Why Forgiveness Isn’t the First Step with Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg

S10 E7—Saying "I'm sorry" isn't enough to repair personal or institutional harm. Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, author of On Repentance and Repair, joins Amy Julia Becker to share an ancient framework for repentance and repair that challenges our culture's obsession with quick apologies. Together they discuss forgiveness, institutional responsibility, and breaking cycles of harm.

00:00 Defining Repentance and Repair
04:29 The Current State of Repentance in Society
07:10 Maimonides' Process of Repentance
17:00 The Influence of Distorted Protestantism on American Culture
22:50 The Complexity of Forgiveness and Purpose of Repentance
28:45 Institutional Harm and the Challenges of Repair
41:59 Repentance as a Path to a Good Life

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg

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SUBSCRIBE to Amy Julia's Substack: amyjuliabecker.substack.com

WATCH this conversation on YouTube: Amy Julia Becker on YouTube

JOIN the conversation on Instagram: @amyjuliabecker

LISTEN to more episodes: amyjuliabecker.com/shows/

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ABOUT OUR GUEST:

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg is the award-winning author of eight books who now makes her primary writing home at LifeIsASacredText.com 

She has received the Lives of Commitment Award from Auburn Seminary, and the Rabbinic Human Rights Hero Award from the human rights organization T’ruah, was named by Newsweek as a “rabbi to watch,” and as a “faith leader to watch” by the Center for American Progress.

Her newest book, On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World is a National Jewish Book Award winner and an American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Honor Book. It was hailed by Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley as “A must read for anyone navigating the work of justice and healing.”  

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Thanks for listening! 

Transcript

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Note: This transcript is autogenerated and does contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

Amy Julia Becker (00:05)
I'm Amy Julia Becker, and this is Reimagining the Good Life, a podcast about challenging the assumptions about what makes life good, proclaiming the inherent belovedness of every human being, and envisioning a world of belonging where everyone matters. I'm joined today by Rabbi Dania Ruttenberg as she shares an ancient framework for repentance and repair that challenges our culture's obsession with quick apologies. We're talking about forgiveness, institutional responsibility, and breaking the cycles of heart.

Amy Julia Becker (00:36)
Rabbi Ruttenberg is the award-winning author of eight books, including her newest on repentance and repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World, a National Jewish Book Award winner, and an American Library Association Sophie Broder honor book. It was hailed by Congresswoman Ayana Presley as a must-read for anyone navigating the work of justice and healing. And here is my conversation with Rabbi Dania Ruttenberg.

Rabbi Ruttenberg, thank you so much for being here with me today. I just was telling you before we hit record that I gained so much from reading your book, which is called On Repentance and Repair. And I'm just delighted that you are here with me and with our listeners so that we can just talk together about the wisdom that are held within this its pages. So thank you for writing it. Thank you for being here. I'm really excited for this conversation.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (01:29)
I'm so honored and thank you so much for having me.

Amy Julia Becker (01:31)
Me.

Well, I thought we should probably start with just defining our terms. So will you explain these terms? Well, actually, so we've got on repentance and repair, and then the subtitle is Making Amends in an unapologetic world. ⁓ so I'd love for you to tell us like what is repentance, what is repair, how are they different from each other. If you, you know, think of it, you could maybe bring in amends and apologies also. But like there are lots of different ways we

think we might be talking about the same thing and I don't think we actually are. And so I'd love to just define our terms as we get started.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (02:06)
I I love that and appreciate it as you know, I think it helps us to think more clearly when we actually know what we're talking about. so in my tradition, and I you know, I'm a Jew, that's my framework, ⁓ the word that we translate as repentance is chuva, which really means return. It's about returning back.

