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If you’re stressed, anxious, or depressed, this is your counterintuitive medicine
How optimizing this skill can change your life – and the world.
Rabbi Sharon Brous has some extremely practical tips for how to improve what psychologists call your social health. She is the senior and founding rabbi of IKAR , a Jewish community in LA. Her new book, a bestseller, is called The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World
Search for Meaning with Rabbi Sharon Brous
Rabbi Sharon Brous, Senior Rabbi of Ikar in Los Angeles, joins Rabbi Yoshi for a conversation focusing on her new book, "The Amen Effect." In a time of loneliness and isolation, social rupture and alienation, Rabbi Brous suggest ways that we can mend our broken hearts and rebuild our society.
Rabbi Brous also shares about the ways that she has tried to navigate these challenging months since October 7 all the while mourning her father who died a few weeks before Rosh Hashanah in 2023.
Rabbi Sharon Brous with Jeffrey Goldberg – “Moral Earthquakes and How We Talk about Them”
2024 Sun Valley Writers Conference – Watch Here
At a time when polarization around the world has never been greater, SHARON BROUS, author and leading American rabbi, will talk with JEFFREY GOLDBERG, editor in chief of The Atlantic, about the extraordinary challenges posed at every level of society—social, familial, individual—by the most difficult and intractable moral issues. How do we begin to talk honestly and effectively with each other, for example, about Israel and Gaza? How do we talk about politics and the monumental election facing us a few months from now? Freedom of speech? Religion, race, gender? As the founding rabbi of IKAR in Los Angeles, one of the most diverse, fastest growing and influential Jewish communities in the nation, Rabbi Brous has spent the last 20 years trying to foster conversations and thoughtfulness that can see us through these seemingly impossible times.
The Power of Connection in a Fractured World
Rabbi Sharon Brous on The Next Big Idea Daily podcast.
CNN, Fareed Zakaria, GPS – American Jews reckon with Israel’s war in Gaza
Rabbi Sharon Brous joins Fareed to discuss how Jews in the US are grappling with their Jewish identity amid the war in Gaza and rising antisemitism.
Rabbi Sharon Brous on Judaism Unbound
Rabbi Brous joins Dan and Lex for a conversation about loneliness, the importance of connection, and the power of showing up for one another.
Hope in Troubling Times
Spiritual leaders and lifelong seekers reflect on how to cope and find optimism in dark times.
Rabbi Sharon Brous on Faith Matters
This week, we are honored to share with you a conversation with Rabbi Sharon Brous, author of the The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World. From the moment we started reading Sharon’s book, we knew that she had a special message, and that she would be an incredible guest. Sharon’s book is a beautiful blend of ancient Jewish wisdom, contemporary science, and deep personal experience that shows how humans throughout history have taken up the responsibility to sit with each other as sacred witnesses to life’s most vulnerable and most joyous moments.
Sharon makes the case that when we sit with each other in “celebration, sorrow, and solidarity,” we are connecting in ways that not only forge deep and lasting relationships, but contribute to a larger healing in our communities and in the world. One of the things we loved about Sharon’s book and the conversation with her was that she shared experience from her own life in which she’s succeeded here as well as where she’s failed. None of us do this perfectly, and so often we feel like we don’t even know how to—Sharon was wise and generous in giving herself and all of us grace for now always showing up for people the way we could have, but also practical advice that help us see how we can do this better.
Sharon’s speaking from the perspective of a Jewish Rabbi, but her work reminds us of our own sacred texts and our promises to be willing to “mourn with those that mourn.” We loved that Sharon explained that these principles of connection and solidarity really are universal, and we all get at them in our own languages and through our own rituals and traditions.
This episode cuts straight to the heart of what it feels like to be human; it was impossible for it not to get personal, since we all know grief, joy, and connection intimately. We absolutely loved talking with Sharon and consider this a special episode. We hope that you enjoy it as much as we did!
