Rabbi Sharon Brous: Mending Our Broken Hearts

Rabbi Sharon Brous is a wise and wonderful friend, and the founder and senior rabbi of IKAR, a Jewish community founded to attend to critical questions. As Rabbi Brous writes in her beautiful new book The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World , “How can our Jewish tradition help us live lives of meaning and purpose? And: Given our faith and history, who are we called to be in this time of moral crisis? We launched IKAR—our best attempt to address those questions—on a hope and a prayer, with no funding, no space, and no business plan. What we had was a shared conviction that faith communities needed to be spiritually alive and morally courageous at the same time.” 

I read Sharon’s beautiful book last summer, and could not wait to talk to her about it. So we recorded our conversation early, before the Jewish High Holidays, at the beginning of August, months before October 7th. Rabbi Brous’s work in general is highly prophetic and brave—she has been a fierce and vocal critic of the increasingly right wing Israeli government, even as many Rabbis try to steer clear of politics. This conversation, which is not about Israel, is also highly prophetic and brave: It’s about the dire need for interfaith conversation, for chipping away at the calcified belief structures of religions that don’t fully serve our broken world, and for being with each other, particularly on our most painful days. This, in fact, is the theme of The Amen Effect, which is about an ancient mishnah, or overlooked piece of Jewish law that instructs us on the sacred act of circling—and tending, face-to-face, to each other’s agony and grief. In today’s conversation Sharon and I also talk about social justice and responsibility, a conversation that I’m hoping to pick back up with her in the new year, as so many of us feel a little lost and confused. While Rabbi Brous and I thought about doing a second episode as a fast follow, we decided to wait a beat—if you want to hear her talk about Israel and Gaza, I highly recommend you listen to her conversation with Ezra Klein, where the two talk about how some of Israel’s actions are indefensible even as Israel itself must be defended. Her sermons are also stunning, and available on the IKAR website. 

I think Rabbi Brous is incredible, and I’m not alone. She offered the blessing at both Biden and Obama’s inaugurations, and led Hannukah at the White House this year. She manages to teach and model what so many of us need to learn how to do: We must learn how to hold each other close even through disagreement, disappointment, and despair. The Amen Effect offers some ideas for how this work might begin. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.

MORE FROM RABBI SHARON BROUS:

The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World 

IKAR’s Website

Follow Rabbi Sharon Brous on Instagram

Follow IKAR on Instagram

TRANSCRIPT:

(Edited slightly for clarity.)

ELISE LOEHNEN: There was a moment in your book near the end where you keep repeating the phrase, the moral of the story is sort of fill in the blank. So rather than just shoving, like, a little bit of unfinished, unprocessed material to be like, I've actually sat with this for a long time and then here's what I can share from this that could be taken forward. Whereas I feel like storytelling often appropriately is just a moment of catharsis. People aren't always ready. I mean, you must know this more than anyone as a rabbi, so much of people's pain or their lived experience is unreflected and unprocessed, right? They're just. In it which isn't always instructive or helpful for other people.

RABBI SHARON BROUS: Well, and I think part of the work of pastoring to people is helping draw the meaning out of the experience. And so reflecting with someone on what they've been through and then trying to identify where the growth from that experience, even experiences of great pain. And I wrote in the book, there's one point where I share about my friend, Reverend Ed Bacon, who was the director of All Saints church in Pasadena and a really, really dear friend. In fact, when I moved out to LA as the, as a young rabbi, none of the rabbis invited me out to lunch, but this pastor in Pasadena was like, Hey, I heard there's a new rabbi , come to lunch with me. And he invited me to to Christmas Eve actually in his church. And I don't write about this in the book, but it really was one of the holiest experiences of my life.

I've never been to church for mass on Christmas Eve. And he has his Jewish and Muslim friends sit in the front row. And I was witness to this incredibly beautiful sacred ritual. And he was talking about the core story of Christianity as a story of a couple that was so poor and so cast out of society that literally the woman's giving birth and nobody will make room for her in the inn. And so she has to give birth outside on the grass. And I was weeping thinking that is not my story, but I also have a story. My story is about a people who are enslaved in Egypt for hundreds of years. And then through a series of miracles, both human and divine, walk on this long journey toward freedom, and then are tasked with building a just society that would be a counter testimony to the society of exploitation that they escaped from. And I realized that he and I were telling two different stories, but we were on the same side of history. And and it was one of the most powerful moments of awakening for me. And I realized since then that I often have much more in common with people from other faith communities who have different stories from mine, but with similar trajectories, but Ed Bacon, he writes in his beautiful book, Eight Habits of Love, about how, in our lives, we often see ourselves as victims or we see ourselves as heroes, but really the challenge and the growth comes from seeing ourselves as learners and being able to step outside of our own story with enough perspective that we can actually say, how can I grow from this? What can I learn from this? And it doesn't mean for me that the pain came in order to teach us a lesson. I do think there are people who hold that theology I don't, but that the pain came, so now what can I learn from it and through it? And so I think that there is something about storytelling as a way of helping us see an experience from a different vantage point so that we can make meaning from it and I see you doing that in your book and I try to do it in my book, to try to show the way that there's growth, even through the struggle?