To the person you have been supposed to be all along. ⁓ and we're all human, we screw up, we make mistakes, but you gotta come back. And ⁓ so, you know, we'll talk as we go about the process of repentance, but that's really the work. And repair is part of that. As I say

Amy Julia Becker (02:39)
Huh.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (03:02)
around the house to my kids all the time. You make a mess, you clean it up. And that's whether or not ⁓ you you're in the kitchen or you hurt somebody that you care about. Hurt somebody that you don't care, you know, if it's in your day-to-day life institutionally, you make a mess, you gotta clean it up. And that's the repair work. That's not all of the repentance work involved. The repentance is bigger, but that's a piece of it.

Amy Julia Becker (03:14)
Uh-huh.

Sure.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (03:35)
and apology is a piece of that there. ⁓ repentance, repair, making amends is a piece of that. We'll we'll get there, right? ⁓

Amy Julia Becker (03:47)
I'm even thinking about the example you just gave of like you make a mess in the kitchen. ⁓ and like if you're now sitting in the living room and you like your mom says, Hey, you gotta clean up your mess, it's like the returning is simply walking into the kitchen and then there's actually like some work to do and it might even be harder because now it's like crusty and like stuck to the counter, you know? Whereas earlier in the day it was just a little puddle or whatever. Anyway, ⁓ I might be extending my analogy a little too far, but

I do appreciate that sense of like physically returning, like going back ⁓ to what you were yeah, who you were supposed to be, ⁓ and whom perhaps we are called to be. ⁓ and I guess within all of this, early on, this page three of the book, you write, to put it bluntly, American society isn't very good at doing the work of repentance or repair. And I know that it is possible that all listeners feel like I and you have just stated the obvious, but I still think it's important

Again, to kind of ground ourselves in our current moment. ⁓ so can you speak to this is in part what this book came out of, like how this book came to be, but also to our current moment and this evidence that we're not real good at this. Like we don't really know what we're doing when it comes to repentance or repair.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (05:01)
I I I mean, you can honestly open any news article today and find your proof texts. but the f the fact of the matter is this this book came out of me too. It ⁓ it came out of the fact that en masse, many, many, many men generally were being named

publicly as harmdoers and our culture's response to that was okay their publicists have posted s a statement on Instagram and now we're gonna go, okay, do do we just hand them another six million dollar contract? I guess that's good enough. Right. And we didn't have better tools than that. And

I at which point on Twitter, you know, in twenty seventeen I was like, I I know a guy from the twelfth century who has some things to say. and you know, if we want to take the twenty twenty-six analogy, w there ⁓ how many ⁓ people have been named in the Epstein Files who are walking around happy and free? How many people were named from me too who simply laid low for a little bit and then are are now

Back collecting their checks without any work of accountability and harm. And ⁓ you know, we c the we can go through a laundry list of cases of harm. Yeah, but it's it's about getting off the hook. It's not about ⁓ care for those who have been harmed.

Amy Julia Becker (06:49)
Right. And so when this the c animating motivation is ⁓ me the harmdoer being okay versus actually caring for the person whom I've harmed, ⁓ that it's a really different animus and that's what we see. I think you're right, like over and over and over again. ⁓ which maybe so maybe that we should go to the process that you do lay out.

based on the twelfth century Jewish scholar Mam Maimonides. Mamonides, am I saying it? Maimonides. Yeah. So in his process, the action of repentance comes first. Apology comes later, which I think is really interesting. ⁓ but would you walk us through the process and I think by walking us through it might be evident why that might be helpful for us now, but I also do want to, you know, continue to connect it to the current moment.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (07:20)
It is. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. So ⁓ you know, the whole process really, if done right, centers the harmed party and involves not the whole way through, but I I I wanna just name this thread of community sorry, community accountability that is

kind of shot through the whole thing. And I think part of the pro problem in our culture today is that we're so individualistic. And so am I okay? I got me mine, that nobody's checking to see if the harmed party is is okay. so the first step, there are five steps in this process as I read Maimonides. ⁓

And I should say Maimonides, who's the twelfth century philosopher, theologian, et cetera, physician, was taking wisdom from earlier and rearranging it. So this is my reading of of him, and he was reading other people, and this is how Jews work. The first step is confession or owning the harm that you caused. ⁓ outlaw.

