How to Make Wrongs Right with Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg
December 27, 2022
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome back to…
Abby Wambach:
Back to… Sorry, I just feel a little playful today.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, God help us all. Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. Thank you for coming back. We are here again, and like I used to tell my third graders, “I just need everyone to really turn on their listening ears, open their minds and hearts. Some life changing shit coming to you today,” and that’s what I used to say to my third graders.
Abby Wambach:
I would’ve learned so much more.
Amanda Doyle:
“Mommy, what is life changing shit?”
Glennon Doyle:
Life-changing shit, y’all.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
They come home. “I learned life-changing shit today.”
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly, exactly, so during our episode with Dr. Galit, she talked to us about how, when they did a study with mothers and babies, it became clear that 70% of the bids for attention or connection between mothers and babies were missed. That is how often we miss each other. But then there was this moment following the miss where the mother or the baby looked out to reconnect to mend or repair the miss, and in that follow up to repair the miss is where connection is made. Not in the initial ask for connection or bid for connection or attempt for connection, but that what we do as human beings is more often than not, we miss each other, but then there is a follow up, which is a repair of the initial bid for connection and that is where connection is made or lost.
Glennon Doyle:
And we miss it. As adults, we miss the repair moment because we have shame, so if you take this baby study and you apply it to children, to adults, to companies, to institutions, to nations, what happens is, yes, we screw it up the first time in our relationships. The person comes to us and says, “I feel hurt.” There is the golden moment to get connection, but since we don’t know the power of repair, we shut down, we dismiss, we deflect, we deny and we miss the golden moment. It’s true for babies, it’s true for children, it’s true for adults, communities. When people tell us that we’ve hurt them, we don’t know how to handle it, okay?
Glennon Doyle:
We think that we’re being told we’re a bad person so we have to defend our identity and then we surrender to our own fragility and we miss the magic. We have to stop missing the magic, so we are going to speak right now to the person who is helping people stop missing the magic. You all know her as Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg. She is an award-winning author of eight books, including her latest, which I loved so much, On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World. She serves as scholar in residence at the National Council of Jewish Women and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, and many other publications. Welcome, Rabbi Donya Ruttenberg. Thank you for joining us.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Thank you so much for having me.
Glennon Doyle:
I have been reading you and following you for years, and when I need to know what the smartest perspective is on any given issue, I often go to you first. I think you’re one of the reasons why I’m still on social media, so thanks for all that you do.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
God, I’m so honored. I’ve been reading you forever, too, so I think it’s about time we talked to each other.
Glennon Doyle:
Can you tell us, Rabbi Danya, why this issue of figuring… And first of all, I want you to describe the issue for us about repair and repentance, but how it came about, why you decided it was so important to put this into the discourse of how we can repair breaches from each other better?
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
So five years ago, just about exactly MeToo broke in a big, big way in our culture. Of course, Tarana Burke had created the hashtag much earlier, but that was the watershed moment for our culture, and all of these dudes were named as sexual abusers. And pretty much to the last, they all offered up these weak sauce statements. “I did it, but it’s really going to be a problem for my fans,” and, “Oh no, the impact on my family,” and, “Oh, God…” and whine and almost to the last did not mention the people that they harmed.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
And then there was this sort of like, “Okay, we’re just going to shove them in the corner,” and then it’s like, “Now what? What do we do with them?” And as it happened, a friend of mine, Jericho Vincent, was writing on this and came to me and said, “Okay, so now what?,” and I wrote up a couple paragraphs using Maimonides, who in Judaism is like the guy on mending harm, owning your stuff. The word is… It’s translated as repentance but maybe I should start a little bit back.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
In Judaism, when we talk about what’s translated as repentance, it’s not now you feel bad. It’s a series of actions. The word is teshuvah which means return. It’s about coming back to the person you were supposed to be all along. It’s about coming back to your integrity. It’s about coming back to the best version of you. It’s about coming back to the path that you wanted to be on before you started screwing up and harming out of ignorance, out of pettiness, out of laziness, out of sloppiness, out of all the reasons we hurt people. And there’s selfishness and greed and all of that, but even the little reasons that we hurt people. And out of our brokenness, out of our trauma, and so you have to come back and there’s work to do to come back and come back to a relationship with God, if that’s language that resonates with you and-
Glennon Doyle:
How would you say it for people who don’t use religious… It’s your integrity.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
You come back, you come to your integrity, to your self, to your values, to who you wanted to be, right? Do you want to be a harmed doer? Probably not. But in order to do that, there’s work to do. And so the guy in my tradition in Judaism is Maimonides, Moses Maimonides, 12th century philosopher, Torah scholar, all-around genius who took a bunch of earlier thinking and sort of rearranged it in a different order and kind of came up with what we call the laws of repentance. Repentance is this teshuvah, this coming back.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
So I wrote up a couple of paragraphs based on Maimonides sort of order of repentance, and we’ll get into what the steps are. Like if you’re a famous dude whose impact is not just on specific victims, these harm-specific people, but you also impacted the entire culture.
Glennon Doyle:
Correct.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
It’s like rape culture. Millions of people are now watching to see what happens next and your choices will impact how we think about gender, power, safety, what women are for, all of these things. So I sent my friend some paragraphs for the piece they were writing, then I threw those paragraphs on Twitter and this thread started, like I want to talk about forgiveness and atonement and repentance and the difference between these things, and people went bonkers.
Glennon Doyle:
I remember.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Because our culture doesn’t have this language for this. It’s like forgive, right?
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, my God. Yeah, nobody knows what it means. Nobody knows what it means. So you offer a starving world paths. “This is why none of you know how to make up. This is why none of you… You’re all just feeling guilty because you didn’t forgive because somebody told you to forgive. This is why you don’t know what to do when somebody tells you they’re hurt.” There actually are ideas on how to proceed and one of the first most important concepts you present is that repentance and forgiveness are two separate processes for two separate parties. Repentance is the work that the one who did the harm, the hurter, does, correct?
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Right.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, so give us an example and then tell us what the first step of repentance is, because we’re talking about MeToo and wider issues, but what I’ve heard you say is that you’ve never seen this path not work in some way for individuals, for mothers and daughters, for fathers and sons, for companies, institutions. It works for everybody.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Right. When we talk about this stuff in Judaism, it’s usually been about individual relationships, like family systems or what happened at work or whatever, and after this MeToo conversation, I started playing with it and like would it work for institutions and, well, what about this case study? Oh, this company that did something really right, it actually maps onto the steps, and what about nations? And I kept waiting for the system to break and it never broke. There’s something there and it echoes other systems that work because there’s something there. So first step is confession, own your stuff. Which means there’s some pre-work which is “What did I do? Why is this a problem?”
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
And there’s a lot of heavy work in having to cross that sort of cognitive dissonance of we have this story of us as the hero. “I’m always the good guy, I never do anything wrong,” and we have to kind of cross that bridge and face the fact that, “Today I caused someone else pain. Today I was not the good guy in someone else’s story and I have some cleanup work to do.” And then you have to name without talking about what you intended and what you meant. We don’t care what you meant. We don’t care abut your great intentions. We don’t care what a great person you usually are, just name what you did, own it. Ideally, definitely to anybody who witnessed the harm. You say something racist in a staff meeting. Those people need to see the confession.
Glennon Doyle:
Publicly. If the harm was caused publicly, the taking ownership needs to be done publicly, correct, because the harm was done to more people than just the person who was offended directly?
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Correct, and it has to be at least as public as the harm was caused, and it is praiseworthy to make it even more public than the harm. It’s not a name and shame thing. It’s not about putting you in the stocks. It’s about, A, asking for accountability, saying, “I’m struggling. I did something that’s not my best self and I need help getting back on that path of where I want to be.” Number two, from the victim’s perspective, this is an end to the gas lighting.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
“I did this, it happened, it was real.” Any question you might have had about, “Whose fault was it, did it really happen, why did this happen to me?” you get your answers, right?
Glennon Doyle:
Relief you call it. You give relief to the person who’s struggling because they are gas lighting themselves at this point probably saying, “Did that really happen? Are my feelings valid?” The other person, the hurter, is giving relief to that person by saying, “Yes, it was real. Yes, I did this.”
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Right, and whether we’re talking about sexual abuse… We want to talk about larger systemic harm. We could talk about the way internalized racism plays out. There are all sorts of different ways that naming and owning that harm can really be critical for a healing process.
Amanda Doyle:
As you’re talking, I’m thinking of the word reconciliation because usually so much of what we think about reconciliation is two people or two groups coming together and making peace, but really reconciling is accepting a situation or fact even though you don’t like it. So in a way, you’re confessing. Is you’re reconciling to yourself with yourself that there is this thing that I did, this way that I’m showing up, this internalized issue in me that I am accepting as just as true as this wonderful part of me, and I am claiming it. And so really the first reconciliation has to be with you or else you’re never going to be able to offer the truth of a confession.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Yeah, deeply, and you have to be able to do that separation between… We have this thing in our society where people think, “I’m not racist so the thing I said can’t possibly be racist.” Not a racist bone in your body as opposed to we are all human beings and we do things. We have actions and some of our actions are helpful and some of them are harmful and we can clean up our messes, but it’s not an indictment of your whole self, and that’s, Glennon, when you were talking about the shame, I mean it’s that, right?
