A Rabbi Offers Spiritual Tools for Healing

Brian Lehrer: The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We're back to meet one of America's most prominent rabbis, Rabbi Sharon Brous, with a new book called The Amen or does she say Amen, we'll ask her, Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World. It's largely a blueprint for bringing disaffected young people into religious communities by abandoning religious extremism, but also by making those communities more relevant. She gave a widely shared TED talk a few years ago criticizing religious extremism, but also what she called religious routine-ism.

Sharon Brous grew up in Short Hills, New Jersey, went to college at Columbia, and now leads a major congregation called IKAR in Los Angeles in a progressive Jewish community that she founded. She's blessed two presidents at the White House, was once named America's number one most influential Rabbi by Newsweek Magazine, and has been grappling hard with a post-October 7th world, including what progressive Jews should think and say about how Israel is fighting the war in Gaza, and how she has felt abandoned by some of her usual allies on the left, who did not wholeheartedly denounce the Hamas terror attack in Israel or even denounce it at all, in some cases.

Here is part of the sermon Rabbi Brous gave on that to her congregation back on October 14th.

Rabbi Sharon Brous: As I found myself saying again, and again over the course of the past week, adding to our shock and our anguish and our heartache, and our fear, is an existential loneliness. I have felt it, and I know that many of you have too. The clear message for many people in the world, especially from our world, those who claim to care about justice and human dignity, is that these Israeli victims somehow deserved this terrible fate.

This week I read statements from longtime allies that shocked the conscience. Some of them so implausible that I actually literally had to reread them multiple times to make sure that they were not satire. In these statements was not only a failure to condemn the atrocities committed against these innocents, but proud support for Hamas. This week we enter the upside-down world when a retrograde, regressive, totalitarian, misogynistic, messianic terrorist regime became, for the time being, the hero of the left. How could it be?

Brian Lehrer: Rabbi Sharon Brous, speaking to her Los Angeles congregation on October 14th, but just a few weeks earlier in September, in her Yom Kippur sermon, just a few weeks before October 7th, Rabbi Brous was urging her congregation to look in the eye the extremism that she saw in the Israeli government and growing in Israeli society, to look it in the eye rather than look away. Here's a minute of Rabbi Brous on September 25th.

Rabbi Sharon Brous: Many of us have spent years trying not to look. We don't know because we don't want to know. Because the world is sometimes cruel and unfair to Jews, and yes, delivers to Israel disproportionate opprobrium among all the bad state actors. We don't want to know, because we don't want to feel anti-Semitism. Because accepting the reality of Palestinians suffering under Israeli rule means accepting that the Jewish people can be not only victims but also victimizers.

It means that our great dream, this monumental national project has come at the expense of another people's aspirations, their safety, their dignity, even their lives, but there hidden in plain sight is the toll of decades of occupation, te reality of life under dual systems of justice that renders Palestinians vulnerable to the whims of Israeli laws and Israeli forces with no legal recourse when terrible things happen.

Brian Lehrer: Rabbi Sharon Brous, who joins me now with her thoughts on both those clips we played and her new book, The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World. Rabbi Brous, thank you for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Rabbi Sharon Brous: Thank you, Brian. Thank you so much for having me with you.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get to your thoughts about those sermon excerpts from the fall, but I want to give you a chance first to introduce yourself more to our listeners. You grew up around here in Short Hills, New Jersey. We just happened to have a caller from Short Hills in our earlier segment today. Were you brought up in an actively Jewish family, bar mitzvahed, anything like that?

Rabbi Sharon Brous: Actively Jewish, yes, in the sense that we had a very strong sense of Jewish identity, but not classically religious in any way. As I came to understand later, essentially functionally illiterate when it came to Jewish law and Jewish literature. My real learning began when I was in college, and then ultimately, in seminary, and I really got-- I had the incredible benefit in some ways of getting to start from scratch already as a young adult. So I was encountering ideas that people who grew up with them might have taken for granted, but because I was really being exposed to them for the first time, I was completely stunned and moved by the enormity of these messages and the power of these messages.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have one relatable, for a short radio story, example of that?