Verbally. ⁓ I deal I mean definitely to anyone who was party to the harm that was caused, ⁓ and ideally publicly. So, you know, at minimum, if you said something ⁓ problematic in a staff meeting, then everybody who was there needs to tier you own it. but it's it's about

saying like I you know, I was not my best self and I want to be better. And I can't do I can't do that if nobody knows and I don't have help. and it's an end to gaslighting for the victim and it's a way for people who might be complicit or willing to support power, you know, to basically say, hey guys, the the tide is turning.

So an example of a good confession that I really love. we want to go back to this me too conversation is Dan Harmon, who was the showrunner for community. When he was talking about ⁓ sexually harassing Megan Ganz, he said, basically, here are the lies that I told myself in order to do the thing that I did.

Amy Julia Becker (10:34)
⁓

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (10:35)
And he said it on a podcast. So he was o you know, everybody here is the thing. And ⁓ you know, it's it's a huge psychic relief. When you think about South Africa and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, right? Archbishop Desmond Tutu said about that. Anyone who said that they did not know can now no longer say that. Right. So it's everybody knew.

Amy Julia Becker (10:37)
No.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (11:05)
But now you know it's right. And this you know, it's this validation for the victims. It's information about specific people's, you know, what happened to my family member. People are testifying about horrific things that they did to prisoners or whatever. ⁓ so sometimes it's information, sometimes it's validation, and sometimes it's just an end to

Amy Julia Becker (11:07)
Admitted that you know, yeah.

Yeah.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (11:35)
⁓ the lie. so it's it's this airing of truth, this confession. ⁓ number two is starting to change. Okay. Because if you don't start to change, don't work on transforming yourself, you the individual, you the institution, you the nation, whatever.

Amy Julia Becker (11:42)
Okay. Yep.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (12:04)
then you're gonna keep doing the thing to the next person, to the next whatever, right? Whether it's acting out your anger issues or your fear of intimacy you know, with at work or in relationships. or it's going to be you know, playing out white supremacy in a new and innovative way all over your country. Yeah. Right? Or or having

Your bad policy impact new people, right? So what are you gonna do differently? So do you need education? Do you need therapy? Do you need addiction treatment? Do you need policy changes? Do you need changes in leadership, specific leadership or the makeup of your leadership? Right. What is changing? So that's two. and then three is amends. And this is the repair like this is part of the repair work, right? Yeah.

What do you do to sew up that hole in the universe that you created? ⁓ who decides what appropriate amends are? The harmed party, right? ⁓ and that can be financial, right? Repairations or land back, or it can be on the individual level time given or using your connections or other kinds of resources in some way.

Amy Julia Becker (13:06)
Mm-hmm.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (13:30)
On the institutional level, you know, it depends on what people need. Are you paying for somebody's therapy? Are you, you know, I I don't know, you know, what what is needed, ask them. Part of the problem with South Africa, in fact, was that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission act came up with a list of

amends and the government didn't follow through. Right. So there's a wealth tax on people who benefited from apartheid that never happened and all these things. So South Africa remains profoundly unequal. ⁓ amends matters. ⁓ and then four is apology. And it's all the way down at four.

Amy Julia Becker (14:26)
Yeah.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (14:29)
Because think about it. If you cause some harm and then you immediately say, ⁓ I'm sorry. You're basically the same person. You're the harmdoer still, right? Oops, sorry. I want to get off the hook. I wanna get my six million dollar Netflix contract, right? I wanna I wanna go back to what I was doing a minute ago. And you don't think about it much. You you will just wanna go away. But if you are forced to

Think through why you did what you did enough to actually say it in front of people and go through all of the you know, internalized story about how maybe today I wasn't the good guy or the hero of somebody's story and the or the PR woes about that or whatever, right? The naming it. And then you have to do the e some education work or some policy changes, right? You have to figure out how to be different. And then you

Ask the harmed party what they want and they say, ⁓ no, I don't want you to pay my medical bill, actually. I have great health care. What I want is something totally different and you're like, ⁓ I huh. I wouldn't have thought of that.