ELISE: Yeah. I mean, isn't that too just all of pastoring, right? Taking these archetypal, mythical, magical, potentially literal stories and then reapplying them, filtering them, placing them over our lives so that we understand the context of our own existence?

SHARON: I think so. I mean, we're in a relationship, at least as a Jew, I'm in a relationship with a text that came down thousands of years ago, and the text is fixed, but the interpretation of the text is always evolving. And so Torah itself, the letters that are in the scroll are unchanging, but there's never been a fixed interpretation of it. Every generation and every new person sees it and reads it differently. And so I think part of it is figuring out how to translate the messages and the wisdom from this ancient sacred literature into into lessons of meaning in our time. And then also the text ends up changing, not in the scroll, not the letters, but the meaning of the text changes based on what we're bringing to it now as people living in circumstances that could never have been fathomed 2000 years ago. And so I feel on one hand, I'm trying to apply lessons that I learned from this text in our time, but also the meaning of the text ends up changing because we understand more now than we did before. So one example from the book that I talk about is in the chapter about the blessing that comes in the night, so there's this, this story with Jacob, one of the patriarchs wrestling with an angel, and he's been through this incredibly grueling struggle of his life and he's been away from home and he's estranged and he's on his way back. And he's about to re-encounter his brother, who he deceived and who deserves to be killed by his brother, basically, and he knows it. And he goes to sleep full of dread. And this angel comes to him in the night in the book of Genesis and he's wrestling with the angel. And then just as the Dawn's about to break the angels, like I got to get out of here. And Jacob grabs a hold of him and says, I'm not going to let you go until you give me a blessing.

And I always have read that for 20 years in the rabbinate thinking, it's on us, even in the struggle to say, hold on, the dawn is breaking. I'm not letting you go until you give me the blessing that comes from this struggle. It's not to deny the struggle, but to say, I need to know where the growth comes. But then one bereaved parent in my community said, I think that's a facile interpretation, actually, because for some people the dawn never breaks. There's no new morning. Like, when you lose a child, she said, there isn't some like bright new day and now Jacob gets to get up and go meet his brother and try to reconcile. Sometimes it's only night and yet there's still blessings even there. And so, in some ways, this bereaved mother, her interpretation, through her own devastating experience of loss, changes the text for me. I'll never read the text the same way, and now it's even more profound and even deeper then it could have been before because now I understand and I've seen since then over the years since she shared that with me that it's true for many people, there's no new morning. There's no dawn that comes and the challenge really is to find the blessings even in the dark of night. So the text itself morphs into something of even greater meaning than it could have been because of the human experience.

ELISE: Yeah. And it's one of my favorite as a sort of half Jew person looking at all faith with interest. I know that people sort of malign that, but to be fair, you quote Rumi, you quote Henry Ngyun, your book in many ways feels quite interfaith, but I love that rabbis are you, and that everyone can participate in the reinterpretation of the text, that it moves, that it's not a fixed, stagnant thing, but that it's a constantly evolving idea, is so beautiful. Will you tell us the foundational story of the book?

SHARON: yeah, sure. So when I was in seminary, it's a six year, really intensive program after college, you live in the text so deeply. I mean the ancient rabbis are your best friends. Like, I'm having conversations with Rabbi Yochanan and Rachel Akish and these guys, and you feel like you're sitting around the table, navigating life with people who lived 2000 years before. I'm living deeply in the text and one day I encounter A Mishnah, so this is an ancient code of law codified in the year 220 CE. And I encounter this text in a pretty random, obscure part of the Mishnah. It's not one that I've ever heard quoted by anybody else. It's not one of the popular ones where you can easily dig your teeth in and find meaning. It's in the context of the architectural layout of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. I find this text, I'm totally bewildered by it. I can't take my eyes off of it, but I don't understand it. I'm sitting with it for hours. And finally, something in me is like, this text matters and I don't get it, but one day I will.

