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RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG | SEP 15, 2025, 10:00 AM EDT

Gaza's Annihilation Can Never Be Forgiven

Revisiting On Repentance and Repair

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Today I'm going to try to do at least three things at once:

- I want to lay bare my process 0f writing about Israel/Palestine in my book, On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World, including holding myself accountable for some of those choices.

- I will annotate the section that I wrote in On Repentance, to both clarify my words from then and re-frame the work now in light of the annihilation and genocide* in Gaza.

- During this season of, well, repentance and repair, I think we're going to be getting a lot of "Atoning for Gaza" - type words from American Jewish leaders. I want to say a bit about that.

It's a lot, but it's all connected. Here we go:

*I know how loaded this word is for many Jews; I do not use it facetiously. Please keep reading. For more on this word choice, you can look to Holocaust historian and IDF vet Omar Bartov, here and here, Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg, here, Holocaust and Genocide Studies scholar Raz Segal here, writer David Grossman, here, or so many other experts and invested moral voices. For those of you for whom the Israeli insider perspective is especially important, well, almost a year ago, before even more bombing and the depths of this human-created famine, Moshe Ya'alon, former Chief of Staff of the IDF and Netanyahu's former Defense Minister (2013-2016), even-- then-- described the army's actions in Gaza as ethnic cleansing.

When I was writing On Repentance and Repair * – I agonized about how and how much, to write about Israel / Palestine (I/P), for a number of reasons.

*In 2020 and early '21 for a '22 release, for context; more on book production another time.

They included, but were not limited to:

The fact that a proper treatment of accountability and a more whole future with regards to Israel / Palestine – harms, obligations, what each of Maimonides' stages of repentance might look like and why– could and indeed perhaps should be its own book, and likely should be written by someone(s) who is not an American Jew.

I believed that I was dealing with a unique situation vis a vis this issue. That is, as I mentioned in the book, with regards to Israel/Palestine, I was writing for readers with a range of ideas about where truth itself was situated.

More than, say, my treatments of Apartheid South Africa; #MeToo; the harms of colonialism to Native peoples; or even the harms of the prison industrial-complex and the possibilities offered by movements for its abolition–

...with Israel-Palestine, I was dealing with a case wherein various people coming to the conversation– and, most saliently, to my book– had often contradictory understandings what was actually happening, and why.

As a writer/educator, I try to be intentional about bringing readers along with me; if I lose readers by going too fast in my assumptions about with what they might agree, I'm not doing my job.*

*You could eg see how I built the book's Chapter Six, about consequences of harm beyond the prison-industrial complex, consider the journey on which I tried to take a reader who'd never had reason to question that system.

Back then, I was trying to bring diverse readers on a journey of shared understanding so that we might ever move towards justice and accountability, without having the conversation on I/P take over the whole project. Moving slowly through specifics really is/was the work of this other theoretical book (written by not-me.)

That said, I failed living fully my obligations to justice then. Let me say that clearly. I was actively trying to do right by the larger work of the book, by Palestinians suffering under Occupation, and by the readers whom I was trying to coax along with me. Yet, even if not consciously, I'm clear now that I held back and remained excessively subtle due to the everpresent pressure of the Jewish institutional-communal professional ecosystem. If I had pushed harder, would I have lost readers who were willing to engage with me as I did pace it? Maybe. Was it a risk I should have taken (including facing how possible fallout might have impacted my work driving a network of 2500 Jewish clergy working for abortion justice in the wake of Dobbs?) Without the latter factor, absolutely. Even with it? Well, also yes. I do not seek to minimize my own accountability.

Marwan Nassar, The Colors of Torment. Gaza, 2025. (A diptych in large brushstrokes: L: abstracted strokes in dark gray, muted brown and hints of reddish-brown, with muted green and red. R: An adult male figure carries a another figure, possibly a woman or girl Red is prominently figured on the figure's midsection. The background is bright pale yellow.)

I, too, am complicit in this genocide.

However much I tried to manage my own various roles–

However much so many of us were trying to manage so many factors at once–

It's soul-splitting.

And it's hardly news that many of us fighting for justice in Jewish spaces have experienced both tacit and explicit pressure around I/P from employers, boards, donors, colleagues – that even as we have gone to the mat behind the scenes to try to push the conversation a million ways – that this game of forced choices has been an exceedingly powerful means of communal control: "Just keep silent on this one issue and there are so many other kinds of good that you can do!" My individual failures are real, and this problem is also deeply systemic. I cannot be exonerated from the ways in which I have participated in this devil's bargain at the expense of Palestinian lives– but I must name this, because many more people's jobs and budgets are still being bound by these structures. The onus to act is greatest on those with power, but they will not act if they do not feel financial or PR pressure. (Also: Every visible shift on I/P is the result of heroic amounts of invisible labor, organizing, strategizing, and effort. Those of you behind the scenes who will never be credited for your work: I see you.)

On the absence of the words "Zionism" and "antizionism" in this piece: The word count here is already far beyond what's good for this format. Engaging with the ultimate Rorschach terms--being both clear and getting many diverse readers on the same page-- would add another 25% to that, at least. Those two words should be a full chapter in this theoretical book, tbh; I hope my thinking on the larger matters at hand are, at least, clear.