Amy Julia Becker (15:41)
Right, right.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (15:43)
By the time you get to apology, you've you've gotten a little bit of the memo, right? You're starting to think about the other person. There is an open, contrite heart that might actually be sorry. Yeah. And that is might actually have some something true flowing from it and might actually be able to center that person.

Amy Julia Becker (16:13)
Yeah.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (16:13)
⁓ or that community. ⁓ and then step five is if you do all of these things correctly, then naturally and organically, when you get to the opportunity to do the thing again, and you always do, naturally and organically, something different will happen. And if you don't do the work, you will do the thing again.

Amy Julia Becker (16:30)
Mm.

⁓

Yeah. It's kind of like, yeah, time will tell, right? I mean that's like w so ⁓ that's really helpful. Thank you for walking us through it. And I'm ⁓ grateful just again for as you said, your own religious tradition in both the current day but also these many, many centuries of kind of working things out. ⁓ but I also want to engage with the Protestant tradition that you write about.

And the ways in which that's actually shaped a lot of our thinking in American culture. So this is just a a quotation that a watered down secularized distortion of Protestant thinking has infused American culture. And I would think that many people listening here, myself included, have swallowed at least some of that watered down secularized distortion of Protestant thinking. I f felt like your treatment of that was really helpful. ⁓ and that it again, that's true on like an individual level.

as well as on an institutional or national level in America. So can you explain what you mean and also some of the roots of that ⁓ thinking and the way it's been what it's led to?

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (17:49)
Sure. So first before I I get into this, I wanna say ⁓ you know, watered down, not the real thing, right? Right.

Amy Julia Becker (17:57)
Yeah, and I appreciate that.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (18:00)
⁓ you know, i if you look at the gospels, the the place where Jesus says forgive ⁓ seven times seventy, yeah. There's a community accountability process happening there. Right? I ⁓ it's it's not ⁓ what I'm about to describe is what the Lutheran pastor theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called cheap grace. Right. ⁓ so this is not real.

Not the real thing, but it serves power. And every tradition, incl definitely including my own, does this thing where we warp the true and the holy to serve power. It just happens that ⁓ Protestant is w a certain kind of white supremacist Protestantism is is what's running American culture. So

That's what we're seeing here. ⁓

Amy Julia Becker (19:03)
And you trace some of this back all the way to the Civil War, like and to I guess enslavement in America. Can you like just spell that out a little bit here?

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (19:11)
So after the Civil War, white northerners, including abolitionists, like some some preachers that were against slavery, began preaching that we should forgive our southern brothers because Jesus forgave and so we should forgive unconditionally. Let's kiss and make up.

And and be friends again. and that was very convenient because that was a nice way to reinscribe white supremacy at a time when it was at risk. And at the time, Frederick Douglass and many other black and white ⁓ supporters of black dignity.

Said, hey, those guys just went to war to preserve the institution of slavery. Perhaps we should set the bar a little higher. That is to say, can we talk about repentance? began then, and this notion that we are supposed to forgive ⁓

Amy Julia Becker (20:23)
Yeah.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (20:40)
We as a culture are supposed to forgive unconditionally as a way of reinscribing the existing power structure, I think really has its roots there.

Amy Julia Becker (20:52)
Mm-hmm.

Right, right.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (20:58)
And you know, and you see it happening again and again. So a friend of mine, ⁓ Professor Sharona Pearl, noticed at some point about ten years ago, I think, that any time a ⁓ there was a a white officer shot an unarmed black person, motorist or person.

Walk into the store. ⁓ she started to track it and discovered that about 25% of the time, the media would ask a family member, right or right, either right as it happened, or when there was a non-acquittal of, you know, at a moment when there was a great injustice, they would literally stick a mic in this person's face and say, Do you forgive the person who murdered your family? The the cop had not apologized.

