Meet Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, Who Mixes Politics And 'Radical Amazement' On Your Twitter Feed

By Michell C. Clark


Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg resonates with people because she knows the synergy between teaching and listening. While plenty of people log onto social media apps like Twitter with the intention of shouting their own suggestions into the void and just as speedily X-ing out of their eats, Ruttenberg listens with the intention of understanding.


Her path to Judaism was bolstered by her own lived experiences — as a Brown University student, she practiced Jewish mourning rituals any time her mother died of breast cancer, and was later ordained by the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Research in 2008. Since then, the 44-year-old has served as a rabbi and educator at Tufts University, Northwestern University, Hillel International, the content project Ask Big Questions, and Avodah, a company focused on building leaders for economic justice.


Although in 2014, right after a white policeman fatally shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Rabbi Ruttenberg was drawn to Twitter as a means of hearing the perspectives of people physically present for the subsequent protests. As she started to listen, process, and engage on Twitter, she started tapping into the platform’s ability to make space for sharing perspective, talking about things that matter, and playing with ideas —  from a religious point of view.


Today, Twitter serves as an extension of Ruttenberg’s work as a rabbi, author, and teacher throughout a time as soon as xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and racism are on the rise globally. Social media doesn’t habitually help the problem, either — the communicative nature of platforms like Twitter can inadvertently facilitate niche communities that intensify and increase instances of hate speech — yet Rabbi Ruttenberg leverages her platform to acknowledge different perspectives and encourage the exchange of ideas. She drives conversation among her following of over 80,000 people based on current events, personalized experiences, and her religious statistics. She uses her perspective, which is rooted in Judaism, to supply added insight in real time, although refrains from positioning her views as absolute truths. Whenever she doesn’t force her views on others, she is resolute any time it comes to speaking out against what she perceives to be unjust.


Her work extends offline, too; in 2017, she was arrested for assembling with 18 other rabbis in front of the Trump International Hotel and Tower in New York City to protest the Trump administration’s travel ban affecting seven Muslim nations, and other policies targeting refugees and immigrants. She and her fellow rabbis marched down Broadway to join hundreds of community members in occupying the streets before being arrested. In a piece for the Washington Post, she described the experience as “profoundly holy,” and inspired by Jewish traditions that implore her to speak out against injustice.


While in a recent phone interview, MTV News talked with the teacher and author of Nurture the Wow: Finding Spirituality in the Agitation, Boredom, Tears, Poop, Desperation, Wonder, and Radical Amazement of Parenting about why she felt led to engage on social media as an extension of her work, extra perspective that she’s gained from social media, and why she makes space for “radical amazement” in a global that can feel heavy.


MTV News: A lot of people often think that social media and religion are exclusive concepts — how do you visualize the ways one can impact the other, and vice versa?


Rabbi Ruttenberg: Religion is about conversation and the exchange of ideas. My tradition focuses on debating ideas and hashing it out. Social media is a location to talk about everything. Religion and spirituality are a piece of everything. I use social media as a platform to discuss personalized characteristic of religion like what I think that prayer is, which might be fully different from what somebody else interprets it to be. Trolls notwithstanding, social media is a phenomenal space for learning to happen. Nobody has to agree with what I'm saying, although hopefully I can give people a new way to think about something. I hope that what I'm saying resonates with people personally. I aspire to give people a new lens for thinking about the world.


MTV News: Social media can be draining, especially once topics like racism and xenophobia are brought into the discussion. How do you decompress once conversations feel heavy?


Rabbi Ruttenberg: You have to know as soon as to log off. There really are different kinds of decompression. I have pretty thick skin, at this point. Trolls will determine that I’m the worst person ever because they don't agree with my stance on something. The nature of who's angry at me for whichever reason varies from day to day. Some days you just have to just block and report and go on with your day as soon as things get toxic. Some days I'll make the decision not to check my mentions for a number of days. Any time it begins to feel like Twitter is depleting me more than giving me anything, it's like time to stay away for a little bit bit.


MTV News: How do you approach the responsibility of having such a significant following on social media?