So I photocopied the text, folded it up, put it back in my Mishnah and put it on the shelf. Then we moved from New York to Los Angeles. We built this beautiful community here called Ikar, really a community designed to stand at the intersection of this spirituality and justice, the quest for a just society, and it's a beautiful community trying to reanimate Jewish life. Anyway, I bury people, I name babies. We do all kinds of rituals of marriage and divorce and pastoral counseling, the world's on fire. One day I happen to open up this volume of the Mishnah, the page falls out, I open it up and I'm like, oh my god, now I get it. So the story that's told in this couple, it's two or three lines of text, is that the people used to go up to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, they would go up there all the time for all different kinds of reasons, but especially three times a year, they would go up on pilgrimage and when they would ascend to Jerusalem, which is a city on a hill, and they would come from all over the land, including the diaspora, they would ascend to Jerusalem, like save all your money, this is the upper, the moment of a lifetime, the spiritual peak of your life. You ascend to Jerusalem, you go up the steps of the temple Mount, you walk through this giant archway, and then they would turn into the temple courtyard, turn to the right and circle around the perimeter of the courtyard, hundreds of thousands of people at a time. And they would walk around and circumnavigate the courtyard. And then they would walk out essentially the same place they walked in. And that was it. That's the ritual. Except for somebody whose heart was broken. That person still had to go up to Jerusalem, still had to ascend the stairs, walk through the arch, but would turn to the left instead of the right. And they would walk against the current of hundreds of thousands of people walking in the other direction. And every single person who passed that person would have to stop and ask, Malach, which means, what happened to you?

What happened? What's your story? And they would have to answer saying, you know, my father just died, or my partner just left, or I feel so alone, whatever was the source of their brokenness, they would have to say it out loud to a stranger. And then the stranger could not go on until they gave them a blessing, until they said, may you find comfort. May you find consolation. May the presence of this sacred community fill you with the sense of the possible. And then they would keep walking. And then that person would encounter the next person and the next and next. And what's so astonishing to me about this ritual is essentially the psychological insight that the rabbis had 2000 years ago for both what it means to be a person who walks to the right and a person who walks to the left. So, for the people walking to the right, you're good. You're fine, right? Like you have your schmutz in your life, but you are embarking on the spiritual journey of a lifetime and you're going up to the temple mountain, the holiest place in the holiest moment. And I read all these testimonies of people who did the Hajj and Mecca and it's the most powerful, emotional experience of a person's life. And then there you are and there's this broken person walking towards you and the last thing you want to do is stop in the midst of your peak spiritual moment and pay attention to someone who's broken, and yet you realize at some point that is your spiritual work. That there's nothing else that they're supposed to do up there on the Temple Mount other than walk around and see the broken. And so you do, you stop and you ask, you invite that person into conversation and then they respond and then you bless and then you keep going. And for the person who's going to the left, the last thing we want to do when we're broken is show up in a room full of people, let alone hundreds of thousands of people, but you go, but you can't pretend that you're okay. You can't just get lost in the crowd because you're not okay. And it's so profound.

We all know these moments when you feel like you're walking in the opposite direction from everybody around you because something in you is broken, and trust that you're going to be held in a community of care that you're not going to be shunned in this place or marginalized or ignored or shoved to the side because the crowd needs to get by, but instead, you're going to be held with love, is such a powerful gift. And so what I realized when I read this is that this was about a ritual from 2000 years ago, but really, it's about us and it's about now. It's about what does it mean to create spaces in which we who are walking for the moment to the right and around and counterclockwise in which we actually can train our eyes to see the people who are hurting and not avert our eyes, not look away, but embrace them with love, knowing that tomorrow we'll be walking to the left ourselves because everybody's on both sides of this equation and to train ourselves that when we are vulnerable to step into our vulnerability instead of retreating, instead of further alienating ourselves, but to know that we can trust that In some places we will be held with love. And how do we cultivate communities and book groups and churches and synagogues and grocery stores, where we can actually trust that in this place, my humanity will be seen and then that central story, that central image of the circle is the thread that runs throughout the book. But what would it mean to then build a society in which we weren't afraid to look at each other's pain? And what does it teach us about solidarity if when we see somebody else who's hurting like that, we don't think that their pain is going to marginalize my pain, or if I accept their narrative, that means that my victimhood is diminished, but instead, that we recognize each other's heartache as our own, and we collectively lift up one another's voices, and I write this early in the book, that I realized at some point when I read, when I reread this text, 10 years into building our community that we had built a community in an attempt to embody Dr. King's vision of building the beloved community, building a truly just and equitable society. And we were fighting the good fight out in the world. But I realized that I had not put enough attention on building the beloved community inside and some people were doing it naturally and instinctively, but I had never prioritized what does it mean for us on the line at lunch after Shabbat services and in the parking lot and in the hospital for us to actually treat each other like an image of God and that our own peak religious and spiritual experience is dependent on us lifting up the humanity, not only of people who are oppressed out and marginalized and exploited in the world, but of each other standing in line waiting to get a bagel. So this transformed our community, Elise, I mean, once we talked about it so honestly, it changed us and we started to show up for each other in a different way. And it's been over the course of the 10 years since then, the whole character of the community is different and we're better at the justice work now than we were before because we actually care for each other's hearts in a different way. And it's been a very profound lesson for me.