Glennon Doyle:
I want to ask a question about what makes a good whatever the opposite of gas lighting is, owning harm, naming and owning harm. Because what I notice a lot and I think whether it’s just the PR agents that are getting a little bit better or actual human beings, I don’t know. I think there’s a couple PR agents who have read your book because some are getting a little bit better. But in terms of people are always saying, “I did something that was out of character for me.” That’s the main message and I always think, “But don’t we do what is in our character? Isn’t the issue not ‘I did something out of line with my character’, but my character wasn’t good enough and what I did revealed my character exactly and so what I’m going to do is make my character better.”
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Exactly, exactly. One of my favorite confessions is Dan Harmon who was a showrunner for Community and he sexually harassed one of the writers on his set, Megan Ganz, and it was all of the gas lighting, and when she sort of rebuffed him, he then treated her badly and when he finally owned it on his podcast, he said… And this is somebody who very clearly identified as a feminist, and he said, “There’s no way I could call myself a feminist and do these things. I clearly did not respect women the way I told myself that I did, and I lied to myself about what was going on and, and, and.”
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
And for Megan Ganz it was so validating to just have it named and just all of the questions erased. For him to say, “The story I’ve been telling myself about who I am clearly isn’t true if these are the choices that I made,” and so that’s why you get to step two, which is then you have to start to change and then you have work to do. We love to put the post on Instagram, right? “I’m very sorry I did a thing. Yes, I shouldn’t have said it,” but very few people will then back it up with change.
Glennon Doyle:
And I want to emphasize it’s that idea that we all are mugs of liquid of coffee and or tea and when we get bumped, something spills out. Something spills out and so what happens with our behavior is what’s inside of us has spilled out, not an accidental liquid that was from somewhere else. Actually what is inside of us, and so what we say then or what we hope to be true is, “I’m going to change what’s inside of me so that the next time I’m bumped something else spills out,” right?
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
So let’s talk about what is next, starting to change. That feels hard. So let’s just use the example that you just used. Dan Harmon. His apology or his owning, it felt like a relief to me when I read it. It felt like some man had stopped gas lighting and admitted what they all know. It felt like an act of mercy. So what might someone do… And let’s give an example, too, of when this is personal, like a relational family situation. We’ve made the owning that would be a mother coming and saying, “I know that I did this.” How do you see it happening in families with the first step?
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
So the first step, you always have to sort of name it, own it, right? “I have been on my phone and not giving you my full attention and it’s a chronic problem and I get that.”
Glennon Doyle:
Can you do a different one? Because that one hurts my feelings?
Abby Wambach:
That one rings too true.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, that’s out of my character.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
I mean, 98% of America is officially busted.
Amanda Doyle:
She hasn’t reconciled that yet to herself.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
“I am taking out my anger about my bad day at home instead of dealing with the hard stuff at work.” So you have to own it and you have to name it and you have to name it clearly. The fact that you were playing a little bit loudly really wasn’t a problem. You were okay, right, into really the reaffirming and the validating and… And that’s the confessing. “It’s me, I’m the problem.”
Glennon Doyle:
I love it. Thank you, Danya, for that. T Swift.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
“Okay, yes, it’s me. I’m the problem. Hi.” And then you have to, what are you going to do so that you don’t keep doing the thing? Because you’re not going back to anywhere. You’re not becoming your better self. No transformation if you keep doing it, you keep harming. So you have to do change, and it depends on the person. What is at the root of this thing? Do you need therapy? Do you need to call your sponsor or get into some sort of rehab situation? Do you need to separate from a group of friends because you always behave horrendously when you’re with them, but you’re kind of okay otherwise but you need to rearrange some of your social priorities? Do you need to do some deep education on anti-racism or trans liberation? Are there places of ignorance that you need to be working on? What is the thing that needs to happen so that you can start to become different and not do the thing anymore?
Glennon Doyle:
Yep. What’s interesting, pod squad, is so far, none of this has to do with the person. The person who has been hurt doesn’t have to do shit in this process, correct?
Amanda Doyle:
We haven’t even engaged them.
Glennon Doyle:
We have not even engaged them. Different than change or moving on from change is restitution and accepting consequences. So tell us about this because there’s an example in your book, I think, of someone who owned the thing, said the thing, then said they were going to change and then tried to get out of the sentence that they… right?
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, that’s the example that stuck with me in your book. Like, “Oh, well isn’t this a hard one?” because you have to say it, change it and then accept the consequences for it.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
I would argue that even the steps one and two are really victim centric. You’re ending the gas lighting, you are preventing future victims, and then step three, A, there’s restitution. What is owed to the person who was harmed? You can’t undo what you did. But it’s like that Japanese art of Kintsugi where you me bring things back together. You repair pottery with gold so it’s not unbroken and you can still see the brokenness, but there’s something. Do you owe them money? Are you going to donate to an organization? Are you going to give time, resources, connections? I don’t know. What do they need?
