Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg — "This Is The Work: Tshuvah In Our Lives, Systems, and Beyond"

Today’s episode is a Shabbat Replay of our September 13th Friday Night Shabbat service. We were honored to be joined by the incomparable joined by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, the force behind “Life Is A Sacred Text” and the ultimate High Holiday book, “Repentance and Repair.”

For High Holiday registration and information on pricing, schedule, venue, and more, head to https://www.mishkanchicago.org/high-holy-days/

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

Rabbi Deena Rottenberg is an award winning author of eight books, and now makes her primary home writing. Life is a sacred text, and you have to find it at Life is a sacred text.com she has received the lives of commitment award from Auburn seminary and the rabbinic human rights hero award from the human rights organization trua was named by Newsweek, as a rabbi to watch and as a faith leader to watch, by the Center for American Progress, and has been a Sunday Washington Post crossword clue,

83 down. 83 down.

So her newest that I feel like that you can't congratulations. I should just stop reading. So her newest book is this is on repentance and repair, making amends in an unapologetic world, and is a National Jewish Book Award winner and an American Library Association's sapphire Brody honor book. Rabbi Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley called this a must read for anyone navigating the work of justice and healing. She has written in many other publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic salon time, many other publications and her other seven books, all of which are really great. Include nurture the Wow, finding spirituality in the tears, poop, desperation, wonder and radical amazement of parroting parenting, also frustration and boredom. I forgot those two and surprised by God How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love religion, the passionate Torah sex and Judaism. Yentl's Revenge, the next wave of Jewish feminism and with Rabbi Elliot Dorf, three books on Jewish ethics. If you go to her website, you can read another few paragraphs of well deserved honors, but I kind of just want Rabbi Deena to talk to us tonight about the subject at hand, which is this, thank you. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me so much shalom, amazing, amazing davening, yes, yes, yes. So seven years ago already, which is hard to believe, but here we are, a thing called me too broke. Y'all remember that, and during that time, many, many, many people told their stories of harm, and many famous, mostly men, were named as harm doers. And there was a rash of a big run of men getting named, and then the sort of, you know, Instagram apologies written by the publicist, and this sort of, you know, yes, I did it. And this really sucks for my family, yes, I did it, and my fans are devastated. Would you like a cinnamon roll recipe that was, that was a real one, you know, yes, I did it. And it's just that people were so dazzled by my amazing good looks. You know, all of this, right? And during this time, there was a lot of talk in, you know, the discourse. TM about like, Okay, now what right these, you know, mediocre apology has been thrown on the internet directed at people or not even an apology, just an acknowledgement that they have been named. And so now, I guess we, the humans of the universe, forgive them, and they are earned. They have earned their next $6 million Netflix deal, I guess, right. And it was just like, you know, picture, you know, all the people with the question marks over their heads like that, and because we had not talked about public harm in in this kind of way, or maybe we had, but you know, mostly then, you know, public national gaslighting is usually the next thing that happens at around this time the now Rabbi jer covidcent, who is wonderful, if you know them, was writing A piece and approached me with the question, so what does our tradition say about this? And I wrote up a thing for them, and then threw it on Twitter because, you know a Oh, hey guys, would you like this? And seemed very clear to me, right? We have a tradition about accountability and repentance and repair, as I read Maimonides the 12th century, sage, philosopher, Torah, scholar, physician, et cetera. There are five very clear. Steps for how you clean it up if you have screwed up. And he's got an entire section of his Compendium the Mishkan Torah called Hilco chuva, the laws of repentance, repair, accountability, however you want to return right, however you want to define teshuva. I see five steps. Number one confession, own the harm that you caused, fully, completely. No hedging, no, but I'm really a nice guy, no, but here's what I intended, right? Just what is, what is the impact? Right? What did I do? Own it, name it, and ideally publicly and definitely, if you know commensurate to the harm, right? If you said something racist in a staff meeting, you have to own that harm in the staff meeting. Number two, start to change. You know, if you can't run around doing the thing again. So what do you need to be different, right? Do you need an education in a place of ignorance? Do you need therapy? Do you need rehab? Do you need like? What needs to happen so the thing isn't going to keep happening, right? Then, three amends. You know, I stepped on your foot. Do I need to? I need to pay you for your medical bill. I need to take pay you for the time you were away from your work. I need to pay you for how embarrassing you were. You know, like emotional damage, we would call it today, right? There are five categories of damages listed in the Talmud for something basic, like physical harm, right? What would be appropriate amends for the context of the harm that was caused, and then apology? Right? Because if I'm causing, if I'm just apologizing, right, as I did the harm, I'm still the same person. I'm still basically the harm doer. So you gotta do this whole transformational process. I go to the person, and I say, what amends Do you want? And I'm assuming that I know you and what you need. And you say, actually, I don't need you to pay my medical bill. I have great medical insurance here, I need something totally different, and I suddenly get this light bulb about what I did that is actually different than what I had thought I had done. Oh, right, so by the time I come to apology, I've had my education, I've had to name, I've had to own what I've done. I've had to do some learning, right? And then the amends, and then the apology. There's this open heart, right? There's this changed person, and then you get to five, right? You make different choices. So by the time you get to five, if you've done steps one through four correctly, it happens naturally and organically, that by the time there's a chance to do the thing again, and there's always a chance to do the thing again, right? Always be, and it's a different person. It's a different context. You're playing out your anger in a different way. You're working out your issues with authority, right? You're reenacting white supremacy in policy in a totally different and new and innovative way, right? You're screwing over your employees in a totally dynamic and exciting new way, right? But there's going to be some opportunity to redo the thing, but if you've been doing all of the steps correctly, naturally and organically, you will make a different choice. So I wrote this Twitter thread about this, and I watched people's heads kind of go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, in real time, because we live in this culture that loves to force forgiveness, right? Because forced forgiveness is a great way to reinscribe the status quo, because a lot of harm happens with power, right? So if I have power over you and I force you to forgive, and everything stays just as it was right. And so people, you know what we expect, the harm doer to do the thing, to own it. And so through these conversations on repentance and repair, was born, I realized that there was a hole in the cultural conversation that people that there was this profound wisdom from our tradition that could help all sorts of situations, because, you know, I'm real time, you know, on my phone, answering people's questions. What about this? What about this? You know, what about Matt Lauer, right? Yes, Maimonides has opinions about Matt Lauer, right? And so, you know, that's how this book got born, and it's the season, right? This is Elul This is chuva time. Chuva is every time, right? Chuva is all the time. But this is high season for this time. But we've got this recipe, right? Confession, own the harm you caused. Begin to change. Amends, apology. Make different choices. It's great, right? We have this formula. It's easy, right? No problem. And then they laugh, right? Because, as much as we have this beautiful, incredible, profound system. We resist it because it's it works, it's true. I have in my research, discovered that our systems of repentance echo indigenous systems of justice all over the world. Okay, there's something sort of deep and true here, and we resist it because as deeply as you know in this time, we all feel that pull towards, you know, kind of secretly looking at the phone, right? Who's going to call me and apologize to me? Because we all know that we've been harmed. We've all been harmed.

