Episode 23: Rabbi Sharon Brous
On Finding Her Place in the Jewish Community and Working to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World
Sharon Brous’s Five Books:
Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America by Letty Cottin Pogrebin
The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel and The Prophets by Abraham Joshua Heschel
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
The Postcard by Ann Berest
The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World by Sharon Brous
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Hosted by Tali Rosenblatt Cohen
Produced by Odelia Rubin
Editorial and website support by Sarah Waring
Artwork by Dena Friedman
Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions.
In a time of loneliness and isolation, social rupture and alienation, what will it take to mend our broken hearts and rebuild our society?
Sharon Brous—a leading American rabbi—makes the case that the spiritual work of our time, as instinctual as it is counter-cultural, is to find our way to one other in celebration, in sorrow, and in solidarity. To show up for each other in moments of joy and pain, vulnerability and possibility, to invest in relationships of shared purpose and build communities of care.
Sharon Brous is the founding and senior rabbi of IKAR, a trail-blazing Jewish community based in Los Angeles. A leading voice at the intersection of faith and justice in America, she has been named #1 Most Influential Rabbi in the U.S. by Newsweek/The Daily Beast. She blessed both President Obama and President Biden at their National Inaugural Prayer Services, and her TED Talk “Reclaiming Religion” has been viewed 1.5 million times. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post. She lives with her husband, David Light, and their children in California.
In our conversation, Rabbi Brous shares what it took for her to carve out a place for herself in a community that didn’t always feel welcoming. We’ll also discuss the power of foundational stories, the idea that religion begins with asking the right questions, and how to stay in conversation even when it’s difficult.
Other Books Mentioned:
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays by Rabbi Irving Greenberg
The Book And The Sword: A Life Of Learning In The Shadow Of Destruction by David Weiss Halivni
Transcript:
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen:
Welcome to The Five Books, where each week we talk with a Jewish author about five books that are near and dear to them. My name is Tali Rosenblatt Cohen, and today I'm excited to speak with Rabbi Sharon Brous about her book, The Amen Effect, a powerful call to restore connection in a time of loneliness and division.
Rabbi Sharon Brous:
I really came to see and understand that Mishnah Midot Tutu really is our ancestors offering to us a response to the epidemic of loneliness, the deep pain both spiritually and also physically that comes from feeling socially alienated and isolated from one another, and also the great danger to our society, to our democracy that comes when people are really experiencing this kind of profound disconnect from one another.
Rabbi Sharon Brous is the founding and senior rabbi of IKAR, a trailblazing Jewish community based in Los Angeles. A leading voice at the intersection of faith and justice in America, she has been named the number one most influential rabbi in the US by Newsweek, The Daily Beast. She blessed both President Obama and President Biden at their national inaugural prayer services, and her TED Talk “Reclaiming Religion” has been viewed more than one and a half million times.
Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. In this episode, we discuss Rabbi Brous’s painful journey as a young adult trying to find her place in the Jewish community.
I realized that their version of Judaism was very different from what I had learned and I was completely humiliated by my ignorance. I mean, I was essentially functionally illiterate as a Jew and I had been going to religious school two and even three times a week when I was growing up and it was so important to me, but I didn't know the rules. I didn't know the prayers. There was a kind of secret language that all the Jews around me on campus seemed to know and share that I had simply never been exposed to before, and it was particularly painful because my Jewishness mattered so profoundly to me.
We'll also discuss the power of foundational stories, the idea that religion begins with asking the right questions, and how to stay in conversation even when it's difficult.
Where is the root of our sorrow? Can we speak to each other from the place of that heartache? Can we ask one another, tell me what you see, what's breaking your heart, help me understand you? And I think when we do that, we are rehumanizing the other person instead of saying, there's nothing for me to learn from them, they're just wrong. And I think that that is really the essential work of this time.
This conversation feels especially fitting as we approach Shavuot, a holiday where we reflect on the sacred covenant between God and the Jewish people.
Before we get started, I do want to share a reminder that this episode would have been the last of the season, but we're moving to an every other week publishing schedule. So we'll be back in two weeks and every two weeks after that with more books, more authors, and more recommendations. If you'd like to get reminders for when new episodes drop and a full list of each author's five books delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletter through the link in the show notes or by heading to our website, fivebookspod.org.
And now let's get to today's episode of The Five Books.
Welcome to The Five Books. Thank you so much for being with us today. The Amen Effect is one of those rare books, I think, that's both deeply spiritual and really grounded in real life. I know that it has stayed with me as I think it has stayed with so many other people. So thank you for writing it and for being with us today.
Thank you. So happy and honored to be with you.
Thank you. So the premise of The Amen Effect is rooted in this beautiful Mishnah. I remember learning it. It's stayed with me for so many years. Can you start by telling us a little bit about that text and why it became the foundation for this book?