ELISE: I want to come back to that, but I want to go to the founding of the community. And you mentioned this quote, which I think anyone can relate to from Rabbi Heschel, you write that "he had offered a scathing critique of American religious life. Religion declined, not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. What young people need, he wrote, is not religious tranquilizers, religion is diversion, religion is entertainment, but spiritual audacity, intellectual guts, the power of defiance." Oh, it's so amazing, as like the rallying call of your community, but this sort of active faith, active grace as a force in the world is really sorely missing, right?

It's funny, you hear this sort of the people who are like, I'm spiritual, not religious, and people I know scoff at that denomination. But really, I think it's because everyone struggles to find a community that's a line to what you were just saying, like on the inside and on the outside, right? How do you take care of your community and how do you extend that care to the world in a way that's not otherizing, dehumanizing us versus them, particularly in such a polarized, terrifying time when it's become increasingly difficult to get on side when really it's like, can everyone not see? Like we have to get on side in order to contend with threats to our environment that are so much bigger than any one of our own personal concerns. How do you think about that in terms of spreading just this idea, like the sensibility of what this can be? Not that everyone needs to join the community, but how do you make that contagious within religious life?

SHARON: So first, one of my teachers is an incredible Benedictine monk, David Steindl Ross, who you've probably encountered in one way or another over the years. And I read a piece that he wrote, maybe 20 years ago as we were starting, in which he says, all religions are like a volcano, they begin with some massive eruption. There's fire, there's thunder, there's lightning, there's insight, there's revelation. And then the lava pours down the mountainside, and at some point it settles at the base of the mountain. And he says, at that point, a few hundred years pass, and what was once fire and passion appears to the eye like cold, dead rock. And he said, it's the work of the creative practitioners today, to chip away at that rock and engage in this Holy work of excavation so that we can rediscover the mystical fire that is within and he said, at some point, like all of our traditions had this mystical insight, this great revelation. But I think that our ancestors, in every tradition were so worried about losing the power of that initial revelation that they froze it. That they froze it into cold, dead rock, and they built containers around it and then more containers around that. They built rules and turned what was initially acts of love and expressions of joy into ritual that was hard and fast and unbending and unyielding.

And at some point we're left with an empty shell, a container, and not with the flow, the insight, the flow, fire, the joy, the passion, the love, the fear, the awe, all of the things that make a spiritual life. And I get why people yearn for spiritual and not religious lives, because they're saying, I want the fire. I don't want the container. And so that really touched me very deeply. And I started to understand that we were living in a moment in the turn of the 21st century, in which religion was defined in the public space by either this kind of ritualism on one hand, which is a concrete, spiritually dead, soulless, perfunctory, institutional, religious life. And on the other hand, fire, which was in the hands of religious extremists, violent religious fundamentalists, and all of our traditions have them all of them, and these are the people who really seem like they're responding to the word of God. But the word of God is calling them to engage in acts of violence and cruelty toward other humans.

So when you look at a religious picture that on one end is violent extremism and on the other hand is kind of ritualism, I understand why the Pew studies have been telling us for the last, you know, three decades that people are fleeing from a religious life. And so part of what we were trying to do is kind of stake a claim on a different kind of religious life. I was saying, what we have to do is maybe abandon the failed containers that have been placed around this sacred fire and go back to the sources and go back to the prophetic traditions. You know, the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, they ran naked through the street for years, screaming, people pay attention. Pay attention to the widow and the orphan and the workers who are being exploited and the earth that we're trampling under our feet. And what if we went back and reclaimed the prophetic tradition and reclaimed the stories and the narratives from these ancient sacred texts and translated them into a language of meaning and purpose that wouldn't be discontinuous with our sacred tradition, but would actually reattach us to that sacred tradition, but in a new and different way?

And so what does it mean to reclaim joy as an expression of faith practice? What does it mean to identify thriving at human, thriving individual and communal as an imperative of a faith community? How do we reclaim a moral compass? What if those are our driving questions instead of what do we need to do to get the most people into our sanctuary, cause we just raised millions of dollars to build this sanctuary? Or what would it take for us to move services from 8pm to 6pm on Friday night? The board's going to be up in arms about it. Or I can't change that tune because that's the tune we've been doing for the last hundred years and that's the tradition of this synagogue or this church. It's asking totally different questions. What is being asked of us as human beings living in a world on fire. And when you start from those sacred questions, instead of how much change can we get away without a board mutiny, you're going to end up with a totally different appearance of community and, at its essence, it's a totally different community. So, in fact, we called our community IKAR because That means the essence. And I was wondering 20 years ago, what is the essence of this sacred tradition that has, against all odds, survived through thousands of years of persecution and oppression and exploitation and degradation and gas chambers and pogroms? What's at the heart of this thing? And how do we honor it? Because I don't think that we often ask that question. I think that we're invested in institutional perpetuation and we end up engaging in ritual for the sake of ritual, not for the sake of growth.