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
How do you find out? You ask them because if you decide for them what appropriate amends are, then you’re still making them an object. You’re not centering their personhood and their needs so you’re reinscribing the same harm. So you have to ask them and it has to be negotiated. What are amends? And you have to accept the consequences because the cup is broken. Maybe you’re not invited back to game night anymore. Even if you are totally repentant, you do all of things great amends, you still don’t get to come back to game night. You lost the job opportunity. And so the story is Barry Freundel is a rabbi who was caught recording over 150 women as they undressed for the mikveh, the ritual bath.
Abby Wambach:
Oh, my God.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Recording anyone as they are undressing is already a profound breach of trust, but the rabbi congregant relationship and the sacred space of the ritual bath… I mean people go there when they’re trying to conceive, after miscarriages. It’s also a very emotionally-laden space and I can’t even convey the rage that I experience when I understand this. And so he was ultimately sentenced to significantly fewer of the crimes that he committed than he should have been because of statute of limitations, so his sentencing didn’t reflect the full amount of crimes that he committed.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
And he gave this beautiful apology because he’s the rabbi, he knows his Maimonides. He knows what he’s supposed to say, right? He’s got all the same books I do. He knows what to post, but then he argued that he shouldn’t be in jail for very long because he really ultimately only committed one crime because they’re all bundled together, which tells us that he doesn’t understand what he did.
Glennon Doyle:
What’s the eggshell plaintiff doctrine? Sister was adding her lawyer self to the-
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah, I was thinking about this as we were talking about restitution. I was thinking about the way that the legal system approaches that, and there’s this doctrine called the eggshell plaintiff that if you negligently cause an accident, you are responsible for the actual damages caused. So even if the person you hurt is as fragile as an eggshell, you can’t say, “Well, the average person wouldn’t have been hurt this bad,” or “It’s unreasonable that this person suffered such a great injury.” You take your victim as you find them.
Amanda Doyle:
So if you bump somebody a little bit and they fall to pieces, you’re responsible for those pieces even if you don’t think that’s reasonable. And I think that is fascinating as it pertains to all of this because if you do something you can’t say, you know, “You were too sensitive. What I did doesn’t correlate to that kind of injury. Aren’t you exaggerating?” all of that kind of gas lighting? I just think that that legal doctrine of taking your victim as you find them is fascinating as it applies to this.
Glennon Doyle:
So next, after we’ve accepted consequences, no matter how sensitive or fragile the other person was, because that is not the issue here, then comes the apology, which is so interesting, all the way at the end, all the way at the end.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Just think of it, right? Because when you think about it, if the apology is at the beginning, you’re still basically the harm doer.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Nothing’s changed. You’re still that person and so it’s like checking off something in a box and it’s the publicist writing the thing you post on Instagram on your little notes app. I don’t know why that’s a thing.
Glennon Doyle:
Me either.
Amanda Doyle:
It looks so organic if you put it in the notes app.
Glennon Doyle:
Because it looks raw. How is this different than the first owning harm? How is the apology different than number one?
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
You own the harm, right? You say, “I did this thing,” and then you have to do the work. You say, “Okay, really this is me. Today, I’m not the good guy.” And then you have to do the work to change and make that coffee a different… Put in some sugar, get some cream, whatever it is. The true coffee is sweeter and better. And then you have this negotiated amends and so imagine somebody’s going on a journey of anti-racism, for example. They said something out of deep ignorance and then they have to understand what they did, and as they’re learning, there’s that moment of like, “Oh, oh,” and then in the negotiated amends as they hear what the other person needs, there’s more understanding of what really happened to them, and the deeper empathy and connection. And so by the time you get to this apology, this transformation has happened, right? You have been transformed, you are already someone else and that apology is flowing from a truly contrite heart. That you get what you did and you’re really sorry, as opposed to the harm doer\ who doesn’t understand at all why everybody’s so mad.
Glennon Doyle:
They’re baffled. The harm doer is baffled in the beginning because they didn’t do something out of character. They did something in character and then the world said, “That character sucks,” and then they’re like, “Wait.” And so by the time we get through all the work and we get to the apology, we are of a different character. We can look back on our previous self and have sorrow for the harm that that person did. “I’m sorry,” means not, “Oh shit, I got caught,” but “I have sorrow in my heart.” If we don’t have sorrow in our hearts, we shouldn’t be saying, “I’m sorry,” right?
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Right, and it’s not about getting off the hook, and notably the work of repair that amends, what do you need to do to sew up that hole in the cosmos that you caused already happened? Do the work first. We don’t want your words until you’ve already done the fixing thing. Somebody’s sitting there on the floor with a broken foot and you’re like, “I’m sorry,” and the person is like, “I really would just like you to pay for my hospital bills,” or whatever. Do the work first and then we can have the conversation about how you feel about what you did.
