: Yes.
DR: So Rabbi Nachman of Breslov was a great Hasidic teacher in 19th century, in what is now Ukraine, and he spent a lot of time kind of off alone, vibing, I think would be the contemporary word, and he developed a number of really powerful spiritual practices, one of which is this ability to sort of do an inner scream, a silent scream, a scream within yourself, within your mind, within your soul, within your heart, almost without saying a word. It is so powerful and I wanted to share it with people. I think it can be a really, really powerful tool for expressing feelings that have been trapped. I think it can be a really powerful tool for lifting up that which we’ve buried and for just giving space to that, which has been waiting patiently to be expressed and that we need to give space to, in order to be freed up for any other purpose in this world.
That it’s a distraction and just being able to let go emotionally and spiritually, and to give not just our thanks and our praise and our request to the divine, but also to offer up our screams, why not that too? It still is Torah. So I think it’s really important for all of these reasons, both because we have all of these screens inside and we need a variety of ways to express them, some verbally when we are in the place that that’s what can be done and to have other kinds of practices for other times, but also, to be able to name that our screams are holy, our agony is holy, our desperation is holy, our pain is holy, and we can lift this too up and to offer it up and say, “Here, take it.”
TS: It’s beautiful. Our agony is holy.
DR: Yes.
TS: Towards the beginning of this series on Mending the World, you talk about how we need to allow our bodies and hearts to process the stories of harm that we read in the news, that we hear about, that we know about, that we’re in touch with. I thought to myself, so often I don’t allow my body to fully process what I read and hear about in the world. If anything, I actually become a little, I would say, dissociated or something, like I’m kind of doomscrolling and there’s no way I’m letting my body and heart process all of that. I don’t even think I could, even if I wanted to, I’d be screaming all the time. So tell me more about that, how do we actually allow our bodies and hearts? Is that even possible to process what’s happening in the world right now?
DR: So listen, we can’t process everything fully. There is so much pain and harm in the world. I want to acknowledge that, and if all we do is scroll and scroll and scroll and pretend that none of it matters, if we pretend that none of it matters to us in an existential way, that is terrible for us spiritually, that act of dissociation, that act of numbing is terrible for us spiritually and it’s terrible for us as citizens, as people who are supposed to let things matter to us, and we cannot be open wounds 24/7 about suffering happening halfway across the world because we do need to go about our days and yet we need to make space for it. We need to acknowledge the pain.
So dedicating space and time to experience those feelings I think is really, really critical and actually, I have a new book that’s out, On Repentance and Repair, that also talks about our obligations as bystanders of harm when we live in a world where we are constantly witnesses to this ongoing suffering and what’s our role as bystanders, as receivers, as secondary participants of harm. So, we need to think through it spiritually and we need to think through it morally as well, in terms of what are our obligations here and though we can’t do everything, that doesn’t mean that we can’t do anything.
TS: What do you see as our obligations? We think, “Well, that’s not… that’s happening over there. I’m not really involved with that. That happened before I was born. That’s not really mine. I’m working on… I’m dealing with… I got enough on my plate right here just with my family.”
DR: Well, On Repentance and Repair, there’s a lot to say about obligations and the ways we can mend the harm in our own relationships and in our own lives and institutions. Ultimately, we have to do something. We have to pick our place on the boat, right? We need all hands on deck, and there’s a lot of deck. So we need to figure out what our sphere of influence is, and to do that and to know that we cannot fix anything single-handedly, and that sort of savior mentality isn’t useful anyway in the work of justice. We cannot be useful in every sphere, but we can show up somewhere and help on something and work actively and regularly somewhere to make things better, and if everybody did that on something, then we would start to lift some boats, right? We would start to lift up a lot of the pain that’s in the world.
