Victims, Heroes & Learners with Rabbi Sharon Brous

And Margarita is I mean, yeah, I'm just like, oh, I need food, and then I'm like, here's a protein.

two as they say in Canada. And so those are the two probably coldest cities I will have been too.

get on the mounta until twelve. Then I went to the Umbrella Bar and then I was there till one thirty and then we went skiing and there was just everyone was skiing out, and so we decided to go back to the Umbrella Bar and wait for everyone to ski out. And then I had to pick up my daughter at four, so I have to well she's actually my son, but we call her my she's a girl,

but we call her my son. And so I had to go pick her up and bring her to a super Bowl party because there was going to be a cutie piet to super Bowl party that she wanted to meet, so obviously that's a priority.

and how amazing she is. So I thought, okay, let's have her on. And she wrote this beautiful book that I just read. You read it. It's gorgeous, right, like, I love the way she wrote. I'm writing a lot about that stuff in my book. So it was very resonated. It's called the Amen Effect. It's ancient wisdom to mend our broken hearts and world. So please welcome Rabbi Sharon Brouse. Hello, good morning, Hi, Thank you so much for joining us today.

constant theme of connectivity and showing up. I mean, there's a lot of ways to show up for people, but just the act of showing up itself and what that can do, how that can help a person who is dying, or is grieving, or is just in any sort of emotional trouble or trauma. So tell me, like, is this something that you've obviously learned throughout your rabbinical training and practicing and being a rabbi, But is this something that comes naturally to you?

and even in sometimes unhelpful ways. I think so, But I think the idea of moving toward pain instead of running away from it is for many of us as counterinstinctual, and even for people like me who feel pain deeply, we often pull away from folks who are struggling and

suffering because for lots of good reasons. I mean, we're afraid that we're going to say the wrong thing, we think that we'll be a burden, and they don't actually want us or need us there, Chelsea, I think we think that people's pain is contagious, and if we get too close to someone suffering, it forces us to think about how vulnerable we are, and that's really hard for

people to come to terms with. And so what ends up happening is that we really retreat from each other, precisely in the moment that we need each other the most, both that the person who's suffering needs to be connected and also that the people who are doing okay really need to be of service, but instead pull away from those kind of really deep and meaningful encounters. And it hurts all of us.

consumed and everyone's reaching out to her. And it's like, you shouldn't even be thinking about any of that. That's not your you know what I mean. That's it's so important to like register that you're available for that person who's going through something. In my opinion, I mean, that's the thing I'm best at, is showing up in times of turmoil when other people want to look away. That is the strength of mind. And I take a lot of pride in it because a lot of people think

it can be meddlesome. And it's like, well, it's not meddlesome when you really care about somebody and you're just they're giving yourself and so like I'm trying to squeeze them for details and information, it's actually being available, being there and sitting next to somebody and the withness that you talk about in your book is so important for the human spirit.

this is what you need. And so I think our responsibility is to try to be attuned to what the other person needs, but to err on the side of presence, to err on the side of presence. And I write in the book about you know, one of the ways that I learned this was because my beloved Rabbi Marcello, who's so dear to so many people, his mother died and I literally remember thinking the same thing that your

friend thought. I thought, he is just burdened right now by all the love and all the lasagna and all the lingering hugs, And so I just wrote him a little note, but I did not fly in for the funeral. I didn't call, and afterwards he said to me. A few months later, when I saw him, he said, you really failed me. He said I needed you and you weren't here for me. And when I heard I felt so defensive. And I had all these great reasons why

I think. I had little kids, I had a community, I had work, you know, and I finally realized this was a gift. He was saying to me, like, don't

assume that you know that I don't need you. Just be there, and so we can be there in a way that actually speaks to the needs of the person who were going to a kind of like light touch presence that lets people know that we love them and that they're not navigating these moments of real hardship alone, but that we will be here and will be here with relentless love and presence in a way that actually suits the needs of the person who's going through this time of suffering.