Glennon Doyle:
And become safer for the person because you’re not even safe to approach the person when you’re of the same character that caused the… Tell us some things that make horrific apologies.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Blame.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s awesome, right, Rabbi Danya, when people say they’re sorry and then cry and then get very victimy and then make sure that all the attention is on reassuring that person? So that’s good, right?
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Right. I mean that’s the thing is that the apology, it all has to be victim centric, and what I love about the language that Maimonides uses in this section of the laws of repentance is that Maimonides says you have to appease the victim. So it’s not you have to do a certain thing, and it’s like what is going to appease? There’s some other languages and there are some other words in Hebrew as well, but to care for, to appease, to take care of the victim, it’s going to be different for different people and it will be different depending on what happened.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
It’s not Maimonides says you have to say these three magic words and then you’re off the hook. It is what does the person who was hurt need in order to feel better? What are their spiritual needs? What are their emotional needs? So again, it’s about having to engage them as full people.
Glennon Doyle:
There are many, many examples of times when the perpetrator who’s doing the repentance work needs to not directly have contact with the person who is victimized because that would be bad and more hurtful, no matter how much work the person’s doing, and that victim person never wants to hear from this person again and will do their own healing work on their own.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
And that is there and that is real and there are times, and again this is victim centric so if it’s going to harm the person who was hurt to show up and say, “It’s amends and apology time so I can go back and do my teshuvah work,” then you’re not doing it right because it’s not about the harm doer. So there are ways to do indirect amends. Instead of doing something directly for the person you harm, you volunteer your time and energy at an organization that would make sense, or you fight to get certain laws passed or you spend the rest of your life trying to transform our culture into a better, safer place. If you committed sexual assault, you should not work with victims of assaults but there are things you can do.
Glennon Doyle:
And you just have to live with the consequence of not getting let off the hook by the victim. That might be really uncomfortable for you and that is your consequence for the rest of your life that you don’t get to possibly have that moment with your victim where your victim says, “I forgive you.”
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Well, and that’s the thing, as we said at the beginning. Forgiveness and repentance are different tracks.
Glennon Doyle:
Let’s talk about that.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Yeah, so the person doing the repentance work can do all of their work and do everything and not be forgiven and it’s still okay. Maimonides says if you go and you apologize and the person says, “Piss off. I’m not interested in this,” then you come back with an accountability team. You bring three people and they’re there to watch you and see what your language is and what are you saying and how are they responding, and then maybe you debrief afterwards, like, “What am I missing? Why is this not landing?” And you do that a few more times, you go back and forth. Maimonides says after you’ve apologized ultimately four times, once on your own and then three times with different people who are trying to help you make this connection, if it’s not landing, you have done everything you can and you are free to… And then this is where it gets Jewish. You are free to ask God for forgiveness on Yom Kippur and the Day of Atonement and you’re fine. There’s no place in Judaism for the sentence, “You have to forgive me because I can’t finish my repentance work otherwise.” It doesn’t exist.
Amanda Doyle:
I am just obsessed with how we, as a culture, even our expectations and the onus and the agency is on the person who had the harm done to them. If there is an injury, we don’t look at the person who did the harm and say, “Have they atoned? Have they repented? Have they changed?” We say, “Oh, did they make up? Are they forgiven? Are they good now?” as if the victim of the situation is the one who’s holding the ball the entire time. And for me, that’s so frustrating because culturally we could shift that and be like the victim is in charge of taking care of themselves and has zero other obligations, and I’m looking at you and seeing what you’re doing. If you do harm, you get to be the passive one, and just looking over and saying, “I’m ready to receive my forgiveness anytime. I did my thing.”
Amanda Doyle:
And so, for me, I feel like forgiveness is between you and you. There is no two people in forgiveness, so when you forgive, it’s not letting the other person free. When I have forgiven, it’s not to let the other person free. It is to let myself free and it’s not accepting what they did, it’s accepting that it happened. So the famous Oprah show thing of forgiveness is giving up the hope it would’ve been different, not that it was okay, but that it happened. And I just think this thought of forgiveness as an exchange of value or a gift between two people is horseshit because you do it so that you are not a prisoner to the thing that happened to you, and I think the reverse is true, that if you are the harm doer, forgiveness is still between you and you.
Amanda Doyle:
You don’t go to the injured party looking for gifts because, A, that’s wildly inappropriate and, B, it’s not even useful because it doesn’t actually express anything real. It’s just if you are holding yourself prisoner because you did harm, that’s your business, and an apology might be part of what you try to do, but it can’t be what frees you. You need to free yourself through your own work.
