• she/her

healthcare bureaucrat in philly, v adhd, orthodox jew, ect ect, im love my wife



shel
@shel

I'm reading On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by Rabbi Danya Ruttenbreg and it's so incredibly clear reading this book that she is so extremely used to Twitter. He writing is constantly on the defensive.

For every single thing she says, she immediately responds to every single possible bad faith misinterpretation or distortion of what she said, and reaffirms baseline social justice maxims that we all already agree with anyway.

"I'm going to mostly talk about the people who caused harm, because this is about repentance, but I'm not trying to center their feelings over Survivors." "I'm going to try to mention the identities of people I cite when it's relevant but I don't know everyone's identities so I'm sorry if I don't when I should." "I will cite people who are impacted by structural violence, whose voices often lead these conversations—as they should. We have to listen to marginalized voices and center them" etc. etc. etc.

The most egregious is a fully one-paragraph long aside, in parenthesis, explaining that she's going to use both the terms "survivor" and "victim" and explains why someone might use one over the other and assures us she isn't trying to imply one term is more correct to use than the other simply by using them in any given sentence. Simply because she used the word "victim" in a sentence about something entirely different.

It's so distracting and sad because it's clearly written like a really long Twitter thread and not a book. It's written like after every two sentences someone is going to jump in and reply to only those two sentences removed from context and criticize her extremely harshly and start smearing her in bad faith. That kind of response is centered in the writing. To preempt it. So many moments of expecting someone to say "I can't believe you're erasing obvious common knowledge background detail by not talking about it in this chapter about something completely different."

I hope that as she gets through all the preludes in the book she is able to move away from this defensive writing style because I very much genuinely want to see what she has to say about this topic as a rabbi who I respect deeply. But gosh is it tiring. It's good to defend your thesis but when you're not on Twitter you can just go through your thesis to start and then respond to counter-arguments one at a time later instead of going on paragraph-long parentheticals that interrupt the flow.


You must log in to comment.
Pinned Tags