TS: Now, one of the curious things for me has been being deep into, I also majored in religious studies, deep into spiritual literature, reading a lot of Eastern traditions and seeing even through the work of Sounds True, many people who have mystical experiences, the world melts, they know they’re interdependent, but yet it doesn’t translate necessarily into a form of all-hands-on-deck activism. And I’ve often tried to understand why for some people it does translate and why for other people their life still seems… people talk about it as the wellness bubble or the spiritual bubble, some kind of bubble and I’m curious what your view is of that.
DR: It makes me a little bonkers, to be honest. Because if we are interlinked with all things and interconnected with all things, and I believe that we are, and I’ve had experiences that testify to that fact on a spiritual level. And of course my experiences are not complete external reality just as everybody else’s are not, but I too have had this experience described by mystics of every tradition. If we are interlinked with everything, that doesn’t just mean the trees and the flowers and the people we like. It means the people who are suffering in wars that our government started, and that means the girls who are taking off their hijabs in Iran and getting brutalized by government police as a result, that means that earth that is currently in absolute crisis is part of our interlinked destiny.
It means that the people who are losing their autonomy and their dignity and sometimes their lives, because Roe [vs. Wade] has been rolled back, are part of what we are interlinked with. It means that the trans people who are under attack nationwide are part of who we are interlinked with, and that interlinking involves obligation. It’s not just about a narcissistic, groovy feeling, for me personally. It’s about recognizing my interconnected obligation to the whole and recognizing that my purpose here on earth is to serve the interconnected whole. That is to say, other people and the earth.
TS: Okay, let me just push a little for a moment, Rabbi Danya.
DR: Okay.
TS: Because imagine someone who says, “My job on the deck is to sit here in radiant, full lotus yoga posture sending out rainbow waves. That’s my job on the deck”. What do you think?
DR: For people who think that their job is to sit, radiant on the deck and to … I don’t know what, bring-
TS: “I’m bringing the light, I’m bringing the rainbow light. I’m sitting here, I’m bringing the rainbow light.” Isn’t that a job on the deck too?
DR: I believe that we are a world in extreme, extreme pain. And we need people who are going to show up and help and be ready to move chairs and get coffee and make the Xeroxes so to speak, and we need teachers for sure. We absolutely need people who are going to hand over the tools of resilience, the tools of drawing from the deep well. The tools of ancient knowledge and the tools of staying connected through the long, long fight, no question.
We need teachers. We need people who are going to pass on ancient tools. We need people who are going to help people to draw from the deep, deep well. We need people who are going to be offering up tools for resilience, for understanding the big picture, for seeing what the work is really about, for maintaining love, even when it gets hard.
For understanding the deeper meanings of solidarity. We need teachers, absolutely. No, I do not believe that sitting on the deck not doing anything is part of the project. That is my personal belief. I think we need people showing up in roles and that is very Jewish of me, I recognize and I believe that how we serve is by showing up and taking care of other people. That’s the work.
Tami Simon: Now, in the series, Mend the World, you talk about the prophetic voice and that I think many of us are feeling a call to embody a type of prophetic voice at this time. I wanted to understand more. One, what you mean by that? And two, what we can learn from the Jewish tradition about the prophetic voice that can help us now?
DR: So the ancient prophets… and I’m talking about the ones in the Bible — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos — all of them spoke uncomfortable truth. That was their role was to say things that were not always easy to hear and who they were saying them to and how they were saying them to differ, depending on their roles. Isaiah was in the court and so he was constantly saying to the king, “You are making a bad decision. Don’t become friends with the Babylonians. They are not your friends. This is going to lead us down the wrong path. Our vision for a moral world looks like this, not like that. Stop with the political scheming and keep your eye on the ball.”
Then he would say to the people, “You’re getting too wrapped up in the ritual stuff and you’re forgetting that the whole point of our tradition is to take care of those who are socially marginalized, to feed the hungry, to not exploit your workers. This is the fast I desire.”