Amy Julia Becker (21:53)
Yeah.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (21:58)
This the police department had not acknowledged any harm. Nobody had gone to give them anything, but it's just do you forgive? Will you let the state off the hook? And this onus became on them. Right? And that that's the thread that began with these northern preachers.

Amy Julia Becker (22:22)
And I think also as I again, like as a Christian who's grown up with some, I think, ⁓ again, influence from that as you said, watered down version of my own tradition. I can still, if I am feeling harmed by someone, the sense of you have to forgive, you have to forgive, you have to forgive. Like the a and even like guilt over not knowing if I've done that or not. Not and

It's not that I should never think about where is my heart in relation to this other person. But at the same time, it can be a way of not even acknowledging the harm that has been done to me, the responsibility that this other person has. Like there there's so much that it actually shortcuts ⁓ if all I'm thinking about is forgiveness, or if I'm thinking about forgiveness as ⁓ this immediate

Or unconditional or you know, all these different things. So I I I just found that really helpful and I think we can again experience that personally as well as in a historical and institutional way. So maybe like b going back a big picture a little bit again, what do you see as the purpose of repentance? What's it for?

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (23:36)
I think it's for a lot of things. I think ⁓ on the very immediate level, it it flips that, right? It it instead of telling the the harmed party your your your experience of harm and sometimes trauma doesn't matter. You're not allowed to think about it, you're not allowed to worry about it, you're sitting there

Leaving by the side of the road, you know, whatever it is, and we're asking you if you forgive so that we can all go back to business as usual. ⁓ because they didn't mean it, right? Their intention it wasn't their intention.

Amy Julia Becker (24:16)
Yeah.

We

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (24:26)
center you and we say, are you okay? What do you need? We attend to your care. the I mean the presumption in Jewish law is is first of all that we're not lead you know ⁓ there are literally five different kinds of payment for harm. ⁓ there you know there's like ⁓ the harm the for

You can't go back to work. There's the harm for your suffering. There's the harm for emotional damages. ⁓ But ⁓ the work is concerned with not creating further victims, right? That's immediate. Right? What are you gonna do differently?

Amy Julia Becker (25:12)
Uh-huh.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (25:14)
The work is concerned with making sure that the harmed party got

What is appropriate for them in terms of repair, that's amends, right? An apology. and then there's this deep work of transformation in terms of the growth of the the harmdoer. And listen, we are all harmed, we are all.

bystanders to harm and we all are all harm doers, right? We're we're all of us in these these places. And as somebody who has walked, you know, now walked these steps again and again once you know, I started kind of internalizing this work. ⁓ like it changes you. Grow from it. You're like the the

Amy Julia Becker (25:56)
Yeah.

Yeah. Right.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (26:15)
work of having to face that I did something not okay and the resistance to it and the ugh like it's never it is never good and it's never fun and you it's a gift. It is literally a gift to get to grow. It's a gift of care to give to someone else and a gift of love and it's a gift for your own

Amy Julia Becker (26:31)
Hm.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (26:44)
Becoming more the person that you actually want to be and having your inside idea of who you are and your outside being who you are in the world match up better.

Amy Julia Becker (26:57)
I was struck by ⁓ a place in the book that I think resonates with what you're saying here, where you write that repentance is a type of self care. Yeah. And that, you know, again, when we know that feeling of like, I don't want to know this about myself, but I'm also struck in how you describe this and that idea of repentance as return, that it is returning to our humanity, both to the broken parts of our humanity in terms of having to like reckon with the things that we do wrong.

But also to the beautiful parts of our humanity that can heal and grow and care for other people. And also that kind of interdependent web of our humanity, that we are not just these isolated individuals that don't affect other people. but in fact are like deeply embedded within ⁓ each other's lives, whether we kind of like it or not. So ⁓ I really appreciated it w that idea of like repentance as self care, because it is a type of self care that does not feel like a warm bath. That's all I can say.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (27:53)
No. But there is that thing, you know, that w when you have that ⁓ you know, there's still a small voice kind of knocking and going, Hey, hey, you know, you need to do this thing. Hey, hey, you weren't okay, hey, and and you work so hard to ignore it, you're like, Cush

Amy Julia Becker (28:12)
Shut up, go away. I don't want him. I don't like it.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (28:16)
Hey. Still here. And then you actually go and finally attend to the thing that release feels so good.

