On Repentance and Repair Review by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg — ★★★ Review

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

I was profusely excited for this book when it was announced. I did the rare act of pre-ordering it. As a librarian, I rarely buy books for myself at all since it's so easy for me to get free copies of things (whether by borrowing it from work or just getting an ARC from the publisher.) It's a big deal for me to be excited enough to pay money for a book and to do so before it has been released.

Drawing primarily from the text Laws of Repentance by 12th century rabbinical scholar Maimonides; but also drawing from many texts and traditions from outside of Judaism, Ruttenberg explores what accountability, repentance, and repairing harm looks like in various different circumstance. She begins at the microscopic interpersonal level, zooms outwards to institutions, then entire nations, then looks at justice systems, the concept of forgiveness, and ends with the concept of atonement. At each step, she applies the framework of the five steps of repentance as outlined by Maimonides: recognition, remorse, desisting from the harmful behavior, restitution, and confession. Ruttenberg orders and translates these as 1. Owning the harm perpetrated 2. do the work to become the kind of person who doesn't do harm 3. make restitution for harm done 4. apologize, and 5. when faced with the opportunity to cause similar harm again, to make a better choice. In that order.

I was profoundly disappointed by this book. I pushed myself to read all 210 pages despite not feeling very compelled to, because I was so hopeful it would get better. Ruttenberg is the author of seven books at this point. I deeply enjoy reading her newsletters of torah wisdom and followed her on Twitter when I used Twitter, and found many of her threads to be insightful and well composed. I have a lot of respect for her as a spiritual leader. I had never read one of her books until now. I assumed, because she had written six other books, that her writing talent extended to long form. I want to believe her other six books are not written this way. In the introduction, Ruttenberg says that this book grew out of a popular Twitter thread. Unfortunately, you can really tell.

On Repentance and Repair is written like a Twitter thread. There are profound, inspiring quotes; surrounded by pages and pages of defensive asides and clarifications addressing every single possible bad faith reading or reason that someone could be upset by what is written. Often, this involves hedging every statement and appeasing both sides of the tiniest of issue. For instance, there is a one paragraph aside, all in parenthetical, clarifying that she does not intend, simply by using the words victim or survivor, to imply that using one word is better than the other. Nobody anywhere but Twitter would object to your entire book because they think that using a word, by itself, is intended to imply that in all circumstances that choice of words is better and more correct than another choice of words. In the acknowledgements section, Ruttenberg thanks her many beta readers for "correcting her" on her "mistakes" in the text. I have to wonder how many of these defensive clarifications were in response to the feedback from these readers or just Ruttenberg being so used to writing for Twitter that she expects the reader to jump in at the end of every paragraph to complain about that one paragraph in isolation from the entire book.

Ultimately, in trying to appease everyone, this book lacks the bravery necessary to say much of substance. The first and seconds chapters are quite good. There are many good moments throughout the book. These moments are each brief, and feel disconnected from the overall chapter. They feel, perhaps, like good tweets. Good tweets followed by long threads of defense and clarification which weaken, rather than strengthen, the point.

I can't help but compare it to my other favorite three-star book about repair and harm. Conflict is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman. Both books have much in common. Both are responding to a real need in American culture for skills and processes for resolving conflicts and addressing harm outside of involving police. Both address the real issue that we are quick to demand accountability but rare to define what would constitute accountability. Both authors are queer Jewish women and draw from eclectic sources from within and from outside of Jewish tradition. Both authors also make the unfortunate mistake of taking frameworks and concepts which are valuable, important, and applicable to interpersonal conflicts, and then attempting to apply those same ideas to macro-scale societal conflicts. Ruttenberg, to her credit, does a better job at adapting the five steps of repentance to the macro-level scale than Schulman; but I think in the process loses the bold and challenging nuance and complexity of how Schulman tackles interpersonal harm. Still, with both books, the earliest chapters are incredibly strong, and each book loses track of its point and falls apart as it goes on and gets increasingly abstract and macro-scale. This especially visible in how both books seem to attempt to address the Israel-Palestine conflict with their framework, each with their own flaws in doing so. Schulman frames the State of Israel as enacting violence due to a society-level fear, trauma, and even mental illness. Ruttenberg attributes it to a lack of self-recognition of harm done to the other side, from each side (with an emphasis on the harm done to Palestine.) Neither author engages with the material economic conditions which drive an occupying nation to oppress and exploit an occupied nation. For that matter, neither fully engages with the material economic conditions which drive an imperialist capitalist empire to mass-incarcerate and disenfranchise Black people to exploit them for their labor. Schulman says that the police are afraid of their victims. Ruttenberg says police do not know how to do "the hard internal work of repentance in a culture that overvalues forgiveness." Neither seem to realize that these relationships cannot and should not be analogized to interpersonal conflicts without factoring in economics and global capitalist imperialism and colonialism. They do not repent because there is no money to be made in repentance. They oppress because there is much wealth to be gained through oppressing. Macro-scale systems and nations are not people, they do not make decisions and take actions using the same psychology as an individual person.

While Schulman is so bold in her takes that she puts her foot in her mouth and says some reprehensible things that make it challenging to recommend the book despite its many strong, powerful, challenging, and well-written parts; Ruttenberg is so apprehensive, hedged, and defensive in her takes that she fails to say anything particularly powerful or challenging which has not been said already by others. It feels like a series of threads explaining and advocating for common Twitter maxims, stated as maxims because that is how it is. Even on issues like mass-incarceration and the death penalty, Ruttenberg concedes ground. Perhaps the Scandinavian model of prisons is good. Perhaps there are crimes so unforgivable as to deserve the death penalty. G—d forbid she challenge and contradict any of the beliefs already held by the reader, especially given that she does not know what the reader already believes so she needs to cover her bases and give acknowledgement to each possible belief that could be held and validate it. It is as though she is so desperate for us to adopt the Maimonidean process of repentance she is willing to bend over backwards to hedge it and weaken it so it can fit into whatever beliefs and worldview we already have.