Rabbi Sharon Brous: Yes, for sure. The first and most basic principle of human beings that we learned in the beginning of the Torah, the Hebrew Bible, is that all people are created in God's own image. That's the first thing that children learn in religious school, but I didn't learn that until I was 19 or 20 years old, and suddenly was struck with the fact that there was a faith tradition thousands of years old that insists that every single human being is created in God's own image. That has to take your breath away. To take that seriously changes everything about the way that you look at and engage other human beings in the world. For me, it was a stunning revelation.

Brian Lehrer: You went to college at Columbia. Were you planning to become a rabbi from the start?

Rabbi Sharon Brous: No. I was planning on becoming a civil rights attorney, and I was very committed to that path. Then through a series of experiences, many of them which awakened me to my own ignorance, my own Jewish ignorance led me to want to discover what it was about my own Jewish inheritance that I had either overlooked or never been taught. It led me on this incredibly profound journey which ultimately landed me in Jerusalem studying Talmud for the first time as a junior in college. I just fell in love with Talmudic discourse and I wanted to study Talmud 14 hours every single day for the rest of my life.

Just the argumentation, the delight that my ancestors took in grappling with questions that they knew they'd never find the answers to. I realized that also at that time that so many of the heroes of mine, the people I admired most, the real agents of social change, were people who had faith at the heart of their activism and were actually driven by a core faith narrative. I realized both I was so excited by this tradition and history that was mine but that I had never owned and that my faith was at the heart of my activism.

This narrative of the ancestors being enslaved in Egypt for hundreds of years. Then in partnership with God, walking toward a redemptive future where they could build a society that was a counter to the oppression and cruelty that they had experienced in Egypt. That was the heart of my faith, and it all came together in this really beautiful epiphanes moment. I remember calling my parents from Jerusalem and saying, "I'm going to be a rabbi," and they were just completely shocked because this was not the path that any of us had ever imagined I would pursue.

Brian Lehrer: You were a Jersey girl, a Columbia grad. How did you wind up in Los Angeles?

Rabbi Sharon Brous: I studied for six more years after that at JTS, the Jewish Theological Seminary on the Upper West Side and lived in Morningside Heights. The final couple of years of my rabbinical school studies, I ended up studying a course in international human rights and conflict resolution at Columbia in the law school and School of International Public Affairs, and really was trying to marry these passions that I believed somehow that the ancient wisdom of our people carried on for thousands of years through unthinkable persecution, oppression, and also trial and triumph, could help us live a more meaningful life.

Then I engaged a two-year fellowship at [unintelligible 00:09:42] in New York, which I know many of your listeners will be familiar with, and then had to leave the Upper West Side. That was one of the stipulations of the fellowship, actually. My husband was just finishing his time in film school. So we decided to come out to Los Angeles and give it a try. It's very hard for New Yorkers to adjust to life in Los Angeles, at least it was for me, the pacing, the intensity of it.

At the time, it really felt to me like the world was on fire. This was the early 2000s. I looked out at this world of oppression, of racism, of war, of poverty, of indifference and I felt like, "What is this ancient tradition saying to us that can help guide us through these impossible times and where are the people who want to be involved in that conversation?" We built this community because we wanted to both capture some of the joy, and beauty, and profundity of the tradition and also hear the voices from the Jewish tradition that were calling us to engage these moral questions with a sense of clarity and a sense of courage.

We built IKAR in the year 2004. Honestly, I never looked back. Once we started the community, LA really became my home. It felt like this was the place where we were able to really center this conversation around what it means to be a Jew and a human being in the world today.

Brian Lehrer: IKAR, I-K-A-R, pronounced IKAR. What does that mean?