Rabbi Sharon Brous:
Yeah, sure. I encountered this Mishnah by accident when I was in rabbinical school. It wasn't on any of the top lists of Mishnayot that one needs to study to become a proficient learner. But I encountered it by accident. I remember sitting for an hour in my apartment in New York City, I was studying at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and I couldn't figure it out. But I knew and understood that there was something deeper going on than what the text appeared to be saying. And so I literally photocopied the text and put it back in the book and put it on my shelf. So the Mishnah describes that Jews used to come from all across the land and even from the diaspora, and they would ascend to Jerusalem, and then they would ascend the steps of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the holiest place. This ritual took place supposedly at all times whenever someone would visit, but I always envision it on the pilgrimage festivals because that's when the most people would have been there and the ritual would have been observed most dramatically. But essentially they would ascend the steps, walk through this beautiful arched entryway at the Temple Mount. They would turn to the right and they would circle around the perimeter of the courtyard of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. So imagine hundreds of thousands of people en masse circling. They would go in, they would enter, circle, and leave essentially right where they had just entered. Except the text says, mi she’ero davar, someone to whom something had happened. And that person would go up to Jerusalem, up the steps and go through the same entryway, but they would turn to the left when everyone else was turning to the right. And here this sacred encounter would occur in which someone who had come from the right would see the person who's coming from the left. They would look into their eyes and they would ask very simply, Ma lach, tell me what happened to you. Ma lach ma'kif l'smol. What happened to you, person who walks to the left? Tell me about your heart.
And this person would say, Ani avel, I am a mourner. And I extrapolate from that. I'm a mourner. I am bereft. I am bereaved. I am ill. I am taking care of someone who is ill. I am lonely. I am worried about my child. I am frozen in uncertainty. I'm in pain. And some probably stranger sees them, asks them, and they say out loud that they're in pain, that they're in heartache, and the person coming from the other direction blesses them. And it's something very simple like, may the one who dwells in this place hold you with love as you navigate this difficult chapter. And then they go on.
I realized years later, I moved out to Los Angeles after I was ordained as a rabbi, and we built this beautiful community that was intended to stand at the intersection of a kind of revitalization of Jewish ritual and Jewish learning. And also, our deepest attempt to build a more just and loving society. And we were working for 10 years furiously to do this. And then at some point around 2012, I started to realize that people were really coming to my office talking about loneliness. They were talking about their heartache, about how they felt that nobody in the world really knew or understood them. They worried if they disappeared, would anyone even notice? And I somehow kind of instinctively went back to this Mishnah and I read it more deeply and differently than I had read it before. The text at that time, I realized that I had experienced more of life in the course of the 10 or 12 years in between. And I just saw it totally differently. And I saw that text as a response to a lot of what I understood that our people were experiencing.
And then of course, recognize that what my people were experiencing wasn't specific to Los Angeles or to IKAR, but was actually part of this kind of global trend, which now there's been a lot of writing about that right at the time that everybody started to get cell phones and got on social media, that there was this kind of worldwide loneliness epidemic. And I really came to see and understand that Mishnah Middot 2:2, which presents itself as a very simple text speaking about really the architecture of the beit ha’mikdash, of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, really is our ancestors offering to us a response to the epidemic of loneliness, the deep pain both spiritually and also physically that comes from feeling socially alienated and isolated from one another, and also the great danger to our society, to our democracy that comes when people are really experiencing this kind of profound disconnect from one another.
As I was dealing with all of these pastoral questions about loneliness and about belonging and about a sense of purposelessness that many people were feeling, that the power of the ritual, which this is something I didn't understand when I encountered it first, you know, in my mid-20s living in New York City, the power of the ritual is that none of the people participating in this ritual want to be there. They don't want to have this encounter with each other. They want to be there maybe, but not with each other.
The people who are having the spiritual peak moment of their lives, engaging in this incredible ritual, holiest day, holiest place in the world, the last thing that they want to do is peel away from their friends and their family and their community and go check in on a stranger who looks not okay, whose eyes are red, who's walking in the wrong direction. It's totally counter-instinctual to do that. And when I was writing the book, I started researching and reading firsthand testimonies of people who completed the Hajj in Mecca. And the way that they describe that experience, for them, it's millions of people. As far as we can tell, for Jews, it was hundreds of thousands in Jerusalem. But same idea. I mean, this mass movement of people, and it's so counterintuitive to break from that kind of spiritual movement. And I mean, people describe their legs giving out. They burst into tears. It's just so powerful to be, they feel so alive. It's such a transcendent experience. And to pull out of that, it's like the record skids to a stop because you see someone who's crying and you need to go check on them. Something that seems so mundane and yet that's exactly why they're there. That's precisely why they're there. It's to see that person and engage in that encounter.
And of course, for the person who's walking to the left, it's also completely counter-instinctual when we are brokenhearted, bereft, bereaved, ill, worried, lonely, all of the things that weigh most on our hearts. The last thing we want to do is get out of bed, let alone show up at a big party where everybody's moving in one direction. And we're told explicitly, you're not allowed to walk that way. You have to walk the other way. And you have to show everybody that you're not like them and that you're vulnerable. And then when a stranger asks you, tell me about your heart, ma lach, you have to tell them the truth. We don't wanna tell the truth about how lonely we feel. Everything we know about loneliness now is that it drives us to do exactly the opposite of what we need to do. So normally when we feel pain, when our hand feels pain on the stove, it's sending signals to our brain in order to get safe, you need to move in the other direction. But loneliness, when it gives a pain to our body, when we feel the pain of loneliness, it's sending the wrong signal to us.