Glennon Doyle:
I experienced that. A direct example in my past marriage, rampant infidelity was revealed and immediately in my church I was a project. And it’s okay, Craig’s used to me talking about this. It’s part of his repentance. I’m just joking. It’s not, I’m just joking.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
No, no, no, no. My reaction was just that visceral horror at totally getting it, like I was a project factor.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, it was like he was unfaithful and then I was the project. I had to go to Christian therapy. I had to go to the circles. I had to read the books because my job was to forgive. “Has she forgiven him yet?” But there was no, “Let’s put Craig in the groups,” and there was this compulsory forgiveness, and I love how you talk… Just talk to us about compulsory… Because it serves somebody and it’s always the people in power.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Compulsory forgiveness, pretty much always reinscribes existing power structures. Harm isn’t always between someone with more power and someone with less power. It’s not the only way that harm happens, but almost always to the last when one person is pushing or a bunch of people are pushing one party to do the forgiving it is in order to maintain the status quo so that nothing will change, so that systems won’t change, so that social dynamics won’t change, so that we can just keep exactly everything as it is. Our pastor doesn’t have to resign. We don’t need to ask any larger questions about the police force that enabled this Black motorist to be shot. We just push forgiveness and then everything can just stay exactly as it is.
Amanda Doyle:
Isn’t unity often a euphemism for forgiveness? We just all need to be unified on this.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
I actually think that our country’s obsession with forgiveness came at the end of the Civil War. When white northerners started preaching, “Listen guys, we need to forgive the South and we all need to be unified and aren’t we all brothers and na na na na na,” right? Even abolitionists who were maybe against slavery but not against white supremacy and they threw Black Americans under the bus. Said, “Don’t worry about that violence you’re hearing about. It’s fine. The lynchings, it’s okay. But we are still friends. We are all unity. Forgiveness is the number one thing,” and we started hearing, “Forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness,” and it was a way to reinscribe white supremacy at a moment when it was at risk. Unity, right?
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
And then it’s the same thing that happened right after January 6th, and it is always at the expense of someone and you always have to look around and do the power analysis. When you hear the words unity, the words forgiveness, when they’re getting pushed, sort of see whose interests aren’t being served and why.
Glennon Doyle:
Unity at the expense of justice, you ask whose justice, and forgiveness, okay, forgiveness without demanding what repentance. Because as you point out, Rabbi Danya, this unity is always demanded. Nobody’s even said they’re sorry.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Nope.
Glennon Doyle:
We haven’t even required that.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
No, oh, no.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
After the Civil War, you had all these people saying, “We’re all going to be friends,” and then you had both Black and white, other people who were like, “Can we talk about repentance?” Frederick Douglass saying like, “Listen, if Southerners want to do repentance work for,” I don’t know, “enslaving human beings and they want to talk about how genuinely sorry they are that they did this and then went to war to defend their right to do it, sure we can have a conversation, but this thing where they’re not sorry at all and we’re just going to pretend nothing happened?”
Amanda Doyle:
Not only are we going to pretend nothing happened, but we are in fact going to give reparations but it’s going to be for the people who enslaved people who have lost their property, not reparations for people who lost their lives and their ancestors’ lives, but we’re going to reimburse you for that because that is an offense that needs atonement, taking your property.
Glennon Doyle:
And to bring it down to the personal level also, this is what you see in families when the child comes and says, “I was mistreated,” and then the mother says, “We just have to forgive. It’s just the way it is.” That is the same dynamic of we will keep power and we will keep status quo exactly as it is without changing. And by the way, in my previous marriage, there was no power differential. We were equal in the hurt. But that process still protects power because by saying, “Glennon is the one, the victim is the one who has to do the work,” power is protecting itself because then all of the people above us, the pastors, the men in powerful positions don’t ever have to be the ones doing the repentance. So even if the two people in the conflict have equal power, power is still protecting itself.
Abby Wambach:
I think this whole conversation around power and the dynamics between perpetrator and victim, I guess my question is is forgiveness even possible? Because-
Glennon Doyle:
I don’t believe in it.
Abby Wambach:
To me there’s a big question in that it is to create status quo. It is like, “Oh, but we all must forgive. That’s just the way of the world.” Religions have these tenets that are based in it, but it’s to keep those institutions central. I just don’t know and I’m curious from your perspective.
Glennon Doyle:
What does it mean? Is it real?
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Okay, let’s talk about forgiveness. So in Judaism there are two different words that get translated as forgiveness because nothing is uncomplicated. There’s mechilah and selichah. So mechilah is like a closing of accounts, like you stole from me, fine. You acknowledged that you did and you figured out why you made that choice, or you’re working on it, you’re in therapy, you paid me back, you apologized really nicely, we’re done.” And remember, none of this includes reconciliation, right?
Amanda Doyle:
Right.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
That’s a whole different thing.