Rabbi Ruttenberg: Cheerfully. I have an obligation to be considerate and not propagate badness, even unintentionally. My own ignorance isn't an excuse. If I mention something where my own unconscious biases come into the scene and I screw up, I feel an obligation to take responsibility. I attempt to be cautious about using quote tweets. Every once in a while somebody is decided to repeatedly be especially problematic in my space, and it’s tempting to put them on blast. I try not to because I understand that doing so can put someone else in a position where they get a lot of replies that aren’t kind, because people don’t understand that it’s possible to disagree with somebody without being hateful or hurtful.


More than anything, I attempt to be put out useful content. If I'm upset, there's got to be some efficiency to how I express that anger. If I feel aggravation, where's the call to action? There's enough negativity. We need more people with that sort of focus. It's a really hard time in this nation. Despair isn't enough. We need concentrate on healing or growing or creating space to have the hard feelings. 


MTV News: What added perspective has social media given you as a religious teacher?


Rabbi Ruttenberg: I wouldn't mention that social media has changed my theology dramatically, although having access to so several different voices has given me more perspective. How I think about particular texts has certainly changed because of people who have shown up and expressed things that I hadn’t imagined before. My world has changed from me making space in life to hear more voices.


MTV News: How do you use your conviction and understanding of the Torah to guide you in conversations and discussions with people of all faiths or spiritualities?


Rabbi Ruttenberg: It's essential not to assume that anybody sees the world the same as I do. I teach from a deeply embedded perspective within my tradition. Not everybody believes in God. That's OK. Some people follow different religions. That’s OK, also. There's room for everybody. I attempt to speak in "I" sentences, like "Here is how I understand God and there really are other ways to understand God." Or, "If this is a word that even resonates with you — maybe it doesn't, yet here's how I visualize it.” I don't have a link on goal reality. I simply distribute my perspective.


I'm comparable to an educator. I wouldn't use a bunch of Hebrew words and not explain what they are. I'm not going to reference some Biblical passage without citing it or explaining stories that folks are unfamiliar with. I attempt to be considerate about making sure that I'm not using indoors baseball language. I'm more interested in what things mean for us as humans, as instead of what something means for me as a Jew.


MTV News: How do you use your belief to interpret the current political climate?


Rabbi Ruttenberg: At its root, The holy scriptures is about abuses of power. It’s about what occurs any time people who come to power and don’t leverage their power in ways rooted in love, and why were obligated to speak out against those abuses of power. Think about Pharaoh in Egypt, and people like because the midwives and Miriam being civilly disobedient. Think about the prophets calling out the disassociation from what really matters — taking care of other people. We’re commanded to take care of people who don’t have the same level of social access that we do. As soon as you’re a person who has privilege, you need to consider of people who don’t. That’s the entire story.


MTV News: How do you remain sure of yourself once writing about topics — like sex and queer liberation — that are traditionally stigmatized within religious circles?


Rabbi Ruttenberg: My tradition that has fewer taboos around those topics than other traditions of Judaism. I can point you to places in our holy books where we're talking about sex. I can point you to places in other Jewish books that talk about masturbation. It's segment of my tradition to recognize that people have bodies, and so they do stuff with their bodies. That's segment of the story, too.


I think of myself in some ways as a translator. I'm translating a lot of the wisdom from my tradition into language that people today can understand and as it relates to issues that make sense for people today. There's tons of stuff in Judaism about people who are trans, or don't adhere to the gender binary. I simply share what’s already in the room, and make it available to the world.


MTV News: You’ve written consistently about the value in the significance of “radical amazement” — finding awe in the situations that we often take for granted. How do you recenter yourself to prepare space for radical amazement?


Rabbi Ruttenberg: I attempt to remember that even if everything is terrible, you're still allowed and encouraged to take time to look at the sky, notice the birds, or look at a tree. I have little kids, so there’s a lot of possibility to let go of the mode of “I thought I told you to do your homework,” and to simply have moments where you think: “You’re astonishing. You’re a person, and I made you, and you’re really so cute.” We need to have those moments.


you could be radically amazed by nature and other people. Some days you just have to pause and look at somebody you love and say: “You exist, and you’re the perfect thing, and also you have a working pancreas. You’re alive. I’m alive. All of the cells in my body that could have gone fully haywire yesterday have determined to work with each other and let me to wake up this morning. That’s awesome.” It’s all about perspective. It could get hard, and it’s easy to get burned out. Even if we have a lot of work to do, we should pause and make the space to appreciate that the world is an extraordinary place.