Hello friends, my name is Tammy Simon and I'm the founder of SoundsTrue and I want to welcome you to the SoundsTrue podcast insights at the edge.

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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Rabbi Dania Ruttenberg. Rabbi Dania serves as a scholar in residence at the National Council of Jewish Women.

She's the award-winning author of numerous books, including Surprised by God and Nurture the Wow.

She was named by Newsweek and the Daily Beast as one of the top 10 rabbis to watch and by forward as one of the top 50 most influential women rabbis and called a Wunderkind of Jewish Feminism by publishers weekly.

With SoundsTrue, Rabbi Dania is the author of a new eight-part audio series. It's called Men to the World, Spiritual Tools for Healing, Repair and Justice.

Rabbi Dania is someone who speaks uncomfortable truths and this is the essence of having what she calls a prophetic voice, which is certainly the voice that we need at a time like this.

Here's my conversation with Rabbi Dania Ruttenberg.

Rabbi Dania, right here at the beginning, can you share with our listeners a bit about you and what brought you to the decision to become a rabbi?

Well, I was raised in a very typical American suburban Jewish household and I had about mitzvah but it wasn't taught what it meant.

We went to synagogue a couple times a year, we did Passover Seder.

By the time I was 13, I decided I was an atheist. I was interested in philosophy and by the time I got to college, I somehow stumbled into the religious studies department by accident.

It was interesting, right? It was history and it was literature and it was what really happened and it's the mysteries of what we can piece together with archaeology and its textual analysis and living philosophy basically.

I didn't have to believe what the people in these texts believed and then when I was 21, my mother died of cancer.

And I had run her hospice as you know, it's a whole, about six months story of finding out that the cancer had come back and being back and forth and then the six weeks of her hospice and when she died, we did the funeral Jewish because this is how you do funeral.

And people came to our house for a week and brought us food and took care of us, which is called sitting Shiva because this is what you do.

And I said the mourners prayer during these times and I kept going back to synagogue to say the mourners prayer because that's what you do.

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