Awakening to Our Blessings – Rabbi Brous on 33 Voices
Rabbi Sharon Brous was on her way to lead her community, IKAR—a Jewish community she founded 20 years ago with a new vision of how faith can center and connect us—in the sacred ceremony of Tashlikh, when she stopped to buy index cards and sharpies. It was an unexpected stop, given the day’s holiness: Every year between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the two holiest days of the year, the Jewish community visits a body of water to release their sins, or anything they don’t want to carry into the new year, into the water. Still, Rabbi Brous was reflecting on the dying wishes of her dear friend and community member, Erin, and had a question for the community.
During her final days, Erin wrote that each of us has an innate sense of who we’re called to be. Yet, despite that knowing, too often we construct reasons to delay fulfilling our calling. On the brink of her own tragic death, Erin asked—What if we don’t have forever?—and urged her community to live urgently. When Rabbi Brous delivered her message to the IKAR community, overlooking the Pacific Ocean for Tashlikh, she asked: What are you waiting for?
The question—What are you waiting for?—is the through-line of each topic we explore in this rich conversation about her book, The Amen Effect; From getting quiet enough to hear divine wisdom and cultivating our spiritual strength, to accompanying each other through joy and sorrow and, inspired by the Jewish ritual of being thankful for 100 blessings, creating our own system of blessings.
As you settle into this conversation, consider a yearning that exists deep within your heart. What are you waiting for to pursue it? What is one step you might take to move towards it today?
Rabbi Sharon Brous on The Collective Table
This week, join Chelsea and Dana in a conversation with Rabbi Sharon Brous as they discuss her national bestselling book, The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend our Broken Hearts and World. She is the senior and founding rabbi of IKAR, a leading edge Jewish community based in Los Angeles.
Rabbi Brous on Jewish Healing and Humanity Amid Conflict
In our conversation, we delve deep into the heart of Jewish wisdom, exploring how it can serve as a beacon of healing and openness in these times.
The Economy of Empathy
In this bonus episode of Reset the Algorithm, curated in partnership with Mother Tongue Magazine, Moj Mahdara sits down for an emotional and heart-felt conversation with Rabbi Sharon Brous and Patrisse Cullors.
Rabbi Sharon Brous: Building Bridges in a Divided World
In this inspiring episode of Remarkable People, Guy Kawasaki engages in a thought-provoking conversation with Rabbi Sharon Brous, the influential founder of IKAR, a groundbreaking Jewish community in Los Angeles. Together, they explore the power of coming together in difficult times, finding purpose through service, and imagining a future of peace. Rabbi Brous shares wisdom from her new book, The Amen Effect, providing tangible practices to help us stay connected, honor each other’s humanity, and work towards a more just and loving world. Discover how small acts of compassion can create ripples of change and healing in our lives and society.
Guy Kawasaki is on a mission to make you remarkable. His Remarkable People podcast features interviews with remarkable people such as Jane Goodall, Marc Benioff, Woz, Kristi Yamaguchi, and Bob Cialdini. Every episode will make you more remarkable. With his decades of experience in Silicon Valley as a Venture Capitalist and advisor to the top entrepreneurs in the world, Guy’s questions come from a place of curiosity and passion for technology, start-ups, entrepreneurship, and marketing. If you love society and culture, documentaries, and business podcasts, take a second to follow Remarkable People.
Listeners of the Remarkable People podcast will learn from some of the most successful people in the world with practical tips and inspiring stories that will help you be more remarkable
Training Our Hearts in Spaciousness
The free person, awake and humble, can acknowledge the truth that emerges from various even contradictory perspectives.
A Bit of Optimism – We Cannot Heal Alone with Rabbi Sharon Brous – Simon Sinek
Loneliness is now an epidemic, with devastating impacts on our health. How can we rekindle the deep human connection we need now more than ever?
For Rabbi Sharon Brous, this question is the focus of her work. Considered one of the most influential rabbis in the U.S., she’s founded her own congregation and has led multiple White House faith events. In her new book, The Amen Effect, Sharon explores how grief and heartbreak can be gateways to truly seeing each other.