Amanda Doyle:
Very important.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Maybe we’re friends again, maybe we’re not, but whatever. This story is over, we’re good closing the books. And then there’s selichah which is the more emotional, empathetic, like I see you and it’s warm and fuzzy and that’s the one that usually American culture is all about. “I forgive you,” kind of vibe. Jewish literature generally talks about mechilah. “We’re just closing the book, it’s over, case closed.” So it’s a much lower bar and so if we’re saying repentance and forgiveness are different tracks, so, A, we have the penitent person has gone and done all their work, they’ve trotted off and are changed and transformed, yay, okay good.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
And then the person who was harmed now has to figure out where they are, and if somebody is coming to them and they’re genuinely sorry and they’re genuinely doing the work, Jewish literature says, A, don’t be super petty. If it’s something that’s not a major, major deal, don’t be petty, don’t lord your wounds over them. Check yourself to see if your refusal to close the books on this situation is… If there’s something in you that you need to check on because it may be spiritually bad for you that you’re hanging onto this. So you shouldn’t do that and that’s bad. And I have a whole extended disagreement, very nerdy disagreement with Maimonides about some of the language and choices he made in this section. We don’t need to go there.
Glennon Doyle:
I love you. Just see you arguing with that man.
Amanda Doyle:
I have a nerdy disagreement with a 13th century Jewish scholar.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
I used to refer to him as my dead medieval boyfriend.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh, of course you did.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
I don’t anymore but…
Glennon Doyle:
Well, I love those two differentiations. We need that. We need that because in your book you said sometimes… Somebody else said this, but it was a quote, “Sometimes forgiveness is wishing that rotten S.O.B. peace and getting along with your life.”
Abby Wambach:
I can buy that.
Amanda Doyle:
Roz Weber, yeah.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Right, and it’s just like go, zoom. And whenever I talk about this I always make sure to make sure this is clear. The Jerusalem Talmud, is an authoritative source. Says that if somebody slanders you, they never ever have to forgive them, and the reason why that’s given by later commentators is very much because if somebody talks crap about you, it’s like the feathers have been let loose in the wind. You can never collect them all. You can never get back everybody… The story is already out there and there’s no way to totally take it back. That is harm that can never be fully repaired.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
So my read is that if you are harmed in a way that can never be fully repaired, you are never obligated to forgive.
Abby Wambach:
That’s how I feel.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Right? You’re never obligated to forgive your abuser ever. Trauma? Never. You might in your healing process as you do your work of healing, and I think my personal take is that victims of harm, and we’re all perpetrators, victims and bystanders, all of us, all the time, when we are victims, our job is to do the healing work and to do everything we can to take care of ourselves. And if organically at some place at some time we find that we have closed the books, okay, then we can tell the perpetrator or not.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s so good because it often feels like, “Can you forgive me?” feels shorthand for, “Can we pretend that that never happened? Can we go back to where that never happened?” And that feels like the opposite of forgiveness for the person which is accepting that it can never be different. You have to accept it can never be different, but the perpetrator gets to pretend like it never happened. It can’t be both ways.
Glennon Doyle:
I want to ask you a heavy, serious question, but I know that you are the one to ask. So you thought, and the writing in the book is so beautiful and specific about really how you see this repentance, not even really repentance forgiveness, but repentance forgiveness process, how it might be implemented in different conflicts, interpersonal and institutional and international. So how do you see this being implemented in the Israeli Palestine conflict?
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
It’s so hard. Obviously Israel is the party with more power and human rights abuses are being committed in an ongoing way. I’m very comfortable naming that I’m against the occupation and I’ve been vocally against the occupation. And the fact of the matter is that there are competing understandings of what is true. That is a reality. I’ve made it a project to go learn and learn and learn and learn and learn and shut up and learn, and there are a lot of things that are true simultaneously, even if it’s not convenient that they’re all true at the same time.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
And the first step of this work is always confession, truth telling. I look at the South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the book as one kind of model, and I really believe that with Israel Palestine, what we need to do is make space for all of the truth to be told in one place and that everybody hears all of the things. It’s a massive project and I don’t know if we start with everything that happened in 1948. I have ideas about which specific people or organizations we would bring in.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
But you get all of the things told in one place, and then what does starting to change look like? I really believe, deep in my bones, that if we can get the truth telling done right, like a real truth telling, that the next step will present itself. What that’s starting to change will look like will find itself in the middle of that process. And if you get the right people working together to formulate what that could be, it can and will happen.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, you’re making me think one of the important keys is complete surrender and presence in each step without thinking forward to what the next thing is going to be, because you’re going to become a different person and more will be revealed in each step, which will then make the next step clear. So this is very next right thingish, and when you’re saying all of that, it rings so true because as you were speaking, I was thinking about a family and how impossible it is to… You’re saying this and I’m saying this in this part of my life, but the way you are, you’re that way because of the generation before you.