that you can do better. That that's actually a gift of real love, which which connects to something that I speak about in chapter two about the idea that I mean the first person was created alone, and it's the first thing in the Hebrew Bible and the terror that God says is not good that you know every day at the end of at the end of every day, it's good, it's good, it's good, it's really good. And then it says it's not good for a person to be alone, which doesn't mean that a person should be

married or should be partner. It means that we shouldn't be fundamentally alone in the world. That we should have someone who we can let in, who can see us, and who we can see. And that could be a sister or a friend, or a therapist or an aunt, a grandma. I mean, it could be just somebody who

we allow to see. But the language that the text us is to see us by being opposite us, which might mean to see our beauty, but also to see our brokenness, our bruises, our failures, our flaws, and not to run away from us when they encounter those things, but instead to say, you know, hey, I really needed more from you than you were able to give me. That that could be an incredible gesture of love because it helps us grow. Those kind of relationships are the ones we grow from.

She's gonna be like, were you talking about me? Yes? Yeah, talk about the story about together, separateness aloneess, because in your book you talk about Adam and Eve and what it's in the Tora about that. Talk a little bit about that. I had never read that before.

And as the sun is coming down, Adam, the first person, just starts freaking out and he does what we do when we encounter darkness for the first time. He starts catastrophizing, right, and he thinks, oh my god, it's not just darkness, it's the end of the world. And he does what we do when we see darkness, which is he blames himself for it, and he thinks, what did I do to deserve this? And maybe I did something wrong, and maybe this is all my fault, and now everything's lost.

And the story says that Eve heard him weeping and wailing and crying as the night descended, and she just went and she sat right across from him, and she just wept with him and held him all night and until the dawn came. And I think that the story asks, it challenges us to ask this question of ourselves, like who will be with you through the dark night of

the soul? Because everybody has these dark nights? And will we let somebody into the intimacy of that heartache in order to just be with us, not to fix us, not to try to say, Adam, don't worry the sun's going to come up in the morning, because she didn't know that either, but just to sit with us and weep with us through the dark night, because often there is joy does come in the morning, right, I mean, there often is a morning. There's not always a new

dawn that comes. As I also speak about later in the book that after some kinds of losses and some kinds of struggles. There isn't some bright new day that now we can start again, and then our challenge is to find the blessing even in the dark night. But very often there is a new dawn that emerges, but the fact of the new dawn doesn't make it any easier to make it through the long night. The presence of another person who just loves you and cares about

you is what helps us. And by the way, to contrast with the friend who climbs into bed and cuddles when the last thing you want is to be cuddled by somebody. If you're a person who wants to experience your grief differently than that, maybe you don't want a foot massage. Maybe you just want to, you know, like you just want to.

the It was just a terrible, terrible loss. I write about him a little bit in the book. He was a healer, and I think he took a lot of the pain of his patients in the world into his body and it just kind of metastasized inside his body. But I found out years later that a couple in

my community knew about the loss. They weren't very close with either the person who died or his family, but they called the mother the following week on Friday because they just assumed, like, this is going to be really hard. Fridays are going to be really hard for her. And then they called again the next Friday, and then the next Friday, and they literally called her every single Friday for three years, and now it's been almost six years.

And they called every single week, just sometimes for five minutes, sometimes for half an hour. They connected because they wanted her to know that they were not going to abandon her, that they knew that this was a hard time. And so that's the kind of sort of relentless love in showing up that doesn't actually intrude on someone's privacy and doesn't make it about your need as the caregiver rather than the person's need as the recipient of the care.