Rabbi Sharon Brous: It means the essence or the heart of the matter. What we were responding to back then was that it seemed like everybody at the turn of the millennium, everyone was trying to address this question about Jewish discontinuity and the way that no young Jews were interested in going to synagogue and people were totally disaffected, disaffiliated.

I thought, "We're not asking the right questions. We have to get to the heart of the matter, which is what is demanded of us in a time of moral crisis, and who are our partners and allies in building a just and loving world? Could we get back to the essence of the question?" That means doing the work of sacred excavation, going back into our text, and trying to hear the ancient voices that maybe weren't prioritized over all of these years, but are so much a part of our tradition to help guide us in living decent lives, just lives and hopefully building a just society.

Brian Lehrer: Your book, The Amen Effect-- well, first important question, do you say Amen or Amen?

Rabbi Sharon Brous: I say Amen. That's the Hebrew way of pronouncing the word. I found that when I say Amen Effect, people think I'm saying Boba Fett. It's not a storybook. I'm happy to call it The Amen Effect, but part of what's so powerful about the word Amen is that it's used in so many of our traditions. In the mosque you'll hear Amin and in church you'll hear Amen, and in synagogue you'll hear Amen, but this word has resonance through so many religious traditions.

Brian Lehrer: In the book you describe how conferences, retreats, and other strategies to win over young people often work to repel them instead. What do you have in mind?

Rabbi Sharon Brous: Well, look, again, I think that we were certainly in a crisis in the sense that if young people are totally disconnected from religious life, then what's the future of religious life? I think that the established Jewish community was in many ways asking the wrong questions. They were looking for tools to try to convince young people to come into Jewish life, free pizza, free trips to Israel, et cetera.

Those are good things, I think. There's a good argument to be made for these, but what we really needed to be asking was more foundational questions. What does it mean to live a life of meaning and purpose, what does our tradition demand of us when the world is upside down? I wanted to really challenge our community to focus on those core questions. What we found was that when we did, that young people, of course, want to be part of those questions. I found that so many people were hungry to have questions of depth and relevance and to seek guidance from ancient sources that frankly survived incredible turmoil for a reason, not so they could be muted in the moment when they mattered most, but so that they could be lifted up and learned from.

That's what we try to do at IKAR. There are many communities now around the country that are also trying to do exactly the same thing. We wanted to experience real joy. I wanted people in our prayer services to cry and to laugh and to dance, to reclaim our humanity, to find our breath again. I think that that's the role that Shabbat, that the Sabbath used to play in the synagogue space. We needed to actually bring that kind of vitality back into our sacred spaces.

Brian Lehrer: If you're just joining us, my guest is Rabbi Sharon Brous, one of America's most prominent rabbis, actually named a number of years ago as the number one influential rabbi in America by Newsweek magazine. She's the author now of The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World.

Now let's get to the Israel-Gaza situation and the clips we played of you from your sermons in September and October at the top of the segment. Let's take the October 14th one first when you said you read statements from longtime allies that shocked the conscience, not only a failure to condemn the atrocities but proud support for Hamas. Who are some of these longtime allies?

Rabbi Sharon Brous: Well, Brian, if I can, I want to just take a step back before we dive into this and I'll get there. I want to just establish first one of the principles that's really at the heart of the book because it's been, for me, a guiding light. I think of it as my North Star, these last 20 years, but especially the last three months. This principle is drawn from one of these ancient texts. It's actually drawn from a Mishnah that articulates a ritual that would happen in pilgrimage when the Jews in ancient times would go up to Jerusalem.

They would approach the Temple Mount, and hundreds of thousands of people would enter, and they would turn to the right and circle around the perimeter of the courtyard of the Temple Mount. Then they would exit, essentially, just where they had entered, except the text says, for somebody with a broken heart, those people would ascend to Jerusalem and they would enter the same entryway, but they would turn to the left.

Everyone who passed, someone who is broken-hearted, would look into their eyes and say to them, Mal'ākh, what happened to you? Those who were walking from the left would answer saying, my heart is broken. I'm in sorrow. I'm in anguish because my loved one was killed. My father died. I am sick. My child is not well. Then those walking from the right would give their blessing and say, I see you, and may you find comfort.

