← Lunch with Jamie
Lunch with Jamie
The Loneliness Crisis and Why Community Matters More Than Ever | Sharon Brous
01:05:56
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- [00:04]
A
Today I'm sharing a conversation from February 2024 with Rabbi Sharon Brous, who most recently wrote the book the Amen Effect and who is also my rabbi at ECAR in Los Angeles. We're living in a polarized world and this conversation with Sharon felt crucial to share as it touches upon what makes us human and the importance of showing up for each other and leading with love. There's so many important topics that are covered in this book and in her sermons. One of the things that she talks about in this book is the loneliness crisis, which we heard the Surgeon General Vivek Murthy so eloquently talk throughout his time in the White House and the health implications that that's leading to, the staggering stats and facts about how dangerous loneliness is for us. Who talks about how the importance of community is a critical tool to combating the mental health crisis we're facing today in society. She also talks about why disag agreement is natural and how sitting at the table with people you disagree with is one of the most important things you can do for growth. The book the Amen Effect focuses on grief, although it talks about so many other topics, but one of the critical things you can take away is how to support people in grief. There's so many tools that you can use from this book and so many stories that will bring tears and smiles to your face, which is just such a rare tool to use in a book. And she does it so eloquently. She talks about the concept of bearing with ness. She talks about her own experience talking about death with her parents, which was such a critical tool for her and for all of us to think about when we start talking to our own parents about the end of their lives. She looks at Judaism and the way that confronting social issues is such an important tool to use. How faith should be about compassion. There's really no topic that Sharon can't talk about, add value and give you a new perspective or a different way in. I hope you enjoy this conversation. I enjoyed it so much I've asked Sharon to come back now for a Part two, which will be coming soon. Now here's my interview with Rabbi Sharon Brous. I am beyond excited that Rabbi Sharon Brousch is here. I read her book instantly when I got it within one sitting in just a couple hours. I then bought the audiobook and listened to that as well. So I've now decided that's the perfect way to approach this book is you need to do, everybody needs to do both. You need to buy Both. So I learned a lot more in a different way the second time. And I can listen to Sharon speak for hours, and I got to in the audiobook. So let's get right into it. Sharon, first question I want to ask is what inspired you to write this book?
- [02:49]
B
Hi, everyone. First of all, Jamie, thank you. I'm so. I'm happy to be in conversation with you, and I see lots of friends here, and so it's really good to be with all of you today and have this conversation. So what inspired me to write the book? Is that what you asked? So the book actually grew out of a sermon that I gave Eddie Carr 11 years ago that some of you were actually in the room for when I gave it. I think Dana and Mark and Jamie and some others who I see here. That sermon was about 10 years into the building of our community in LA. And what I was really sensing in the community was that, was that both within and beyond icar, we were seeing signs of loneliness in our society and a true impact that it was having on us as individuals and on us as a collective. At that time, there was really one great book written about loneliness by a guy named Dr. John Caccio. And he was writing about the impact, not only the emotional impact, but the physical impact that loneliness has on our bodies and now things that we know well, because of Dr. Vivek Murthy and others who've been writing about this, that, you know, a lonely person, loneliness has the physical equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day in terms of impact on our bodies, in terms of inflammation and illness, et cetera. And I was seeing it as. As a pastor, as a rabbi in a community. And I was really concerned that we had built this community to really stand at the intersection of revitalizing Jewish practice, giving. Giving out these great Jewish traditions back to a generation of people who seemed increasingly disconnected from religious life and also really responding to the moral crises of our time. Those were sort of the two. The two objectives of the community that we had set out to build. And what I realized was that there was this whole world of kind of spiritual and emotional pain that we hadn't expressly addressed. And so I gave this sermon essentially saying, we who dream of building the beloved community out in the world, we who dream of building a world without racism, a world of equity and equality and justice, we have to learn how to turn toward one another with love and care. And that means actually showing up for each other in moments of great joy and also in moments of great pain. We have to actually Learn that even in moments where we feel incredibly disempowered by what's going on in the news and even very overwhelmed by that, that we are not powerless. And sometimes the thing that we can do to reclaim our own agency is turn to one another with love and with care, and to do that with a real sense of urgency. And that sermon transformed our community in many ways. I mean, it made us feel like we had to take responsibility for each other differently than we had before. And it was really the beginning of the next chapter of the community. And for me, it became this kind of spiritual and moral imperative to share that message, not only inside the ICAR community, but more broadly.
- [06:06]
A
Yeah. I think the concept of loneliness is so fascinating. And when you had the surgeon General at ecar, that was just an extraordinary session. I noticed my friend Cash Warren, who has a company called Paraphyse, had made a sock that said never alone. And it had the suicide prevention hotline on it. And I just. It's. There was so much that came out of that. And just that that concept, I think, is something that we all need to put a little more emphasis and effort towards the community building.
- [06:40]
B
Yeah. And I'm so grateful to the Surgeon General for the way that he's put a spotlight on this issue. I think it's so critically important. And my concern and part of the driver for the book and for these conversations around the book is that loneliness is not only harming our bodies and our spirits and our communities, but is actually endangering our democracy. And that's something that I think is really important for us to be clear about. As I write about in chapter eight, Hannah Arendt warns that loneliness, social alienation, and isolation are preconditions for tyranny. That conspiracy theories cannot take hold in a society in which people know each other and are proximate with each other and turn toward one another with compassion and curiosity. And so this very broken moment that we're in spiritually is actually contributing to a kind of larger cultural and political brokenness that's very, very d for us. So one of the things that I learned in researching for the book is that a study, this is pre Covid a study, very important study, found that 30% of Americans do not know the names of their neighbors who live next door to them. They don't know. We don't know our neighbors names that more than 20% of Americans say they don't have one single confidant in the world. There's not one person to share joy with, to share Pain with. We're really walking through life alone, which is contrary to our nature because we are fundamentally dialogical beings. That is part of our biology, that's part of our spiritual nature. That is the way that we were created. And so to live in this kind of isolation is very counter instinctual and it's actually doing grave damage to us and endangering our society. Now if you know your neighbors, when conspiracy theories come down saying terrible things about your neighbors, you know that they're not true because you can point to the person who you know well and have spent time with and are in relationship with who you know. Your lived experience can contradict whatever that conspiracy theory is. But if we don't know each other at all, then we're much more vulnerable to those kind of really nefarious ideas taking root in our society.
