Thursday

the ladder

climbing redistributive justice

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg

Mar 27, 2025 • 11 min read

Collecting Stardust, Watercolor, by Emma, Age 7, one of the winners of the Royal Academy of Arts in London's Young Artist Summer Exhibition, 2020. Emma said, "My biggest dream is to fly. If I could find a big ladder, I could touch the sky and pick some stars and maybe they can give me the magical power to fly. Fairies can do it! Why not me?" FAIR. (Watercolor painting with a grey background fading up to a bluer sky with black splotches on top. At the bottom of the image there is a crayon drawing of a large blue tub from which gold stars are emanating, and next to the tub is a brown ladder in crayon, which goes all the way up to the top of the image. At the top of the ladder stands a figure with their back to us with a blue watercolor dress, shoulder-length brown crayon hair, and one hand up holding what may be a grey flower or a wand with a three-leafed crown. )

This past autumn, I was at a convening of Jewish leaders on the question of spiritual equity– the fact that, simply, not everybody has access to the same kinds of spiritual resources, just as not everyone has access to the same material resources.

Anyway, we were in the middle of this conversation when my friend and colleague, Rabbi Dr. Josh Feigelson– President and CEO of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality– made an interesting observation about a few words.

We began talking about the distribution of resources on Monday, and it felt imperative that we continue that conversation today.

Rabbi Feigelson noted:

Trust
Mutual
Investment
Interest
Bond
Value
Equity
Ownership

They're all words related to the world of money, finance, capitalism.

And they're also words related to the importance of human connection, human investment in our relationships with each other, ourselves, the Big Bigness.

There is this tension. There has long been this tension.

There's this quote from the co-founder and chairman of Netflix, Reed Hastings–

“You know, think about it, when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night. We’re competing with sleep....”

He regards his competition as sleep. Just think about that for a moment.

But it doesn't have to be that way, and it's not always been that way.

In our last missive, we looked at the commandment, "There shall be no people struggling to get by among you," (Deuteronomy 15:4) and everything that flows from that.

Let's keep reading from that chapter, because it turns out that this section is very important for how we engage with the idea of redistributive justice today:

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