He said, “I don’t care if you go to synagogue in your fancy suits, so to speak, but rather, the fast I desire is that you feed the hungry. That’s what God wants, whether or not you make it to the service, 7:00 exactly on the dot, is not the point. The point is that you walk by a homeless person and you didn’t even make eye contact. What Judaism is that, right?” That’s Isaiah.
And then, you have Jeremiah who is an outsider, who is… basically he’s giving over the same kinds of messages but from a different point in society and he is reviled because of it. He doesn’t have that sort of insider posh situation and he’s taking different kind of risks and he’s paying significantly higher prices as a result.
That prophetic voice is about risking something from where you are in order to speak important truths about who we need to be, about how we have lost our way morally, about finding our integrity, about caring for … about showing up in solidarity, about our work needing to focus on those who are most socially marginalized, about letting those who are most marginalized lead, even though it might be most comfortable to keep your mouth shut and to let whoever is in charge continue hugging the mic, right? When prophetic voice is not… having a prophetic voice is not comfortable. It is not easy. There is sometimes a price. And for us to follow in the footsteps of the great and holy who came before us is, I believe, sometimes a moral necessity.
Definitely, it’s an option for us in our change-making work. There are times when we know that we can open our mouths and say the thing that needs to be said and we can make a decision about whether or not we are going to be that person.
TS: Can you give an example of a time when you exercised your prophetic voice and had to pay a price for it, what was the price?
DR: Good God. The number of times, I… throughout rabbinical school in my early career, I was continually saying, “Well, what about ..? Well, what about ..?” I was the one in our Talmud class who would say, “This is very nice that we’re talking calmly and coolly about what’s actually the sexual abuse of women, and I understand that this is a very interesting literary technique, but can we name what’s happening here, people?”
I brought a friend who is trans to school, to answer people’s questions. This was 25 years ago. Trans folks’ lives and needs were not as well understood as they are… so that rabbis could be better equipped to serve trans congregants. My friend obviously thought this was a great idea and was happy to participate, and got screamed at by a dean because what if The Jewish Journal found out? Yes, and I paid a number of institutional prices for that kind of thing.
And making some decisions about what are the stories to tell. More recently I — it’s public — made the decision to make a substantial donation to an organization that supports survivors of sex trafficking as an offset to time that I’d participated in a fellowship run by somebody who, I didn’t know it at the time of applying, was an associate of Jeffrey Epstein’s and I’ve gotten… let’s just say I’ve gotten a very mixed reception in my community as a result of that choice. Because I named a very uncomfortable truth that a lot of people in my community have not wanted to look at.
TS: Now, you brought that up and interestingly, your new book, which you referenced On Repentance and Repair, this whole notion of: are we willing to take the actions of repair? And there you are, embodying that, Rabbi Danya. Good work.
DR: Thank you. I mean, just for me, the work of repentance — and it’s not a feeling that you have in your heart — it’s a set of actions and On Repentance and Repair is about taking what I think are my… in my mind, is this five steps of the work of repentance. And they’re all very victim-centric, and applying them to a number of things in our modern world, both our contemporary personal lives but also very significant public problems like sexual abuse and systemic racism. There are five steps and they’re concrete steps. There are things you do. So, you have to put your money where your mouth is, proverbially or literally sometimes.
TS: Can you tell us the five steps?
DR: Number one, confession, own your harms fully, completely. No hedging. No “what I meant,” no “my good intentions.” We don’t care, just name what you did. Really face it and ideally publicly because then you A, have accountability. You’re telling people that you’re going on a journey of change and transformation and you now are going to be having backup in that process, and B, it’s an end to gaslighting for the victim. That you are now naming fully what happened and it was real and now, everybody sees that you know that end. Whoever didn’t believe them now sees that it’s putting the truth fully out there in the world, confession.
Number two, start to change. If you’re still the same person causing harm, where we’re not getting anywhere. So you have to … what therapy is it? Doubling down on prayer and meditation but with a spiritual guide who’s going to help move you from where you’ve been? Is it calling your sponsor? Is it ditching the friends that are always the bad influences and help you make bad choices? Is it going on a journey of learning about anti-racism in a new way? I don’t know, what was the harm? What is the need for learning and growth? You have to grow. You have to grow.