- [08:57]
A
There's a movie that came out this year called Leave the World behind which I think got overlooked and has some of the most brilliant themes in it and actually directly speaks to what you just spoke about. And this concept of neighbors and also just how we can destroy ourselves from within as a society. I gave away too much of it on another zoom because I was very imp passioned by it and wanted to speak on it. But there's a really powerful scene which you know, people can debate if it's a great scene or not, but looks at an exact point of the neighbor where literally the. It's this concept of, you know, you know me, I know you, why are you now, why are you now, you know, questioning us, there's a stranger here with us. But, you know, and that's how. What's gonna, you know, could take down society is this, this concept. And when you read your book, it really, you, you highlight a lot of these aspects and just the, the concept of needing to communicate with people and, and sharing good news and bad news and, and being able to share that information is such a critical part of our existence and who we are.
- [10:04]
B
Right. I mean, I think of this as sacred accompaniment that we need to be accompanied. There's I speak a little bit in chapter one. It's funny, it hasn't come up in a lot of the book talks yet, but about joy and the, you know. Now we know from studies that the experience of sharing joy is, has almost even a more powerful impact on the spirit than even experiencing the joy in the first place. Meaning sharing with people your good news is as powerful or more powerful than actually experiencing the good news itself. Like calling your friends to say that you got engaged or Sharing with your loved ones that you're falling in love is almost better than the feeling of falling in love. So there's something so powerful about being able to accompany one another in moments of celebration. And then we also know obviously how important this is in moments of great pain. And so much of what the book is looking at is how. Is how counter instinctual it all is. Like this is what human beings need. And yet in our culture, we're really in a culture of retreat, not of proximity, not of leaning in toward one another, but of pulling away from each other, especially in times of pain and times of heartache, which is when that need becomes even more pronounced.
- [11:19]
A
Well, I have to say what is the most amazing part of your book is the concept that I could cry and smile on the same page. And are a few books genuinely to me that I even tear up at. And it's hard. And I'm not gonna, you know, I can't sugarcoat the fact there's a lot of just heartbreaking and devastating things in this book that will just crush you. But the ability, your ability to make me smile was what made the book so special. And, you know, we could talk for hours about the book, but based on the topic you just talked about, maybe we can give three quick examples about, you know, the. The recently divorced man celebrating with the new couple, the grieving woman asking permission to dance. It's just, I mean, I don't want to. I don't know if you want to give a quick snippet of the book and those two stories.
- [12:15]
B
Oh, sure, sure, sure. So. So in chapter one, I talk about Dodie. Some of you probably know Dodie, but Dodi, we were in a Friday night service at Ecar early, early days, and. And I was doing this kind of experiment because I felt like, you know, Jews who are the descendants of King David who used to like sing and cry out and dance and, you know, in kind of spiritual ecstasy, have become so polite in synagogue services. And we just, we sit and we don't stand until someone says, please rise and please be seated. And it's just, it doesn't match the. That kind of formality does not match the kind of spiritual ecstasy that I know that we've all experienced at various points in our lives, whether at Yosemite or when a baby's born or when we're dancing at a friend's wedding. And so I was trying to figure out, and I'm always trying to figure out, how can we bring that kind of vitality back into the space So I took all the chairs out of the room and we built this Friday night practice where basically people were forced to kind of be embodied and have an embodied experience. This is all the backstory because we're having this now, incredibly beautiful Friday night service. And it's, in fact, it's such a powerful experience that a couple gets engaged in the middle of Shabbat services, which, like, somebody. Melissa, runs over my. The CEO, Eddie Carr, and my partner in all things here in the community, she runs over and she said, oh, my God, Dan and Rachel just got engaged in the middle of, you know, in the middle of Shabbat services. And I'm just so excited. But as I'm about to announce this, I look up and there's Dodi, who's standing at the threshold at the other end of the room about, like, really halfway in, halfway out. I know that Dodie's mother is very sick, she's about to die, and he's going through a very painful divorce. And all of a sudden I'm struck by what hap. What's the pastoral response right now? Because, you know, I have to share this wonderful news with the community. And also I have to hold that this person's in terrible grief. And sometimes, you know, it's just takes one thing to trigger, like, your, you know, your fight or flight response. And I don't want him to leave and feel like I just can't show up in my time of pain because there's too much joy here. And I'm really wrestling with it. And I finally decide I'm just going to announce it. I can't let this moment go. And so with great, like, you know, angst, I say, Dan and Rachel just got engaged and the community just goes crazy. And everyone's dancing, you know, a lot of 29 year olds, you know, like, everybody's so excited. I think I was 32 when this happened, so. So everyone's running over and dancing around this couple, and they're holding a tallit, you know, prayer shawl over their head like a chuppah, like a wedding canopy. Dancing, dancing. And I can't breathe because I'm looking at the doorway and Dodie's gone. And I just feel like I sent him running. And he will never come back to, you know, to Jewish community. He will never. So I feel terrible. And then. And then a moment later, see that actually he hadn't left, but he was halfway in the middle of the room. And then a moment later, he escaped, standing underneath this tallied. And he's holding one of the corners, and his feet are off the ground, and he's dancing with this couple. And I'm just totally stunned by it. So services ended. I went over to him by the cookies afterwards, and I'm like, dodie, I know what's going on in your life right now. I can't believe you were dancing with this couple. And he said, sharon, they have what I want everybody to have in the world. Like, I'm not going to let them dance alone. And I just couldn't believe that he had the wherewithal, even in that moment of great pain, to say, I need to experience joy, too, and I want to celebrate the beauty of love fulfilled, even though I'm at a moment where I'm realizing that I don't have that. But that is what I want one day. And what does it mean to show up for somebody even when you yourself are, you know, are breaking or even broken? It was an incredibly powerful lesson for me about the power of presence and how we can show up for each other even when our own hearts are broken. What's the other story that you asked me to share? One other one. Do you remember?
- [16:24]
A
Yeah. The other one is about the asking permission to dance. The grieving woman.
- [16:29]
B
So this appears in a different chapter of the book, but it's a brand new rabbi. And I was at Benetrin in New York City. Some of you probably know this community. And it's Friday night, and there's. I mean, this was the 90s. There was like, crazy. I know it was actually 2001, right. Right after my ordination. And there's circles of people dancing and dancing and dancing around the. You know, around the room. And a woman comes up to me and says, rabbi, I don't know what to do. My mother died this week. But I really, really feel moved to dance. Am I allowed to dance? And I was a brand new baby rabbi. And I start to run the halachic calculations, the Jewish legal calculations in my head. I'm thinking, okay, first of all, you're a mourner, and so you shouldn't even be in the room right now for this prayer. There's a time when the mourners come into the room, and it's right after this prayer because the rabbis were sort of struggling with the spiritual dissonance between so much joy and so much grief. On the other hand, you're already here, and it would be cruel to make you leave. On the other hand, you're still in Shiva. She was in the first week after her mother died. And so she really shouldn't be dancing. But on the other hand, Shiva is suspended on Shabbat. And so I'm running these calculations like a good rabbinical student, and I. I'm stuck because I don't know if she can dance or not. And, you know, I finally said, you know, the only reasonable thing I could say, which was, I don't know. You should go ask the senior rabbi. And so she walks away from me, and she goes over to him. And I have to say, I couldn't hear what they were saying because everybody's dancing and there's all kinds of music in the room. But I see her saying to him. She's talking to him like this, and then he just takes his arms and with his giant tallit, just wraps her up in this big hug, and she just starts bawling. And I realized that she came to me asking a legal question, but she did not want a legal answer. She just wanted to have somebody accompany her in her grief. She just needed somebody to let her cry. And we're so oriented away from sacred accompaniment that I literally was trained to be a rabbi, to pastor people through these moments. And my training led me to a. To a halachic answer, to a legal answer, as if it were truly a legal question, when really what she needed was someone to say, I'm so sorry about the death of your mother. What was her name? Tell me about her. You know, like, let's talk after services. I want to hear more about her. And so I, like, this was. These were some important lessons for me about the power of our actual presence. About, as I say in the book, bearing withness, which is not a phrase that I made up, but something that a friend of mine who's. Whose son. Some of you know, Charlie. But Charlie was this beautiful, amazing, wondrous human in our community who, when he was 20, was on a skiing trip with his family, and he. And he died in a freak accident. And it was like in an instant, this beautiful, amazing kid was just gone from the world. And. And so his father said to me, you know, in the year of grieving, kind of as we would connect, and he was reflecting on the grief, and he said, the problem is all these people, all my friends, like, they're coming to me and trying to pull me out of my grief and cheer me up and make me feel better. But I actually. I need to grieve. I want to be in the grief, because the grief is really an expression of our love. The grief isn't something to avoid it's something to, it's something to move through and with. And so he said, well I don't want them to pull me out. I just want them to be with me in the darkness. And we started talking about this idea of bearing withness, of what it means to just sit in the discomfort with another person and how oriented we are away from that. We want to fix the problem, but most of us are not car mechanics who can actually fix our problems like we are friends and we can't fix people. We can just sit with them as long as they need to so that they're not alone as they actually go to the depths of the pain. And that's been a really important lesson for me as a rabbi, but I think it's really an important lesson also as a daughter, as a mother, like just not fixing my kids problems but sitting with them as they figure it out and learning how to be okay with not being okay. It's again very counter instinctual but I think really, really important. And a few people have told me since they read the book, said God, I really thought that being a good friend meant fixing our friends problems. And one of the mothers in the book, a bereaved mother said literally after her kid died, her friend wrote to her saying what you need is to cheer up. And she's like I don't need to cheer up, what I need is to grieve. And so I keep hearing these messages again and again and again from bereaved people. What we need is to be validated in our grief and to be accompanied in our grief and not to be pulled out of it.
- [21:42]
A
Yeah, I am as a husband and a father of two daughters, I am desperately trying to learn not to try and just always go to fixing the problem. That's one of the lessons that I think is critical to take and we do so often. I think that term bearing withness is such an extraordinary term and so helpful. But the I want to talk shift a bit. One thing that I thought was really interesting as well, and you talked about this in this, in your sermon, is that in this community, you know, the goal isn't to just have an echo chamber of people all from the same place and a bunch of people from, you know, Jewish people or Democrats or Republicans, obviously, you know, because of where we live and our community, that is a large percentage of it. But I think the concept that you talked about, you know, conceptually just the, even the name of the book, the Amen Effect and the term Amen. But one other thing I Noticed on the second time reading it was a quote that you referenced from Rabbi Heschel. We actually had Deborah Heschel, his daughter Susanna. Susanna, yeah. And he had this quote talking about religion today. Today, but religion just in general. And what the quote was, religion declined, not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, and insipid. And what young people need, he wrote, is not religious tranquilizers, but religion as diversion, religion as entertainment, but spiritual audacity, intellectual guts, the power of defiance. And I resonated deeply with that call. And this relates more to why e car was started. But I think this. It's. I'd be curious to hear you talk just about the aim, the Amen effect overall and how, you know, religion, you know, is playing. How you see it playing a role today and both within grief and also just in life as well now.
- [23:37]
B
Yeah, I mean, the first thing is that I don't. I mean, I think that the function of religion is not to make us comfortable. I mean, religion over the course of it especially, you know, I can speak to the synagogue experience in the course of the 20th century. It really became a bit of a tranquilizer, as Heschel writes. And I'm so moved by his analysis of what was broken in the synagogue. You know, Heschel wrote that the synagogue is the. Is the graveyard where prayer is buried. Right. That is so damning. That's so damning. And there's a reason why, you know, so. So many Jews feel. Have felt so like, spiritually hungry and not fed in those conventional institutional environments. And so it doesn't mean that they. That we can't be. It just means that we have to actually question what is our work here. And when I. When I first met my. The people who had become my partners in building Ikar, I. You know, I. They told me, Melissa and Adam, we were in their house. It was a small group of founders, and they basically said, you know, go home and write everything that you dream to be possible in the Jewish community, and let's see if we can build it together. And I sat down and I wrote what eventually became a TED Talk many years later. But I said, on one hand, religion in the public space today is defined increasingly by intolerance, cruelty, exclusivity, and even violent religious extremism. On the other hand, at precisely the moment that faith communities need to be providing a counter testimony to that kind of toxic religiosity that is so certain and is actually manifesting in real cruelty toward real human beings instead, our Religious institutions have essentially become, you know, defunct. They're lifeless, they're perfunctory, they're uninteresting. They don't want to take risks because they don't want to lose members, and they certainly don't want to lose donors. And so when you, like, take Heschel's critique written in the, you know, early 70s, I think he wrote those words in, like, 1971 or maybe even before. So. So what he's saying is don't take the safe road. These faith traditions did not survive, and Judaism did not survive for thousands of years so that you could not offend anyone. Judaism survives and Torah survived so that we could have a moral compass to guide us through the most challenging and painful moral questions of our time, so that we could be bold and imaginative and creative. And at some point, it became about the preservation of the institution, which was really just a container to hold this sort of sacred, mystical reality inside. And I was very moved in my. The early days of my rabbinate, I still am, by the work of David Steindl Rost, who's a Benedictine monk. Some of you might know his work. He's incredible as a spiritual teacher. And he says that when that. That religion, all religions, began with some kind of profound mystical revelation, it's equivalent to an erupting volcano. It's fire, it's fervor, it's fierce. And then the lava descends down the side of the mountain, and at some point, it settles at the base of the mountain. And then some years pass, maybe a couple hundred years, and anybody who's walking by now just sees cold, dead rock, and they have no idea what the fire was at the heart of this. Of this whole mountain. And so he says, like the work of any faith practitioner today, is to do the work of sacred excavation, to chip away at the cold, dead rock and find the fire within. And so we built the community to really say, can there be a fiery expression of faith that doesn't lead to people killing other people in the name of God? You know, and to people, you know, going into abortion clinics and shooting people? Like, is it possible that we can believe fervently in a tradition that calls us to see one another as images of God? And that means actually fight for each other's dignity. And that means build a society that would be a counter testimony to the oppression of the. Of the worst experiences of our own history and our own past. And so that was the goal of the community. Like, let's. Let's build that reality. I believe that we can reclaim those voices. And also there should be scotch and there should be great coffee, and there should be, you know, good, like, really good food and that. Like, we can build a place where people can actually dance and actually cry together. And that will be the deepest expression of our, you know, of what. Of what faith might look like in this time. So that. I mean, that was my response to Heschel's critique. Heschel died the year that I was born. And I felt. I feel in many ways, and I've talked to Susanna about this, who's a brilliant professor at Dartmouth, who, by the way, I think, saved Dartmouth's campus. And she is really one of the reasons that Dartmouth did not implode last semester like so many other campuses did, which we can talk more about if you'd like. But what was Heschel actually calling us? To dream is possible in our faith spaces, both morally and spiritually. And could we actually be brave enough to imagine and then try to build those spaces?
- [29:07]
A
Yeah, I. It's, you know, it's interesting in preparing for the zoom, how the news cycle works. Right. We even talked a bit about a couple of topics, you know, thinking of the college campuses, you know, is all we were talking about. We haven't. We haven't talked about that for a bit. I think it would be worth. Worth having diving into that for a bit. Yeah. I mean, I guess I don't have a direct question, but, I mean, you know, what's your. What comes to mind for you as we think about the college campuses?
- [29:37]
B
Yeah. So, Jamie, can I take. I want to take a step back, if it's okay, and sort of share the kind of central paradigm of the book, because I think it will be helpful for us in talking about the campuses, too. So the. The book. There's one central image that I track throughout the eight chapters of the book, and it's rooted in this ancient ritual. And forgive me, Dana Klein, who's heard me talk about. About this, you know, Now I think 12 times and others. But. So this is a central image that comes. It's a ritual that used to take place in ancient days in Jerusalem, when on pilgrimage days, when people, Jews used to come from across the land, and the Diaspora, they would ascend to Jerusalem. They would ascend. Jerusalem is a city on a hill. They would ascend the steps of the Temple Mount, which was the most sacred space and the most sacred city. They would enter this grand arched entryway. They would turn to the right and en masse, really, hundreds of thousands of people at Once they would circle around the perimeter of that courtyard of the Temple Mount, and then they would exit, essentially right where they had entered. So. And I always think about Mecca and the Hajj when I'm imagining this. Like, just what it means to have so many people moving together in this kind of collective mass of humanity in shared, sacred purpose. Except the text says for somebody who was brokenhearted. And that person would ascend to Jerusalem, ascend the steps, enter the same entryway, but they would turn to the left, and every person who's coming from the other direction would see this person walking against the current. The way that we do when our hearts are broken and it feels like the whole world is moving in one direction and we're moving in another. And the people who are going this way would have to stop and ask this really simple question. They would say, malach in which means, what happened to you? What's your story? What does it look like from your vantage point? And this person would answer, saying, I'm a mourner. I just. My husband just died. Or, my best friend is losing her battle right now with cancer. Or I'm worried sick about my kid. Or, I'm just so lonely, and