This little ritual has become really the heart of building our community in LA and the heart of my understanding of our role in the world, that when we have the strength, we look at those who are coming toward us, who are in sorrow, who are broken, who are hurting, and we say, I see you in your sorrow, Amen. This is really what I've trained myself and my community to do.

What we as Jews in America, in a position of relative privilege and power over the course of many years, have really worked hard to do. That when you can you lift your gaze and see who's coming towards you, who's more vulnerable than you are, and figure out how to be an ally. What does it mean to be a partner, and what does it mean to be a friend? When we're walking from the left, we know and trust that we will be held in a community of love and compassion, and care.

What we saw on October 7th, almost immediately and then in the days after, is that our community was walking to the left. We were reading these horrific stories of people in our own family who had been raped and abducted and massacred in their own homes. Some of them heroes of the peace movement, like the beloved Vivian Silver, who dedicated her entire life to working for a just and loving future for Israeli Jews and Palestinians alike.

There were so many people in these border communities in the kibbutzim who had dedicated their lives to driving Palestinians from Gaza to hospital visits in Israel. All of a sudden, these same people, most of them peaceniks, most of them, these same people, some of them just kids who are out dancing and celebrating life, their death, their abduction, their rape was being justified or even celebrated by the people who instead of walking toward us in that sacred human space in which we see one another, they were being blamed for their own abduction.

Brian Lehrer: You said in the sermon, Hamas, a totalitarian, regressive, misogynistic regime became, for the time being, the hero of the left and you asked, how could it be? What's your understanding of how it could be?

Rabbi Sharon Brous: I think that people in this moment have become willfully blind to the abject cruelty and the obscenity of these attacks and have determined that we on the left who have built this world that rejects binaries, that rejects even the gender binary. If you look at government forms now, they don't just say male and female, right? We understand that the world is complex but instead have attached to a false binary in which either you completely delegitimize the State of Israel and therefore justify any attack on any civilian who identifies with the State of Israel by living there or by associating with it, or you don't care about justice for the Palestinians, which is an absurd false binary that has been embraced by so many people on the left. When instead the reality is that the only future is a just future in which Israeli Jews and Palestinians are able to live in a just reality side by side, in which both people's aspirations for self-determination can be seen and uplifted.

That's a reality that there are many Israeli Jews and Palestinians working toward on the ground in Israel and in the West Bank and in Gaza, in Palestine but there are so few voices speaking that way in the public space here. What that does is it essentially renders us either invisible because we are walking to the left and nobody's seeing us coming from the right or totally powerless because we just look at the world and nothing makes sense.

Instead, I really am begging us to just take a breath and see one another. We are living in times of incredible sorrow and the utter heartache that I experienced watching my family and my community just be devastated on October 7th is similar to the heartache that many of my Palestinian friends are experiencing every day after when they're witnessing the terrible, terrible death toll to Palestinian civilians in Gaza, and now deeply worried about what the future will hold if we don't get immediate humanitarian aid into Gaza to save lives now. Instead of setting this up as a false binary, you either care about the Jews and the Israelis or you care about the Palestinians. We care about human life. We care about human beings. We dream of a just future for all of the people who dwell in that region and really for all human beings.

Brian Lehrer: Are you in the ceasefire camp, if that's the right terminology?

Rabbi Sharon Brous: I'm in the camp that sees and honors and affirms human life and human dignity, that sees that war is terrible, and that every day of this war, more and more people are dying, Palestinians in Gaza, and also Israeli soldiers. Many of them friends of my family and extended. 26-year-old kids who studied robotics who are dying in Gaza fighting this war. What I want is a long-term negotiated end to this conflict. I want the creation of a reality in which all people can live justly and can live in peace.