Every single choice to hold back– my own, my colleagues', every single person in our community's– has happened at the expense of Palestinian lives.

Again, then, I did not always do so consciously- but I did do so. And my figuring out how I can become a different person next time, figuring out how to pour the rest of my life into the work of amends– well, that's beyond the scope of today's missive, but it'll come up again.

I am grateful to the many Jews, especially the Jewish leaders, organizers and activists, who've been leading our collective moral conscience loudly and fiercely these decades, and especially these last years on behalf of Palestinian safety, freedom and life–

reminding us all that no one's blood is redder than anyone else's (Talmud Yoma 82b), that the answer to “Am I my sibling’s keeper?” is, has always been, yes.

Subscribe to the House of Study to support the labor that makes this work -- independent and committed to the process of truth -- possible.

Regular readers have seen Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz' annotations of the Talmud often shared here, wherein BOLD is the original text, and ROMAN [regular, not-bold] is commentary added for clarity to help later generations make sense of the thing.

I thought I'd try this with the original On Repentance section on Israel/Palestine – I've never done anything like this before, but it could be a way to transparently bridge some of the gap between then and now.

I don't have the bandwidth now to craft the kind of research-intensive case summaries found in On Repentance. (I spent five years on the book.) So if you want more robust historical context for everything, please look to the reading list at the bottom of the post.

For those just tuning in, On Repentance and Repair is built around the medieval scholar Maimonides' Laws of Repentance:

As I read him, there are five stages of the work we all must do:

1) Owning the harm caused– naming as fully as possible what was done

2) Beginning the process of transformation to enable a different future to become possible

3) Amends to the harmed party, determined by the victim-survivor(s) and their needs

4) Apology (yes, it's step four)

5) Making different choices next time

The chapter on national repentance opened with an investigation of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) – what succeeded, what was controversial, and the fact that it fell short of creating true post-apartheid transformation because the government didn't follow through on many of the TRC's recommendations with regards to amends and systemic change. (There were many other sections in that chapter.)

Maimonides' wisdom proved itself again and again in my research; when steps were skipped or missing, the impact was all too visible.

The larger the scale of harm, the more important it is (I believe, and argued) to engage thoroughly with the first step, owning the harm caused.

Archbishop Desomond Tutu described the importance of televising of the TRC hearings this way:

"This is the horror that was apartheid. And those who supported the system must know what they supported. Those who claimed they did not know cannot very well say so now. They know.”

With this, here's the On Repentance section on Israel/Palestine, newly annotated (again bold was in the book, everything is new today):

Image of one of (what I'm almost sure what is) Raed Issa's paintings, in the rubble. (Not enough people including photos of art that honor their artists.) More than a metaphor, more than a story within a story. (Image of a canvas painting of a figure of a person with their arm up in an exuberant gesture against a blue background, crumpled, destroyed, in the rubble of bombing's aftermath.)

Needless to say, this truth-telling is needed in many contexts, in all places where great harm and suffering has been caused.  And it can open up space to consider what appropriate next steps might be needed—like the TRC in South Africa had a committee dedicated to formulating concrete, reparative steps.

Sometimes the harmed party knows what accountability they want, but the process cannot advance until the harmdoer is pulled from their privileged hermitage through a brutal accounting of the victim-survivors' experience: "Those who claimed they did not know cannot very well say so now." And as I wrote in the TRC section and elsewhere in the book, there are many other important things that this airing of truth does, can do, for victim-survivors. I won't rehash them here.

But I wonder if the process of truth-telling isn't sometimes necessary for all involved to even be able to get clarity what the next step in the process could or should be. When I was writing this– and perhaps even now, but certainly then– this idea felt like a core component of my thinking around Israel/Palestine. But (as mentioned above) it didn't feel like my place to be saying this too explicitly.

One imagines such a process of truth-telling being useful in the United States around the horrors of its immigration policies and practices, including the atrocities of Trump 2.0, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory; I failed here. I struggled to find a better word than "conflict," which too many people use to imply that power is equal, and was stumped, then; I was trying to plow through an eight-word sentence fragment while holding everyone's traumas plus naming Occupation. If I were advising 2020 me now I'd reword to something like "The Israeli Occupation and other harms, traumas and atrocities related to Israel/Palestine," – though of course now it would have to be "The Israeli genocide in Gaza, as well as the Occupation and apartheid systems, and other dimensions of harm in Israel/Palestine"–

the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar; the persecution of the Uyghur people in China; in Cyprus, in Kashmir, in Chechnya, and elsewhere around the world. And, of course, there are many more peoples I could and should list whose harms have occurred since this was written, but I'm trying to stay focused.

Particularly in places where groups perceive competing truth claims about the basic facts of historical events—as is the case with Israel/Palestine—a truth commission that began with a specific scope could be a first attempt to gain communal consensus.

This, above, is the big sentence around which I should have put blinking lights, and I think many people missed it.

