Three lines of text about an obscure, ancient ritual changed her life. Rabbi Sharon Brous told this to a crowd of more than 250 gathered on Sunday, Nov. 17 at the Edgar B. Berger Performing Arts Center for “Community in Unity,” an event presented by Jewish Family & Children’s Services of Southern Arizona (JFCS) and the Tucson Jewish Museum & Holocaust Center (TJMHC).
In her bestselling book, “The Amen Effect: Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World,” Brous describes the ritual she read about in Mishnah Middot 2:2, in which hundreds of thousands of pilgrims ascended the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Most would enter on the right to circle the courtyard before exiting. Those who were brokenhearted would enter on the left and circle in the opposite direction. The people in the larger circle would stop and ask, “What happened to you?” The sufferers might reply, “My mother died,” or “I found a lump,” or “My husband left.”
The people who asked would then bless the bereaved, the sick, and the bereft, saying, “May God comfort you,” or “May you be wrapped in the embrace of this community,’” says Brous, the founding and senior rabbi of IKAR, a Jewish spiritual community in Los Angeles.
It took her years to fully realize the meaning of this sacred encounter, which took place amid the spiritual excitement of pilgrimage, “that it is precisely at the moments that we’re most inclined to pull away from each other, to retreat from one another, that it’s most important that we actually turn toward one another instead.”
Brous has been named #1 Most Influential Rabbi in the U.S. by Newsweek/The Daily Beast. Her TED Talk “Reclaiming Religion” has been viewed 1.5 million times.
She wrote “The Amen Effect” to address the crisis of loneliness in our country and across the globe, a dilemma exacerbated by the COVID pandemic, she told the Tucson audience.
Loneliness affects us not only emotionally but physically, she says, noting that according to the U.S. surgeon general, it has the same impact on our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Loneliness, she adds, is “more an inner state than an external reality … it’s about feeling alone, not necessarily being alone.”
The antidote, she says, is compassion and community. “The Amen Effect” is about showing up for one another, in good times and bad.
We should engage with others, even when they espouse ideas that scare us, Brous says, adding that what she suggests is not “capitulation to toxic ideologies.”
“It’s just a way of reclaiming our humanity, which we will desperately need to do if we are going to survive in an era that I think we can all agree is now marked by a very dangerous division, social alienation, isolation, and a very deep and almost impenetrable loneliness,” she says.
Lori Shepherd, TJMHC executive director, echoes this sentiment.
“Our local, national, and global communities are fractured and bruised from years of political, racial, economic, and cultural strife,” she says. “On Sunday, Rabbi Brous helped us look forward to a process of healing.”
Carlos Hernández, JFCS president and CEO, says the agencies scheduled the rabbi’s talk for after the election “because regardless of who won, we knew that tensions would fly high.”
They knew Brous “could help us process that a little bit,” he says. “It is important for people to listen to each other, respect each other, value each other even if people’s values and positions are different.”
For some, the subtitle of Brous’s book, “Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World,” might suggest she wrote it in response to the horrors of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, the subsequent war, and the increasingly open manifestations of antisemitism around the world.
But Brous finished writing “The Amen Effect” 10 months before Oct. 7, 2023.
She told the Tucson audience she was scared before the book came out in January 2024, wondering if it would be relevant “in this new reality.”
But she realized that after Oct. 7, “in many ways, the whole Jewish community is walking to the left,” like the ancient mourners on the Temple Mount.
In a conversation with TJMHC’s Lynn Davis after her prepared remarks, Brous spoke of the lack of concern for the Jewish community after Oct. 7 from many longtime allies in the movement for social justice.
“It was very painful to see the immediacy with which the dynamic shifted,” Brous says. Her brother lives in Israel, and she saw that it was hard for some people she considered real friends “to literally call me and say, ‘Is your brother alive?’”
But while recording the audiobook of “The Amen Effect” just a month after Oct. 7, she realized the ancient rabbis “were not speaking to 2022 or 2012 or 2000, they were speaking an eternal language.”
On her book tour, she says, people in Jewish crowds often asked, “What happens when everyone you know is walking to the left?”
“That we live in a time where we have to ask that question is very painful,” she says. “And my answer is that even when we’re all walking to the left, we can still hold each other and support each other.”
It is one reason Jews have increasingly been seeking community, she says.
On the first Shabbat at her shul after Oct. 7, she noticed the participants included a man who was “the most conservative with a small ‘c’ member” and a young woman who would identify as part of the radical left.
She was curious to see what would happen.
“We all wept. We all just wept together,” she recalls. “And I realized that we need each other,” even though those two people see the world differently and may reflect “some of the broader division in the community.”
When we are in trauma, in grief, or in fear, Brous says, it can be hard “to be our most empathic.”
“It’s very hard to draw upon empathy when we do not feel safe,” she says. But even as we connect with our tribe, she believes, we need to push back against the instinct to draw the line against others.
Dividing the Jewish community into tribal Jews, who care only about other Jews, and universalist Jews, who care about the Palestinians, is a problematic paradigm, she says, calling on Jews to love both fellow Jews and “the stranger.”
“Our hearts are big enough to do both.”