Sharon and I talk about what it means to be present to someone else’s pain and how a 2,000-year old ritual taught her the meaning of healing together.
Rabbi Sharon Brous with JCCSF
The founding rabbi of IKAR and one of our country’s most influential rabbis discusses the spiritual necessity of community and offers a blueprint for a more connected and caring world. In The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World, Rabbi Sharon Brous — named America’s #1 Most Influential Rabbi by Newsweek and The Daily Beast — makes the case that the spiritual work of our time, as instinctual as it is counter-cultural, is to find our way to one another in celebration, in sorrow, and in solidarity. To show up for each other in moments of joy and pain, vulnerability and possibility, to invest in relationships of shared purpose and build communities of care as pathways to a world built on love, rooted in justice, and propelled by our moral imagination.
Rabbi Sharon Brous says community can unlock our humanity
“Take seriously the fact that there’s something in the world that you need to do and then do it now. Don’t wait — we don’t know how long we have.”
Join us for a conversation about how to join or build a community, how to stay centered in your humanity while the world’s turbulence roils around you, and why you should never delay fulfilling your desires.
In this conversation you’ll find:
* Her own spiritual journey,
* How she’s building a community of those who have been disaffected by religious institutions,
* Her take on the ways social media is keeping us apart,
* How her book landed at the perfect moment for the state of the world,
* The ways in which we’re all struggling with loneliness and isolation,
* How the loss of a friend gave her much needed clarity
* What she hopes she’ll leave as her legacy
IKAR’s 5784 Haggadah Supplement
We Know Why This Night is Different. The Question is What to Do About It.
— Rabbi Sharon Brous
At Passover Seder, we retell a story so central to our Jewish tradition that it has informed who we are, and how we live in the world, for literally thousands of years.
Ours is a story of a people that after hundreds of years of harm and humiliation, were ultimately able to walk toward liberation. From degradation to dignity, from darkness to light.
But how are we to approach Seder this year? Many of us come to the table holding grief, anguish, and fear. We are so raw. Words that for decades have given us comfort may tonight strike us as simplistic, cacophonous, or just empty. And for many, the Seder table will situate us in proximity to people we love, but whose perspectives may have created an emotional distance over the past six months that seems impossible to bridge. Every word is a potential landmine. (Oppression… whose oppression? Liberation… from whom? For whom? Justice…? Don’t get me started.)
There’s so much at stake around the table tonight… we may be tempted to skip the conversation altogether and get right to the meal.
And yet this Seder ritual has been at the very heart of our people for generations. And ours is not the first generation to struggle—both within and beyond our Jewish family. So let us begin this evening by affirming that our homes and our hearts are spacious enough to hold all of us—our beauty and our brokenness, our heartache and our hope.
Let us remember, on this holiday of questions, that that our goal is not to change one another—it is to sit together. To get curious about one another, and our shared story. To ask questions of each other, to explore and learn and engage together. To weep, to learn and to grow—in our connec- tion to one another, in our understanding of our Jewish story, in our commitment to building a fair and just and loving world.
We invite you to begin your Seder with the following kavannah:
I come to the table tonight with a grateful, tender, and open heart. I am committed to turning to you, my loved ones, with compassion, curiosity, and care.
In addition to many wonderful supplements written by friends and colleagues to help us navigate Passover this year, we are please to share a few supplementary offerings for your seder that might help spark conversations of meaning. Our hope is that you will find not only inspiration, but con- nection, breath, and hope… for this holiday of Passover is at its heart a ritual transmission of hope, one generation to the next. That is a blessing we cannot afford to sidestep this year.
We bless you with a meaningful and inspiring Passover.
Yahatz: The Fourth Matzah
-Rabbi Deborah Silver
This year, we need a fourth matzah at our Seder.