It is a fact that around I/P, more than many other places/events, there are groups who perceive competing truth claims about the basic facts of historical events.

Is it Memorial Day "or" Nakba Day? Whose "true" ancestral homeland is it? Whose accounts of what happened or even whose death tolls are trustworthy?

In 2021, this perceived-truth gap was even greater, I think.

Work like this is genuinely only possible because I am sustained by all of you, independent of so many of the systems discussed here.

And I can only continue if I have the support of this community.

And. The more that we invest in this space together, the more we can grow it so that we can enable more people to tell more inconvenient truths.

These are facts.

THE LESSON TAUGHT / THE LESSON LEARNED, by Addam Yekutieli, @thisislimbo on IG. (There is a new documentary out now about Yekutieli important work, called Know Hope.) Chalk installation along the Via Dolorosa in The Old City, Jerusalem-Al Quds, 2019, in which a line was drawn and on one side, "THE LESSON TAUGHT" was written, and on the other side, "THE LESSON LEARNED." Yekutieli posted a series of photos of people walking over the boundary. (Municipal and border police walk towards "the lesson learned" side of the chalk, while an older Palestinian man sitting in a chair underneath the Via Dolorosa sign, slightly around the corner, on the "the lesson taught" side of the chalk, watches them approach.)

Now, with more recognition of the genocide (what language which Jews use is variable, but even so), there is more Jewish openness to more aspects of this conversation. Yet, of course, many significant gaps exist: Some of it's about fear and priorities; some about sources of news; some, due to what histories are taught and what are buried; some about where of it is due to differing family histories and family traumas.

As I said in the days immediately following October 7th, a lot of things are true, and/though the truths which acknowledge everyone's humanity do not at all need to be contradictory (even as we must name power imbalances.)

Where were we?

Particularly in places where groups perceive competing truth claims about the basic facts of historical events—as is the case with Israel/Palestine—a truth commission that began with a specific scope could be a first attempt to gain communal consensus.

Following this, I should have written something like,

"Palestinians have been subjected to Nakba, subjugated under Occupation for decades, including many of the horrors that characterized apartheid-era South Africa, such as the gutting and seizure of homes, restrictions on day-to-day movement, removals into refugee camps and land dispossession, the banning of political protest and organizations, detention without trial, torture, assassinations, the brutal murders of activists, and, of course, creating conditions of terror, poverty, and desperation.* When it comes to the scale of harm and power differential, there is no comparison.

And it is both true on a level of honoring all trauma, all human life, and a level of creating a new future for all fourteen million people in the region: Every truth about every atrocity must be told."

*In this new text in italics just above this, from the words "South Africa" until that asterisk at "desperation," I literally copy-pasted the line from my manuscript describing the horrors of apartheid-era SA (only including the parts that I know also apply to I/P without having to do additional research.) Other features may also apply, but I'd have to confirm. Yeah. Still so sure that "apartheid" isn't a word that applies here? I take responsiblitly for not spelling this out in the manuscript. Then--writing even before the release of the Amnesty report [at which my community predictably blew a gasket]-- I thought the effort persuading reluctant readers would detract from the other work the chapter was meant to do. This is my complicity. Fully.

I was overly subtle about the power differential, hoping that my using the word Occupation and my careful wording of the examples below would do my work for me (since I didn't have the word count to accompany readers through a process that I perceived that they needed) (and also, again, none of these reasons doesn't also mean that it wasn't a coward's choice, conscious or not).

There's a chapter in this theoretical not-by-me book called, maybe, "Jewish Trauma, Jewish Feelings." Because – the Jewish experience of trauma is real, and much of what Jews carry is real.* And it's also true, my wonderful kin, we all too often wear our trauma as both shield and sword, using both our history and anything that might take place now as proof that we cannot possibly be expected to do thoughtful power analysis or engage empathetically with others' experience.

Let me say this with love: We are better than this, we are smarter than this, and our false equivalences– and the fact that tiptoeing around these sensitivities has been a condition for engaging with the Jewish community on any terms for so long – has contributed to genocide.

Again, I'm complicit. I wanted to try to bring my people along, wanted them to keep listening so that I could teach them– but I stepped wrong. I know that now.

*For white American Ashkenazi Jews, this map by Jo Kent Katz is illuminating. Here's various research on JOC experiences and here's some on various Sephardi and Mizrahi communities. Conversations about Israeli trauma are even less my lane--needless to say, the Holocaust is deeply personal to most Ashkenazim in the country and Jews of just about every other ethnic/cultural community –the Middle East; North Africa; elsewhere in what was once the Ottoman Empire; Ethiopia; the former Soviet Union and elsewhere– have their own communal stories of trauma and suffering. And this is before the larger context of the last decades of kidnappings, the thousands of civilians killed in terrorist attacks, and more. (I am naming, not justifying.)

But. And. To bring a new future into being, in a new truth-telling, we would need to name every harm– and this includes acknowledging Jewish traumas. What justifies genocide (nothing) and what will make tomorrow possible (all truths) are not, to my mind, the same thing.