What it says is, retreat, retreat, get out of this awkward social environment, nobody wants you here anyway. And so we pull away at exactly the moment that what we need in order to respond to the loneliness is connection. And so I realized that both of these parties are being asked to do something utterly extraordinary. They're being told at the moment that you most wanna retreat from each other, that's when you have to turn toward one another. And if we can do that, then we can begin to heal not only from our grief and from our pain, but from the social fractures that are literally driving us apart as a community and as a society right now. And so the message for me became very clear that this was the moral and spiritual heart of what we needed to do in order to respond to the pain that we were experiencing in our time.
Book One: a Jewish book from childhood — Deborah, Golda and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America by Letty Cotton Pogrebin.
Rabbi Sharon Brous:
I grew up, in retrospect, my family calls us, we were Haredi Reform, because we were really reform Jews, but we were so serious about it. And so we had this very strange and eclectic blend of ritual practices that were preserved from my grandparents to my parents to me. And looking at them once I began to understand more about halacha and about this kind of comprehensive system of observance, I realized there was no real order to it. It was just these were… These were remnants and pieces, but we held on to them. Like each one of them was the most sacred practice. I got very involved in high school, in reform youth movement. I was involved in NFTY and I lived in New Jersey. We belonged to a very large reform synagogue. And I felt like my early years of my quest for my own connection to Judaism was in many ways a reaction to the synagogue that I grew up in, because it was so very formal and it was really a reflection of that kind of 20th century suburban reform Jewish approach.
And a big part of my religious journey was the realization that I had grown up with a very strong sense of Jewish identity, but really disconnected from the reality of what a more formal Jewish practice looked like outside of that very small, small frame. And so when I went to college, which I chose my college in part because it was 20, 25% Jewish, and I really wanted to be part of a very vibrant Jewish community. And as soon as I arrived, I realized that their version of Judaism was very different from what I had learned. And I was completely humiliated by my ignorance. I mean, I was essentially functionally illiterate as a Jew. And I had been going to religious school two and even three times a week when I was growing up. And it was so important to me. But I didn't know the rules. I didn't know the prayers. There was a kind of secret language that all the Jews around me on campus seemed to know and share that I had simply never been exposed to before. And it was particularly painful because my Jewishness mattered so profoundly to me.
And so I went on a real journey in those early years of college, essentially from humiliation, I fled the Jewish community. I mean, I walked into too many environments where I did the wrong thing, spoke between hand washing and motzi at a Friday night dinner, you know, stood up when you were supposed to sit down, walked in at just the wrong moment during lekha dodi on Friday night service. I mean, I did all the things that one does when you don't know that you're not supposed to. And I just, it just broke my heart. I felt that there was no home for me. And so I thought, I'm a New Yorker now. I'm a cultural Jew. I don't need to be religious. I don't need to observe Shabbat. I can eat bagels and read the New York Times. And that's my Jewish identity.
And that's where I sat for a while, about a year and a half. And then there were really two things that happened. One of them was there was an attack in Buenos Aires on the Israeli consulate. And I remember hearing the news and feeling the weight of it as though it was my own family. And that really confused me because I was a universalist. I was a human rights activist. I loved all of humanity. I wasn't connected to, I had this kind of Rosa Luxemburg, you know, there's no special corner in my heart for this family versus that family. And it really felt differently to me than the rest of the horrible news did at that time. And I went to go explore what was happening. Like, why did I feel so deeply connected? I'd never been to Israel. I had no connection to Israel. I had no connection to Buenos Aires or the Jews of Buenos Aires. Like, why did I feel so wounded by this personally?
And I went to a little gathering on campus where people were just singing together. And I thought, okay, so this is my family on some level as a cultural Jew. And then they started to sing Hatikvah, which I was the only one there who didn't know the words to it. I'd heard the tune before in my childhood, but I had no idea that there were words to that tune. And I just thought, I can't sit in ignorance forever. I have to start to learn. And one of the first books that somebody put in my hand after that moment of kind of awakening, which really led for me to a year of like excruciating encounters with the Jewish community of me kind of trying to bang on the door to get into the party I wasn't invited to, going to every synagogue in New York City, trying to sit through services, trying to learn and understand and grow and just feeling like all the doors were closing instead of opening for me. But one of the first books that I actually read in that time was the book by Letty Cotton Pogrebin, who is a feminist journalist, called Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America. And somehow that book with its kind of raw honesty about the challenges of living in and loving a religious tradition that doesn't always feel like it's loving you back, of having this deep yearning to be fully a part of something that doesn't really make space for the fullness of you. It just struck me at the right moment in the right way. And it made me want to fight for it. It made me feel like this is my inheritance too. And I have a right to sit at this table.
It's so painful to hear that your encounter of the Jewish community also included these moments of feeling so excluded. it's so interesting that this was the book that you picked up and she also, this is a lot about her two arcs as a Jew and as a feminist and how they relate to each other. And you have such a poignant story in your book of being in Israel and having this amazing Shabbat experience with a group of ultra-orthodox rabbis who, and then you say at the end of the Shabbat, I want to be a rabbi, and they're, what? You should want to be a rebbetzin. So I'm curious about these two arcs of feminism and Judaism, and you obviously found your way through it, but it seems like it took some negotiation there.