And so what if we ask, what is at the heart of this? Who am I being called to be? Why did Torah survive for thousands of years? Maybe it's so that we could read the story of what happens when a new king arises who knows not Joseph and who's scared of, you know, a tiny minority community living in its midst and directs the full force of the empire against that community in order to suppress it. And what does spiritual resistance look like under that kind of empire? We start to ask totally different questions and see the text not as a source of Entertainment or a spiritual balm, but instead as a kind of force for good in the world, a moral and spiritual imperative that we engage differently in the world. And that was really the driving force for me. And by the way, it manifested in the most profound ways during the next 20 years in which IKARs existed because as different world events happened as different regimes came to power, both in the United States and around the world, we felt an imperative to act because we felt this sacred ancient call that was saying not to ancient communities, these are narratives that have, that will help hold your community together. But to us today, this is what's being asked of you as a human being, you resist empire, you resist exploitation, you know oppression because you were enslaved in Egypt. And so whenever you stranger's heart, these are words that become part of the kind of moral fabric of our lives and of our community.

ELISE: It's so beautiful. I love to this idea of going back to the prophets running naked in the streets because you think about the prophets that are foundational to all of our religions and the mystics that invariably followed and this direct experiencing of God that wasn't necessarily unavailable to all of us, right? Our own prophetic natures, our own mystical bent and the way that's disappeared from contemporary culture, and not to say everyone's a prophet, but I think in many ways, many people are, but are severed from that idea or that connection to sometimes you have a deep knowing, sometimes you see, right? And then how do you share that with the world as part of these living traditions in an effort to continually make the world more equitable. So I think it's such a beautiful idea.

SHARON: I just want to add to that in light of your book also this sacred tradition, my tradition is really a patriarchal tradition. And so the words that were written down were the words of men and they were passed down from one generation of men to another generation of men to another. They were interpreted by men and for men. And so to your point, in the language of Steindl Rust, part of the sacred excavation project today, I think is inviting and centering voices that were always in the conversation, but were never recorded and seeing what are those prophetic voices and what were the women prophets saying that didn't get codified in the Hebrew Bible, that those voices that weren't captured by history. I mean, we have this tradition of, you know, there's the black letters on the scroll, but what about the white space around the letters? And what do we see that that wasn't written? And how can we find our own voices in the margins and then center them instead of marginalizing them? And so I think even more so, bringing these voices from the past into our present also demands of us a kind of reckoning with both what's present in those voices, but also what's absent. Who are the people who are not here? These are women. These are voices of people of color, voices of people with disabilities, voices of non binary and trans people. How do we center the voices that traditionally and historically we know existed, but we're only marginalized in the tradition and that does feel like holy work. And for me, in part, when I encountered a tradition that was so driven by male stories and male voices, I felt so alienated by it when I first began to encounter it. And I had this moment, which I think lots of, you know, women faith leaders have, which is Maybe this just isn't for me. I mean, I'm not intended to ever even read these texts, let alone teach these texts. And, then I had an awakening where I realized not only is it meant for me, but I have an obligation. It was waiting for me. It's waiting for me and for so many more people because there's a void until our voices enter this space. And I think part of the privilege of building my own community is that I get to choose whose voices I center and so we can be really active about pulling into the center people with voices that weren't heard traditionally. And then there's this beautiful sacred chorus of the traditional and also the new and something very holy happens when we bring those in harmony with one another.

ELISE: And I think, in speaking of prophetic and mystical voices, I think that we can still hear the people who are marginalized, even if they're not recorded. I think that we can all relate, right? So, and going back to that Heschel quote, spiritual audacity, intellectual guts, the power of defiance, part of that chiseling at the lava is saying, sorry, I recognize like you might revere what's calcified in history, but this is a moving faith and it requires again, that excavation, but a reinterpretation. I mean that's like a whole nother sidebar, but when you go back to some of those original texts, I'm thinking of the work of someone like Bart Ehrman, who works, I think, primarily on the New Testament. I mean, he used to believe in the Word of God, the Bible was the Word of God. He was a total fundamentalist Christian who now is, I believe an agnostic, but his point is that there are more errors in the New Testament than words, and he talks about a lot of the misogyny that's now in Paul, and a lot of the anti Semitism, or the way that it's been interpreted, were added. Were not in the original, were errors and or intentional sort of renderings of history, but then you just start to think about when you revere with static now, you're missing the way that it's changed and by the hands of men.

SHARON: Yeah.