For those of you who resist naming every harm (say, talking about kidnappings, terror attacks) because of power asymmetry, let the pragmatist in me speak: the Israelis who most need to hear Palestinian voices would be most reticent to listen if there was not space for Israeli voices in the conversation as well. And truly, it's the only fully cathartic, fully healing way forward.

Again: I'm never the person anybody needs to hear on any of this. But I am applying my research on other mass atrocities to this moment in one small essay and, please God, someday, may reconciliation work may yet come to pass.

And for this to succeed this must, I believe, include women at the table.

One wonders if beginning with a public detailing of everything that happened in Israel/Palestine in 1948, for example, could open the door for additional space to unpack other events,

I should have said Nakba, explicitly, even if I didn't get into specifics like Saliha, Deir Yassin, Lydda, Tantura and Abu Shusha, or the vicissitudes of the expulsions of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and how these things are glossed over in Israeli society. At the same time, a full truth-telling would include things like the Hadassah medical convoy massacre, the Haifa Oil Refinery massacre and Kfar Etzion massacre by Palestinians, the latter in retaliation for Deir Yassin, as well as the fact that Jews committed the al-Dawayima massacre and (for Haifa Oil) the Balad al-Shaykh massacres in retaliation.

No facts left unchecked. No loss, unspeakable. And, like the broadcasting of the TRC hearings, everyone with a stake in the outcomes– all of the 14 million people in the region– would hear it all. The truths of what had happened. All of it, named in one place, all the pain. That was the idea.

The stories themselves would pave the way to the next step.

"Those who claimed they did not know cannot very well say so now. They know.”

Needless to say, all this is supplanted by the genocide now. What needs to be spoken is not only what's happened, but what was known and planned when, by whom. Who gave what orders. There's already ample documentation. But there's so much more that must be unearthed. Stories to be told. Those who do not want to listen must hear.

After the Holocaust, Germans hid their heads in the sand for a couple of generations, left a lot of Nazis in power and did much of their reckoning process backwards, which might explain their descent back into far-right fascism now (though, granted, that's a bit on trend these days.)

If Israel is willing to face what is has done– is doing now– to Palestinians, both in Gaza and the West Bank, to engage with its moral gravity– there might be hope for a different kind of future.

But as I noted in the book, it may have been easier (uh, 25-35 years after the end of the war) for Germans to grapple with their past actions to those who were no longer present (as they had been either murdered or expatriated) than what went down in South Africa. There, significant systemic restructuring is (still) required to undo centuries of oppression of 90% of its population by the other 10%—and that inequality is still ongoing. .

The occupation of Palestinian lives and land is also far from theoretical, and very much related to Israeli privilege and comfort today.

... whether in 1929, 1967, 1987, 2000, 2014, 2021, and all the years in-between and beyond.

These years were not selected capriciously. They're each significant in terms of the stories of the people of the land, many of which have a lot of "competing truth claims" baggage.

It could begin with the work of personal testimony of Israelis and Palestinians, archival documentation and more.  Or, perhaps if it could begin, and expand, upon the much more recent work of Breaking the Silence (an organization of Israeli veterans who tell the truth about the Israeli army's activities under Occupation), Al-Haq (an independent organization that details human rights violations of Palestinians by both Israeli and Palestinian institutions), international NGOs and monitors, and the work of Israeli and Palestinian historians, sociologists and many others who have been working for decades to document the many truths of what has happened and what is happening now.  So much is known, even if it is not all spoken, not all in the same place.

I didn't think that I was being subtle. Breaking the Silence has been heavily targeted by Netanyahu because because they tell inconvenient truths about the IDF's human rights violations and atrocities. And Al-Haq is an important Palestinian voice, and one willing to call both Israeli and Palestinian harms to account. (Again, any large-scale truth-telling process could and should include stories of what Hamas has done, yes.)

But there are so many forces both within and beyond my community trying to pretend that the balance of power–and the scale of harm–has been equal. When it never has been, and it certainly is not, now. And in my attempt to try to nod at the Occupation without wanting to unpack it, wanting to acknowledge it without peeling out the many layers present because I was trying to do *waves hands* all this in 300 words– I believe that I contributed to this equivocation. That's on me.

A truth and reconciliation commission could also be a crucial first step in addressing harms with hundreds of years of accumulated injustice, such as slavery and institutional anti-Black racism in the United States.  But of course, as the lessons of South Africa and Canada—the latter mentioned in Chapter One—show us, making space to tell the truth isn’t enough.  Recommendations must be followed.  Structural changes must be implemented.  Restitution must be provided.

And in the wake of this genocide– please God may we end it soon – that accountability is greater, the changes even more significant, the restitution beyond conception. Perhaps the only way to feel our way to Step Two is through Step One. In any case, this white American Jew isn't the right person to dictate any of it; Palestinian voices, Gazan voices, survivor voices are where to look.

But, to my dear colleagues working on their "Atonement for Gaza" sermons, I might remind you that in our tradition, the obligation of repentance and repair for serious harm can be deep, ongoing and consume the rest of one's life. And this must, ours, This is an obligation from which we can never be free. Never.

However.

