Speaking
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg is available to give talks or classes on any number of issues related to Judaism, God, text, spirituality, feminism/gender politics, sexual ethics, popular culture or some combination therein. Please drop her a line using the “Contact” link above, and she’ll be happy to talk about possibilities.
Here are a few possible programs:
1) Surprised By God: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Religion
This will be, in part, an autobiographical book talk about my trek from punk rock and the glitter-drenched fairyland of dot-com era San Francisco to the Conservative rabbinate–via meditation, mystical experiences and a semi-reluctant path to traditional Judaism.
In some ways, this talk will just be a good story, the tale of one young woman’s unexpected, combat-booted path to service of the Divine. But it’s also a look at the process of taking on a religious discipline in today’s world–it’s about reconfigurations and reintegrations, about trying to navigate faith without shipping off to the yeshiva or the monastery or denouncing the life already lived with the regret of conversionary zeal. in some ways, the rules are as ancient as they’ve always been, and in some ways, we find ourselves on entirely new terrain.
2) The Spiritual Marketplace: America, The Selling of Religion, and Us
These days, yoga postures are found on greeting cards, Jewish identity can be acquired online and Buddhist prayer beads have been getting periodic sightings at the mall for years. In instructional CDs and self-help books, enlightenment is sold as quick and easy, requiring relatively little investment and promising immediate gratification. Even mainstream religious institutions now use the language of personal fulfillment in their attempts to “sell” their church or synagogue, everyone bound to answer the question, “What’s in it for me?”
It’s inevitable that living in an individualistic, materialistic culture is going to affect the way we navigate age-old religious challenges like confronting attachments, figuring out what we need, and allowing the discrete self to find its place in community. Though the wisdom found within our ancient religious disciplines has never been handed out on a silver platter, now, perhaps, it’s harder than ever to access, because there are so many real obstacles in the way—obstacles that are sometimes difficult to notice or identify because they have become our cultural wallpaper.
This talk will focus on the ways that our understandings of religion and spirituality have been affected by this particular cultural moment, and will offer some concrete suggestions about how we can strip the wallpaper and access the treasures waiting for us on the other side.
3) The Perils of Spiritual Practice
Taking on a religious practice (and/or coming to belief in God) is, for many, a fraught, complex path. As we go deeper, we find that our comfortable ideas about ourselves, our relationships, and our understandings of the world are set into a tailspin–it’s confusing, to say the least. But if we can manage to hang on for the ride, we may find something sweet and glorious on the other side that is well worth all the hard work.
This talk will be about the ways that Judaism (and/or spiritual practice more generally) can effect a mind-boggling transformation, and the ways in which Judaism might impact all areas of our lives. It can be structured as:
• A more autobiographical book talk (in which I read from and discuss my memoir, Surprised By God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion; click here for more)
• A more interactive talk about Jewish spirituality that invites audience participation as we discuss these processes together
• A talk focused on Elul, the High Holy Days, and the process of tshuvah
• As a writing workshop about the process of writing spiritual memoir
OR
• Some combination of these things (for example, a writing workshop on spiritual journeys and Elul, or as a two-part series, in which I give a book talk and then the next day or later that day facilitate discussion about the way these questions impact all of our lives.
4) I and Thou: On Jewish Sex
What does Judaism have to say about how we conduct our most intimate relationships? How is a married couple supposed to interact in the bedroom, and what are they allowed to do there? What might Judaism have to offer folks who aren’t exactly ready to settle down? How does and can sexuality impact our relationships with God? Ourselves? Does, or can, traditional Judaism intersect with sex-positive feminism? How? What does it mean to move through the world with a “Jewish sexual ethic?”
This talk will address all of these questions, and more. It can be structured either as a frontal presentation or as an interactive text study and discussion.
5) The Boomers Want To Call It “iPod Judaism”: Hipsterism, Jewish Life, and the Next Generation
Judaism has undergone a cultural renaissance over the last few years, with the advent of klezmer fusion, smart and snarky Jew pride t-shirts, new media like Heeb, Jewschool.com and Zeek, a slew of new independent minyanim (prayer groups) and a new American Jewish sensibility. Is it the beginning of a glorious new chapter in Jewish history, a superficial commodification of the Jewish religious and cultural heritage, or both? Neither? What does it mean, and what are its potential implications for American Jewish life in general?
6) Yentl’s Revenge: Jewish Feminism and the Future
Despite the many changes to women’s roles in Jewish life over the last 40 years, plenty of questions remain. What are the challenges facing young Jewish women today, and what work remains to be done? How has our hard-won access to Jewish learning changed the conversation? How are younger women–those who grew up learning that God was a Being, not a boy–finding themselves in this ancient tradition, and what are they refashioning, on their terms? What aspects of the “third wave” feminist conversation are finding their way into the Jewish world?
This talk will talk about some of the hot issues in Jewish feminist thought today, offering a way to further the ongoing dialogue in Jewish life. This can be either a lecture or an interactive text study and discussion.
7) Hard Torah: The Challenge of Sacred Text
The Torah is an important guidebook for human living, affirmed in Judaism and Christianity as sacred text. And yet, it also demands that we stone our rebellious son to death, take an eye for an eye, and kill a bride who cannot bring forth proof of her virginity. The Jewish tradition has addressed the Torah’s troubling texts in a number of ways–just as we often deal with the problems in our own lives in a number of different ways. How can we make sense of these texts–and what might our choices say about who we are? How can a book with such terrible things be considered sacred? Can rabbinic textual interpretation provide a useful model for helping us to deal with the hard Torah in our own lives?
These are a few of the places at which Rabbi Ruttenberg has been a featured speaker or lecturer:
Jewish Women Changing America conference, Barnard College, New York, NY
Dartmouth Summer Institute for Jewish Studies, Hanover, NH
Conference for The Association of Jewish Studies, Chicago IL
Founding Conference, the Tikkun Community, New York NY
The Women’s League of Conservative Judaism Pacific SW Conference, Irvine, CA
Brandeis University (scholar-in-residence)
Stanford University (scholar-in-residence)
Brown University
The University of California at Berkeley
The University of California at Davis
The University of Connecticut
The JCC of Manhattan
MAKOR, New York NY
The Jewish Museum, San Francisco
Fuchsberg Center for Conservative Judaism, Jerusalem, Israel
Writers With Drinks (Featured Writer), San Francisco, CA
The Park Slope Jewish Center, New York, NY