Rabbi Sharon Brous:
Yeah, and I think, I mean, what it really taught me was, yes, about feminism, but not only about feminism, it was about all of the parts of me that didn't fit neatly into a Jewish community that as an outsider looking in seemed like it was requiring a total conformity. You have to think like this, you have to talk like this, you have to dress like this. In many ways, when I got ultimately found my way into the Jewish community, I realized it's far more diverse and complex and nuanced. And there are always people who are sharing stories that even though they wear the clothes of this movement, actually, their heart is here. But also there's truth to that experience that I had. I mean, there are ways in which we have, there is a script that operates in the American Jewish community. And when you break script, you do so at your own peril. And so I was both responding to something real and also something exaggerated.
But it was really about all the parts of me. I wanted to belong fully and I just couldn't. I mean, I really, if I could have, I would have studied at Yeshiva University to become a rabbi. I mean, when I had this awakening, I wanted to live a fully traditional Shomer Shabbos life. I wanted to be in a halachic environment. I fell in love with orthodoxy. I really found that to be, my spiritual awakening happened in that place. And yet I was constantly bringing up issues and challenges that there was really no, it seemed that there at that time was no room to answer to a person like me. I still bump into the systems there, but not only in orthodoxy, I mean, everywhere. So, I mean, what I ultimately discovered was that, I mean, a couple of things happened. I'll share with you. We had one, we had one gathering when I was just starting my rabbinic fellowship after a few years. So I had that experience that you described in Jerusalem and I had this epiphany and I was going to become a rabbi and then they told me to become a rebbetzin. And then I went home and called my parents and they were mortified. I mean, this was not their dream for their child. In fact, honestly, I think they thought rabbinical school was for the kids who couldn't get into medical school or law school. Like it was, they had no model of how a rabbi could actually move through the world, help people heal, help our community and society heal. That wasn't a part of their understanding. They became very supportive very quickly afterwards, but this was not the obvious path for me to take. And so I went and started a rabbinical school.
I remember we had this incredible gathering at a synagogue that I was connected to in New York City when I came back for seminary. And it was a gathering of rabbis from all different denominations talking about the critical urgent justice issues of New York City in the late 90s. And so we were talking about homelessness and we were talking about police brutality and talking about really difficult issues. And it was incredible that all these Jews were in the room together. We had Haredi rabbis who agreed to show up in a room with reform rabbis and conservatives, kind of astonishing. And everyone, mean, every single speaker who got up kept saying, it's just incredible that we can all be together. And this is where the healing starts. And then someone hit the table and said, Mincha. And I thought, great, Mincha, I need to daven Mincha. I mean, this shows you also how naive I was on some level, but like all the people who wanted to daven Mincha went over to the side of the room to daven and they just didn't start. And I'm like, why aren't we starting? What's going on?
And I, you know, at some point, like they're waiting and waiting and waiting. And I look around and I realize I'm the only woman who's standing there. And so I like, I, and I'm horrified. And so I find myself like moving to the back of the group. So I'm standing behind all the men. put that on myself and they still won't start because there's no mechitza in the room. There's no separation for the men and the women. So that means I literally can't stand there at all. Otherwise they can't pray. And I realize I am an obstacle to their experience of Klal Yisrael, of Jewish people coming together. Like my very being as a religious Jew who's taken on davening three times a day and observing Shabbat and observing kashrut, all the observance that I had taken on, my love of God, my love of Jewish texts and tradition, I was an obstacle to these men having the powerful unifying experience of being able to pray together because a Haredi rabbi can pray with a reformed rabbi as long as they're all men. And it was devastating for me.
And so it's not just the gender issue. I realized I want to create a space in which we really hear and understand the voices that have been marginalized in our community for thousands of years, in which we are brave enough to imagine new scripts that could be written to read ancient Mishnayot and see in them not just architectural setup and technical descriptions of who goes this way and this way, but how this could be a pathway toward our shared healing. And so while the book is specifically speaking about the two arcs of feminism and Judaism, the two great loves of, know, Letty's life, for me, it taught me something even bigger, which is how can we imagine the most expansive version of our tradition so that there's room for all of us here? So that we can all find a home because that experience of feeling like you're banging on the door of the party you weren't invited to. And if you can get in, I used to have this image like they wouldn't let me in the front door, so I was running around the side of the house to see if there was an open window and I would jump in because I really wanted to be at this party only to get in and realize they did not want me there. So I don't want anyone to feel that way about our community.
And I want us to imagine a Jewish community and I want us to imagine a world in which everybody is seen as an image of God, in which everybody belongs, in which we understand that knowing each other deeply is actually one of the holiest acts and we feel responsible to one another in that way. That was the beginning of my learning on that journey.
That’s so powerful and I think you really have created all of these new openings for so many people. The other part that strikes me is just Something that was so important in her book and in her life is dialogue and she talks about Black-Jewish dialogue, Palestinian-Jewish dialogue, both through a feminist frame. That's obviously also been very important to you and she also talks about how the antisemitism that she experienced as part of the women's movement, in particular at certain UN events between 1975 and 1980, that really precipitated her return to Judaism as a result of that exclusion, that then she reconnected with her Judaism and there was this emergence of a space for Jewish feminist women. And so I'm wondering about that kind of formative crossroads and given that you've been involved in all of these dialogues and conversations, have you experienced that same kind of friction between your Jewish identity and other movements that you care about?
Rabbi Sharon Brous:
Yeah, it's interesting. I think she wrote this book in 1991. It's interesting to think about what she already had seen, what she saw coming in some ways, considering what we've experienced now in our time. And yeah, it's very painful, obviously. This time is very painful. And I think we have to remember that we have agency here, that we have choices to make about the way that we engage our Jewish identity, of our Judaism that we are most attached to, the story that we choose to tell, are we “Am Levadad Yishkon”, a people that dwells apart and nobody will ever understand us and they're always going to come after us, or are we “Lo tov heyot ha-adam levado”, like it's not good for a person or people to be alone in the world and we have to constantly try to reinvigorate connection and ties with one another.
I've been thinking lately about a dear friend of mine who's a European Jew who grew up with two parents who had totally different foundational stories. One of them, her father, every one of his relatives was murdered in Auschwitz. He was from the line, the sole survivor. The story that he told was, you never trust, never trust a non-Jew. When the time comes, they will kill you. Or someone said to me the other day, the story that he learned from his survivor parents was “the Jew reaches out his hand in peace and the Gentile shoots him in the head.” That is a core foundational story that a lot of Jews share and it's rooted in trauma and it's real and it's painful. And it's especially dangerous when it directs our communal agenda, when we build even law and policy around it in the state of Israel. But my European friend's mother had a very different story. Her whole family was saved by righteous Gentiles. And so her story was, there are good people everywhere, you just need to find them. And she described to me how her whole life she kind of gravitated more toward her mother's story because she felt that was where her heart drew her. And after October 7th, she found herself kind of pulling toward her father's. And now recognizing that these and these are both true in some way. You know, I think that what we're grappling with today is a very complex reality in which our core Jewish stories are often in conflict with other Jews' core stories and often in conflict with many of the people who share our deep concerns about building a just society. And the only way that we can show up at the table is as ourselves.
And so I really don't want to see Jews pulling away from these difficult intersectional spaces where we're really meeting both with very strong and harsh ideas about Judaism with, I think, some very deep rooted antisemitism in some cases with misconceptions about our community. I can see how some people's instinct is either to pull away from the space or pull away from the Jewishness, from the Judaism. And I think we have to keep showing up exactly as we are, and we have to stay in conversation, you know, a big piece of The Amen Effect has to do with the way that we hold that same kind of curiosity and compassion, not only toward the bereft and the bereaved and the ill, but toward the people who've hurt us, toward the people who don't want to see us, toward the people whose views have caused us great pain. And what does it mean to be called to hold them with wonder nevertheless, and to invest in the relationship and to invest in the discourse when all we want to do is cut off ties. And so I feel very strongly a lot of the tensions that Letty was writing about. I feel those tensions very much alive today and feel that the only way to respond as a Jew in this moment is to hold our integrity, to hold our deepest dreams for our people and for the world, and to speak in a voice that does not align with other people's perception of what a Jewish voice is, but what we know to be the deepest truth.
Book Two: a Jewish book from adulthood — The Sabbath and The Prophets both by Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.
Rabbi Sharon Brous:
This is a really hard question. I'm sure your listeners know this, but you asked for a book that we read as an adult that impacted our Jewish identity, I had, so I was trying to...
It's so much harder for a rabbi, right?
Rabbi Sharon Brous:
It was impossible for me because I thought, okay, the greatest impact on my Jewish identity was probably Abraham Joshua Heschel's book, The Sabbath, which really gave me the gift of Shabbat. It gave me Shabbat. I began to understand through that book and also frankly through Rabbi Yitz Greenberg's book, The Jewish Way, and this one particular chapter on Shabbat that he has, these were together transformative for me and helped me understand that stepping out of the world as it is and into the world as it could be is an act of self-love. It is an expression of love of God. And it is the only way that we can ever transform our society, that we could ever build a more just and loving society, is when we're able to actually give ourselves that pause. But then as I'm thinking that, I also thought obviously of The Prophets, which was really his seminal work in many ways, Heschel’s seminal work, and helped me understand who those prophets were and why, how we are called to use our prophetic voice in our time, what it means to see and be attuned to pain that other people around us seem not to be bothered by. How do you deal with a kind of escapism mentality when you feel that we're really standing at the edge of the abyss and in great moral crisis? All of those questions. And so I can't give you one answer to this one, I know.
And then, and then I think at the last minute I sent you an email saying, but what about Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning? Because, because really that book probably had the greatest and most profound impact on my, on my Jewish life because it, that it was that book that helped me understand this idea of agency, that we always have a choice, that we can always choose to see beauty. I mean, he has this image. I don't know if you remember from Man’s Search for Meaning, but he has this incredible image where they're all at the, in the work camp and at, they're in Auschwitz and they come back after a long, brutal day and it's bitter cold and they, they get back to the camp and one of the fellow prisoners in Frankl's group calls all the other prisoners out and says to them, come look. And there's this incredible sunset. Do you remember this image? There's the, he says, “the whole sky is alive.” And he starts to describe the colors of the sky from Auschwitz. And it feels like the most powerful and profound reminder that as long as we are still alive and breathing, we have the ability to make certain choices. can't choose everything, but we can choose the way that we respond to the challenges that we're facing. And so all of those in different ways became the most important and most impactful for me.
I see all of those in so much of your work. Certainly, Heschel, whether it's The Sabbath or The Prophets, so many of his ideas are centered around this idea of questions and the big questions that man is called to respond to. And you write about how IKAR was founded on the premise of these two questions that you were responding to and the idea that religion begins not with answers but with the rediscovery of the right questions. That feels really central to your work. So what are the questions that you find yourself returning to most often, both personally and as a spiritual leader?
Rabbi Sharon Brous:
What a great question. Well, the two questions that you alluded to are the two questions that we really started the community with. One was, how can we mine our Jewish inheritance to live lives of meaning and purpose, right? How can we access what I couldn't access when I was, you know, trying so desperately, going from synagogue to synagogue, trying to respond to the humiliation by learning and couldn't find my way in. How can we access the depth of that connection?
I had one of these moments over Shabbat, by the way, where I was learning the parshah and trying to put together a sermon and learning and learning and learning, and I couldn't crack it. I just couldn't crack it. And so Shabbat came in, and that for a rabbi, that's not good news when Shabbat comes and you haven't finished figuring out. And then I spent all Friday night just thinking about it and all of Shabbat morning thinking and talking to my husband about it, trying to figure out this one puzzle that I couldn't answer. And then all of sudden I saw it. It came into focus right before we started walking to Shul. And I realized that's the thing, that owning your tradition, accessing your tradition with enough awareness that you can actually draw the messages that we need in order to live more purposefully in our time. One question was, how can we do more of that? And the other question was, who are we called to be? in times of moral crisis as Jews and as human beings. And those were the two driving questions that we started IKAR with. And those are really still the two dominant questions of my rabbinate in addition to a third question, which kind of emerged out of this, the book at which started as a sermon, which started as lots of, you know, painful pastoral visits with people, which is how can we best love each other in a really painful time when all of our hearts are broken. Can we find our way to each other in shared sorrow? Or does our heartache make it impossible for us to see each other? So those, that's a kind of third vector that I'm also adding to the mix of the, really investing in our Jewish roots and our Jewish inheritance, our Jewish tradition, and asking this question. So what, why did our Torah survive for thousands of years? What is it trying to tell me about how I need to live now, given what the challenges are and where the pain is now? And how can I move that away from the abstract and into the very real and very close and very intimate? Because as I write in the book, I had for many years believed that our community was one of the communities that took so seriously Dr. King's quest for the beloved community, for building a world that was devoid of racism and exploitation and war and suffering and starvation and pain. And I realized at some point you cannot build that world out there unless you invest in that world internally. And that means in your smallest and most intimate circles with your friends, with your family, with your core community. Can we treat each other as images of God? Can we love each other? So these three questions are all obviously deeply entwined and they were and are the core questions that I ask myself literally every day in the work.
When you think about IKAR, what are the elements of IKAR that you think are meaningful in other communities, whether Jewish or otherwise, that you hope others take away from this model that you've built?
Rabbi Sharon Brous:
One of the most powerful and emblematic aspects of the community now is that people really do show up for each other. This, again, took me some time to get to, but I did realize about 10 years in that I had never told people that that was a moral and spiritual and religious obligation. And we talked about all kinds of other obligations. I never talked about how going to the funeral, going to the Shiva is a moral and spiritual and religious obligation. And once I said it, people did it.
And I mean, of course there were people who did it before naturally because that's who they were and that's how they were raised. But this is something that in orthodoxy, I find they do so well. There people just know and understand that when there is a loss, they just have to show up and fill the fridge, you know, and just make sure that this family, that this individual knows that they're not alone, even in the depths of their sorrow. And it's not something frankly that we do very well outside of the Orthodox community. I'm very moved by that. I mean, what happens now at IKAR and literally what it required was me just talking about it and saying, this is something we need to take seriously. But what happens now at IKAR is not only do people show up at funerals for people they do not know in the community. Like, I don't know you, but your father died. So I'm going to your funeral because that's what community does. They don't only do that. They literally run up to the front of the room and dance with kids who they don't know as they become B'nai Mitzvah. I mean, there's something so profound about that message. They show up and set up the house for Shiva. They go to the hospital and bring baskets. They just show up and it takes my breath away.
That's something that I feel some church communities do that really, really well. You know, some shuls, especially Orthodox shuls, do that very, very well. Thank God our community now does that really well. I mean, that's one of the things. Beyond that, I really set out to create a davening experience, a prayer experience that would be able to speak to the hearts of a very broad spectrum of Jews in terms of religious knowledge and observance. That broad spectrum has always been in our community and it's, I think it's one of the things that's very unusual about Ikar. We have a lot of rabbis, a lot of PhDs in Talmud, a lot of history professors, Jews who are kind of in the know and Shomer Shabbos Jews and Jews who will walk in the pouring rain to get to shul. And then we have a lot of Jews who will drive an hour or two hours to get to shul. I have Jews who tell me that they're proud that they ate a bacon maple donut before coming to shul.
And I love that. I love the diversity of the community. I love that in that space, there are people who are incredibly knowledgeable in Jewish text and there are people who are lawyers and judges and have never studied Jewish text before. And they're encountering the same learning together when we sit together on Shabbat morning. And so that kind of diversity is really important to me in terms of observance and knowledge.
But to create a prayer environment that could speak to all of those people at once is really critical. You know, speaking of books, I remember reading David Weiss-Halivny's book. I think it was in the book In the Sword where he wrote, “one of the great tragedies of my life is that I can't talk to the people I pray with and I can't pray with the people I talk to.” And I wanted to create a community in which we could pray with the people we talk to, and we could talk to the people we pray with. And so in order to do that, we have to be very careful with language that we use. We have atheists, we have people of faith, they're all praying together. So we're always aware of kind of protecting that diversity in the community. We have to have incredible music, a culture of music that takes people by surprise, that invites people in, that brings a kind of richness and diversity of sound into the space. And that's been really important working on that with Hilal Tigay, who's our music director and incredible davening team and rabbinic team that we have.
And the one last thing I'll say that I think is kind of an ingredient at IKAR is about storytelling. We believe that in order to build relationships with each other, that we have to make the space to tell our stories and to hear each other's stories. And so for the Yizkor book, for our memorial service, we have people tell the story of their loved ones, put a picture in and share memories. What was challenging about them? What was a story that kind of embodied who they were? How did they stand at the crossroads? And what do you think of now when you do, when you think of them? We learn each other through our shared stories. And I think that that's a very beautiful part of the tapestry of IKAR.
Book Three: a book that changed your worldview — Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.
Rabbi Sharon Brous:
I read this novel, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, two or three times. Each time it was as delightful as the first, by the way. Delightful, painful, beautiful, wondrous. So it's 10 generations of descendants of two sisters in Africa. But what I'm so moved by with this book and why I want to read it again after this conversation is the way that it deals with multigenerational trauma.
It looks at the impact of violence and enslavement and the depths of human cruelty that is visited upon the descendants on both sides. But it's really looking at multigenerational trauma and the way that we're impacted by the experiences of our ancestors. And ultimately, it's a really brave book because it's a hopeful story. To me, the story ends in this very hopeful way. It's not just about survival. It's about a kind of rebirth rooted in all of the pain of the past that allows the contemporaries who are where the book ends after that 10 generation journey to really begin to do some healing.
And there are no Jews in this book and it has nothing to do with Israel or Gaza or the American Jewish community. But it felt like it was speaking to me in a very personal way, not only helping me understand her story and also people in my community who I know and love who come from Ghana and whose families are still in Ghana, and also just being a part of racial justice spaces here in the United States. But it helped me understand the way trauma impacts the system in our own Jewish families too, and how there might be ultimately some kind of hopeful outcome. The reason I'm mentioning it especially now is because it's so hard to attach to hopeful outcomes right now. There's just so much sorrow and it looks really bleak. I have talked to two optimists in the last six months, but I think they're outliers. I think most people who I talk to are looking at the reality on the ground and it looks like we're sinking deeper and deeper into a very dangerous and very dark chapter of human history.
And this book is written with full, honest awareness of what the darkness could look like. And it emerges into this very hopeful present. And so for me, it's a reminder that the trajectory is not set. And in fact, our journey is one that has to move me-afelah le-orah, from darkness to light. That is the ultimate Jewish journey based on the experience of the Exodus from Egypt. But it's something that is really the, that's the trajectory that we map on to all of our human experiences since then, from enslavement to freedom, shi'abud and me'avdut, from enslavement into le'cherut, into liberation, from degradation into dignity. I actually heard the safda of Edan Alexander used this language of this trajectory last week when they found out that Edan was coming home.
And she said, “this is our Passover. This is our Passover. This is our Yitzi'at Mitzrayim. My grandson is moving, me’shi'abud le’cherut, from enslavement to freedom.” And so we use this paradigm and this map that it is possible to move from darkness to light. And yet the darkness feels so heavy right now. And so I really appreciated this book that came from a totally different tradition and told stories that I had never heard before and basically come ultimately to the same conclusion, which is that healing is possible and that our dignity can be recovered even after horrific indignities and that there is a way to move forward from the darkness into light.
Book Four: the book you're reading now— The Postcard by Anne Berest.
Rabbi Sharon Brous:
I think it just came out a year or two ago written by a French author who's, I think it's autobiographical. She's exploring this anonymous postcard that's sent to her home that tells the names of her relatives who perished in Auschwitz. And so she goes on this kind of journey to try to understand what actually happened to her father. And she's a secular sort of disconnected Jew. The search to try to figure out who wrote this leads her to uncover the story of her family and her own identity. And it's a beautiful book.
Book 5: the author's latest book — The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World, by Rabbi Sharon Brous.
You're often seen as a moral, spiritual voice for the Jewish community, sometimes in moments of pride, inaugurations of Obama and Biden, and sometimes in moments of deep conflict. How do you carry that responsibility, especially when you know that there is disagreement within the community about what that voice should sound like?
Rabbi Sharon Brous:
I'm always concerned that I not misrepresent our Jewish tradition and that I not endanger people's lives. And I feel that I have to speak the truth. And so I'm constantly navigating that dynamic. I'm never speaking recklessly. I think before I talk, because I want to make sure that I can stand by what I've said. I feel really blessed right now that we built a community 21 years ago in which my board of directors has always wanted me to say the truth as I see it and to say hard, things that are hard for us to hear, even if they disagree. And so that gives me both an incredible privilege and also a responsibility.
Because it means that I have to say things that sometimes people who really agree with what I'm saying can't say out loud because they will get fired. It's not to say that there's not a price to pay for saying some of the things that I say. I've lost donors, I've lost board members and I've lost friends. I'm not proud of that. I mean, that's very, very painful for me, but I feel ultimately that I have to speak and I do feel this very profound sense of urgency. I think we are in a moral emergency right now. I think that our Jewish community is breaking at the seams. I think that Israel is so, in such a precarious state right now. And it's really hard for people to find the language to speak from a moral voice about what's happening. Because for so many years, that singular script in the American Jewish community has shut down most attempts to speak outside of the script. So a lot of us don't have the moral muscle to do what we need to do right now with some few wonderful exceptions, of course, of colleagues and folks in the community. But I do, I think that we're in crisis and we have to speak. And I understand that that doesn't make people happy. I mean, every time I open my mouth, you know, I get this onslaught of antisemitic misogynistic violent threats, sometimes or even often coming from within the Jewish community. This is obviously hard. I feel really grateful that I have a platform where I can actually speak because the response that people offer to what I say makes me feel that it's even more important that I say it.
I mean, you do walk this very thin line and keeping people in dialogue and in conversation with each other is so important. It's something that you write so powerfully about. I'm wondering what wisdom you have, especially for parents and children, about staying in relationship in moments of deep disagreement.
Rabbi Sharon Brous:
We just did a session last night for how to talk to our kids about Israel-Palestine. And one of the hardest sessions that I did in the last year and a half was with progressive Zionist and mainstream Zionist mothers with their anti-Zionist daughters, which was not within the IKAR community, but in the kind of broader LA community, they asked me to come and do this session. And what I found was that our families are being torn apart by this conversation right now. They are being torn apart. They feel that the other is placing them at existential threat. And so what we have to do, I feel really strongly about this, is learn how to root in our own values and to see the other with curiosity, with humility, and with compassion. And so this means instead of focusing on how am I going to convince my child that they're wrong and I'm right or my parent or my sister or my you know, ex friend who posted something on Instagram it means approaching the other with genuine curiosity and actually holding on to who we are and what we believe at our core but engaging the other with a genuine interest in learning what they see.
Now, going back to this metaphor from Middot, from the Mishnah about the circling. When the person coming from the left is not a broken-hearted necessarily, but is a menudeh, is an ostracized person, which is the second category that the Mishnah uses, they too are met with the question of, tell me what happened to you, what happened to your heart? And they respond saying, I've been ostracized from this community, meaning my words or my ideas or my actions have really harmed people here, and they are also received with a blessing. And what I think that is telling us is that we are called to approach with compassion and curiosity, not only the people who are grieving the death of loved ones, but the people who are maybe not even coming toward us, but coming at us, people whose ideas and views and perspective feels like an attack on us or may actually be an attack on us. Can we turn to them with curiosity and say, tell me, what do you see from your perspective? Because I'm coming from this direction and you're coming from that direction. We literally see things differently. We have different narratives. Your narrative is that is your whole side of the family perished in Auschwitz. My narrative is righteous Gentiles saved me. Your narrative is you're reading, you know, how many children died in Gaza from that aerial strike. My narrative is I'm hearing from the hostage families that time's up. There's no more time. So where is the root of our sorrow? Can we speak to each other from the place of that heartache? Can we ask one another, tell me what you see? What's breaking your heart? Help me understand you. And I think when we do that, we are rehumanizing the other person instead of saying, there's nothing for me to learn from them. They're just wrong.
They may be wrong, by the way. But when we say that we're dehumanizing them, and there's enough dehumanization happening right now, I mean, the whole premise of eternal war is that the people on the other side are subhuman, right? What we need to do is the antithesis of that mindset. We have to rehumanize each other, and in so doing, we become more human ourselves. And I think that that is really the essential work of this time. Can we reclaim genuine curiosity, humility, and compassion in talking to each other about even the most painful, most challenging questions that are confronting us today?
Such a powerful framing. I just really want to thank you for being here. I think your teaching and The Amen Effect in particular feels like a book that's a guide and a comfort at a time like this when so many people are searching for both. So this was a really helpful and reaffirming conversation for me. Thank you.
Thank you. I'm so honored to be with you. Thank you for this beautiful conversation.
Thank you so much for joining us today for the Five Books. Our guest today was Rabbi Sharon Brous talking about her book, The Amen Effect. You can find a link to the book and all the others Rabbi Brous discussed in our show notes. If you'd like an email reminder to keep you up to date with new episodes, plus links to all the books we discussed directly into your inbox, you can sign up in the show notes or on our website, fivebookspod.org.
If you enjoyed our show, please be sure to subscribe and share with friends and family and rate and review an Apple podcast or wherever you listen. Rating and reviewing really does help new listeners find our show. You can also now find us online at fivebookspod.org. You can email us feedback or author recommendations at team at fivebookspod.org. You can find us on Instagram at five books pod or on Facebook, the five books podcast. I'm Tali Rosenblatt Cohen. Our producer is Odelia Rubin. Editorial and website support from Sarah Waring. Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions. Art by Dina Friedman.
Thanks especially to Greg Rosenberg, Shoshie Rudinsky, and the Jewish Book Council.