Only harmed parties can forgive those who committed harm against them.*

Over 64,000 human beings have been murdered. Including 17,000 children.**

The dead can never, and will never, forgive.

The work of repentance and the gift of receiving forgiveness are not the same.

It is upon every single one us to work on repentance and repair for everything from the small harms we have caused to the great evils in which we have participated, been complicit–

Even if we meant well,

Even if we were "still learning,"

Even if it was "a process,"

Even if we were breathing in toxic communal fumes.

Even if some accounts can never be closed.

Having to live with the knowledge that our hesitation meant that we participated in genocide –

may, sometimes, just be one of the consequences of our actions.

There is no atonement for Gaza, ever.

There is only–

ever–

the unsparing, lifelong, work of repentance and repair.

*Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, in Simon Weisenthal's classic The Sunflower, cites the classic tale of the Brisker rebbe and Mishnah Yoma 8:9 to make this point. To those I'll add Mishneh Torah Laws of Repentance 2:9 for basics; there are other sources, but I believe this suffices for now.

**Data from an internal Israeli database suggests that, in fact 83% of those slaughtered were civilians – a higher percentage of civilian deaths than the atrocities of Aleppo ending in 2016, the Bosnian genocide, or the more recent genocide last year in Sudan. By December 2023, the Israeli bombing of Gaza was already "one of history’s heaviest conventional bombing campaigns" onto a population of 2.2 million people packed into 141 square miles.

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Gaza Soup Kitchen – This isn’t just a soup — it’s a recipe for resilience, simmering on the stoves of Gaza, feeding bodies and souls alike. Each bowl serves not just sustenance

On Repentance and Repair by Danya Ruttenberg: 9780807013311 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

Winner NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS in Contemporary Jewish Life & Practice Myra H. Kraft Memorial Award A crucial new lens on repentance, atonement, forgiveness, and repair from harm—from personal…

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The book in question, in case you were wondering.

BOOK LIST BOOK LIST BOOK LIST YES IT'S A BOOK LIST Lots missing, but if you read these and need to learn more, I am optimistic that you can find next reads from here.

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Especially without Substack's built-in network, word-of-mouth– forwarding emails, sharing on social media, passing notes in class, all of it– matters more than ever.

Please spread the word about this post and Life is a Sacred Text in general.

Thank you. 🙏 ❤️

Open Communities · Pro-Ceasefire Jewish Congregations

Observe the High Holidays with an inclusive, values-aligned Jewish community.

NOTE! NOT EVERY WONDERFUL, THOUGHTFUL ETHICAL COMMUNITY IS IN HERE! A lot of excellent rabbis are not here for a lot of reasons alluded to above. Just because something's not in here doesn't mean that it's bad, and honestly not every community here is my own specific personal cup of tea, but the point is to have starting points, and there's a lot of great stuff here.

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RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG | SEP 11, 2025, 10:00 AM EDT

Ask the RabbiS!

so much wisdom, soooo many opinions

This is Life as a Sacred Text 🌱, an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives. It‘s run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:

As always, two weeks ago y'all had a lot of great questions. It's impossible to address all of them, but we've gotten to a bunch of them. I'll pipe in some, but I decided to ask a bunch of amazing colleagues and see who responded if they had time– assuming that a couple of weeks before Rosh Hashanah that would not be everyone– but I got a lot of answers in! So here we go! Experiment #2, as always let me know what you think!

Rabbi Avigayil Halpern (she/her), an independent writer and educator whose work focuses many things, including queer and feminist Torah, who is currently at work on a book about queer niddah. You can read her writing here, and check here to see the online classes she's offering now.

Rabbi Jess Belasco (they/them), a radical Torah teacher, organizer and community convener primarily focused on disabled and queer Jewish communities, ordained at JTS and the founder and director of the Disability Justice Torah Circle.

Rabbi Michael Rothbaum (he/him) who lives with his husband, Yiddish cultural worker Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell, in La Mesa, California and serves Congregation Dor Hadash, a Reconstructionist synagogue in San Diego.

Rabbi Becky Silverstein (he/him), one of the cofounders of the Trans Halakha Project and Horizon Philanthropy, who believes in the power of community, Torah, and compassion in transforming the world.

Rabbi Jenna Shaw (they/them) an organizer and educator serving as the Associate Rabbi at Sixth and I whose work lives at the intersection of relationships, intentional pedagogy, queerness, joyful Jewish practice, and a commitment to justice.

Rabbi Megan Doherty (she/her) the CEO of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association (among many other things).

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (AKA RDR): yeah yeah yeahhh (she/her)

Without further ado...

Street art, Pilsen neighborhood, Chicago. ("A Shot Worth Taking" in bright green graffiti lettering, with two boxing gloved hands coming up and butterflies and roses around it, against a sky blue background with clouds.)

How do we turn towards repentance and repair in [the month of] Elul [that leads up to Rosh Hashana] when we are hurting and exhausted, sometimes in the very interpersonal relationships that need repair? How do we make ourselves reach out to start that repair when part of our exhaustion and hurt is that we are always the one building the bridge? What do, rabbi(s)?

