Danya Ruttenberg could once be found hanging out at Kafein and Unicorn Cafe, sipping coffee for “hours and hours at a time.”
Now, the new Hillel rabbi has come full circle. Instead of sitting in Evanston coffee shops like she did when she was a self-described “punk” teenager growing up in the Chicago suburbs, she rests on a comfortable couch in her office, drinking water and cracking jokes about how a former atheist somehow decided to become a rabbi. “I thought we were praying to this big God in the sky with a beard and a thunderbolt and a temper tantrum,” Rabbi Ruttenberg says with a laugh.
Ruttenberg’s serious interest in religion began when she “sort of stumbled backwards into the religious studies department” as an undergraduate at Brown University. She originally wanted to study philosophy, but found the subject too dry. She says she wanted to engage more with questions and experiences that people encountered in their lives.
After college, she moved to San Francisco and worked as a freelance writer for a few years. She covered religion, sex, gender and art, eventually joining a Conservative synagogue along the way.
And then Ruttenberg heard the rabbinate calling.
“This small voice within—some people call intuition, some people call the voice of God; I think it’s both—said, ‘Rabbinical school,’” Ruttenberg says. “I said back, ‘Ha, I was an atheist twenty minutes ago, what are you talking about?’ And I shrugged it off. But the voice got louder and louder.”
Ruttenberg received her rabbinic ordination in 2008 from the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in Los Angeles.
Since then she’s served as the Senior Jewish Educator and one of two staff rabbis at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., and has written three books: Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism, The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism and Surprised by God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion, a memoir about her own spiritual journey.
Last quarter was her first at Northwestern’s Hillel, and so far, she says it’s been a blast. Ruttenberg is working to achieve a slew of goals for Hillel.
She wants to start some informal Torah discussion groups, have more “hot topics in Judaism” discussions and start groups for seniors who are gearing up for graduation and the transition to adulthood.
“I want to continue to take part in the amazingness,” Ruttenberg says. “And if I have one real agenda for my rabbinate: to create spaces where people can talk about the hard and the messy, their hopes and their yearnings, their reckonings and their revelations.”