But it's just a gesture of love to say, like, I haven't forgotten that your son died, and I know that you're thinking about it every day. I'm also thinking about it. I'm right here with you with love, and I think we can give each other those gifts of love much more than we do, and much more than we think we can.

to what you're describing. I think, because all of us have this like reservoir of strength, right and when we lose something, or we're losing something, you know, we can all handle it. In different ways. But we can also always surprise ourselves and each other in the way in which we do handle things, and that you can like muster up the courage and the strength to charge forward just when you think you don't have another step.

and imagine a different kind of future. I mean, she's writing poetry about sitting with her with a Palestinian woman, both of them elderly, wrinkles on their face from laughing so much together, and you know, their teeth brown from all the tea that they drank together, watching their sons and their grandchildren playing together. Like she she's calling us to imagine a different in the future, even as she's

grappling with the most unimaginably painful reality. And that's pretty extraordinary and one of the things that that makes me think of when is that one of the reasons that people stay away from the pain is because they say

they don't want to trigger the bereaved. They don't want to trigger the person who's experiencing laws because maybe you're having a good day and you're not thinking about your child or your you know, or your loved one who's died, or you're not thinking about your your breast cancer or your you know, whatever illness you're struggling with, or whatever

worry you're holding. But the fact is, we know that when we're going through those periods of darkness, when we are bereft and bereaved, we're thinking about it all the time, and it just appears like the whole world is moving in the other direction without even any awareness that we are,

as Rachel Goldberg says, living on a different planet. And so what we're doing when we show up, as we're saying, I see you on your planet, and I acknowledge that you're moving in a different direction than I am, and I don't want you to feel like you are alone in this moment. Even as I continue with my life, I still see you and the pain that you're holding in yours.

And the central paradigm of the book is this ancient ritual that used to happen when the Jews would go up to pilgrimage on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in the old old days and so two thousand years ago, and the ritual was that people would ascend to Jerusalem, which is a city on a hill, and then they would ascend the steps of the Temple Mount, and they would go through this grand entryway and they would turn to the right, and everybody on the pilgrimage, masses of

people all at once would circle around the outer the perimeter of the courtyard, and then they would essentially exit where they had left, except for someone with a broken heart who would go up to Jerusalem, go up the steps that they would enter and turn to the left. So they are signaling that the whole world's moving in one direction and they're moving in another. They're actually showing

with their bodies. I'm not okay. And I think part of the problem of our time is that, first of all, when we're suffering, we just don't want to get out of bed because we don't trust that we're going to be held with love and with care when we do. And then if we do, we feel like we have

to pretend that we're like everybody else. I have a friend whose child died from a terrible cancer, and she described going to a wedding a couple months after her child died, and she's like, I felt like I had to get all dressed up and put on makeup and address and dance like everyone, and I didn't want to be there at all. And I wonder what it would mean to trust that we are going to get up and we are going to show up when we're broken,

but we're not going to pretend that we're okay. We're going to be very clear that we need to be held with love and with care because we're going to trust that we will be. And then this ritual, it's so powerful because the ancients understood something about the human psyche that I think really reflects a very real truth that we know about our spirits but that we try

to deny. So what would happen is every person who's coming in the counterclockwise direction would see the broken hearted person stop, look into their eyes, and then ask a simple question, what happened to you? Tell me your story, why does your heart ache? And then that broken hearted person would respond saying my father just died, or my kid is sick, or I'm just really lonely, and then they would receive a blessing, not from the priest, not

from the rabbis, not from the great leader. They would receive a blessing from the everyday people who are there on the pilgrimage, who, by the way, their instinct is to not notice the broken hearted person because they're in this beautiful, spiritual peak moment of their lives. But they are asked to stop, to see, to ask, and then to bless. And so to answer your question, I think we need to be honest about the pain that we're experiencing. We need to be willing to say to someone I

need your help, I'm not okay right now. But the only way that we can do that honestly when our hearts are broken is because we trust that we are in a community of care that will not mock us, humiliate us, marginalize us to great us, but instead will

hold us with love. And our shared responsibility to each other is to create those kinds of relationships, friendships, and communities, because all of us at some point will be walking in the direction of the bereaved and the bereft and the ill, and will need to be held by love when we are and this is a kind of shared commitment that we can make to one another.

And then you talk about kind of seeing her as a whole person, seeing that she's been through things that have affected her in this way and impacted her behavior, and so can you talk a little bit about that and like what the status of that relationship is, because I found it so interesting to have someone coming to your congregation who has those kinds of feelings but they're really not about you.