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RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG | SEP 4, 2025, 10:31 AM EDT

This instead (subscriber only)

don't sleep on these goodie good things

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RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG | AUG 28, 2025, 10:00 AM EDT

Ask The Rabbi time!

bring it, people

It's that time again!

What's on your mind?

What personal, political, theological or ethical questions are you holding?

What recommendations for books or podcasts or places to connect are you ISO?

What frustrations or stuck places might you want an outside take on?

Given that it's now officially Elul, the month leading into Rosh Hashana, do you have any repentance and repair-specific questions on your mind and heart?

This article was downloaded from https://www.lifeisasacredtext.com/ask-the-rabbi-2/ on Sep 17, 2025 at 8:44 AM EDT.

RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG | AUG 25, 2025, 10:00 AM EDT

Fat Torah: Every Body Beloved

A Guest Post by Rabbi Dr. Minna Bromberg

This is Life as a Sacred Text 🌱, an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives. It‘s run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:

An announcement before today's intellectual main course:

It's been a difficult year, individually, and communally.

Logistically and, especially, morally.

We don't spend enough time talking about the moral toll, and the moral implications. Join us for a conversation about everything we're holding, and what it means:

The next House of Study Zoom Salon will be September 7th, 2pm ET/11am PT.

Join us!!

What does our individual spiritual work look like this year-- for the mundane, the crucial but hard work looking at who and how we have been as individuals-- as well as communities and as a larger society? These are days that require brave moral engagement, but we are up for the task. Join us for a lively, interactive conversation on questions that matter.

Onward!

I have enjoyed and appreciated Rabbi Dr. Minna Bromberg's work long before she began Fat Torah, but this project– centered on educating and inspiring towards fat liberation through the lens of Jewish spirituality– is particularly important.

It's profoundly revolutionary to celebrate every body of every size a culture that wants to encourage so many to be less. And Rabbi Bromberg has opened up a unique and critical lens to the holy, while also facing down some of the specific mishegaas (uh, foolishness) in our community.

And now, lucky everybody, Rabbi Dr. Bromberg has a book, called Every Body Beloved: A Jewish Embrace of Fatness. You should get your copy with a quickness.

GET THIS BOOK NOW

And we have a little preview of it here today!!

Taking Good Care

by Rabbi Dr. Minna Bromberg

(Excerpted and condensed from Every Body Beloved by Rabbi Dr. Minna Bromberg)

When I started more publicly asserting that fat people too are created in the image of God, I knew that one milestone in measuring the reach of this message would be the arrival of “concern trolling”—attacks in the guise of caring about well-being.

When the trolls arrived, they were in fine form. In response to a lovely article about Fat Torah and other efforts at faith-based fat activism, one commenter wrote, “There is never a reason to celebrate being overweight,” while another made it even clearer that hers was a “nonjudgmental” concern: “Not to judge people on the basis of size or weight . . . but let’s not celebrate unhealthy behavior.”

When it comes to fat people, suddenly everyone is a crusading public health advocate using the language of “caring” to do anything but that. Caring is in the eyes, and the heart, of the cared for. In the more than four decades that loved ones, healthcare providers, and complete strangers have expressed concern about my fatness using some variation on the question “But what about your health?” I have not once experienced this concern as caring. To be told I am being cared for when I feel that the opposite is true is gaslighting, pure and simple.

True Caring

The first hint that offers of concern for fat people’s health are not actually caring—whether they come from people who actually know us or from random strangers on the internet—is that they are usually offered without our consent.

A series of stories in Talmud (BT Berakhot 5b) is often used to discuss the topics of suffering, caring, and receiving care.

We read first of Rabbi Yoḥanan, a famed healer, visiting his sick student. (Rabbi Yoḥanan was also famous for being very fat and very beautiful, but that’s another story.)

In our story, Rabbi Yoḥanan begins by asking his ailing pupil,

Is your suffering dear to you? Do you desire to be ill and afflicted? Rabbi Ḥiyya said to him: I welcome neither this suffering nor [any] reward, [that I might receive in this world or the next as a result of it]. Rabbi Yoḥanan said to him: Give me your hand. Rabbi Ḥiyya bar Abba gave him his hand, and Rabbi Yoḥanan stood him up and restored him to health.

Similarly, Rabbi Yoḥanan fell ill. Rabbi Ḥanina entered to visit him, and said to him: Is your suffering dear to you? Rabbi Yoḥanan said to him: I welcome neither this suffering nor its reward. Rabbi Ḥanina said to him: Give me your hand. He gave him his hand, and Rabbi Ḥanina stood him up and restored him to health.

The Talmud asks: Why did Rabbi Yoḥanan wait for Rabbi Ḥanina to restore him to health, if he was a healer?... The Talmud answers, they say: A prisoner cannot generally free themself from prison.

When this text is taught, the emphasis is often put on its moving message of interdependence. Even the most powerful healer needs to be cared for in order to heal. But what strikes me when I think of how much concern is expressed about fat people’s health is the very first question that the healing visitor asks in each story:

“Are your sufferings welcome to you?” In other words, “May I offer you help?” Every one of us needs helping hands at many different points in our lives, but true concern—and helping and healing—starts with consent.