Amy Julia Becker (28:19)
So yeah.

Yeah.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (28:32)
I it really does. And i you know, it is an act of care for somebody else, but it also like it really just feels better. You know.

Amy Julia Becker (28:42)
Honestly.

I'm curious to hear you talk about the difference between and I know there are ⁓ similarities too, but the differences between the harm that occurs ⁓ and the repentance and repair that can occur between individuals and institutionally. I just think like the idea of institutional harm and how to reckon with it ⁓ might be even harder. Like on an individual level

It might feel really hard, but there is some degree of like, I know what I could or perhaps should do. On an institutional level, I think there are perhaps different complexities and like who takes responsibility for how long in the past? How do we like and how do we actually do that? What's at stake? Can you just speak to some of the challenges and how you might like apply this process when we're thinking institutionally?

Yeah.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (29:39)
It is it is a bear. ⁓

not gonna lie. So institutional trust, right? When people trust an institution like a school or a house of worship or ⁓ you know, other kinds of community spaces, they they say, Listen, I assume that you are our space.

Amy Julia Becker (29:57)
Mm-hmm.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (30:07)
Right, that you are for us. You have sent out all of these emails saying, you know, we are with you, we are for you. And so this bad thing happened. I'm assuming you're gonna take care of me, right? That's the test. And psychologist Jennifer Frey talks about institutional courage.

Amy Julia Becker (30:24)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (30:35)
And she observes that it's not an on-off button, right? That it's not that institutions are brave or not brave. It's always degrees and kinds. so institutions have choices and th there's always going to be pressures from ⁓ you know, the lawyers who say, if you acknowledge that someone was harmed under your watch, you're opening yourself up to a lawsuit and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the

Amy Julia Becker (30:44)
Okay. ⁓

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (31:05)
Coms person is going to say, ⁓ but it we can't send out this press release because it will make us look bad. And the development director is going to say, but then, you know, if you acknowledge that the donor actually did this, then we are going to lose the chance to solicit from the donor, right? There are all of these voices operating. And ultimately the question remains, who do you serve?

Amy Julia Becker (31:34)
Mm.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (31:36)
And what do you serve? And there's a wonderful lawyer, may his memory be for a blessing, named Kelly Clark, who did a lot of work defending people who were victimized by the Catholic Church and Boy Scouts and other institutions of trust. ⁓ and he has his own repentance story that I talk about in the book. you know. ⁓

Amy Julia Becker (31:38)
Yeah. Interesting.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (32:06)
he caused harm at a different point in his life and I think he showed up for it. And he says, you know, all too often institutions are delighted to take credit when their people do something great. And then the minute they cause harm, those institutions kind of cut and run like a thief in the night, right? They're they're gone. And

Amy Julia Becker (32:23)
Mm.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (32:35)
This is the test.

And before through and after writing the book, I mean part of the reason that I became the person who wrote the book, and then as a result of writing the book, I have been involved in consulting with many, many, many institutions on many, many, many stories of harm and abuse of many different kinds. I know a little too much.

Amy Julia Becker (33:07)
I bet.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (33:08)
I have seen too much. And

There are all too few stories of people s insisting on doing the right thing. And all too often, what happens is that there are people within the institution who have a stake and are able to organize a different subsection of their people to.

Amy Julia Becker (33:21)
Mm.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (33:43)
leverage power in some way. Right. I I have a staff position and I've gotten a bunch of stakeholders over here to say we're not going to pay our annual dues unless you, you know, ⁓ folks at the central station.