And so in this particular case, this is a person who came in many times over the course of many years and just vented, I mean, all of her rage, but as if I'm the target. And it took me some time to realize that it wasn't actually about me, because I'm a human being. And as you know, this person sits in my office and screen and curses and blames, you know, like I'm taking it into my body and I can feel I'm getting hot, I'm getting wet. I'm thinking like I do not deserve this. I do. I

just want to be home right now. I just want to be, you know, anywhere but here. And then I realized, I thought about this something that I learned from one of my very dear friends who's a pastor, like an incredible pastor and Reverend Ed Bacon is his name. He was here at All Saints Church in Pasadena, and then he moved back to the South where he lives now, and he taught me that in every experience in our lives, we can walk away from the experience and we can

see ourselves as the hero. Of the encounter, like, wow, I handle that so well. You know, I'm such a hero that, you know, they lost my luggage and I kept my cool and I just moved right through it and enjoyed the weekend anyway. Or we can see ourselves as the victim, which is like, they lost my luggage again. You know, I will never fly this airline again, and or we can you know, why does this always happen

to me? Or we can see ourselves as learners, which is, you know, this is the third time this has happened to me. I'm really going to try to just use carry on moving forward, and so we can assess the experience and determine how we want to let that experience land in our psychic memory. And I had this realization as I'm sitting with her, and I thought, I don't want to be a hero here. I made it through this terrible another terrible day with Amanda, and I don't

want to be a victim. Like I have dedicated my life to trying to build a just and loving world, and this maniac comes into my office and is screaming at me, and what has she done to make the world a better place? You know? And here I want to just be a learner, and so in this moment, I envision a screen that comes down from the ceiling and goes right into the space in between Amanda and me.

And suddenly I see her not as you know, some maniac who's screaming at her poor rabbi, but I see her as a character in a film about trauma and how trauma manifests in our relationships. And I now see her that here's this woman who's aggrieved in the world, and she's screaming at her rabbi. And obviously it's not about a rabbi. It's about her rage and her trauma. So I have enough psychic distance that I can start

to ask. I wonder what traumatized her. I wonder where the pain really is coming from here, And that gives me the space to ask different kinds of questions of Amanda. And when I do, because I'm no longer on the defensive, I start to learn things about her that literally, I mean, I've been in relationship with her for many years and

I never knew. And it turns out she is a victim of trauma and unprocessed trauma, and so she's raging not just at me, but she's raging at a lot of people, and then I can past her to her, I can actually help her. And more importantly, I feel detached enough that I can be in a position of

service and not a position of like victimhood. And that helps me understand why curiosity and wonder about another person are so critical and why they're so hard for us to achieve when we feel like we're being targeted.

it alone entirely, and we distance ourselves from relationships. And this not only harms our spirits and harms our communities, but it's actually endangering our democracy. Hannah Arendt, the great twentieth century philosopher, wrote that social alienation and loneliness are preconditions of tyranny, that conspiracy theories and tyrannical regimes cannot take root in a society if we know each other.

And we are living in a country and in a time where thirty percent of Americans say that they do not know the names of their next door neighbors, and so we are really alienated from one another, and that's very dangerous, and I think that's part of the reason that we've seen over the last several years, just so much division. The ground is rich and ready for the kind of conspiracy theories that we're seeing taking root and

the kind of divisiveness. So the question is can we turn to one another not only with compassion, but with curiosity. And the story of Derek Black is one in which this is a guy who was the son of the Grand Wizard of the KKK. He was David Duke's nephew. I think he went off to a liberal arts college in Florida. I don't know how his family ever let him go, but at some point when he was there,

he was outed as a white nationalist. Some in fact, awkwardly, somebody was sitting in the dining hall and looking at some white nationalist website and making fun of it, and then realized that the guy who wrote the article was the name of the guy who was sitting across the table laughing with them. And so this guy is totally alienated.

