Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg is the author of the Sami Rohr Prize-nominated Surprised By God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion, The Pasionate Torah: Sex and Judaism, and other books. She was named one of 10 "Rabbis to Watch" by Newsweek in 2013 and serves as an educational consultant to Hillel. She tweets at @TheRaDR.

Faith and Practice

Towards a New Tzniut

By Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg

My third day of rabbinical school, a male colleague ran his finger slowly up my arm to my shoulder and said, in a voice that was somewhere between flirtatious and downright creepy, “You’ll be wanting to cover up, then.”

Faith and Practice

Truly Transformative: Motherhood and the Spiritual Practice of Parenting

By Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg

My mother always said that she never believed in God until she had kids. Something about my brother and I coming into being — from sex into clumpy cells, and then somehow into little creatures that emerged from within her with noses, ear canals, and personality quirks — changed everything about how she understood the world to work. She never told me, really, what had happened for her, but if I had to guess, I’d imagine words like miracle, impossibility, and soul would be involved.

Faith and Practice

God of Contradiction: On Language and Liturgy

By Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg

The time has come to stop thinking about language and God, lest we become so tangled up in our metaphors that they become our experience of God entirely.