Amy Julia Becker (34:13)
Do this sex wise.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (34:14)
Way,

right. and then, you know, this other group of activists also say, right, that that even that institutions doing the right thing often requires a lot of different forces at work. These activists over a year, these people leveraging financial power, right? These staff members fighting tooth and nail in the meetings. ⁓

Amy Julia Becker (34:42)
I'm just you're making me think about the ⁓ the ways in which culture works also within an institution. ⁓ because y you've got what can happen in terms of repair from the top down, but you've also got what's happening from the bottom up in terms of whether or not the culture is ⁓ I don't know, I guess structured in such a way ⁓ where harmful behavior is normed or normative, right?

⁓ so you c like think of ⁓ some some news anchor who was sexually harassing women who like actually really and truly does like does the full gamut of repair and yet the organization could still be set up institutionally for that to happen again. So there's like some individual repentance and repair without institutional. But also if the institution is starting to do it, it almost it either forces out the individual.

But the institution, it's not I mean, it is the top saying publicly, come what may, we're gonna do this work. And there's also some like ground level and groundswell work that if that's not happening, it it's still ineffective. And I think you're talking about the groundswell that kind of pushes on the power structure. But it seems to me that even the power structure, ⁓

the power structure alone is not enough because you have to have that ground level of like the day-to-day people saying, Yeah, actually we we don't want ⁓ the, you know, white male voices to be the only ones that matter in a meeting, right? Like and so and what are we gonna do to actually make sure that other voices get heard if we have a culture of all the women or all the whoever, like knowing there's no point in even

Speaking up because no one's ever going to listen anyway. So I anyway, just I'm just kind of playing out some of what you are making me think about ⁓ because it does seem that there real is real relevance ⁓ to this process of repentance and repair on both an individual and an institutional level, but it is really complex on the institutional level.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (36:53)
That's why step two is so important and so hard. Because how are we going to make sure this doesn't happen again? Is is this is the systemic

Amy Julia Becker (36:56)
Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's I've got a quotation of yours written down here. Even if complete restoration is impossible, transformation is not. Repentance does not unbreak what has been broken so much as interrupt the cycle of repeated harms. And I do think that's part of it again is like wha how do we actually g ⁓ yeah, stop the wheel from turning and turning and turning in the same direction over and over and over again.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (37:31)
Right. And the problem the problem with institutional change and national change, the or not that I say problem. The challenge with institutional and national change is and the thing that I love about this paradigm as somebody who who actually is very excited about upsetting power is that

Amy Julia Becker (37:40)
Challenge. Challenge. Challenge a challenge.

Surely.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (38:00)
This work upsets power. if done correctly, this work and the reason that I think people are with power are excited about forgiveness without accountability is that accountability troubles power, right? If you say ⁓ you institution caused this harmful thing to happen.

Amy Julia Becker (38:13)
Hmm.

Mm.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (38:31)
And they say, ⁓ we're so sorry. it won't happen again. You say, Okay, what are you going to do in order for that not to happen again? And they say, ⁓ well, here's a cute little band-aid solution.

Amy Julia Becker (38:44)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (38:53)
It's like, well, no, if if we really mean for owning the harm and transformation and amends and apology, by the time you get to the end of it, power might look very different than it did a second ago. And if you're the the human at the top of that power scale looking down at the victim, you don't like that proposition very much. And that's

Amy Julia Becker (39:21)
Right.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (39:23)
That's why it takes so many people so often to push for real accountability to happen. and and that's why, you know, we're seeing right now in this moment a desperate need for true accountability in our political moment and why our culture is so resistant to it. And it's it's why I want to come back to white supremacy for a second when the

Amy Julia Becker (39:30)
Mm-hmm.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (39:52)
1619 project came out. That was not that was not a confession because it was an invitation to confession. Right. This was published by ⁓ st people who were impacted saying, Hey guys, guess guess what? Can we let us talk Can we talk about can we can we have a conversation? And ⁓ the answer was

Amy Julia Becker (39:59)
Okay.