ELISE: But it can be reinterpreted in different ways.

SHARON: And I think it has to be. I mean, Judaism is an interpretive tradition. And so we don't look at the Torah and say, but the Torah says that you have to do this, we look at then thousands of years of rabbis arguing about what the Torah says. And the beauty of that is that it's not fixed and there isn't really a fundamentalist engagement with Torah and yet the danger of it is that it's in the hands of the interpreters and people could interpret in ways like you're describing that are, you know, rooted in our own biases. And so that's why I think the interpretive tradition really necessitates a multiplicity of voices of interpreters, people who take it seriously and live in it and have different perspectives on it. And if you open up a page of Talmud, you'll see that there are so many voices around the text and in the way that we print traditionally the Torah, in Mikrokodolo, for example, the text of the Torah is like this big and then all around it are all of these different voices because there's no one definitive interpretation. But the idea is that it's a chorus of interpretation. So each of us needs to add our voice to that chorus so that hopefully the truth can be discerned.

ELISE: Yeah. And it goes to at the beginning of our conversation, too, when you overlay that on life, that chorus, and then, you know, in the way that life is a choose your own adventure, right? And in some ways, it's a choose your meaning, like you can again, I like that you don't abide by the theology, the bad things happen so that you can learn which is really harmful, I think, to someone, as you mentioned, who's lost a child. So many, so many harmful theologies, some of which you outline in the book, like, God only gives you what you can handle, etc. But as your life continues to evolve, and the meaning that you extract from that, the moral is, in some ways, up to you, right? And how you do or do not choose to move forward? Respect to both choices, right?

SHARON: Yeah, and I think that's right. And I also want to be careful that I don't think that every interpretation is an acceptable interpretation. And I mean, right now, so much of my heartache comes from looking at extremists in my own Jewish community and seeing the way that they interpret our tradition as a call to arms. And acts of violence that come from people who call themselves religious is a great sickness in the system. And so on one hand, I feel we have to keep adding interpretations to the page and bring in voices from the margin. And not everything is right. And so I think that's part of what I was trying to get at in chapter eight of the book, actually, which is in chapter eight, I'm expanding from the very personal and communal to really look at global systems. And the question is who gets to be in that courtyard? And for the sake of the safety of the people who are walking, whether to the right or the left, are there some people who just are not granted access into that secret space who it's not our job to try to understand them. That there are certain people who hold ideologies that are so toxic and so dangerous and so harmful in our society that I don't want to be on a quest for understanding with them. I want to minimize their voices so that we can build a just and equitable and loving society, which they would try to destroy. And so I'm really wrestling with that question because at the same time, I feel that in many times we say that we're fighting against polarization, when really we have to be fighting against systemic racism. And we say we're fighting against division, when we have to be fighting against exploitation. I think we get it a little bit wrong sometimes because we want people to be civil toward each other instead of people to act justly toward one another. And so we have to rewire the conversation a little bit. And at the same time, I know that change will never happen in our society until we recognize each other's humanity. And I gave a couple of hard examples in chapter eight of these stories where, I mean, these are people who are really dangerous and problematic people who change because somebody sees their humanity and that work is not for everyone. And I don't think that it should be on the responsibility should be on the shoulders of the impacted community to reach out to the oppressors and try to change them. And even still, if you can, that's the only way that I've ever seen change happen.

ELISE: Let's talk about that because I thought that those, the stories that you told too about your own sort of like maintaining a bridge, having the uncomfortable lunch and conversation, one with some change from within a rabbi potentially that could be traced back to your conversation. But this is the really hard work, right? Whether you turn and huddle and protect or whether you continue to extend and continue to extend and where you draw those lines. And I've thought about it a lot trying to understand who's responsibility, I don't know if you have this experience, but one of the things that I've observed as a white woman is that it's a little, it's quite acceptable right now to dunk on white women, you know, we can often be the ones rightly or wrongly holding the trash bags, like the endless shaming of like the Karens, quote unquote. Again, I'm not defending those actions, but white men, for example, seem to be not held accountable, right? It's typically only directed at women more or less and it's really has me thinking then about like, how do we hold white men accountable? And I have to wonder if maybe white women are holding the trash bag, sometimes I feel a little bit like an airbag, if it moves up and down a ladder and it's our job to hold white men responsible, it's other marginalized people, other marginalized women need to hold us responsible. I think that there's a fair amount of that that happens, rightly. I'm not saying that it shouldn't be happening. But I just wonder how you think about that. Like whose job is it to go to lunch with the extremist rabbi and hold him accountable or work to understand or re humanize the way that he sees the world?