Brian Lehrer: Right. In the meantime, especially supporters of Palestinians would say people are dying at the rate of maybe hundreds a day, and there's the hunger problem that's been documented and all these other things. So before we get to a negotiated long-term settlement, people have to take a side on what to do right now. Are you doing that one way or another?

Rabbi Sharon Brous: I want to say that one of the problems with the language around this moment, with the ceasefire language is that many of the people who advocated, the leading voices in the ceasefire moment were calling for ceasefire on October 7th. Meaning, immediately after these Hamas attacks occurred, the ceasefire movement was born. What that means for many people, what we hear when we hear that is that Israel does not have a right to defend itself, to protect its borders, and to get its hostages home.

There's still over 130 hostages who are living there. Very often in a ceasefire, in the prominent ceasefire spaces, those questions are ignored. I align with the people in that movement when what they're saying is, I don't want any more people to die from this terrible conflict. I want the hostages home. I want everyone to be safe and I desperately want humanitarian aid to get to the Palestinians. I don't want any more human suffering.

I told you earlier that one of the core teachings that changed my life was the idea that every single human being is created in God's own image. That is true of every single person, including every Palestinian child in Gaza who's dying from hunger or from attack. Every single person deserves to live a life of dignity and safety. I want that to happen and I want that to happen now.

Brian Lehrer: What does that mean, because a lot of pro-Palestinian protestors would say the ceasefire calls on October 8th that you cited are one thing but now it's January 17th?

Rabbi Sharon Brous: Right. I'll tell you, Brian, I'll say this as clearly as I can. Every day that this war goes on, more people are dying. I don't want any more people to die. The demands now are the same as what I have been saying for the last several months. We want these hostages home in their family's arms. We want immediate humanitarian aid. I don't want any more people to die. I believe that we can build a just future, and that is what we have to focus our sights on.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we'll take a few phone calls for Rabbi Sharon Brous either on the ideas in her new book, The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World or on the path she's trying to walk as both a progressive rabbi outraged at Israeli extremism that's denying basic rights to Palestinians and the existential loneliness, as she puts it, of feeling abandoned by some fellow progressive allies after the October 7th attacks. Who identifies? Who doesn't? Who has a question? We'll have time for just a few at 212-433-WNYC. Call or text. We'll take those calls and texts right after this.

[MUSIC - Mardeen Hill: Hijack]

Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with Rabbi Sharon Brous. Let's take a question right now. Rob in Westchester, you're on WNYC. Hi Rob?

Rob: Hi. Thanks so much for taking my call. I really appreciate it.

Brian Lehrer: Sure.

Rob: Rabbi, I wanted to thank you so much first for-- I mean, you've given a lot of voice just in this segment to exactly how I feel about so much of this as a Jew on the left who feels absolutely. I think when this attack happened on October 7th, I'm on a very liberal text chain with friends that's ongoing, and I said, "Can we all agree that Hamas is the bad guy here?" I was shocked at how many of my friends could say on October 7th, "No. We can't say that Hamas is the bad guy."

My question for you is, and I think it's very important, a lot of progressives on the left, there's been a rallying cry of those who support the mind of like, yes, they understand how bad October 7th was, but the Palestinian day-to-day existence is worse. This is the progressive perspective. I'm not pro. I'm not anti-Israel. I'm anti-Zionism. My question is, to me, there's a difference between what Zionism truly is, and that's the belief in the right for there to be an Israeli State, not an Israeli like imperial expansion that's taking over the world. The core of Zionism is there should be an Israeli State. Somewhere along the way-

Brian Lehrer: You're saying, Rob, as a Jewish State?

Rob: Yes. Zionism to me, I'm not the rabbi here, which is why I'm just asking the question, Zionism means there should be a Jewish state. Partially because of Israel's actions, it looks like Zionism is an expansion take over of the Middle East state or take over Gaza or something. I don't think that's true, but that's the perception, I think, among progressives right now. That Zionism means expanding. I know the West Bank makes that very complicated because I don't agree with the way that Israel-- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Rob, I'm going to leave it there for time so I can get a couple of people on in our remaining time. Rabbi Brous, do you want to respond briefly to Rob?