Now nobody wants to engage him on this campus, except for one Jewish kid who invites him for Shavist dinner and they sit together, and I imagine it's a very awkward dinner, like you're literally sitting across the table from

a neo Nazi in your dorm room. And then the meal ends and he invites him back for the next jabst, and a couple more friends join, and then again and again and again, and by the end of the year, this guy, Derek Black, has essentially renounced white nationalism and writes a public letter for the Southern Poverty Law Center about how he was raised on a lie, on a series of lies about white supremacy and about the dream of a jew, free, black, free Latino free America, and

that that's not where we should be heading as human beings. And so what I wonder in the book, and there's been a lot of work on Derek Black and what happened to him that he was able to make that trans transformation from being a white nationalist to being, you know, a menji guy. But I'm really interested not only in that, but also in that kid who invited him for Shabas dinner and then the others who joined, Because I don't think I would invite a neo Nazi to my home

for Shabbat dinner. But I'm really glad that someone did. And what does it mean to sit at the table with someone, even someone who doesn't see you in your full humanity, and not get up and just stay at the table. What seeds could be planted in those encounters, especially when we engage them with an open heart. And we can only do this if we feel safe, if we're really legitimately safe. The work is not on everyone,

but the work is on some of us. If we can stay at the table, and if we can hold curiosity, what might change? And in that chapter I describe a couple of stories, some of failure where you know, as been hours and hours at the table, and I have a hundred of these stories because I do tend to stay at the table when I can, but where you think like nothing really happens, and then a few stories

where it actually changes someone's life. And so could we sit there and just stay and hold curiosity, because if we do, something might be born. You know, we have a.

of self love, you know. I think that that's important for us to note that some relationships are so dangerous, abusive, toxic that staying in them does harm to us. But I think that we in general are too quick to end relationships, and so aside from those relationships that actually contribute great harm to our lives, I think that most relationships,

most relationships, we can actually stay at the table. So what I envision, Catherine, is this like ven diagram of the human experience with these overlapping circles, and generally when we are sitting at that table with our uncle or with our you know, with the crazy person in the family who sees the world in a totally different way. We're hearing him at the margins of his views, and we're responding from the margins of our views, and so

we are completely oppositional to one another. But in fact, aside from the margins, there's probably a good amount of overlap in what we do care about. So I share in this one story in that chapter about an encounter that I had with someone who really saw the world in dramatically different ways than I did. And I stayed at the table for almost three hours with him, and I was desperate to find commonality with this guy, and

we disagreed on everything. I mean, the whole way that we look at the world we disagreed on, and it was very disturbing for me. And even still, what I knew from talking to him was that he cared about his kids, and he cared about his community. I was disturbed by where he draws the line of his family and his community and his responsibility to those, but I could see that he was driven by care and that mattered. Okay, So that was enough that he's not a person who

I have. There's zero that I can see in him, But I did walk away very disturbed. But I'm glad I stayed because many years later, it turned out that some of what I shared of my perspective in that conversation may have penetrated a little bit, because he ends

up shifting his approach. And he's a public figure, and so I only know about this from the newspaper, but his approach shifts, and some of his associates credit it to that lunch that we had together years before, Because when you sit with someone at the table for two or three hours, you can't make them into a caricature

of themselves anymore. You see them as a person, and you see them as a person with flaws, with value, you know, with beliefs, with ideas, And so when we're sitting at the table with our uncle, can we move away from the margins and actually start with, Oh, you're afraid for the future, So am I? You know you feel like we could all be doing better? So do I? You know you're really disturbed by how broken? So am I?