SHARON: They're really three big stories in chapter eight, and two of them are mine and one is my beautiful congregant, Hannah's, but in both of my stories, I feel that I can be safe sitting at the table with these two different men who I had lunch with so, one who I call him the shock jock, but you know, this guy who's just part of this hideous media ecosystem of our time, who's words are causing violence, I believe, primarily against trans and non binary people, and the other is this rabbi that you're referring to and in both cases, I have the privilege of being safe sitting with them. They'll both talk to me and I'm not going to get physically harmed or tremendously emotionally harmed by them because they're not actually dehumanizing me and so I feel like I can maybe put myself into that position because I think it is our work. I think that part of having the privilege is stepping into the space and using the privilege to try to affect the kind of change that it's frankly not fair to leave on only the people who are the target. So, to take it out of these two examples, as a Jew, I feel incredibly grateful and moved when people who aren't Jewish will stand up and speak out against antisemitism. And especially when they'll go to people in their own communities and speak out against antisemitism, because I feel like that burden shouldn't only be on me and my community, especially when we're hurting.

So when people misinterpret or speak in wrongheaded ways about anti Semitic acts of violence, I don't want it to be that I'm standing out there alone. And so I feel similarly that these are fights that we actually have to fight with each other. And there's certain moments when each of us will have the strength and the privilege to step forward into the battle. And then there are other times where we feel like, you know what, I just want to be safe right now and be with my people. And so I think we have to navigate that with great tenderness with one another.

So again, It's not a heroic act to step into a lunch with this horrible anti trans activist. It's not heroic, it's just the only thing I could do is basically try to say to a person who would take my call, you're really causing great harm by writing and speaking in the way that you are. And that's something that others can also do, but others might not want to. People who really are in the direct line of fire might not feel safe doing that. So I think to answer your question, I think we have to do a kind of internal audit and see, do I feel safe stepping into this conversation in this way? And it's true that white women have a certain kind of access and a certain kind of privilege and it is our responsibility to use it when we can and I think a lot of people take a dump on white women who would never criticize white men. And if you look at all the levers of power in our society are still held by white men, and that's unfair. And also white women need to start taking responsibility ourselves for being complicit in a lot of the pain points in a lot of what's broken in our society. I mean, even just looking at voting patterns in the past several elections, we can see the way the majority of white women in America voted for a candidate who was actively harming not only women, but L G B T Q people, people of color, you know, actively working against the interests marginalized communities, and that's something white women need to take responsibility for. So I feel that it is our job to step into the arena, as Brene Brown would say, but to step into the arena and take the risk when we feel that it's safe for us to do so, precisely because frankly, if I were a Palestinian woman I don't think that rabbi would have ever sat down with me. So he sat down with me because I had a certain measure of privilege and I could have said, he makes me uncomfortable, I don't want to sit with him. But if there's a little, if there's a little opening and maybe he or any conversation partner might start to think just a little bit differently because somebody has said something that opens their heart a little bit, then it's worth it, I think. And it's incumbent upon us to try when we can.

ELISE: Yeah. I definitely appreciate that. I want to see society structured in a way where it's like, I push you so that you push on the person who is next to you, if that makes sense, so that we can start shifting responsibility up and applying pressure. Because right now it feels like it's all somehow fomenting right there on women. And you have men who are like, I can't get a job because I'm a, you know, like woe is me, but there's still a dearth of responsibility and I think that there's this idea that because women are inherently more nurturing, caring, whatever is ascribed to us as part of our gender, which is a whole nother conversation, that we should be the ones, and most of us are more than happy to do this, and it's like, come on, men, like, let's go. It's your turn too. And I know that there are a lot of men fighting this fight.

SHARON: My sense is that I think the reason that white women are the target of so much animus is because it feels like white women are betraying marginalized communities. That white women of all people should understand what it means to be unfairly targeted, marginalized, to be victims of violence, of exploitation, of cruelty, and yet, Instead, often choose to attach to power instead of fighting for a more just society. So it feels more like an act of betrayal than when white men do that. And so that's my sense. And I feel it, I mean, when I saw the election results and saw the percentage of white women, you know, that the majority of white women voted for Trump and I thought, how, like, how did that happen? And what does it mean? Because I understand why people, why white men would attach to the promise that he's offering, but for white women, how did that happen? And it feels like you know what struggle looks like as a woman, so how could you leave behind all of the people who are going to be harmed by these policies and by this culture shift? And so I do think there's something there that we must take responsibility for.

ELISE: Yeah. I agree. And I write about this a fair amount in the chapter on anger and how women are sort of caught in this no man's land, which I have some empathy for. Understanding exactly what's happening and then also being attached to this patriarchal power system, sometimes dependent on it, reliant, protective of their children, right? So it's like this sort of neither here nor there existence where it's easier in that ballot box, I think, for people to say, well, I have to align with my own safety and security, clearly. Not to say that it's not a betrayal. I'm with you 100%. But I think that's where we've collectively failed is to build a movement where we can bring down those threats, bring down this feeling. I mean, we live in a country with no social security nets, there's a lot of fear, understandably, so it's hard, I get it, I guess I understand on both sides, as progressive and aggressive as I can be I also, I don't know, I don't know how we move forward, unfortunately.

