Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg Profile picture
Rabbi, award-winning author. Newest 📚 ON REPENTANCE & REPAIR. Spirituality + justice missives, Life is a Sacred Text. 🌱Collective liberation or bust.💥she/her
Shadowy Cabal Enthusiast 🇺🇦 Profile picture Ross Grayson, MPH, CIH Profile picture Leslie Jaszczak (Eserafina@nerdculture.de) Profile picture Jennifer Gum-Fowler-Librarian Profile picture speakhard Profile picture 110 subscribed
Apr 21, 2023 8 tweets 2 min read
We have been saying: Never again is now.

The State is asking citizens to report their neighbors, whose children will be wrenched from them. If the parents don't face criminal charges this time, they will in the next round of bills.

Never again is NOW.

Do something.

1.x You can't do all of these, I imagine, but I also bet that you might be able to do more than zero of them:

Show up when you see or hear of an action happening.
Support organizing (can often include lots that can be done virtually.)
Apr 21, 2023 12 tweets 3 min read
AKA-- safe is good. Legal is good. But "rare," apropos of @toddiepeters' talk on our culture's implicit claim via Christianity that we need "appropriate" moral justifications for abortion--"rare" is stigmatizing.

Who decides whose reason is good enough?

1/x How does it feel to be part of the 1 in 4 people who can get pregnant who will have had an abortion by the age of 45 who hears "safe, legal, rare"?

Do you feel more or less like you can tell your story to someone you love?

Do you feel more or less shamed?
Apr 17, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
1/x thread.

In the 7th c BCE, Judean mercenaries began arriving to the Egyptian Elephantine island in the Nile, with their families. After the Babylonian conquest of Judea, more refugees came and a thriving Jew-ish community was rocking over there. A whole storehouse of ancient papyri from the 6th-4th c BCE- has been found—so this is while parts of the Hebrew Bible are getting written , for context—that offer an amazing glimpse into their lives.
Apr 3, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read
Thread 1/x

The act of preparing for Passover can feel deeply spiritual in its way, but it also invites us to ask whether we're removing the spiritual leaven from our lives as well as the physical stuff. A lot of traditional commentators describe leaven as puffy & swollen—think of bread rising. They talk about spiritual chametz as the puffy, overextended parts of our ego—how we preen, to be someone in the world (or in the room)...
Apr 3, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
This is major--BUT "A Vatican statement said the papal bulls, or decrees, 'did not adequately reflect the equal dignity & rights of Indigenous peoples' & have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith" -- isn't quiiite owning the atrocities it encouraged/sanctioned. #LandBack

But also ferstinkin' own your role and complicity in the thing, friends. It's been 500 years. You can do it. We believe in you.
Mar 27, 2023 14 tweets 4 min read
Someone asked me to explain what’s happening in Israel now.

1/x thread.

Picture it:

Trump won in 2020.

Has Senate & House, both by a narrow margin.

Steve Bannon is Senate Majority Leader.

Stephen Miller is Speaker of the House. They’re trying to pass two laws:

One, that anything illegal Trump ever has done or ever will do in office is A-OK (👌, if you will )

And two—well, the judicial overhaul bill doesn’t quite translate given how our branches work, let’s just say they’re trying to smash +
Mar 22, 2023 12 tweets 4 min read
My latest is on a fascinating, complex, deeply loaded (for many) case of applied tumah laws (misleadingly often translated as “ritual impurity”) to the post-Temple era.

That’s right—it’s time to talk about that time (of the month).

(And also: Ejaculation.)

1/X thread 🧵 Person with long hair immer... Well, to start off, if you missed last week's missive, it's on the whole business of tumah/taharah, my beef with the "ritual purity" translation, and kiiiind of an overview of the concept during the biblical era/Temple times. You can read that here:

lifeisasacredtext.substack.com/p/contracting-…
Mar 20, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
THREAD. 👇 This is going to be, I believe, one of the most important moments of Jewish learning in a long time.

People will, I predict, look back at this as a watershed moment. Both bc of the expansion of halakha specifically for trans Jews--which will be game-changing in ways that imho many cis Jews don't yet see (even tho we have SEEN halakhic revolutions before & what they can engender, pun intended jwa.org/feminism/hyman…)

but also:
METHODOLOGY
Mar 17, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
I am on a panel on religious ethics and space exploration and I GOT TO TRANSLATE GER/גר AS ALIEN!!! 👽

(As in widow, orphan, and ger) My main point was that we haven’t figured out how to organize a just, caring society down here, so (all major questions about space colonialism & exploitation & economic divides even notwithstanding) why on earth 🌍! do we think we can create functional societies up there?!
Mar 13, 2023 9 tweets 3 min read
My latest missive is about a biblical concept that is, generally, wildly misunderstood.

It’s usually mistranslated in ways that lead to people getting the wrong idea, and honestly the whole thing is messy and complex enough without the red herring.

Soooo

1/x thread 🧵 At a at a certain point, we... A lot of people connected to Judaism and Christianity are aware that there’s a *thing* in the Torah. Some sort of ancient cooties a person can catch.