Before breaking the middle matzah for Yahatz, this year, let us add another matzah to the plate. And then we crumble it, as a tangible reminder of all the brokenness around us this year.
Here is a ritual which can be recited by the Seder leader or passed around the table:
[Lift the fourth matzah]
I lift this matzah, bread of affliction,
to remind us of what is broken in our world.
[Break the matzah in half]
I break this matzah
to remind us of the four corners of the earth where human greed and gratification
have wrought destruction.
[Break the matzah in four]
I break this matzah once more
to remind us of the children whose futures are fractured
and whose eyes are empty of hope.
[Break the matzah again]
I break this matzah in pieces to remind us of the rubble
of lives ruined by war
and hearts broken by hatred.
[Crumble the matzah]
Tonight we relive the story
of our own brokenness and redemption – May it remind us
to work for the redemption of the world.
Two Open Doors
Make Your Seder Transformative, Not P erformative
— Rabbi Sharon Brous
Let’s talk about opening doors.
After dinner and before Hallel, we rise to open the front door of our homes, and we recite: shfokh Hamatkha– Pour out Your fury against the nations who do not know You… Pour out Your wrath on them and may Your blazing anger overtake them.
The message is tough—I’ve always found it dissonant both with the spirit of the celebration, and with my core understanding of our Jewish tradition. Certainly, there are strains of the tradition that lift up a harsh and vengeful God, but that image has never resonated for me. Actually, much of my spiritual and religious
life is a counter-testimony to that rage-fueled reactivity.
But this year, we come to the table shattered. The pain of the past six months—the shock, horror and anguish over the atrocities committed against our family, the sense of abandonment and existential loneliness, the fear of a future uncertain… it’s too much. I met a young woman last month, the same age as my daughter, who survived the massacres of October 7th. I asked her if she had a name of a loved one to share for Mourner’s Kaddish… she said she had forty-two names. Forty-two of her dearest friends died before her eyes. She was lucky to be alive, though she felt anything but lucky. She wept as she spoke to me, her voice quivering but clear. What did she want? She whispered: I want revenge.
Without that tender, devastating encounter, maybe I would approach shfokh Hamatkha this year with the same discomfort and dismissiveness as I have in years past. But this year, I can, a little bit, relate to the vulnerability and desperation that must have led the author of that prayer—back in the 9th century—to write it in the first place. I still don’t share the sentiment, but I do understand it. Maybe you, too, see it differently this year than in years past.
Shfokh Hamatkha is a dark story—a story drenched in pain, and we are living through an era drenched in pain.
Perhaps I’ve been so distracted, in years past, by the dissonance of this prayer that I never realized the deeper problem with this dark story—it’s not just the sacralization of vengeance, the argument for retribution in religious language in the heart of a religious ceremony. It’s the placement of those words, of that fever dream—a prayer for revenge spoken belly-full, couched between words of gratitude and praise.
Here’s the problem. Every Jew in every generation is called to see ourselves as though we, personally, left Mitzrayim, that narrow place, and began the long walk to freedom, to a place of possibility and expansiveness. The Seder is structured to mimic that journey. We traverse sacred time following the trajectory of our ancestors: we begin in degradation, and we end in praise (Mishnah Pesahim 10:4).
Our story moves from pain to promise, not the other way around. In other words: there is no place for a revenge fantasy at the end of our Seder, the celebration of our freedom.
But there is another door opening, one that occurs hours earlier in our Seder, long before we eat, just before we begin telling our story. We rise, this first time with the table set and hearts full of anticipation, to open the front door. But this time we say: kol dikhfin yeitei v’yekhol — All who are hungry, come and eat.
Think of it! Seder is an exercise in memory and spiritual mobility. We taste the maror to remember the bitterness of life under Pharoah; the haroset reminds us both of the bricks and mortar of our enslavement, and the sweet possibility of freedom, even emerging in the depths of our suffering. This story, this journey, is at once collective and deeply personal. Yet we do not begin to tell our story, let alone eat our meal, without recognizing that for others, even in our place and in our time, enslavement is no metaphor or abstraction. And for those who have been blessed to traverse the darkness and make our way toward the light, the only responsible thing, the only human thing to do is open our doors and invite in those who are still now where we once were.