Step three, amends. What does the person who was harmed need? What do they want? You can never undo what you have done, but what would help sew up the hole in the cosmos that you created? And that’s done in conversation with them, not at them. Note, that the person asking amends is already the person who’s on the journey for change. We’re not asking somebody who’s totally uncooked to show up at the victim, right? We need them to be already doing the work.
Then apology, which is flowing organically from an open heart that’s already doing this work and genuinely, finally, starting to get it as opposed to somebody who’s checking off a box or God forbid, as their publicist, writing something, right?
Then finally, step five, when the opportunity arises to cause that harm again, and there’s always an opportunity to cause that harm again, you make a different choice. You have changed. You have transformed. You don’t do that harm anymore. So you go in a different direction.
TS: Very powerful. I do want to share that in preparing for this conversation, and here in talking with you, I have committed to a series of repair steps that I was considering, but I wasn’t sure of, but I think the strength of your soul force made it 100% something that I had to do, so thank you. Now, I want to go back to this notion of the prophetic voice for a moment.
Speaking uncomfortable truths, because it seems like there’s sort of pitfall which is in the world of influencers and everybody wants the mic to speak what they want to say, that the prophetic voice can be distorted into, “I’d like the stage, please, to say what’s on my mind.” It’s not really speaking the prophetic voice, it’s more speaking a kind of
self-aggrandizing need for attention. So how do we sort that out for ourselves when we feel called to pick up the mic?
DR: That’s a good question. I mean, this is where the work of spiritual practice is so necessary because it can help us to take that pause, to take those breaths, to do some discernment work, and I really believe that the best spiritual practice is not done in isolation. We need community and we need people who can be our partners in the work of discernment.
In Judaism, we talk about Havrutot, your study partner. The person that’s … Haver is friend and Havruta is the person who is classically your study partner in classical Jewish text. You picture the two people are talking across the table over a page of Talmud, that’s your Havruta. We have Havrutot in all sorts of things in our lives like, “Hey, can I check in with you about this thing?”
Sometimes when we’re just meditating us and ourselves, we can get kind of caught in the circles of our head and our unhealed trauma and our whatever else and having other people with whom we can check in and say, “Check me on this. Am I right? Is this the right thing? Would this be correct?” This is really critical. So for example, when I made the decision to donate that money, I wrote out a statement and then, I sent it first to one group of dear friends to say, “Hey, workshop this, check me. Am I on track here? Is this even the right thing to say or do?” I got some really important feedback from people who are trauma therapists and experts in all sorts of things that are relevant.
Then, I sent it to another group of people who know this community well. Who are all either survivors of sexual abuse and/or people who work in that field and got some more feedback because… and these are people that I would trust to tell me if I was on the wrong track, people who I would trust to say, “No, this is not it. You shouldn’t do this. This is a bad idea.”
We all need people in our lives that we can trust, who will tell us no. Sometimes when it’s time to exercise big prophetic voice, we need those people first. When it’s time to speak up about the racism in a joke that’s being made in real time in your staff meetings, sometimes you just got to open your mouth and say, “That’s not right,” and you have to just own your moral code and own your understanding of what’s fair and just. You need to be able to say, “Well, I have noticed that only men are on this panel. I have noticed that this policy would be absolutely terrible for trans people.”
I mean, you don’t always need a panel of people to workshop your statement to speak truth to power, but when it’s a tricky time, then you should check in with your people.
TS: When it comes to speaking uncomfortable truths at this time, what for you are some of the most uncomfortable truths that you want to speak to?