SHARON: You know, I had this realization during the Kavanaugh hearings it happened to align with the reading of the beginning of the book of Genesis in our annual Torah reading cycle. And I was reading that week preparing for my sermon. I was reading about the two creation stories in Genesis one and two, and I suddenly had this realization, to your point earlier, about the way that ancient texts kind of inform today and then were informing both backwards and forward. And I had this realization that there are two creation stories that are put forward. One in which. Adam and Eve are created as two fundamentally equal creatures. And it says in God's image, God created them. Adam, in the first person, is both male and female. It's totally equitable. And then in Genesis two, when the creation story is told, it's told as Adam is created this man and this man is lonely. And so he needs a partner. So God creates Eve out of his rib. And the partner's purpose is to be his Ezra connecto to be his kind of help mate, we translate it often.

And that is a fundamentally submissive role to the dominant role of Adam. And the realization that I had during the Kavanaugh hearings was that, the problem that a lot of women have in our society kind of holding this moment is that we live in a Genesis one mentality. We partner in a Genesis one ideal. Many of us raised in nineties feminism, chose partners who would be equal partners to us, who treat us with dignity and with respect. We want to be affirmed as, you know, as full thinking human partners, but we live in a society that's still that's built on a Genesis two mentality, in which the function of women is really to serve and to be secondary. And so the structures of our society are actually built on a model that's contrary to our own self understanding of what the model is that we yearn for. When you hold the Genesis one mentality, but you live in a Genesis two reality. When you hold a fully equal and equitable mentality, but you live in a world that gives the good jobs and the high pay and the prominent positions and the the place on the panel to the guy, not because he's more qualified or knows more, but because he's a guy and he'll put his hat in the ring with less concern than you will, there's a clash. There's an inner clash that happens. And I think a lot of us have been experiencing that inner clash over the past many years because the world doesn't make sense to us because we've already adapted to the ideal. What's interesting to me about Torah and the Hebrew Bible is that it puts both of those stories out for us. I mean, there's Genesis 1 and there's Genesis 2 and as a society we have to decide which one we're gonna lean into. For throughout history, as your book attests to, They've chosen a Genesis 2 story, a narrative that really quiets and suppresses and contains and controls women. And we know that there's another way. Genesis 1 is equally valid from the vantage point of the book, and even more valid from the vantage point of our own humanity. And so what will it take for us to build that other kind of society? And I think that's the real challenge for us today. And that work is on all of us, including white women, including people of color, including white men. I mean that work is really on all of us.

ELISE: It's beautiful. I know we have literally one minute. I loved that part of the book. I love when you talk about the, how to re translate that word, which is someone to help you by standing opposite you. Someone to face you even when everyone else looks away. Someone to turn toward you and say, I am here. Tell me your pain. I love that. I mean, it's the whole thesis in many ways of the book, which is how do you bring these two parts of each of us and of our society together, those who are moving to the right and those who are moving to the left.

SHARON: Right. I mean, the words ma lach, which they ask, the Hebrew words that they ask are, that is also the word for angel, ma lach. And so it there's something angelic about it. Like this is the way that we achieve holiness or spiritual fullness, is actually by looking at each other and saying, tell me your story. Tell me your pain.

ELISE: Beautiful.

We didn’t get to this a lot in today’s conversation—which I loved, I think Rabbi Sharon is such a fierce advocate for all of us, and I could go for hours on our role with social justice and faith—but much of her book, The Amen Effect, is about being with each other in these times of great distress, she talks about it as “with-ness,” which is such a beautiful idea, this comes from a person in her community, a man named Christopher whose son Charlie died tragically. He tells her, “We don’t need people to fix us, we need people to not be abandoned. We need people to be willing to sit with us in the pain.” So, she talks a lot about this idea of bearing with-ness and that you don’t always have to know what to say, in fact, she recounts talking to one of the rabbi’s in her life about not knowing, being terrified, this is early in her career, and she was terrified to go be with someone in pain because she didn’t know what to say and the rabbi said to her, “Sharon, you’re not leaving space for God.” And I think that’s such a beautiful idea. So many of us go into situations that alarm or terrify us, armed with all of the things we’re going to say, not remembering that presence is required, not always conversation and as she says, she’s not looking to draw people to meaning in times of great distress, she is just simply being present and by asking malak, the angel, what happened to you? And just the invitation of “tell me about your pain,” is all that people need. Thanks for listening, I’ll see you next week.