Our special guest this week is Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, author of Surprised By God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion (Beacon Press); editor of The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism (NYU Press) and Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism (Seal Press); and co-editor, with Rabbi Elliot Dorff, of three books on Jewish ethics.
A graduate of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in Los Angeles, Rabbi Ruttenberg has served as Senior Jewish Educator at Tufts Hillel and Campus Rabbi at Northwestern Hillel. She has written for the New York Times, Salon, and The San Francisco Chronicle, and she is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post.
This week's Torah portion- Parashat Lech Lecha (Genesis 12:1–17:27)- features Abram's Journey to the land of Canaan, his forced departure to Egypt, his covenant with God, the birth of Ishmael, Abram's circumcision, and the changing of his name to Abraham. Our talk discusses, among other things, the symbolic nature of the uncertainty facing Abraham and the problematic father-son relationships in the stories of the patriarchs.