All who are hungry, come and eat! This generous invitation is drawn from the example of Rav Huna, the Rosh Yeshiva of Sura. He was not only learned, but also full of grace. In Masekhet Taanit (20b), we read a series of extraordinary actions Rav Huna was known for in his time, culminating in the practice, before each meal, of opening his door and declaring: let all who are hungry come and eat!
It’s clear in the gemara how extra-ordinary—out of ordinary—Rav Huna’s behavior was. He was a giant of his generation. Even the great Rava admits: he’d never go that far. But when this tradition is incorporated into the Haggadah, it is not only those who are extraordinarily resourced, or extremely righteous or wise who say it, but every single one of us.
Now many commentators go to great length to explain that. Don’t worry! This is not meant to be taken literally—we’re not really inviting hungry people into our homes.
But we must know that there have been times in Jewish history when this directive was taken very seri- ously. Elie Wiesel writes (in his Haggadah) that in his small town, before the war, the Jews used to wander through town searching for strangers—the poor, the uprooted, the unhappy, the hungry—to come and sit at their table as treasured guests. Without them, they could not begin their meals.
This door opening sends a clear message: the great dream of Passover is not individual liberation, but col- lective liberation. Until all of us are free, none of us will truly be free. So all who are hungry, come and eat!
Now what would happen if we were to actually open our doors and bring a hungry person to the table? Or even if we take seriously the call to open our hearts to bring true awareness of the reality of their suffering to the table? Does that not change us? Does it not bring new significance to our own story? Does it not awaken a kind of gratitude for what we have, an awareness of the fragility of it all? A commitment to use our freedom to bring love, comfort, dignity to those who remain in the narrow straits?
This year, this question strikes me as more urgent than in years past.
Even as we sit this year, with our hearts broken, maybe even with empty chairs at the table to symbolically hold our captives, and their dear, shattered families, we cannot ignore another terrible reality: Gaza is on the verge of famine. More than a million people living there are on the brink of starvation, and that is a moral catastrophe.
It’s so hard to open our door to another person—or another people’s—heartache, especially when you, too, are holding fresh sorrow. I wonder how Rav Huna did it. How was he able to put aside his own desires and needs, his own grief, and open his door so graciously, again and again? In Megillah (27b), we are given a hint. This great sage was born into poverty. In fact, he was so poor that he once sold his belt to afford wine for kiddush on shabbat, and was forced to hold his pants up with a rope. I have to believe that
it was because he knew the ache of hunger, the humiliation of hunger, that he cultivated a heart so deeply generous toward others who were hungry.
Is the Seder not designed to do to our hearts precisely what that childhood hunger did to Rav Huna’s? Thir- ty-six times in the Torah we are reminded to treat the stranger fairly, generously, even lovingly… because we were strangers in the land of Egypt. The whole point of the Seder, arguably, is to remind us that we know the heart of the stranger. The stranger’s story is our story—built into the Jewish collective conscious- ness over thousands of years.
Open your doors, the tradition calls out to us. Open your hearts! All who are hungry, come and eat.
The careful construction of the Seder takes us on a narrative journey from narrowness to expansiveness. If we take seriously that first opening, of our doors and our hearts, if we allow the Seder to be not performa- tive but transformative, then by the time we open the door that second time, we will have changed.
What, then, are we to do with the revenge fantasy of shfokh hamatkha—pour out your wrath?
Haggadot today increasingly offer an alternative, in the form of a liturgical piece called shfokh ahavatkha —don’t pour out your rage, pour out your love.
Pour out your love on the nations who have known
You and on the kingdoms who call upon Your name.
For they show loving-kindness to the seed of Jacob
and they shield your people Israel
from those who would devour them.