DR: I think that we as a country are still in deep denial about the climate emergency and that we are in a deep denial about the degree to which Christian nationalism has been… as the culmination, the 50 years of work on their part, 50, 60, 70 years of work on their part really has taken over parts of our country, that it’s going to be many years of organizing and sort of the emergency that that is. I think we need to talk about the ways that capitalism influences so many of the things that we normalize. Sort of who and what is behind what we lift up as laudable, and talking a little bit more explicitly about marketing forces, about philanthropy, about all of that. There are places and pockets where it’s happening and so many places where this conversation isn’t happening. It needs to be happening in an intersectional way because it’s all… systemic racism turtles all the way down.
TS: Now, Rabbi Danya, in your new series, you touch on a lot of these topics in different ways, offering spiritual tools for healing, repair and justice. Interestingly, in the section on justice, you talked about how rest, the practice of rest can and should be a justice issue. Can you talk about that?
DR: In the Torah, we are told… we are commanded to rest. And not just we, whoever we are, that is hearing, but we and our family and our workers and the Levite that is in our gates, the Levite who does not own land and the widow and the orphan and the stranger. It’s everybody in our community, those who do not have power, even our animals.
Shabbat is the first labor law in… maybe in history, I don’t know. Definitely in our religious history, and it is a labor law and it’s a way of saying that we are not meant to be grinding all the time, that our humanity matters and everybody’s humanity matters equally. We need to live like that matters. In our culture today, getting back to capitalism, we treat people as though their primary value is in their usefulness.
During the pandemic, care rationing was stacked against disabled people. More disabled people died because they were deemed not as worthy of care, because their lives were deemed less important, because they were… ultimately, if you drill it down, they’re less useful to society. That does not mean their lives had less value. They were just disabled and more disabled people died.
The exploitation of workers is so normalized in our country. The fact that we do not have labor laws that protect Amazon workers from working in COVID-riddled conditions, from having to pee in old Coke bottles along the way of their routes because they don’t have enough time for proper bathroom breaks. I mean it’s a health and sanitation issue. The fact that our labor laws don’t allow for that is incomprehensible.
So when we decide to rest, it is a statement against this culture that says your only value is in what you do, is in how you produce, is in what you are for this culture. It’s who you are, matters, right? Your wholeness matters, your self matters, your refueling matters, you’re pausing to take time for yourself.
We see this in activist culture too. There’s a lot of burnout because people feel like things are so urgent that they’re not allowed to take time for themselves and they feel guilty. It’s like, “No, you need to refill. You need to pause and care for yourself even, so that you can give off the cause, but also because you matter. These workers that you’re fighting for matter and you matter too. You’re allowed to.” For everybody to say, “I’m going to rest,” it is a radical proposition in a culture that is designed to exploit them.
TS: You’re obviously a very high-achieving person. You’ve written how many books at your relatively young age?
DR: I’m 47. I’m not that young, but I’ve written three and then we’re up to eight including the edited anthologies.
TS: Yes, you’re a very accomplished person. How has the practice of rest been for you? Was it easy to embrace it, like sure, you’re like, “Well, actually I think I’m going to go check my email. I realize it’s Saturday. It’s not quite sundown, but I mean, it’s six hours, it’ll be sundown,” or no, is it like, “It’s easy. This is what I need.”
DR: Shabbat is such a gift. I started keeping Shabbat in my very early 20s when I quit my job and went freelance and realized that I was spending all day, every day just hustling because when you’re freelance, you’re on the grind all the time and that this was the day, right? This was the antidote to my own burnout. Since then, what my Shabbat practice is has taken a lot of different forms over the years. Now, with three kids, there’s a lot of snacks and card games, kind of chilling, laziness and it is so good and so needed and so necessary. I’m so grateful for it.
TS: Okay, Rabbi Danya, two more things I want to talk to you about in terms of Mending the World. You quote the Hasidic master, Rabbi Nachman as saying, “All the world is a very narrow bridge.” What does that mean?