Glennon Doyle:
And it’s like the only way a family could heal is if we could have one room with the ghosts of our ancestors and our great-grandmothers saying, “Oh, she’s like that because I healed from this, and then she healed from that and then you healed…” And it would be like the only way a family could truly heal is if generations were in the same room because all the things are true at once.
Glennon Doyle:
I had a friend sit in my house last week, a dear friend, and she is a freedom fighter for all oppressed groups and she is Jewish and this is right after the latest Kanye fiasco, and she sat on my couch, fire in her, sadness in her, and she said, “It just feels to me like antisemitism is the last permissible hate.” Talk to us about where we are in this country with anti-Semitism and why that rings so true.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
I have to kind of go back a thousand years in a sentence or two.
Glennon Doyle:
If anybody can do it it’s you.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
So beginning in the medieval Christian era, Christians didn’t want to do money lending. Jews are like, “It’s not against our religion. You don’t care and y’all won’t let us own land, are taxing us ridiculously and keep kicking us out of different countries, so having liquid resources is great.” And so we get this association with Jews and money, and then little by little this game of blame the Jews not us starts up. So anytime someone is in power and things aren’t going very well, they start to say, “It’s the Jews, it’s not us. Those greedy Jews, it’s not us.” Remember we are mostly poor, we are mostly refugees from country to country because they keep kicking us out but they still play this game.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
And so you get to like 1902, the Czar Nicholas, his people write the protocols of the Elders of Zion, write secret cabal of the Jews because things were going badly for him. 1905 Revolution was getting going. Blame the Jews, not us. It’s always the people in power but the Jews are the scapegoat, and so we have this ongoing story of the people in the shadows who are secretly behind the scenes pulling the strings. You can’t see them but they’re there and they’re really behind everything. And then we have Jews come to America and we are like, “This is the best we’ve ever had it, honestly, anytime in history.” Things are kind of going okay. The white Jews managed to assimilate into whiteness in a lot of different ways. It’s conditional whiteness but it’s partly there, and the same shadowy Jews behind the scene trope continues.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
That’s why it’s so hard to see because it’s slippery and, you know, you talk about the deep state and you talk about like, “Oh, Soros, Rothschilds,” like it’s an ancient trope. It’s these little things, you just show the names of a few politicians, you know, you just raise up and it comes up again and again. QAnon is now bringing up blood libel tropes. It’s the same stuff over and over again but because by design it’s the folks behind the scenes and it’s hints and it’s whispers, we are somehow secretly pulling the strings even though white protestants have been basically running the country and Christo-fascism is coming for all of us.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
It’s like I’m sorry but somehow magically Jews are supposed to be behind all of this but you don’t say Jews and so it’s in code. You talk about the globalists and you talk about those cosmopolitan people and the rich people and the people on the coasts, the elites, and so it’s in code but we all kind of know and it’s half conscious and it’s half not. And that’s why, because it’s slippery. The other thing is that the way that anti-Semitism operates that is different from other oppressions is that, unlike other oppressions, anti-Semitism even works better when Jews are doing okay.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
When Jews are actually doing okay in society, it continues to function and even thrives off of that, whereas many oppressions are about keeping a population below, under, beneath. And so that is also part of the slipperiness of it. It looks like everything’s fine. It looks like we’re doing fine. The Jews are fine. Why are they complaining? And it’s like, “Well, because people keep gunning down our synagogues, kidnapping our rabbis. If people would stop doing that then that would be great.”
Glennon Doyle:
Thank you for that. Thank you. So we’re going to close now. We call this We Can do Hard Things. I just really have come to believe in my life, whether it’s in personal situations, whether things I do online, that this process of really surrendering to a repentance path, it’s like when you’re in the airport and you get on one of those little escalators that are just flat but it moves you faster than everybody else.
Abby Wambach:
People mover, yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
In terms of spiritual evolution, in terms of personal development, actually surrendering to a repentance process feels so uncomfortable, and it is a speed track to being a better person, and we are all missing it. Since America’s so physically obsessed, it’s like there was this one workout that was the magical thing that would make you live longer and then just none of us did it because it was hard. This is the equivalent of that.
Abby Wambach:
This is a spiritual workout.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s a spiritual workout.
Abby Wambach:
A spiritual workout.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s a thing that you don’t want to do at first and then it hurts and it’s sweaty and icky and then it changes you and then it changes everyone around you and you can actually see the magic happen in your relationships when you stop refusing it. And I think that your work, because of that, and also for a million reasons… I mean you guys have to read the rest of Rabbi Danya’s work. This is just her latest. So important, world changing, life changing. Thank you for being who you are in the world and all of you, we can do hard things, pod squad. Follow Rabbi Danya. Check her out and the book. Thank you so much. We appreciate you. Thanks for doing hard things.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:
Thank you so much.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, see you next week, pod squad. Bye.