Additionally, true caring means meeting people where they are and addressing their concerns, not only your own. Even if you are an actual health expert, you cannot accurately assess a person’s health just by looking at their fat body. When people tell me they are concerned about my health without knowing what my own health concerns, or lack thereof, might be, they are not truly seeing me.

In one Ḥassidic tale, a rabbi learns something about true caring when he sees two men drinking together.The first asks his drinking buddy,

“Do you love me?”

“Of course, I love you so so much!” replies his inebriated companion.

“No,” the first one insists, “you cannot possibly love me because you don’t know what hurts me.”

When you are concerned about my health without knowing anything about my health, about what does or does not “hurt me,” I do not experience it as caring.

Is “Being Healthy” a Mitzvah?

When the trolling started, I began to notice that some comments came from people who expressed specifically Jewish concerns about fat people’s health. Often these commenters would swap out “But what about your health?” for “But what about shmirat hanefesh?” If this is the first time you have heard of the mitzvah of shmirat hanefesh, please know that I had never heard of this Jewish religious obligation either. Sometimes being a rabbi feels like one long moment of being made aware of all the things you didn’t learn in rabbinical school.

Shmirat hanefesh, which means “taking care of yourself,” is a mitzvah that uses a verse from Deuteronomy as its prooftext. “V’nishmartem me’od l’nafshotekhem,” the verse begins, urging us to “Take very good care of yourselves” (Deuteronomy 4:15). It is worth noting that the meaning of the word nefesh changes over time. In biblical Hebrew, nefesh means a living being—human or animal; biblical Hebrew makes no distinction between body and soul, nor does it explicitly imbue human beings with a “self.” Under the influence of Greek philosophy, Rrabbinic Judaism does begin developing an idea of body and soul as potentially separate “parts” of one human being, but this never coalesces into a doctrinal or fixed definition of what the soul is or how the body/soul/self relationship needs to be construed. In this context, nefesh comes to be used as one of a number of words for the soul/spirit/lifeforce—each with its own nuanced set of meanings—in the Jewish mystical and spiritual traditions.

This potential interpretive openness in various times and places, along with the ongoing presence of the biblical text itself, can allow for varied meanings of the opening words of our verse in Deuteronomy.

More broadly, how each of us sees the relationships between our bodies and any other aspects of ourselves can impact what we think it means to “take care of yourself.”

Health is not an achievement, moral or otherwise, and illness is not a failure.

Similarly, “being healthy” cannot possibly be a mitzvah since mitzvot are all actions that we are called upon either to “get up and do” or to “sit down and refrain from doing.

Mitzvot matter to me, though I see them as something I take upon myself as a devotional practice rather than viewing them as a legal code that I will somehow be punished for violating. So if someone tells me that pursuing health is a “positive commandment” (i.e., one of the “get up and do it” mitzvot), I take that seriously. The question of “what about shmirat hanefesh?” made me curious to know more about this mitzvah.

Was my call for fat people to be recognized as human beings somehow in conflict with shmirat hanefesh, as some online commenters and direct message correspondents claimed?

Healthism, but in Hebrew

In contemporary usage, if my concern trolls and Google were to be believed, shmirat hanefesh is mostly used to put a Jewish patina on plain old anti-fat bias and healthism. Coined by economist Robert Crawford in his 1980 article “Healthism and the Medicalization of Everyday Life,” healthism is “the preoccupation with personal health as a primary—often the primary—focus for the definition and achievement of well-being; a goal which is to be attained primarily through the modification of life styles.” Crawford’s concern is that healthism ignores social determinants of health and necessarily limits the pursuit of health to people with the wealth to do so. In addition to anti-fat bias, we can also think about how racism, ableism, misogyny, ageism, and other oppressive structures make healthism worse.

In popular usage, shmirat hanefesh is used to sell all kinds of contemporary ideas about wellness and fitness (think Jewish-themed juice cleanses). This is not to say that shmirat hanefesh is always used nefariously. It has been used to promote vaccination among the ḥaredi (ultraorthodox) population as well as to encourage mask wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, this principle is too easily wedded to racist, classist, anti-fat, and anti-femme diet culture and wellness culture. Indeed, whenever the pursuit of health slides over into non-evidence-based territory—not to mention outright quackery—shmirat hanefesh is right there to wrap up ableism and healthism in halakhic (Jewish legal) bows.

Idolatry

Frustrated by the various takes we were finding on just what shmirat hanefesh was all about, my chevruta (study partner) and I decided to have another look at the verse in Deuteronomy. And when we look at the whole of Deuteronomy 4:15 and its continuation in the following verse, the Torah does not disappoint.

V’nishmartem me’od l’nafshotekhem. “Take very good care of yourselves,”

our verse urges, and why?