Rabbi Sharon Brous: Yes, sure. I'm happy to. Brian, let me just say, as my friend Ron Lieber pointed out, the word Israel does not appear in the index of my book. My book is not an Israel book. It's actually about connection and community and compassion and love, and how we need to find our way to one another in a time of loneliness and isolation and political extremism so I'm happy to address this just as a rabbi and person alive in the world today, but that's not--

actually the heart of the book is about how we can begin to heal. I do want to recommend to Rob, and to some of your other listeners, a book written by Daniel Sokatch called Can We Talk About Israel? Because it really addresses these questions very profoundly and very clearly and accessibly. I hope that some of you will pick that up.

One of the problems that I've always found with the language around Zionism is that we have different people using the same words in very different ways. Zionism is, as Rob indicates too, many Jews, or traditionally Zionism is the Jewish quest for national liberation, for self-determination. That after generations of exile, oppression, persecution, and ultimately genocide, that Jews need to take history into our own hands and actually be in a tiny swath of land where we can protect and defend ourselves, and where Hebrew culture and language and art can thrive, where Torah values, the idea of every human being being created in God's own image and many other values can actually be at the center of the public square rather than behind shuttered windows in the diaspora.

To many other people, especially Palestinians, that's never been what Zionism has been about. For them, Zionism is about Nakba. It's about the dispossession of Palestinians from their own homeland. That is a fundamental disconnect. What we have in the public space is that people are using this word in fundamentally different ways and meaning different things by it.

Do I believe that the Jews, after a history of oppression, persecution, exile, and ultimately gas chambers, deserve to have a place where we can be free and safe and take care of ourselves and where our beautiful many thousands-year-old culture and traditions can thrive? Yes, of course. Do I want us to be dispossessing another people? Of course not.

I think we have to get very clear about the language that we're using and the way that we're using it. Again, this goes back to, can we actually see one another? Can we hear what the other is actually saying? Because right now we're living in this time in which it seems like there's a denial of one another's actual reality. You have on one side, there are Jews who say that Palestinian is a made-up identity, that it never even existed, it's not even a real thing. You have many people who are saying that Jews have no historical connection to the land. Both of these aren't true. We're not helping anyone by advancing these arguments.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. I think this is going to be a tough one. We have two minutes left to address a big question. Ian in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Rabbi Sharon Brous.

Ian: Hey. You said a lot of nice things, but I have to say, it really feels like crocodile tears when you express sympathy for the Palestinians. I want to ask you a direct question. Do you believe that Palestinians have the right to defend themselves against Israeli aggression?

Rabbi Sharon Brous: Ian, thank you. These are not crocodile tears. From the depths of my heart, I actually believe that all people are created in God's image. The death of any person, as I said, is just a horror. Do I believe they have the right to defend themselves through acts of mass rape, and abduction, and murder? No. I do not believe that any movement for liberation can be advanced through those atrocities.

I do believe that Palestinians have a right to lift their voices and call for solidarity and for support in a movement for justice. That is a movement that I also support as a rabbi and that I have dedicated many sermons to and used every platform I have to join in the fight for. I believe that Palestinians deserve to have freedom, to live a just life, and to live in dignity as all people do.

I believe that, especially as a Jew who understands my own history of oppression and dispossession, of exile and of persecution, that's what brings me into solidarity with that just struggle. That just struggle cannot be advanced through the rape and the murder and the abduction of innocents. There is no just struggle that can be advanced through committing atrocities.

Brian Lehrer: One of America's most prominent rabbis, Rabbi Sharon Brous, leader of the IKAR Jewish community in Los Angeles, and now the author of the book, The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World. Thank you so much for discussing your book and your sermon excerpts that we played relating to the post-October 7th World and the pre-October 7th World. Rabbi Brous, thank you.

Rabbi Sharon Brous: Thank you, Brian.

 

 

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