We've all been bystanders to harm, to profound harm, profound harm, right in our lives, globally, we've all caused harm, and we resist it. We have these stories of ourselves as the good guy, and that's okay, like it's a, it's a, in some ways a self preservation instinct, but this cultural narrative about good and bad is dangerous. We are human people, and we screw up whether or not we intend to, whether or not we knew better, whether or not we had all the information at the time, right, whether or not we wanted to, whether or not we were being actively predatory, right? We screw up, we hurt people, we just we do. And those parts of us that want to say, if I acknowledge that I did this, then I have to deal with all shame, right? This narrative that if I did this, then maybe I'm not good, except we're all good and we're all just people, right? We're all just messy, right? That's why our tradition talks about the yetzer hatov and the yetzer hara, and it's just, right. There's no we are, who, how we act. It's okay. We maybe have some deep, deep, primal stuff that gets pinged about being taught that we needed to be perfect, or being taught that we were always the screw up right, or being afraid that if we acknowledge that we did the thing, we will face loss of reputation or loss of relationship, right, or maybe even serious consequences that fill us with fear, or it may be something else story time through the it took me five years to write this book, in part because I had, you know, jobs. I had things to do besides write this book full time, and there was a lot of research and a lot of conversations and a lot of talking to people that went into this and through. Through the process of writing and going over Maimonides, laws of chuva again and again, and pouring over commentaries and trying to, you know, pick apart and what about this? Why is is this? Can anybody explain why he worded it this way, going down rabbit holes I became somewhat of a chuva evangelist, right? You know, saying in our household, you make a mess, you clean it up. And so I got better and better at owning my own screw ups. And I got more facile with the idea that, you know, we all mess up, and so I screw up, I'm going to own it. It's not that big a deal. And I would, you know, people who knew me from the Twitter days would see me, not infrequently, because I am a human person. I not infrequently screw up. I don't have great impulse control, so maybe more than most people, you know, I would say, Okay, that was not my finest moment, and I would correct myself publicly. And it does not have to be a shameful thing. I'm just Okay, make a mess, clean it up. Does not have to be a big deal. Until one day, a colleague of mine, who I did not like very much, published an article that was a Jewish legal paper making a suggestion that was an opportunity to further marginalize people that were already marginalized in our community. And I had some feelings about it, and I decided to go on Twitter and chair to Fisk it basically to offer some public critiques, because I was seeing a lot of murmurings by younger Jews who did not have that level of kind of cultural power, and people were being very were very uncomfortable, but nobody was saying this isn't okay, and somebody needed to publicly say this isn't okay. And I was furious, because this was someone with a lot of power, who was harming, harming our community members. And I was writing from, as they say, in preschool, the red zone. And I offered, there were probably some decent academic critiques of his work in there, and also I crossed several lines inside. Boys came outside, and I, you know, my my psychoanalytic theory about what might have been driving the choice to write the paper and maybe some personal digs possibly fell out. It was I was not in my finest form. It was not good. I was not okay. I was not good. And, you know, there's that moment you sort of finish feeling, you know, that self righteous, you know, glow, or whatever, and and then a couple of colleagues emailed me and said, what was that? And I went back and reread and said, Oh, that was not it. And I deleted the thing posted on the big internet y'all. That was not right, that was not okay. And then there's that pause, and that pause, and then, you know, it's like that TellTale Heart moment I'm walking around, trying to ignore it. I know there's something there. I don't want to. I now have been doing Teshuva work as a spiritual practice, you know, a for a very, very long time, because I've always been a fan of this particular chunk of Maimonides, the wife beating less, so this much more. But I know I'm missing some stuff. I'm aware of this. I'm willfully ignoring it. I have to go apologize to this person directly, don't I? Oh god, I'm furious, because I am full of feelings about this paper, and I felt that it hurt people, and I am still angry about it, and I was still in the wrong, and I had to deal with it. And so there's that moment of, you know, finally, finally, the noise gets so loud that I have to face it. And I, you know, open up my computer and open up the. Notes app, because I'm the dork who uses those. And you know, the feeling of resistance was so strong, my pride, my ego was so strong. I don't know why it was this thing, this day, this whatever, what buttons were being pushed inside me. I didn't wanna. I didn't wanna. And finally I got myself to start drafting the email. And then finally, you know, and then, and at the minute I started drafting it, I started to feel better, because I started to realign with the person I know I was supposed to be. And then I hit send, and then I didn't hear anything. Now here's the thing about forgiveness, okay, I will, I go into my beef with Maimonides about this in depth in the book. What you know, you can read it, it gets nerdy. The bottom line is this, if somebody comes to you sincerely having done the work of teshuva, wholeheartedly, and they are really sincere. You're not supposed to be petty, right? You're not supposed to stand on ceremony and not forgive just because you're having a moment, right? If they show up and they are just going through the motions, or they have done completely insufficient garbage work. Are you required to forgive them?