And at least have enough of a foundation that we can stay at the table, and then eventually, at some point we might realize that those overlapping spaces are a little bit deeper and richer than we imagined, and they might help some healing come about. We know, for example, in the struggle for justice for LGBTQ people, that the way that movements started to happen, especially in the struggle for marriage equality, for example, was because people started recognizing

that their loved ones were gay. And once you know that someone you love is gay, it's very hard to hold this really strong oppositional view. So I think part of the challenge is can we stay at the table without being endangered or diminished, but in an act of curiosity and in a gesture of presence and love, in the hope that it might one day lead to a shift in the conversation.

to people I love. And I went to sit with him because I had this kind of naive view that you know, like I think if he just hears me talk about this, that I can humanize the issue for him, and then he might take a beat, he might think before writing, you know. Anyway, And in that experience, as I share in the book, I really did fail. I mean I felt like he was not listening, Catherine, like you're saying. I mean, some of your listeners might really feel that this is the way that some of their

family members treat them, but like they can't hear. There is an iron barrier around their hearts and they can't here. And so I failed. But I didn't feel like I wasted my time because I did grow through it. Pastorally, I've had many failures where you know, I myself retreated from people who were in pain because I didn't understand that how it was my job to actually step closer to the pain. I worried that I wasn't going to have the right words. I had all the things that

we've talked about. I mean, I worried that I would fail a person, that I would screw up and instead of seeing them in their pain and moving closer to the pain. In a moment of isolation, I pulled away because I was scared that I wasn't going to be good enough and strong enough. I tried to look back at those moments now as a learner, clearly not a hero,

but also not a victim. I mean, we only learn these things by failing in many ways and by seeing that that actually it hurt somebody when we engage that way. We have this powerful idea in the Jewish tradition called tea, which is translated as loving rebuke, and the idea is like, don't cut people off, rebuke them with love. So we approach people who've hurt us and we let them know

you really let me down. Like you were saying earlier, Chelsea, I mean like, don't bring it to the grave, bring it to the person, because there might be a possibility of healing here. And I have found that through that kind of loving rebuke, I've been able to grow as a human being, and so I'm so grateful for it. It's actually a mitzvah. It's an obligation to turn to someone with loving rebuke when they've hurt you or let you down. And those moments become transformational moments for us.

on both sides. And it feels like, I mean, you've been pretty vocal about it, So I want to let you talk about your views and how you feel.

have a safe and just future. And so I don't see the humanity honoring the humanity of Israeli Jews as in any way contradicting the need to honor the humanity of Palestinians or vice versa. I actually feel that people choosing sides in this is really there's something really perverse about what's happening, as if this is like, you know, we're like it's like the super Bowl and people are

choosing which team they like better. But I am very moved by and inspired by the Israelis and Palestinians on the ground who acknowledge that there are millions of people living in a tiny sliver of land. None of them

are going anywhere. We have to learn how to live together, and I believe that as a diaspora community, the best way that we can help advance a just future for all people is not by choosing sides and entrenching in false binaries and trying to prove why my team is more right than your team, but actually lifting up, amplifying, platforming, resourcing.

The Israelisians on the ground who are from the depths of their anguish actually dreaming of a different kind of future, not a future of eternal war, but a future in which the people are able to achieve both individual and

collective rights. And two people who've been essentially persecuted by the world and marginalized by the entire world, Jews and Palestinians, who actually are very well suited to understand and empathize with one another's pain and one another's need for home and one another's quest for self determination, should be able

to work together toward a different kind of future. And you framed this as something that a lot of women seem to be unders have a kind of a heart that's big enough to understand that, or capacious enough to understand that, maybe more so than men. And I just want to say, I mean, I know many men who are also part of this movement for building a just

future for both peoples. But I am struck that it is the men who are leading this war effort on both sides, and that it is women who are the voices that are really calling out for peace, who are leading the movements for peace. And I am so struck by voices like Vivian silvers. Vivian was murdered on October seventh in her key boots. Vivian had dedicated her entire life to building women wage peace, to building movements for

peace with Israeli, Jews, Palestinians, Bedouin women. And many people said when because we thought at first that Vivian had been taken captive, and then found out about a month later that actually she had been killed on October seventh, And so her funeral was held about a month later, and many of the people who I love, you know, who live there, said that her funeral was the first hopeful moment that they had experienced, because it was actually

a funeral that was attended by Jews and Palestinians, and they were all there saying, we have to take up the baton and carry on, we have to carry on Vivian's legacy. And so I really feel that this is a moment in which we have to move away from these kind of stake in the ground, false binary positions and instead affirm the common humanity that intersecting part of the ven diagram between people who see the world very differently.