Yeah.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (40:20)
Shut up, we're going to ban up ban this book in thirty plus states. That's how that went.

Amy Julia Becker (40:23)
Yeah.

Right, right. So I wanna try and like summarize what I some assumptions from the book that I think I've have gleaned. Tell me if I'm wrong. So one, that we actually live in a moral universe and how we behave towards one another matters and has consequences. ⁓ two, that we will harm one another within that. ⁓ and three, that we can take steps to seek to repair that harm.

even if we don't unbreak what was broken, right? ⁓ that there's still it's still worthwhile to do that. so does that all is that like reading accurately? Like okay. I mean 'cause I yes I very much agree and again I really appreciate the examples you give throughout the book that go kind of amazingly from like the most mundane like I was mean to my sister to the like biggest agree most I mean horrific human ⁓

wronging wrongdoing against one another as we have ever known when we're talking about like apartheid and the Holocaust and, you know, genocide. So we've got we've got it all in there. Good job. but I did want to like just close with thinking about the title of this podcast, Reimagining the Good Life, by reflecting on both how these assumptions about who we are as humans actually challenge the American version of the good life, kind of up and to the right where

⁓ if we're doing it right, we're never getting anything wrong. And how also though, back to the idea of repentance as self care, how they might lead us into a different and richer version of the good life. So I'm just curio I wanted to end there with just hearing you think a little bit about repentance and the good life.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (41:59)
I love that. ⁓ I I mean

think this work of 'cause listen, we're all human people. We're gonna screw up. Right? It it happens. and this work of saying I care about you and so I'm gonna take care about of you and I care about becoming a

Amy Julia Becker (42:26)
Uh-huh.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (42:32)
better version of myself, so I'm going to invest in that is the work of

Amy Julia Becker (42:35)
huh.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (42:42)
⁓ this is about investing in ourselves, in our relationships, in our communities, right? This is about creating interdependent universes in which we can better love one another.

Amy Julia Becker (42:59)
And it is an invitation, as I think you're saying, like into yeah, interdependence and love, which ⁓ if we believe those things are possible and in fact ⁓ even like constitutive of like what it means to be human, ⁓ then this really is a beautiful invitation. And if we think that we are just

moral accidents who are wandering around needing defend for ourselves, well then yeah, this doesn't actually this won't actually work. But I think some of the most powerful stories we also have from our ⁓ history as humans come out of this type of work of like acknowledging the ways in which we have really fallen short and then saying there is a way to love ⁓ ourselves and each other that actually ⁓ allows for repair.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (43:51)
And you know, ⁓ the rabbinic teaching, there's no love without rebuke, there's no peace without rebuke. You know. It's always about trying to take care of each other and make each other better.

Amy Julia Becker (44:07)
Hmm. Thank you so much again for your time, for this book, for your wisdom here. I really appreciate it. Glad you could be with us.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (44:16)
Thank you so much for having me.

Amy Julia Becker (44:22)
Thanks as always for listening to this episode of Reimagining the Good Life. I do think you will appreciate our upcoming episodes. I'm going to be talking with Brian Brock about personhood and eugenics and Dietrich Baudenhofer and all sorts of things. Brian Trapp about living within our limits and our full humanity and having a sibling with a disability. And Christian Wyman about faith and doubt and God and suffering and love. If this conversation resonates with you,

Please do subscribe to my Reimagining the Good Life Substack newsletter. It extends the same work. It's another place where we are challenging assumptions about the good life, proclaiming the inherent belovedness of every human being, and envisioning and seeking to build a world of belonging where everyone matters. You'll find the link to do that in the show notes. If you are enjoying the show, please follow, rate, review it. We would love for other people to find out about this. ⁓ And of course, you can always just directly share this with anyone who you think.

would be a good fit. You can also send questions or ideas to me using the send us a text link at the end of the show notes. As always, thanks to Jake Hansen for editing this episode, to Amber Beery, my director of content for producing the show, and thank you for being here. Let's all keep reimagining the good life together.