Are you required to forgive them? Thank you. Is that usually what happens? Okay? The Jerusalem Talmud teaches that if somebody slanders you, you're never required to forgive why slander? Because once it's out there, it can never be taken back, right? It's this famous story of the feathers that get, you know, sent all over the city, and you can never collect them all right? The takeaway is, if someone harms you in a way that is irreparable, you never have to forgive them. Okay, in cases of trauma, you don't have to forgive that's what I learn out of that. Okay? I want to say this very clearly now and forever, this season and every season, you never have to forgive your abuser? Can you Yes, if it's the right thing, naturally, organically, if it will bring healing, great, it's like a Zun. You don't have to No, I had slandered this person publicly. I had done the worst thing, and I knew it, and I had just apologized the once you're supposed to go back again, again, again, and so I'm sweating, and I write again. I write a second apology. I make a donation to the organization. I'm, you know, I apologize again. Each time I'm apologizing, I'm digging deeper into this person's perspective. I'm having to realize more thoroughly what I did and exactly how bad it was, and my casual relationship with social media is getting less and less casual, I will tell you, right? It's a lot less cute, and I'm here being filmed, and so it's you know, level of public confession is going up, right? The reasons we resist are often related to the transformation we most need. The Happy ending of the story is that this person, very magnanimously wrote and forgave me right before Yom Kippur that year. Thank you very much. Nice Person. I still disagree vehemently with the article, but that's okay. I was still in the wrong. But that story we have about I don't want to forgive them, because I was partly mad about that one thing, all of the reasons. So I got onto the book, because I realized that the steps of Teshuvah are the steps for ourselves in our own lives, but also for institutions, also for the public square, also for nations. And the deeper I go, the more I realize that. That the points of resistance are the same, compounded institutions and compounded even more on the national level, right? The all of the reasons we resist in our own hearts get even bigger and bigger and bigger the more we go out. And so when we are part of institutions that are doing wrong, we have an even greater moral obligation to be the voice that tries to move the boat around, because there will be so much more resistance for all of the reasons, because they don't want to, because, because, because right, all of the moral stream will be moving in the other way, the refusal to look, the refusal to see, the determination To keep the story going in one direction, the absolute attachment to the story that I have to be the hero at all times or it's all sunk, as opposed to remembering exactly the Torah that Rabbi Stephen told us earlier. This is the work of love. Okay, when we do this work, we heal ourselves and we heal other people. When we refuse to do it, we harm ourselves and we harm other people. We are all interconnected and when we are able to it's really I'm spending all of this that's spent our time together on this resistance, because when we can move past it, when we move past this first block of resistance, the road opens for us. And that's the place of love and growth and healing, and so I want to bless us all to be brave, brave this Elul and every single day for the rest of our lives, to see that resistance, to hear those little voices that we try to ignore, that are telling us who we need to become in order to become the Most Beautiful, holiest versions of ourselves, even if we're afraid, because that's where we are, that's where God is, and that's where healing and wholeness is, and as the Talmud teaches in the name of Rabbi chama gudalshuva, great is chuva for it brings healing to the world. Shabbat. Shalom, you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai