Life
Meet the rabbi of Twitter
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg has built up a following of thousands on Twitter for her progressive, feminist teaching
May 27, 2021 10:32
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg has built up a following of thousands on Twitter for her progressive, feminist teaching
May 27, 2021 10:32American rabbi Danya Ruttenberg has written or edited seven books, contributed to numerous newspapers, and has lectured on everything from the Torah and economic policy to parenting. She’s the scholar in residence at the progressive National Council of Jewish Women, she’s active and outspoken in campaigning for abortion rights. Back in 2010, aged 35, The Forward named her as one of the 50 most influential female rabbis in the US. But none of this is what she’s best known for.
Ruttenberg’s fame is as The Twitter Rabbi. Her account — @TheRaDR — has more than 137,000 followers on the site, not to mention the coveted blue check. In fact, she’s tweeted or retweeted approximately 137,700 times since 2009. Her posts include retweets from colleagues and activists and Schitt’s Creek gifs, but there’s also a fascinating explanation of how Jewish medical ethics expert Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg decided that Israeli trans pop star—and 1998 Eurovision Song Contest winner— Dana International was legally a woman.
In recent weeks, she weighed in on the conflict in the Middle East, posting: “There is no justification for attacks on civilians. Not in Jerusalem, not in Sderot, not in Gaza.” She was forthright in a thread on the eve of Shavuot: “Tonight begins the holiday of Shavuot, the holiday marking the receiving of the Torah on Sinai — amidst airstrikes and the brutalities of Occupation, rockets & devastation, an increased humanitarian crisis in Gaza. And I find myself returning to the same core Torah truths.” The thread — which went on to quote Hillel, Rabbi Akiva and Ben Azzai —received more than 2,000 likes and was retweeted more than 500 times. “We are all created in the divine image. All of us. Every last one of us. Not a single one of us disposable, not a single person replaceable, no ‘collateral damage’ not unconscionable,” read one tweet in the thread.
Ruttenberg was raised outside Chicago, where she attended High Holy Day services at a Conservative (Masorti) synagogue. Shortly after her batmitzvah at a Reform shul, she decided she was an atheist. Later, as an undergraduate at Brown University, she was drawn to religious studies: “Religious history and textual criticism proved to be a candy store for a hungry atheist such as myself,” she wrote in Surprised by God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion (Beacon Press, 2008). But after her mother’s death from cancer, she found herself saying the mourner’s kaddish at her campus Hillel, and by the time she graduated, she was a regular at Friday night services. She eventually decided to become a Masorti rabbi, and was ordained by the American Jewish University’s Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in 2008.Today she is back living just outside Chicago, with her husband and three children.
She first encountered Twitter as a new rabbi working for Hillel, the Jewish organisation for college and university students. “We were all using Facebook to engage with students, and post information about events,” she recalls. “When a fellow rabbi said, ‘All the students are on Twitter these days,’ I sort of rolled my eyes and thought, ‘Another social media account?’. But I created a profile.”
However, her colleague was wrong. “There were zero students on Twitter, they were all on Snapchat!” she laughs. For a while, she was more active on Facebook, but she found the site something of an echo chamber. On Twitter however, she was intrigued by the diversity of experience and opinions. And eventually, “when I had time, I’d find myself there.”
It turned out to be a good fit for Rabbi Ruttenberg, who, as “a punk kid and a feminist who came out as queer, and then fell in love with Judaism,” was interested in engaging with people outside her community.
“Twitter is a great vehicle for me to do the kind of teaching I’ve always tried to do,” she explains. Although she’d considered becoming a pulpit rabbi during rabbinical school; “When someone who worked at the school said, ‘You don’t want to be just a rabbi to the people on the fringes, do you?’ I thought, ‘Those are my people!’ Everybody deserves a rabbi.”
“I’ve always been drawn to inclusive, expansive, loving readings of texts,” she continues. With Twitter as her pulpit, she started sharing texts she liked as well as her own and others’ interpretations of them. Her posts “really resonated with people. It turns out there are a great many people on the fringes.” Her message is, “This Torah is yours, too.”
Her threads also provide the comfort and clarity of a dvar Torah. For instance, in her posts discussing how the bravery of Jewish heroines Judith and Esther reflected the political realities of their times, she concludes, “May we know when to raise the sword, and when to get it done around the banquet table. May we all merit a little of their bravery.”
For Ruttenberg, the inclusive nature of social media is key to its appeal. “There’s a story in the Talmud (Brachot 28a). Rabbi Gamliel, head of Sanhedrin, gets deposed for repeatedly humiliating a colleague. He was also very elitist, allowing only select students to enter the house of study. But the rabbi who replaces him stops the guards from keeping would-be learners out, and adds benches to the house of study, so anybody can come in and learn,” Rabbi Ruttenberg recounts. “Social media affords us a way to add more benches.”
She compares it to the traditional Jewish process of paired learning. Both social media and paired learning provide access, she points out, to “partners to help you grow as a student.”
Twitter also offers access to history in the making as posters tweet live, personal updates to breaking news or major world events, she says. Occasionally, using Twitter means you’re one of the users making history: “Sometimes the activism is happening on social media. Public pressure includes people talking about issues like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo on Twitter.”
While not many Twitter posters are acknowledged experts with established platforms (or blue checks next to their names), they’re often experienced and insightful “people who have the capacity to transform your thinking,” Ruttenberg says.
“Many of the most brilliant people around today —including some well-known authorities in a variety of fields — are posting on Twitter as things are happening.” Just like the rest of us.
Of course, she acknowledges that “Twitter is not a perfect platform by any means.” The app has been slow to crack down on the users who post lies, death threats, and hate speech in the name of free expression. “I have definitely had horrible people telling me that I’m horrible,” for a variety of reasons, including her religion, her gender, her job, and her outspoken support for trans people and reproductive rights. She knows she’s privileged: “The amount and type of vitriol I get is nothing compared to many of my women colleagues — particularly Black women — have gotten on the platform.”
Despite the abuse, she’s not leaving: “The idea that people can intimidate you out of somewhere you want to be does not sit right with me. [Twitter co-founder and CEO] Jack Dorsey has an obligation to deal with his Nazi problem. He has not, and that’s on him.” She notes, “There is no purity in the systems we have; currently, our public squares are privately owned. I dream of a day when there are better regulated spaces.” But, “In the current reality, I make the choice to stay.”
Social media posts can offer snapshots of users’ well-being (or lack thereof), and “can amplify people’s experiences handling loneliness, iterations of fear, despair, exhaustion, burnout. … Pastorally, I do my best to respond to that, to name it if I can. As a rabbi I feel very conscious of where people are at emotionally. A lot of people are having a really hard time.”
But by the same token, “For some people, social media has really been key during the pandemic.” It’s provided “the space for human connection” that, since March 2020, so many of us have struggled to access. Because many of us remain isolated from friends, families, and/or colleagues, social media is standing in for the place “where we used to meet for coffee.” So, while “There’s definitely people expressing grief and looking for comfort and solace in mourning, there’s also a lot of ‘It’s day 26 of being cooped up in my room!’”
“Social media is a source of wisdom,” Ruttenberg concludes. “Brilliant people are sharing wisdom and are in dialogue with each other. We have the ability to take advantage of that.”