But when you translate it as “ritual impurity,” consciously or not, the moral shade of the word “pure” sneaks in a bit.
Mar 9, 2023 8 tweets 3 min read
"Our central question should be: What is the obligation of the Jewish community at this moment, as we see law after law harming the transgender community?"

Proud to co-author this LTE with @rabbibecky & @KleinIdit.

Never again is now.

1/x

forward.com/opinion/letter… The Jewish community has used "never again" as a rallying cry for years, for good reason.

Never again should any population be singled out or targeted just because of who they are.

Never again should we stand idly by as hate is fomented, cultivated, made into law.
Mar 5, 2023 7 tweets 2 min read
My latest newsletter is a thousand-year history of Purim Torah: saucy, irreverent spoofs of Jewish sacred texts, mostly tied to the holiday of Purim that happens this week, but some venturing widely out into deeply… shall we say… social and political commentary.

1/x thread 🧵 Purim Torah, a history! Plus a Jewish immigration side quest It begins somewhat innocuously—a piyyut (hymn) for Passover is spoofed into a drinking song in the 11th century.

But soon enough great rabbis are, well, having at rabbinic texts, making up ridiculous names for the sages of their “Talmudic” world, tracing the lineages of wine.
Feb 27, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
When your trans friends talk about genocide—

The UN definition of genocide incl: “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a group…Causing serious bodily or mental harm; Deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” This threat could not be more real.
Feb 27, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read
My latest missive is about the desire to understand, well, why bad things happen to good people—and the cultural tendency, as Rabbi Elliot Kukla puts it, to believe that “to be sick is to be a loser.”

And it’s about what else is possible.

1/x thread Illness is not a metaphor: bodies exist in all kinds of ways It is, perhaps, understandable that at least since the Bible, people have tried to answer the question of “why”? For example, the Book of Job is a 42 chapter meditation on this (complete with the unsolicited advice & mansplaining every sick & disabled person gets!)
Feb 20, 2023 10 tweets 4 min read
My latest post is on the Jewish way of interpreting text.

We don't look for the one true meaning (she says, trying not to laugh).

There are all of the interpretations to access the 70 faces of Torah.

Which doesn't mean we don't have ways of doing things.

1/x Thread Jews for Exegesis: into the orchard on backdrop of trees I've seen "exegesis" defined as "reading to find the true meaning of the text" or "God's meaning". But of course we all read from our times and places and contexts--even the great sages, even you--

and the text opens up for real when we start to acknowledge that for real.
Feb 17, 2023 7 tweets 2 min read
*sighs* *taps mic*

Again:

Everything that happens to white women in the horror future dystopia of the Handmaid's Tale (read closely; it’s indeed a white supremacist world) has already happened & in many cases still happens to Black, Indigenous & other WOC in actual real life. The book talks about the “resettlement of the Children of Ham”, of telling the Jews they’re going to Israel and dumping them in the sea, “the cradle of the race,” “differences in fertility rates bc Caucasian & non-Caucasian births.”

If Atwood had written even two sentences +
Feb 16, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
And can we spell out:

Especially not billionaires who use a massive platform to stoke hate against an already targeted, marginalized group of human beings whose healthcare, safety & lives are under attack worldwide—

There is not a single thing abt any of this that is ok. None. FREE SPEECH MEANS THE GOVERNMENT CAN’T CENSOR YOU

IT DOES NOT MEAN THAT THERE IS ANYTHING JUSTIFIABLE IN ANY WAY ABOUT DENYING THE RIGHT OF A GROUP OF HUMAN BEINGS TO EXIST
Feb 13, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read
My newest piece looks at a mysterious biblical illness that is, in so many ways, the story of what we fear--and what we need to learn.

1/x Illness as metaphor - the prophetic wisdom of those outside This illness is, it turns out, a lot of different things.

But the combination of them, to the ancient eye, is the story of the erosion--the threat of everything being consumed, ravaged, taken away.
Feb 10, 2023 13 tweets 4 min read
Thread 1/x:

Next week is Repro Shabbat, a chance for the whole Jewish community to refocus on the importance of abortion health access, rights, & access, during the week we read the Torah verses that undergird Judaism’s perspective on reproductive health. Repro Shabbat Feb 17-18 Abortion is permitted in Judaism, and it's even required when the pregnant person is endangered.
Feb 9, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read
WHEN WE TALK ABOUT HOW GENDER CONCEPTS ARE CULTURALLY SPECIFIC...

Things that are not here on the Masculinity scale:
Study Talmud

On the Femininity scale:
Be primary breadwinner
Plants a vineyard w/the fruit of her hands; stretch out her hand to the poor.. Like, things on this list are really specifically for a white anglo macho thing that certainly doesn't track on what historically has been valorized in my community. +
Jan 29, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
Yep.

It is the systems, not the individual perpetrators, that we must focus on.

These systems have proven repeatedly & incorrigibly injurious no matter how many billions are thrown into reform.

We must begin to invest in other ways of preventing & addressing harm. Now. Today. GET INVOLVED LOCALLY. If you care about making a difference, showing up when your town is figuring out its budget—BEING one of the people who determines that budget—is a huge way.

Find out who locally is working on addressing alternatives to policing and budget allocations.