I feel like if I disappeared tomorrow, literally nobody would even know. And then the people who are coming in the direction of those who are okay in this moment would look into their eyes and offer them a blessing. They would say, may the one who dwells in this place bring you comfort. May you find yourself surrounded by love as you navigate this terrain of grief. Whatever the blessing is, that's in their heart. And I encountered this ancient ritual. It's a very terse little text. And I realized, looking at this, that what's so powerful about it is that it really counters the instinct of every party involved. The person who's not okay does not even want to get out of bed, let alone show up in this place that is full of people and be vulnerable. And yet, part of what the ritual is saying to us is that we need community. We can't navigate grief alone, and we're not expected to. And we need at some point to trust that we will be held with love and care by some kind of community of concern, whether that's your, you know, your synagogue or your church or your mosque, if you're lucky, and you have that. But also, maybe it's your three best friends, or maybe it's your one best friend. But we have to be able to trust that somebody will hold us in our darkest moments, and they'll hold Us with care. And the people who are going the other way, who are in this peak spiritual moment of their lives, and the last thing they want to do is kind of pull over to the side and have a one on one with a brokenhearted person who's coming toward them is actually do that work and say, hey, you look like you're not okay right now. Do you want to tell me what's going on with your heart? And then it's not the priests, the Kohanim, it's not the rabbis who give the blessings, it's not the psychologists who give the blessings. It's the people. It's every single person. And how many of us feel that we have in us the power to actually give blessings to each other and to say, you know, I can see that you're in immense pain. May you move through this pain knowing that you are loved. We all have access to those words, but we don't think we can do it. And by the way, when somebody does it for us, we. I feel it. I have felt the power of what it means to be blessed by somebody because they just can see the pain in me and they know that I also need to be held. And so this is a very powerful call to presence, to compassionate presence with one another and to not pulling away from the person who's struggling. Because divorce is actually not contagious, because cancer is not contagious, because brokenheartedness is not contagious. And so we pull away from each other because we don't want to like catch the divorce. But actually we need to step closer to each other when we're brokenhearted. That we all need that. The brokenhearted need it and the community needs it now to get to the college campus. I reveal not to give it all away, but in the eighth chapter, the first seven chapters are really looking at that dynamic interpersonally. And in the eighth chapter I reveal that in this very terse Mishnah, this ancient text that talks about the ritual, it's not only the brokenhearted that walk to the left when everyone else is walking to the right. It's also the ostracized. Someone who's been ostracized from community because they have committed in word or indeed a very grave act that's caused harm to people in that community. And it's something that was not taken lightly. It's a very serious and severe and rare punishment that would come upon someone. Those people also go up to Jerusalem, they also go up the steps, they also turn to the left and they are Also seen, and it's an. The punishment of ostracized is someone who you're not even because of the harm that they've caused. You're not even supposed to be within six feet of them. You don't invite them for dinner, you don't invite them to come join your, you know, your minion or your prayer quorum. You, you really disengage from these folks. But still they're in the same room and you see them and you ask them. And when you hear that they're walking to the left because they too are broken because they have been ostracized and that ostracization is breaking their hearts, you also give them a blessing. May you one day be embraced again by community, or may your heart change so that you can one day take responsibility for the pain that you've caused. But they're given a blessing. And I, this has been my. The reason I say that this has become my North Star is because it's not only reminding me that when we wake up every single morning these days and read the news, which is like just a devastating experience, I think for, certainly for me and I think for many of us, and we feel so powerless. We're not powerless because we still can turn to the, those who are more brokenhearted than us walking in the other direction and give them love, bring them a lasagna, go to their shiva house of mourning, make a phone call to someone you know and just check in. But also because we are being called by a 2000 year old ritual also to see the people who we would not naturally empathize with because they are coming from the opposite direction than we are. And maybe we've even been hurt by what they have to say about the moment that we're living through. And the last thing in the world we want to do is see them in their humanity. And yet that's exactly what we have to do, is see them as a person who is also experiencing grave sorrow right now. And meet sorrow with sorrow and meet vulnerability with vulnerability, and meet humanity with humanity. Which is just, I think, the most important response to this terrible moment that we're living in. Because the only alternative is just to continue to dehumanize each other until there's no humanity left. And I just am not gonna, I'm not gonna abide that. I'm not gonna be party to that. And so what we're actually, what we're being invited to do gently and lovingly, but also firmly is even in our pain, lift our gaze to actually see the human beings who are coming in the opposite direction and get proximate to them too. Because as much as we're hurting, they're also hurting. And as much as we are human beings who are full of sorrow, so are they.
- [37:54]
A
I am. Well, now you have to clear your afternoon because I have about a thousand follow up questions to that, what you just said. And we're not going to get deep into the college concept, by the way, because I have too many things to talk about. We have 20 minutes left. But I want to say, I want to confess, you did this at Shabbat recently and I failed beyond miserably in the sense of when we all walked in one direction and the people who are grieving and walked the other direction. And I profess this concept of how, you know, we need to live and we need to be uncomfortable to sort of live our kind of greatest, our greatest potential. And I did everything I could to be comfortable at that moment. I put my eyes down, I averted the glare gaze of anybody walking in the other direction. I mean, I really failed. And part of the reason, and this is not a concept of kind of pushing back, but you know, you feel like you're intruding, right? You feel like, you know, obviously someone's walking in that direction because they want to be asked something and you just don't know what to say. You don't. And there's something you address in the book, which is a topic I don't want to get into this idea of people saying there are no words in moments like this. And you reference a story where the father says, you know, find the words, there are words. But how do you, you know, how do you know what, how can you even imagine what that person is, wants to hear, is expecting to hear or just get put yourself in that uncomfortable place to be able to ask that question.