Which sucks, because the process she is advocating for is really good. I do believe that her description of the Maimonidean process of repentance is one of the most well-put versions available. She translates archaic language with religious overtones to a contemporary and secular setting in a skillful manner. I really do think there are many times when people are upset and call for "accountability" without knowing what they want, where having this framework would allow them a path to continue. I think that the first two chapters on their own could be very useful to someone who genuinely wants to make amends and does not know how. I also appreciated, in her chapter on forgiveness, her breaking of the word forgiveness down into two different concepts. I think a lot of good can come from the concept of mechila, or pardon. A way of recognizing that someone who harmed you has repented and no longer owes you anything, even if you still don't like them and don't want to heal your relationship with them. Ruttenberg contrasts this with an emotional forgiveness of the heart, which we need to recognize is unnecessary for someone to be recognized as having properly been accountable. The person harmed might never forgive the person who harmed them, but at a certain point we do need to recognize that they have done everything they can to fix things and we need to move on as a community.

Speaking of community, what was sorely lacking in this text was an engagement with the topic of community and community dynamics. While it is affirmed many times that community is important, there is no discussion of what culture in a community facilitates, incentivizes, and encourages repentance, repair, and atonement. As Ruttenberg repeatably digs in and digs in to the ways that a harm-doer must fully gut themselves, prostrate, and do "the hard internal work of transformation," the question I was continually left with was why. Why would anybody subject themselves to this process, especially when Ruttenberg repeatably emphasizes that it may do absolutely nothing to return someone's standing in a community and seems to affirm that that is as it should be. Simply the consequences for fucking up. To lose everything. That no forgiveness or even mechila is owed by the community, with seemingly no sense of scale as to the harm being discussed, speaking to harm across scale whether it be a minor incident or an international violation of human rights. That the harshest of treatments is deserved even if someone does everything right to repent. Ruttenberg says that accountability is necessary to repair harm done and become a better person, which may truly be healing and fulfilling if done. But why would someone choose to do it? There is a material cost to doing the right thing. Unfortunately, the material incentives always seems to sway behavior more than spiritual convictions, more often than not. Even with the accountability process defined and described so well, why would someone choose to do this rather than dig their heels in and insist that they did nothing wrong? Especially if your income comes from your public persona. For a trans woman whose entire career is driven by selling creative works and personality, who has been called out and excessively targeted disproportionately for genuine harm done, why would she ever fully go through this process and risk losing her audience and thereby her ability to makes ends meet? Especially if, as Ruttenberg repeatably says, that stepping away from being a public figure is reasonable to be expected of people in the entertainment industry. Perhaps for someone who is a wealthy movie star, but not for a small-time video content creator or a freelance illustrator selling t-shirts. The financially incentivized action is always to dig your heels in and deny deny deny, in the hopes of convincing at least half of your audience to condemn the accuser and take your side.

I believe, truly and fully, that is possible to create communities and cultures which encourage healthy accountability and repentance work, including using the framework of Maimonides that Ruttenberg outlines, such that someone would choose to go through this process even if it costs them a material loss of some sort. But in order to create a climate where that happens, we must challenge, not validate, the ways we handle conflict already. We must challenge the notion that someone is bad forever. We must challenge public dog-piling as always justified. We must challenge the notion that the chapter is never sealed. Ruttenberg is careful to always mention each of these issues, but always in a hedged manner. To acknowledge that it is good to seal the chapter, but only if you want to, of course.

I think that, perhaps, the main reason I did not like this book, is truly because I am not the audience for this book. I am a millennial prison abolitionist trans woman. I have never been in a community where survivors of sexual assault are pressured to forgive their assailants. I have never been in a community that centered forgiving someone rather than exiling them for the smallest slight. Many transgender women do make egregious mistakes, but the response is never, en-masse, an urging to forgive and forget. Rather, there is a mass desire for the imperfect to be disappeared and for those who do not cut ties to be iced out themselves. But Ruttenberg primarily shares anecdotes from communities where such a thing is the norm. She primarily criticizes the centering of forgiveness in American culture. This is an alien world to me. I am used to spaces which are harsh and quick to ostracize. Where holding grudges is enshrined beyond anything resembling reasonable. Ruttenberg addresses spaces which are forgiving and conflict-avoidant to a fault, refusing to ever take the side of a victim. Where smoothing things over for the appearance of peace is the priority. Such spaces seem to be dominated by heterosexual Gen Xers or Baby Boomers; some Jewish but mostly Christian. Perhaps someone in those communities would find this book more challenging and engaging.

But my question then still remains, when such a person in such a community is given this book, why would they listen to it? Would someone with those beliefs really be convinced by a book which is so full of hedging and appeasement? A book which is also on the defense? It feels like the true audience is perhaps people on Twitter who already agree with everything that has been written. This is a book with a blue check-mark next to the author's name for readers with blue check-marks after their names.

I wouldn't say I didn't get anything out of this book. It's not a bad book. It's fine. For someone who is very new to this subject-matter, for whom it is confusing why we don't like Woody Allen anymore, perhaps this book would be very powerful for them. Some of the tweets passages from it truly are inspiring and wonderful. I just wasn't blown away like I was hoping to be.

Someday I'll find or write a book on this subject-matter that is what I want it to be.