May they see the good of your chosen ones
and rejoice in the gladness of your nation. (Psalms 106:5)
Some argue this text offers a legitimate alternative, given that it, too, is quite old. It appears, they claim, in a 16th century manuscript from Worms, Germany. But others argue that the poem is actually a forgery, that it was really written only one hundred years ago, by a rabbi who fled Galizia and then Vienna, ultimately escaping the Nazis by coming here, to the United States.
I find the impulse to address the need for another narrative, another end to this story, equally meaning-ful whether it emerged 500 years ago or 100, or even yesterday. This text reminds us that we can, we must choose love.
This year, we must choose to open our doors in righteousness. When we say, all who are hungry, come and eat, let’s mean it. If we do, then by the time we open our doors again, now with bellies full, we will not be able to pour out our wrath, but instead our hearts will be open to the power of love to heal us all.
Maggid/ Avadim Hayyinu: Who Were They and Who Are We?
— Rabbi Hannah Jensen
One of our chief obligations of Passover is to see ourselves as though we were slaves in Egypt. As though we were there. And then we were also part of the Exodus. We made our way toward redemption. We are asked to imagine our ancestors in a way that is visceral in us, not just an abstract understanding of people who came before.
This is an invitation – how did they spend their days? What did they care about? Who were they? What made them laugh the hardest? What made them cry? What difference did they make? Without them – none of us would be here.
And in this connection to our ancestors is an urgent reminder that one day we will be the ancestors. Generations from now people will sit around a table and they will be imagining us. What kind of ancestors will we be? Who will they say we were?
What kind of ancestor do you want to be? What will make you proud? What makes you laugh the hardest? What makes you cry? What does this moment and this Passover story compel you to do or to be?
Start now and imagine where you, and many generations after you, may end up.
The Plague of Disconnection
— Rabbi Sharon Brous, adapted from the Amen Effect
After hundreds of years of enslavement in Egypt, the moment had come for the Israelites to be redeemed, to begin to journey from oppression to liberation, from narrowness to expansiveness. Ten plagues descended upon the land, culminating in the one that ultim¬ately broke Pharaoh’s iron will—the death of the firstborn children. Just before that came the plague of darkness.
Given that the plagues were designed to grow progressively more severe, the choice of darkness as the penultimate plague is perplexing. Darkness can be inconvenient, frightening, even dangerous. But is it really worse than the Nile River—the life force—turning to blood? More unbearable than boils and burning hail? More treacherous than infestations of frogs and lice?
The Bible describes three full days of impenetrable dark¬ness, so thick and dense that “no person could see another, or even rise from their places” (Exodus 10:23). It is this detail that hints at the real terror of the ninth plague. More than physical discomfort, it brought spiritual anguish. “The deep¬est darkness,” wrote one nineteenth-century Polish rabbi, “is when one cannot even see his neighbor, and therefore can’t join him in his suffering and pain. Once a person no longer feels his neighbor’s pain, it renders him completely impotent.” When we are unable to support each other in our suffering, our lives are stripped of meaning. Surely, that is among the most devastating of plagues: the terror of total disconnection.
Years ago, I called a member of our community just to check in and see how she was holding up. She told me that she feared that if she were to disappear tomorrow no one in this world would even notice.
I’d heard this line of thinking a few times before. One woman once described her post-divorce reality, alienated and estranged from her community, her friends, even her children: “It’s like I vanished, but so quietly I didn’t even get a eulogy.”
Some people’s loneliness is situational, the product of a personal crisis. For others, it’s triggered by a global and existential event—the pandemic. War. Climate catastrophe. One thing is clear: loneliness and social disconnection are now dangerous and prevalent enough to be considered a public health crisis. We now know that loneliness doesn’t only break our hearts— it jeopardizes our cognitive, emotional, spiritual, and even physical health.