- [39:31]
B
So first of all, thank you for, you know, saying it out loud, that it was uncomfortable for you. And I was Talking to my 20 something year old nephew who was also there that night. So we did a book launch and a few of you were there. Thank you for coming. Addie Carr. And in the community where this idea was really born and for the first time ever, I asked people to actually engage in the ritual. And I said, anyone who feels like you're, you're kind of okay right now, I just want to invite you to go and turn to the right and circle in this direction. And I am a mourner. My father died just before Rosh Hashanah. This Year. And so I'm going to be walking to the left, and I want to invite anybody who's really not okay right now to just walk to the left. And our promise to each other is that nobody who's walking to the left is going to walk out of this room today without having been seen by at least someone. Now, part of the awkwardness, Jamie, that you felt is that the space was hard. And so it made it so there was basically a one on one interaction, which it should have been. Next time when you all come and we do it again, I'll do it a little bit differently. But I think that what you're responding to is it is uncomfortable because our instinct is to pull away from each other. And we don't want to look at each other's pain and we don't want to be like, we don't. We feel like we're going to say the wrong words. We feel like we're going to insult someone, we're going to compound their grief, or it feels like an invasion of privacy, et cetera, et cetera. But the fact is we need each other. We need each other. And so what the ritual is doing is it's saying, just show up and take the guessing out of it and we'll figure out how to walk through this encounter together. Which is what my nephew ultimately concluded. He said, God, I felt so uncomfortable when you had us do this circling. And he said, and I'm so glad I did it, because in life we just avoid experiences that make us feel uncomfortable and yet we know we're all breaking, right? I mean, everybody talks about. Everyone talks about how disconnected the atomization in our society, the disconnection, the isolation, the social alienation, the profound impact it's having on us. But then this is an opportunity to respond to it. And it's awkward and so we pull away from it. But actually we have to lean into it. So the idea of the ritual is, let's take the guessing out of it. Say it's your obligation to show up. Like, I don't know if I should go to the funeral or not go to the funeral. The rule is go to the funeral. Just go. You never regret going to the funeral. You never afterwards are like, God, that was a waste of time. Like, hearing my friend or my colleague reflect on the death of their loved one was such a waste of time. Like, no going to the funeral matters. And I can say, and I think everybody here has probably been in some position of loss, where you've been the mourner, the People who show up for us in those moments of heartache and pain, we remember it. We remember who was there when we felt most vulnerable. And we also remember who pulled away from us and who sent a one line email and said like, so sorry for your loss. Right. Like, but we don't. But I mean it actually matters who makes their way toward us and who avoids us. And I'm glad that you felt uncomfortable and thank you for sort of throwing yourself as the sacrificial offering for this, you know, for the sake of this exercise because we have to push through the discomfort. And I also feel uncomfortable when I walk into homes of congregants or when I go to the hospital to visit a congregant who's experiencing something awful. I also feel uncomfortable because I also often feel like there are no words and I don't want to screw this up and maybe you don't actually want me here. And yet our presence fundamentally matters. And so it's about a reorientation. The rule is show up. And actually that night I was in conversation with Michaela Watkins and Mikayla shared a story. I'm imagining some of, you know, Mikayla, but she shared a story about how she had experienced a loss and there was a friend, a well intentioned friend who kind of thought that she knew what Michaela wanted and like pushed her way into Michaela's home and even got in bed with her and was kind of snuggling her and Michaela was staring at the wall going, oh my God, get her out of here. I don't want her. I don't want her here when it, like, when will she feel like she's given me enough that she can go home. Showing up doesn't mean showing up in the way that makes us feel good. It means also being attuned to the mourner or the broken hearted or the ill and paying attention to what they're actually signaling. And I've shared that. You know, one example of that, rather than going and snuggling, someone who doesn't want to be snuggled could be making sure that you call the person once a week, every single week after their loved one dies. As someone in my community I found out years later did after beloved in our community died by suicide and his mother found his body on Friday. And two wonderful people in the community just, it just occurred to them that, oh my God, the next Friday this is going to be like one of those really hard anniversaries. It was one week ago on Friday and so they called her. And then they called her again the next Friday, and then they called her again the next Friday. And sometimes they talk for five minutes, and sometimes they talk for. For an hour. By the time I found out about it, they had been talking every single Friday for three years. And so that was a case of someone showing up in a way that actually honored what the bereaved needed, didn't get, you know, didn't like. You know, you don't necessarily want a foot massage, even if the person who's taking care of you is really good at foot massage. It's like. But you might actually want a phone call because that means that every Friday when you're reaching that hard anniversary, someone out there in the world knows that you're in pain and that your grief is not forgotten.
- [45:17]
A
We're going to bounce around just in the last kind of 15 minutes. You learned firsthand about not showing up. You talk about in the book. Will you recount that story? Not to give. Everybody's. Not everybody has to buy the book when they finish. We can't cover everything, but we're giving away some of the.
- [45:34]
B
There's so many more stories. We'll save the best ones for the.
- [45:37]
A
Yeah, just because I think everybody's. Everybody's felt that. I mean, and just to punctuate you what you just talked about.
- [45:42]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I share. I share in chapter one, a story about my rabbi, Marcelo. And Marcelo is just this deeply beloved rabbi in New York City. And I had already moved to Los Angeles, built a car, had a bunch of little babies at home. Marcelo's mother died. And I honestly, I again ran the calculations in my head and I thought, this poor guy is going to be surrounded, like, bombarded by love. And as I say in the book, I think lasagna and lingering hugs. I mean, the last thing he needs is another person calling him right now or showing up. And so I wrote him a nice note. I hand wrote a letter, and I sent it to him, which I thought was fine, but I didn't call him. And I certainly didn't check in a week later or even a month later. But a few months later, I saw him at a retreat. And he said to me, you know, Sharon, I needed you, and you were not there. He said, next time, show up. And I was so upset. And I had that kind of defensive reaction that we have when people give us that kind of feedback. And I'm like, who are you to tell me? And I'm a young mom and running a community and three babies and breastfeeding and all the things like, how dare you? And then I just shifted and thought, what if this becomes a Torah? That actually changes the way I interact with people. And my assumptions in this case were wrong. I thought he didn't need me in that way, but he did. And so I share in the book that my grandma was the one who taught me this rule. Like, you just go. You just go and show up for the joy. You know, don't skip the wedding. Don't skip the Bat Mitzvah. But I realized. And the reason. The reasoning behind her thinking was it my grandma. Because. Because she would catastrophize and she would say, if, God forbid, the child died and you would show up for the funeral, then you should definitely show up for the Bat Mitzvah. And I was like, grandma, everything's a catastrophe for you. But I realized after this situation with Marcelo that her assumption wasn't right. Like, we don't necessarily show up for the funeral either. And actually we have to show up for both. And so I made my new rule was error on the side of presence. Like, if you're not sure if you should go or not go, just go. You don't regret going. And maybe someone will say, hey, I don't need a snuggle right now. What I need is a weekly phone call, you know, and then you adjust. And in fact, in traditional Jewish practice, mourning practice, the mourners sit in this house of mourning for a week, and then the community comes and totally takes cues. Sometimes the mourner wants to tell stories and show pictures and laugh, and sometimes the mourner wants to weep, and sometimes the mourner just wants to sit in silence. We let the mourner dictate what the house of mourning actually feels like. And we. So part of that is about being present, but also taking our cues from the person who's hurting the most. I also want to add that Jamie mentioned earlier that I referenced a book in my book that I think you should all that. I highly recommend. This book is called Finding the Words by Colin Campbell. And many of you, I think, in this group know Colin and Gail. Gail Lerner. And Colin and Gail had a tragic loss about five years ago now. And he wrote this exquisite book about how we sort of let ourselves off the hook by saying there are no words. And he's like, no, there are words. You just have to find them. And he shares in this most, like, excruciating and powerful retelling this moment, how they're. They were hit by a drunk driver. Driving over 90 miles an hour on their way to Joshua Tree with their kids in the car. And both of their kids were of killed. And that horrible night when they found out that. That actually neither of the kids could be saved. The first thing that happened after that discovery was this doctor in the hospital asked that brought the. The two parents into a room and sat them down and said, tell me about Ruby and Hart. Tell me about them. And he said her asking that in that moment was like a gift and a blessing for them because she cared enough to see them as human beings. She cared enough to see through just this horrific tragedy that like, literally nobody wants to think about, let alone actually get close to in order to give people the kind of love and support that they need. She said, these are also two beings in the world, you know, who really need to be held with love and need to be remembered with love. And so, you know, his advice is, and I've learned this from him, is find the words, don't shy away. Like our instinct, probably every single person's instinct is exactly what Jamie described earlier, like, avert your eyes from this tragedy. But what the family, what the person in grief needs more often than not is for someone to just say, I see you in your pain and I'm not looking away. And that's what that family needed. And that's what I, you know, I know that I have needed in my. In my time of grief as well, and so many other people too.
- [50:57]
A
Yeah, that's obviously one of the most heartbreaking parts of the. Of the. Of the book and that story. Just a couple things before we finish. You know, one thing that's that you reference, but is so important, and you reference it in the story with this ultra Orthodox rabbi in isra and just the concept of staying at the table and not getting up. And I think that's an important just thing I want to talk about before we go. Maybe you could reference that story and. Which I think relates to all of us right now.
- [51:26]
B
Yeah, yeah, sure. So. So this is a wild story. Just before COVID I was invited to a small conference of Jews from Israel and from the Diaspora by the president of Israel at the time, Ruby Rivlin. And he invited us to be in the room together for three days in order to see what, if anything, we held as shared values. And I have to say it was kind of devastating because we, like, really could not find commonalities. And that's hard to think about. But secular and religious, Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, like all different kinds of Jews. What can we hold in common? Anyway, at the end of the conference, he asked three of us to share before the group and before him what our take was on the Jewish people and the state of Israel. And I spoke very bluntly and very carefully. I was asked to represent American Jewry. And so I did. I shared my perspective on what was going on on both what was, you know, I found deeply miraculous about the Jewish story and deeply disconcerting about where we were and where I felt we were heading. And one of the things that I spoke about in that speech was a growing violent religious extremism, a kind of ultra nationalist, messianic turn that I believed was actually endangering not only the future of the state of Israel, but actually endangering the Jewish people. And I was very concerned about it afterwards. One of the participants there was an ultra Orthodox leader of the settler movement. He built a very now well known settlement in the West Bank. And he was really upset and agitated about what I had shared. And he came over to me and he was yelling at me. He was really berating me. And he's screaming that I was lying, that this was propaganda. This tends to happen to me, Jamie. This tends to happen that these were lies, that none of this is true, that there's no such thing as violent religious extremism in the genocide Jewish community, that Muslims have religious extremists, Christians have them, but Jews don't have this. And, you know, same thing, my skin is getting hot and red and I realize like that, you know, this guy and I do not see the world the same way at all. And I want to get defensive. But then he pauses and there's a whole crowd surrounding us witnessing this exchange. And he says, you know, you did just anger me, you hurt me when you said those words. And when he said this, his whole demeanor shifted and so did mine. And I don't know why, but I said to him, do you want to have lunch? And he said, yes. And the two of us went down, you know, to the lobby of the Larome Hotel in Jerusalem, and we sat together for almost three hours. And he was with his wife also. And the three of us talked about how we saw the world, how we understood Torah, how we understood Jewish history, how we understood all of the, like, the nature of, you know, what I was calling violent religious extremism, why he felt that that was a mis, you know, a mischaracterization, et cetera. We talked for almost three hours. We did not agree on anything. I got up from the table at the end of our lunch, and my hands were like this, and I was literally shaking for days afterwards. And I took, like, contemporaneous notes. I mean, I sat down and wrote every single thing down that we had said so that I would remember it precisely. Then I went home. Covid came. We don't talk, you know, again. And then a couple of years go by, and there's this. It's Tisha be of the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, A day of great Jewish, you know, destruction, when our Jewish holy sites were destroyed and many people killed. And now these settlements are busing young people in from these extremist settlements so that they can engage in acts of religious violence against Jews who are praying at the Western Wall, but are doing it in a way that does not conform with Orthodoxy. So men and women praying together, women wearing prayer shawls, etc. And they literally bust these kids in so that they can essentially riot, which will end these, you know, the. The. These prayers, these prayer services happening. And this rabbi stands up and says, what is going on here? He says, this is disgraceful. If these Jews came to this place to pray, the only thing you do is hand them a prayer book. He says, you don't berate them, you don't scream at them, you don't riot. You don't throw things at them. You just support them on their Jewish journey. Then he says, we have a problem with violent religious extremism in our Jewish community, and if we don't stop it, it is going to endanger all of us. People are shocked. How did this happen? He's like the leader of this movement, and then all of a sudden, he's what? He's switching sides. So, okay, the only reason I know about this is because an article is written, or maybe many articles are written, where they're trying to figure out what happened to this rabbi and someone, one of his advisors says, I don't know. All I know is that a couple years ago, he had a lunch with Rabbi Sharon Browse, and maybe that was part of what changed his views. Okay, So I don't know if it was, because I know he also met with a couple of other of my rabbinic colleagues. I know that, you know, this is probably part of a longer process for him, but I got a Google alert saying that I was responsible in some way for this. And. And so the lesson of the story is, what happens if we just stay at the table? If we just say to someone who's berating us and screaming at us, hey, do you want to have a quiet lunch together so I can hear your ideas and you can hear mine? What could be born, what seeds could be planted that could grow into something beautiful if we can actually respond not only from defensiveness and anger, in our own rage and sorrow, but with curiosity and with compassion and see each other's humanity. And I believe that most of the time, we will never see the fruit of that labor, but sometimes we might. And most of the time, it might have no impact at all, but sometimes it might. And isn't that a better way for us to try to live in this very broken world?
