Welcome to Life is a Sacred Text by me, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg.

This is going to be a fresh, expansive, loving, everybody-celebrating, nobody-diminished voyage into one of the world’s most ancient and holy books. It’s a book about which a lot of people have a lot of Big Feelings, to be sure—but I believe, passionately, that despite the fact that it’s been used as a bludgeon by too many people over the centuries, it’s really a roadmap for transformation in all the most critical of ways.

Yeah, I’m talking about the Five Books of Moses.

The stories of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy can, chapter by chapter, help us to do the work we must do to become the people we are meant to be; can help us to become more useful to a world in need; can sustain us and nurture us as we do this work; can give us better tools to meet the inevitable challenges along the way. 

This Substack will be an exploration into these stories, a meditation, a chance to see our own lives more clearly by looking at them through the lens of these tales—to catch ourselves reflected back, to illuminate what might have been hard to discern.

Your life is a sacred text.

It can be read in so many ways.

This, maybe, is one of them.

As for me, I’m the award-winning author of seven books, currently working on my next book, on repentance & repair in the public square out 2022. I’m a columnist for MSNBC, and have the profound honor of serving as Scholar in Residence at National Council of Jewish Women. My pronouns are she/her. Would love to have you come hang out with me here.

Sign up now so you don’t miss the first installment, out in early April.

In the meantime, tell your friends!