And pervasive loneliness doesn’t only hurt us individually, but it threatens our society. The great 20th century political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, warned that widespread social alien-ation is a precondition for the flourishing of violent political extremism:
Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other . . . therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical governments is to bring this isolation about. Isolation …is [terror’s] most fertile ground.
For Arendt, isolation is impotence. The more limited our meaningful contact with each another, the harder it is to act together toward the common good, let alone to respond effectively to the grave dangers we face. And worse, people who don’t know each other are more likely to demonize and even dehumanize one other. Alone and apart, we are vulnerable, and we are powerless.
Fortunately, there is something that we can do about it.
The antidote to social alienation is togetherness. We are—biologically and spiritually—relational beings. We now know that seeing one another and being seen by each other enhances our emotional health and deepens our sense of connectedness. This doesn’t only help us as individuals—it alters the physical and psychological landscape of a community and even a society. It lays the groundwork for a kind of scaled molecular remodeling, with the potential of nothing less than the mending of the connective tissue of our society.
This matters profoundly, especially in this time of so much fear and anguish, when so many of us feel like we are drowning in a sea of sorrow and helplessness.
The thing is: we are not powerless. We may feel like we’re living through the plague of darkness, but as Viktor Frankl reminded us: even in the cruelest and narrowest of circumstances, human beings do have a choice of action. We can, he wrote, preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress… There are always choices to make.
The choice that I hope we’ll make today is to find our way to one another. To see one another. In our pain and in our fear, in our joy and in our yearning. In our humanity. This is what I call the amen effect—a kind of spiritual rewiring that trains our hearts to recognize that we’re all bound up in one another. That we cannot make the darkness go away, but we can assure one another that we’re not alone as we navigate life’s greatest challenges. Showing up for one another with compassion and curiosity not only helps us endure times of great challenge, but may be the only way we can begin, in our time, to journey toward collective liberation.
Hallel: Putting It Into Words
— Hazzan Hillel Tigay
Victor Hugo said: “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and cannot remain silent.”
Hallel is typically the most spirited musical segment of the Jewish holiday liturgy. It is comprised of a series of Psalms, which were originally composed not as poems, but as songs. These Psalms were part of the Temple prayer service, and meant to be put to music.
Just as the Mourner’s Kaddish is, counterintuitively, a prayer of divine affirmation and gratitude recited when we are at a spiritual low, after the death of a loved one, so too Hallel—words of gratitude and praise—are still sung even in times like ours, when we are challenged in body and soul. Our tradition calls us to focus on gratitude, to muster hope for peace and redemption. It strikes me as particularly resonant that we are invited into grateful song even as we face profound moral dilemmas and challenges. We are reminded that our people have endured—and overcome—great challenges for centuries.
So sing like your life depends on it, because some of what’s on our hearts cannot be put into words, and even still, we cannot remain silent.
IKAR’s Conversation with Elise Loehnen
Stay after Kabbalat Shabbat services for dinner and a book discussion with Rabbi Sharon Brous and Elise Loehnen on her book On Our Best Behavior The Seven Deady Sins and The Price Women Pay To Be Good.
An Evening with Author & Rabbi Sharon Brous – St. Luke’s Atlanta
St. Luke's Atlanta
The Temple
Ebenezer Baptist Church
Charis Books & More
Sherman Minkoff Memorial Lecture: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World – Valley Beit Midrash
A hybrid event (in-person and virtual) by Rabbi Sharon Brous
The event was co-hosted by Temple Solel
About the Event: The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World, makes the case that in an era of loneliness, social alienation, and ideological extremism, our deepest spiritual work is finding our way to one other—in celebration, sorrow, and solidarity. Relationships of care and curiosity, Brous argues, are essential to both personal healing and social change. This is how we reawaken our humanity.
The event was presented in loving memory of Dr. Sherman Minkoff
A Conversation with Rabbi Sharon Brous: Losses of a Parent, Love, and Overall Loss – Valley Beit Midrash
Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yankolwiz converses with Rabbi Sharon Brous, founding and Senior Rabbi of IKAR.