And the book comes into the world in this really interesting moment when it's really hard for people to see each other and hear each other because we're in so much anguish and trauma and fear, and when you are in that kind of mindset, it's really hard to see

each other. But in fact, everybody is in anguish and trauma and fear right now, and so that should be a point of connection to help us meet each other, sorrow meeting sorrow, and vulnerability meeting vulnerability and actually begin to think together about what kind of just society we can build on the other side of all of this heartache.

it out, you know, just women. Though it's the violence is from men. Women would never reduce ourselves like this and want to hurt so badly, you know what I mean. It's just like the lowest form of rage is this violence. It's almost like there's a smarter way to be rageful. Why do you have to reduce yourself to the dumbest way.

And then you hear Rachel Goldberg, who speaks a different language. Right, I'm adding her to your list of women who we wish we're running. You know, we're running the world right now. But you hear bereaved mothers speaking a different language. Many of them are saying, I don't want any more parents to bury their children. I know that pain, you know, Chelsea.

One of my dear friends is a beautiful preacher here, a black minister here in La and her son was shot and killed in a terrible act of violence a few years ago, and she I went with her to the sentencing trial of her son's murderer, and she was weeping, and she said, the last thing in the world I want is another mother to now have to grieve for her black son who's going to get locked up in prison forever because he took the life of my black son. She's like, that's not what I want in this world.

And I think she's calling us, and many of these women are calling us to imagine a different kind of reality in which we don't answer violence with violence, but we dream together of what could be possible. I turned to the voices of the people who are in the Brief Family's Forum, for example, the Parents Circle and Brief

Family's Forum. These are Palestinians and Israelis who have lost immediate family members to this conflict over the course of the last many years, and they turn to each other from the depths of their grief and say, we don't want any more people to die. Can we collectively imagine a different kind of future? And that is holy work

and very hard work. And I wish that those were the voices that were being amplified on social media and from our pulpits and from our you know, and and in news media, because those are the voices that are actually ultimately going to bring about a different kind of future. And we know, you know, and I know that we'll get there eventually. The question is how many more people have to die before we do?

Post nine to eleven. And I moved out to la from New York, and really I really felt that we were called to excavate our beautiful, rich, thousands year old Jewish tradition in order to figure out how to live lives of meaning and purpose and how to understand how we were called to live in a time of great moral crisis. So kind of at the intersection of those

two questions. I wanted to build a community of joy, a community where we could laugh together, where we could dream together, and where we could work for a just future together, and where we could reclaim some of our ancient tradition and live into the best of what our tradition demands of us. And then I realized about ten years after building this amazing community, which you know, like

all the best people started coming to us. I mean, as you said, you have many friends who are there, and it's a community for like really good people who care deeply about the world and also want to be able to lift their spirits, you know, and dream of

a different kind of reality. So about ten years in I gave this sermon called the Amen Effect, and it was about how we who dream of building the Beloved Community, and we who are working every single day to build a more just society and to fight for racial justice and climate justice and LGBTQ equality and all the things, how we had to start by building the beloved community inside that we actually had to turn to one another

in love and in care. We needed to not only protest together, but we actually had to dance together and cry together, and show up at the bedside and show up, you know, at the grave side together, and that was the kind of missing link, I think, and that's when the community really fully began to live into itself. And

so it is a community of love and justice. It's fun and funny and serious and loving, and the music's great and the people are, you know, incredible, and we're really pushing ourselves to try to envision faith community in a really different way, one that suits the needs of our time and translating ancient ideas into a language that can actually help us live more deeply and more responsibly today. So beautiful, thank you.

Chelseahandler dot com. And I've added two shows in Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma on May third, and one in Thackerville, Oklahoma, which is May fourth, and then I'll be at the YouTube Theater May eleventh in Los Angeles with Matteo Laine and Vanessa Gonzalez and Fortune Femster and Sam Jay. Those are my updates and more shows are coming, so pay attention to If you'd.