DR: I almost don’t want to answer that question because I think it means a lot of different things for a lot of different people, and in responding to this question, I don’t want to take away from your or anyone else’s reading of that line. I want to read the whole line. Kol ha’olam kulo Gesher cár me’od — All the world is a very narrow bridge. Veha’ikar —and the main thing. Lo lifended k’lal — is not to be afraid at all. It’s difficult this being a human being business. It is perilous. It is painful. It is sometimes horrible. Rabbi Nachman did not have an easy life. Okay, anything … you might think about a 19th century Ukraine, it’s not easy to start with, and he himself lost basically, all of his family to illness and his house burned down.
He left this town because of the Kazakhs and came to whatever. He was a man who suffered, and you have to just keep walking, and you think about what you do on a very narrow bridge, trying to hold those twin poles of keeping steady. Do you look down? Do you not, and just keep walking, keep breathing, keep moving ahead, and you try not to be terrified as you take that next step.
TS: What if you are terrified?
DR: The main thing is not to be, and I will tell you that Rabbi Nachman evidently struggled a lot with what we probably would call depression these days. People have tried to diagnose him from afar. I’m not going to do that, but a lot of rabbis preach the sermons that we need to hear, I think he was teaching the Torah that he needed to hear himself.
TS: All right. Towards the beginning of our conversation, you shared a bit about your mom’s death and what you went through in grieving her passing. One of the comments that you offer in Mending the World, this audio series with Sounds True, is in Judaism prayer and pain, prayer and weeping are in some ways, deeply intertwined. That really moved me because I think sometimes we think of prayer as something that’s like all love and light and everything, not connected to our weeping. I wonder if you can comment on that.
DR: In Judaism, we call prayer avoda shebalev, the work of the heart. It is about taking what is on our heart and finding it, lifting it up and I think offering it up to what I would call God. You call it the divine, the great interconnectedness, everything, the universe, whatever words, just offering it up and out and saying, “Here, have it.” Sometimes what we offer up is gratitude, and sometimes what we offer up is longing, and sometimes what we offer up is praise. Sometimes what we offer up is anger, and sometimes what we offer up is pain.
The Talmud teaches all the gates of heaven are locked except for the gates of tears, which are never locked, right? There’s always room for our tears, for our heart to be broken open. For me, that prayer, that connection … and I don’t believe in vending machine theology.
Please, my conception of a deity is not one that’s like a man in the sky being like, “Oh, well, we’ll give Billy a Porsche,” that sort of prosperity theology is not it. You plug in, you offer up, you give out. You say, “Please take this, it’s for you. It’s not mine anymore.” And you’re transformed and then, you are more able to do the work you need to do in the world because you have connected with the big bigness and given what you need to give and then, you can go do your work. Sometimes what you need to give are tears and tears and tears, and more tears. I should know, it was just Yom Kippur and I cried my face off. We name the pain, we name the suffering, we let it out.
TS: To conclude, Rabbi Danya, can you lead us in some kind of blessing here at the end of our conversation for all of our Insights at the Edge listeners, joining us right here, something. Something that feels natural and true.
DR: The first thing that popped into my head, usually, I will say, I’m a very fond of improvisational, freewheeling, spontaneous blessings, but the first thing that popped into my head, so I’m going with that, is the traditional priestly blessing. So I’m going to go with that. This is the blessing that the high priest in the ancient temple in Jerusalem would offer to the people. This is the blessing that many parents give their children on Friday nights. Yivarechecha Adonai v’yishmerecha. May God bless you and keep you. Ya’er Adonai panav eilecha vichuneka. May the face of radiance shine upon you and bring you grace. Yisa Adonai panav eilecha v’yasem lecha shalom. May the face of all interconnectedness lift up to you and bring you peace.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg. With Sounds True, she’s the author of a new eight-part audio series. It’s called Mend the World: Spiritual Tools for Healing, Repair and Justice. Rabbi Danya, thank you so much. It’s been so great to commune with you in this way. Thank you.
DR: Thank you.
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