Surprised by God Quotes

“Does it even need to be said that there are times when one must stand up to the community, and use one's voice in support of an unpopular view? Or that complicity is participation? Sometimes the issue at hand may concern a gross injustice, sometimes it may just be about individual boundaries. Sometimes a dissenting view will be heard and accepted, sometimes it will be ignored. None of this changes our obligation to move through the world with honesty and bravery.”
― Danya Ruttenberg, Surprised by God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion

“My commitment to my friends forced me to develop a complex ethos of pluralism on the ground. I had to find ways to practice Judaism as I understood it while, at the same time, accepting that those around me might not believe or do the exact same things that I did. I had to respect someone's choice to drive to my house on Shabbat, just as I hoped that members of other Jewish communities would respect my choice to wear a yarmulke and tzitzit or to pray in a mixed-gender setting. As Ben Dreyfus, founder of an independent minyan (prayer group) in New York, puts it, "if you want the protections of pluralism, you have to buy into pluralism yourself. This doesn't mean you have to believe that other positions are valid, but it does mean you have to respect their right to exist."15”
― Danya Ruttenberg, Surprised by God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion

“The story of Cain and Abel from the book of Genesis teaches ... the lesson of social responsibility... The answer to the question 'Am I my brother's keeper?' is a resounding yes"31”
― Danya Ruttenberg, Surprised by God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion

“it is far from easy to keep living where God is. Therefore God gives you people to help to hold you in that place and call you back to it every time you wander off."17”
― Danya Ruttenberg, Surprised by God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion

“Years later I would hear about the practice of using music to enter a trancelike state; Sufis, Hasidic Jews, Lakota Native Americans, and gospel choirs (to name a few) do it all the time to reach elevated states of ecstasy, to annihilate the small self in the attempt to unify with something bigger. As twentieth-century Sufi leader Hazrat Inayat Khan wrote, "It seems that the human race has lost a great deal of the ancient science of magic, but if there remains any magic it is music."2”
― Danya Ruttenberg, Surprised by God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion

“Of course, sharing one's thoughts-dissenting or not-in any sort of context is risky. It opens us up and makes us overwhelmingly vulnerable. Sometimes it's tempting to hide, to avoid revealing who we are, lest our failures and most secret hopes are set out for evaluation. But, of course, in allowing people in, we allow ourselves the most fundamental kind of human connection, and do honor to the Divine image in which we are all created. For, as author Martha Beck wrote, "Whoever said love is blind was dead wrong. Love is the only thing on this earth that lets us see each other with the remotest accuracy.”
― Danya Ruttenberg, Surprised by God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion