As the founder of Ikar, the post-denominational Los Angeles synagogue, Rabbi Sharon Brous has been considered among the most influential rabbis in America. Earlier this week, she was in the Twin Cities as part of the Harry Kay Leadership Institute Summit, speaking to a group of Jewish communal professionals, as well a second event for the community.
The themes of the events were “There is a Way Forward: Building a More Just and Loving Society” and “Strengthening Community: Remaining Openhearted During Anguished Times.” Both tie closely to her first book, ‘The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend our Broken Hearts and World.’ TC Jewfolk caught up with Rabbi Brous to talk about how to narrow down topics that seem so broad and challenging.
The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
TC Jewfolk: One of the themes of your talks is “building a more just and loving society,” which feels like one of the broadest possible topics. How do you start to approach such a difficult concept?
Rabbi Sharon Brous: The basic premise of the book is that we’re living through a time of extreme social disconnection, polarization, social alienation, loneliness, and it’s breaking our spirits and our bodies and our democracy. And we might feel, in the midst of so many intersecting crises, powerless. But we’re not actually powerless. And I draw from our Jewish tradition, and in particular from one very ancient ritual that is written about in the Mishna, a ritual from Temple times in Jerusalem to draw up a model of how we might shift our approach to engaging one another when we feel most disconnected from each other so that we can begin to heal individually and collectively. And that was needed desperately before the election and now post-October 7 and post this election.
After more than a year of this war and everything that’s emerged from that, I believe we desperately need to hear this ancient wisdom and think about what it would mean to reorient our hearts for this time, toward compassion and curiosity, instead of conflict, division, callousness and cruelty.
TCJ: The book came out in January, and in between the time you finished it, I’m guessing, and the book being published was October 7. Were you able to address it?
Rabbi Brous: The manuscript closed 10 months before Oct. 7. Then my father died and Oct. 7 happened in kind of rapid succession, then the book came out. I went into the recording studio to record the audio version of the book about a month after Oct. 7, and with my father’s death, very fresh also. I was very worried that I had written a book for a different era; that already the book was coming out in a world that did not mesh with the world I had written it from.
In the book, I talk about this paradigm of the ritual from the Temple Mount, where people who go on pilgrimage are walking in one direction, and the brokenhearted people walking in the other. And my greatest concern now reading the book as a brokenhearted person – many times over, both because of my individual pain, and also because of the collective pain, was that the wisdom wouldn’t stand from the other direction. And what I found was that it was exactly the wisdom that I needed to strengthen my own heart, both personally dealing with my own loss and also helping us navigate this time of collective loss.
Essentially, what I found during the post-Oct. 7 era was that this sense of isolation and loneliness and alienation that I had been writing about beforehand – really thinking about very different data points, pastorally and collectively – was only exacerbated by Oct. 7 and the aftermath and the wisdom that we needed to address it was already in the book, because it came from the rabbis. I mean, they wrote it 2,000 years ago. It’s this really powerful, ancient response to exactly what we were experiencing at this time.
TCJ: As you’re on the book tour, what are you hearing from people?
Rabbi Brous: Many of the folks that I’ve encountered on the book tour in Jewish communities and in non-Jewish communities are really in anguish right now, and what they’re looking for is how to find comfort and consolation when our hearts are completely shattered. That’s essentially what the what, what the book is about. What they’re wondering about is: What happens when everyone I know is brokenhearted? How then do I find comfort and consolation if there’s nobody to help hold me when I’m struggling? Because so much of the premise of this idea is that we have to be courageous and find a way to lean into relationships, especially when we’re most inclined to retreat from one another. Show up at the funeral, show up at the Shiva or house of mourning, call the friend who just got a diagnosis that we’re scared to talk to because we’re afraid of encountering that much pain. But what happens when everybody’s in pain? How then do we hold each other?
What I’ve been exploring over the last 10 months since the book came out and in this post-Oct. 7 reality, is that we really do have those tools. We have a muscle memory for deep communal presence when we’re in real pain, even when everybody is suffering in different ways from the same kind of pain. And that’s been incredibly comforting for me through this period. And I think now in this post-election period, when we’re dealing with an even different kind of pain, worry, confusion and division, that the same wisdom will be very helpful, and as we navigate this time.
TCJ: Like you said, so much of this was written by the rabbis thousands of years ago. So the wisdom is there, but how do you find it and put yourself in the right mindset to interpret it in a way that feels most meaningful to you?
Rabbi Brous: I think the power of this message is that we all understand this on a personal level. We all understand viscerally how absolutely essential it has been in our lives. When we’ve struggled with our own broken hearts and people have shown up with love. We know what that feels like, and we know how painful it is when we are suffering and people have not shown up, the people who didn’t come to the funeral or didn’t call after our loved one died, or distance themselves from us when we went through divorce. We all remember; we have personal experience with this, and now it’s drawing from that personal experience, extrapolating and really thinking more broadly about how, as a collective, we can engage in the practices that have helped us heal individually on a much broader scale. And so that’s why you’re right. It feels like an extremely vague and almost ludicrously ambitious title How can we build a more just and loving society and ancient wisdom to mend our broken hearts and world feels incredibly audacious, and yet, I believe that they’re very simple practices that each of us can adopt as individuals, that actually can change the way that we engage each other. And when individuals change, there can be a ripple effect so that the broader collective can also be transformed.