- [57:46]
A
Well, thank you for sharing that. I'm going to finish up with one thing first. Everybody on the Zoom needs to buy Sharon's book. Now, I think we're not going to. There's 100 of us on here right now. We're going to put up a poll, and you need to answer, yes, you bought the book. You're going to go right now and buy it. So the link is there. If you don't have. Even if you have the book, I want you to buy a second copy. And I guarantee you this is. This conversation has just been a taste of it. But the final thing I wanted. This is. I mean, there's so many takeaways from this Zoom and Sharon, I just. I thank you for everything you do, and I thank you for staying at the table, which I think we all need to do more on a daily basis and walk towards these uncomfortable conversations as opposed to do what I did and walk away. But one other tangible thing, I think that I would love you to finish because I think it's something we all need to do in our own lives is just. Which is very practical, and I'm sure from some of you more than others. Will you just recount the story of. You're talking to your father about the end of his of the bridge story? Because I just think it's. It's something that is so important and. And I think it is something that all of us need to do in some way, and that will be what takes us out.
- [59:12]
B
Yeah, I thank you. Jamie. I want to say two things. I'll tell you the story about my dad, but I also. And I also just want to say you painted yourself. As I said, you made yourself the sacrificial lamb here for this conversation. But, Jamie, you and I know, and I hope everybody here knows that you and Kelly are not just people who, like, pull away from difficult and painful moments, but really do lean in, especially for friends who are in great need. And it is a remarkable trait of yours and I know very precious and very meaningful in this world. So. So thank you for. Thank you for doing that when it really matters most, and especially when nobody's looking and nobody, you know, and nobody's. It's not like the mic. The mic's not on, but you're doing that with great. With quiet care. And I really, like, pray for. For Kelly to, you know, continue to find strength in light of her own broken heart. Right now, I. The story that I share comes from. I actually shared it on Rosh Hashanah this year in my high holy day. And whoever's doing these chats, you're amazing. So thank you for. Maybe you can find the sermon. It's on the ICAR page, but it was a sermon. I told you. My father died just before Rosh Hashanah. And actually the mourning period was cut short by Rosh Hashanah. And so, you know, I was in grief, personal grief, and then, you know, need to go to the most important, you know, moment of the year and preach for the high holy days. And I did talk about this. A little bit of it is in the book, but the manuscript closed long before my father died. And so what I shared is that there's a great piece in the New Yorker that Atul Gawande wrote many years ago about a palliative care worker named Susan Block. And her job was to have hard conversations with people about their dying and with families about their loved ones dying. And she does that in her day job. And then her father gets very ill and needs to have a very serious brain surgery. And she flies out to see him, and she sits with him, and they have a nice connection, but she doesn't say a word about the fact that tomorrow he's going into surgery and he might actually die. And so she's driving away, and she's driving, you know, back on to the hotel across the Bay Bridge, and then she realizes, oh, my God, I failed to have the most important conversation with one of the most important people in my life. And in one of the most important moments and, you know, I imagine this like, u turn on the Bay Bridge. She basically pulls back to the hospital. She runs up, you know, up to the. To the hospital room, and she says, dad, we like, we both know that you could die tomorrow. So what. What matters most to you? How much or what does living look like for you? How much are you willing to sacrifice in order to have that kind of quality of life? And he basically shares It's. I think it's that he wants to be able to eat ice cream and watch football. And if he can still do that, that's the kind of quality of life he's willing to sacrifice a lot for. She's like, I didn't even know that you liked football. They end up getting ice cream and watching a football game together. And she feels like it's this transformative moment that I. That was for me as a rabbi, something very powerful for me to read about the way that not just Jamie, in this moment on Friday night, that a lot of us kind of pull away from having the hardest conversations when we should lean in, instead, we lean away. I then go on to basically screw this up with my own grandma who was dying. And I was by her bedside and everyone was lying to her. All the careg were like, Mrs. Gordon, you're gonna be fine. And I'm like, she's dying. But I didn't tell her either. I joined the chorus of it's gonna be okay. And so. And I felt like I deprived her the opportunity to face her last few days of life honestly and instead gave her this kind of false hope. So then my father was diagnosed with Parkinson's a couple of years ago and seemed like a fast moving Parkinson's, like right away we could tell. And he was this very strong, independent guy. And I basically said, I'm not screwing this up again. And I sat him down when he still had all of his faculties, and I said, dad, you're okay right now, but we all know where this disease takes people. And I don't know how long we have, but I want to talk to you about this before it's too late. I want to know what matters most to you in this world. And then I will commit to doing everything in my power to helping manifest that for your final years. And I hope it's many years, but, you know, however long we have. And he said two things. He said he wanted to be at home as long as possible, as much as possible. And he wanted to be with my mother. And so we basically reoriented our lives the last several years to make that a reality for him. And I then checked in with him every few months saying, dad, remember we had that hard conversation. I just want to check in and make sure those are two the still the two most important things for you. You want to be at home, you want to be with mom. And that's what he continuously said. And we basically helped usher him to his death knowing that we were honest with him, you know, every moment of the way, about how close he was to the end and about the fact that we were dedicated to honoring what mattered most. And so my sermon, which I think the link is now in the chat, and, you know, you're welcome to listen to it if you're. I think many of us have relationships like this in our lives. And I heard from lots of people after giving that sermon that, you know, because of the sermon, they went and had these hard conversations. But we live in such a death denying culture that it's not just that we turn away from each other in that circle, but it's that we literally don't say to our closest loved ones, you know, I want you. I wish you could live forever, but you're dying. And I want to make sure that I honor you in death as I have tried to honor you in life. Let's talk about what matters most. And so this is my plea for all of us. Like, we can't. Death is part of life. We cannot. We can't outrun death. And so let's honor it and embrace the moments that we have with real love and tenderness and honesty. And that. That's part of the amen effect, too. Like, really saying amen to someone else's fear, to their grave concerns about the end and honoring what their desires are for the way that they want to live out their final days. And also hopefully, you know, being honest with our loved ones about what matters most to us so that they'll do the same for us.
- [65:25]
A
Well, thank you for today. Thank you for everything you do. And for those of you who've never been to an E. Car service and haven't heard Sharon speak, you should check it out or you can look at online through the links. They're always informative and interesting and powerful. And thank you all for being here. I will. We'll see you soon. You'll get an update. Who's next? All right, thanks, Sharon.
- [65:47]
B
Thank you so much. Thanks, everyone.
- [65:49]
A
Bye.