“Since you saw no shape when God spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire, lest you act wickedly and make for yourselves a sculptured image in any likeness whatever: the form of a man or a woman.” (Deuteronomy 4:15-16)

What a retort from the text itself! This is a verse about idolatry, specifically about not idolizing a particular shape (or size) of the human body. Taking care of ourselves means making sure we are not forgetting that we ourselves stood at Sinai and heard God urging us to have no other gods but the One.

Ramban, the thirteenth-century scholar and mystic, comments on this verse that it is warning against worshiping only one aspect of God as if God’s Oneness were separable.

We can use our verse as prooftext to help us understand that healthism, anti-fat bias, and diet culture are the very idolatry that we are being warned against; they hold up a particular ideal of body size and health itself as worthy of worship and cause us to forget our inherent human wholeness. Created in the image of the Divine, each of us is a mirror, in this world, of Divine wholeness.

This warning against idolatry can be powerful no matter what we believe, or don’t believe, about God—even for atheists. We have a human tendency to be worshipful, to give power over our lives to nonrational things. If we cannot stop ourselves from bowing down to one thing or another, we ought to at least be intentional about what our objects of worship are. Shmirat hanefesh warns us to make sure we are not worshiping physical health or a narrow definition of what constitutes an acceptable body size as an idol.

I am not being dismissive of the body and its needs and ailments. This is not a “you are not your body” argument. We are allowed to want to live long lives free of physical suffering, and we are allowed to take steps in pursuit of that. We run into trouble when we think our health is entirely up to us and when we mistake a narrow definition of physical health for the whole shebang.

One way that our tradition hints at its preference for something beyond physical health is in the liturgical practice of praying for a refuah shleima, a full healing, even when someone is at death’s door. We do this not because we expect miracles or at least not only because a miracle would be nice once in a while. We pray for complete healing even when physical cure is out of the question because the true healing we seek, the true caring we can offer ourselves and one another, is the reminder of every body’s inherent wholeness.

🌱

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The next House of Study Zoom Salon will be September 7th, 2pm ET/11am PT.

Join us!!

What does our individual spiritual work look like this year-- for the mundane, the crucial but hard work looking at who and how we have been as individuals-- as well as communities and as a larger society? These are days that require brave moral engagement, but we are up for the task. Join us for a lively, interactive conversation on questions that matter.

As always, if you want in on the House of Study, but paying isn't for you right now, email support @ lifeisasacredtext.com and we'll hook you up.

Rabbi Dr. Minna Bromberg brings her uniquely powerful voice—both literally and figuratively—to the urgent work of body liberation within a Jewish context. She is passionate about writing, teaching, and change-making at the nexus of social justice and spiritual care. In 2020, she founded Fat Torah with a clear and compelling mission: to shatter the idolatry of weight stigma and harness the profound resources of Jewish tradition to build a world that embraces all bodies. A gifted singer with five acclaimed albums, Minna also shares her gift by teaching others to lift their voices in song and prayer. Her own unique insights are enriched by her doctoral work in sociology (Northwestern University, 2005) and rabbinic ordination (Hebrew College, 2010). Jerusalem is home, where she lives with her family, continuing to amplify her message of liberation and acceptance.

Get your copy of Every Body Beloved now! (Get a copy for the people in your life – the rabbis, educators, and others who need to read it, too.)

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Fat Torah

Fat Torah

This article was downloaded from https://www.lifeisasacredtext.com/fattorah/ on Sep 17, 2025 at 8:44 AM EDT.

RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG | AUG 21, 2025, 10:00 AM EDT

guilt and responsibility

what does a perplexing ritual that happens in the wake of an unsolved murder tell us about leadership, community, and responsibility?

This is Life as a Sacred Text 🌱, an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives. It‘s run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:

Today we're going to look at a biblical murder mystery. If you've been working with a hevruta/study partner, this is a good one to read together, as you go.

(If you haven't been, and want one, there will be a chance to re-up very soon!)

Butler Tim Curry asks, "What do you mean, murder?" as the rest of the cast of the movie Clue (six other expensively-dressed white actors) look on.

"If... someone slain is found lying in the open, and the identity of the slayer is not known, your elders and magistrates will go out and measure the distances from the corpse to the nearby towns. The elders of the town nearest to the corpse shall then take a heifer which has never been worked, which has never pulled in a yoke; and the elders of that town shall bring the heifer down to an everflowing wadi [ravine], which is not tilled or sown. There, in the wadi, they shall break the heifer’s neck. And they shall make this declaration: 'Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it done... ' Thus you will remove from your midst guilt for the blood of the innocent." (Deuteronomy 21:1-9, abridged)

Dead body, check. No smoking gun– got it. Nearest elders break a heifer's neck and say something about not knowing what happened: OK, then.

Because... this will somehow fix everything? What is this ritual– known as the egla arufa, the heifer whose neck is broken– really about?

This article was downloaded from https://www.lifeisasacredtext.com/unsolvedmurder/ on Sep 17, 2025 at 8:44 AM EDT.

Table of Contents

Life is a Sacred Text: 2025 Sep 15

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Gaza's Annihilation Can Never Be Forgiven

Ask the RabbiS!

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Ask The Rabbi time!

Fat Torah: Every Body Beloved

guilt and responsibility