Rabbi Sharon Brous, IKAR: It is wrong to attack innocents, even if you believe that a cause is just.

And there is a just cause, which is everybody in that region deserves to live in freedom and in justice.

Marcia Franklin, Host: Coming up…I talk with Rabbi Sharon Brous about the seemingly endless violence between Israelis and Palestinians….and a potential path forward.

That's "Conversations from the Sun Valley Writers' Conference," next.

Stay tuned.

Announcer: Major funding is provided by the Idaho Public Television Endowment and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Franklin: Hello and welcome.

I'm Marcia Franklin.

When my guest today was in college, she went to Israel for a semester to learn more about her Jewish roots.

While there, she was struck by what she says was a deep calling…to become a rabbi.

Sharon Brous did just that, and in 2004 also became the co-founder of what has now become one of the most well-known liberal Jewish congregations in the United States, IKAR.

Taking its name from one of the Hebrew words for "essence," the Los Angeles-based group melds its faith principles with activism.

It reaches out to marginalized communities like the homeless, and builds relationships across religious lines, including with Muslims.

On October 7, 2023, though, Rabbi Brous found herself in a complex and painful situation.

Israel had just been attacked by terrorists from the Palestinian militant group, Hamas.

Nearly 1200 people, including more than 40 Americans, were massacred.

Another 250 people were taken hostage, some of them relatives of her congregants.

And yet many of the progressive groups IKAR had been allied with were silent about the tragedy.

As you will hear, the rabbi spoke into the silence, urging compassion for the dead and missing.

At the same time, she's also made trips to Israel to advocate for Palestinians.

And she's leaned into the precepts of a book she coincidentally published shortly after the war between Israel and Hamas began.

It's called "The Amen Effect," and lays out ways that people from opposing groups can come together.

I sat down with Rabbi Brous at the 2024 Sun Valley Writers' Conference to find out more, including what kind of future she sees for Israel.

Franklin: Welcome to Idaho.

I understand this is your very first visit here.

Brous: First time in Idaho.

Franklin: Well, I hope you get to at least enjoy a little something.

I know you're just off of a trip from Israel, so probably you just want to sleep.

Brous: Yeah.

Franklin: But I hope you can enjoy a little bit of the scenery around here.

It's gorgeous.

Brous: I'm thrilled to be here and it's beautiful.

Franklin: Good, great.

Well, your book, "The Amen Effect," was published just three months after October 7th, 2023, which has kind of become like September 11th.

October 7th -- when you say October 7th, most people know what that means.

The terrible assault by Hamas militants.

Um, first of all, where were you when you first heard that news, and what did you think?

Brous: So it was Shabbat morning, and I'm offline on Shabbat and on the holidays.

And so I went out with my husband for a run before going to services, as we do each morning.

And a neighbor stopped us on the street and said, "What are you doing?

You have to go home.

Israel's been attacked."

So it continued to unfold; over the course of the day we learned more.

And in my community in Los Angeles, it just so happened that two of my board members had, had entire families that were abducted by Hamas and were taken into Gaza, um, including parents and children.

Thankfully in the hostage negotiation, in the deal in November, they were able to return home.

And so there were a lot of points of connection, familial and others.

And so we were, we were touched very deeply.

Franklin: So you were immediately pressed into action, having to be support… Brous: Yeah.

Franklin: …for those individuals.

Had to come up with a sermon, come up with some sort of words to help calm and unify at the same time.

Brous: Just give voice to what was going on.

I mean, I remember my first sermon on October 14th.

Franklin: Yes.

Brous: The first Shabbat afterwards.

And I was so stunned, as so many were, by this, um, kind of abandonment of so many people then.

I mean people who I've really been in the work with for so many years, building a safe, you know, and vibrant democracy, fighting for racial justice and climate justice, and um, fighting for a better, more just and loving society -- who I just didn't hear from.

We, like all people, hunger to be understood outside our own community.

We hunger to be seen in our suffering.

Our humble ask is that people give a damn when we die.

Franklin: You called your sermon, "We've lost so much.

Let's not lose our damn minds."

Brous: Yeah.

And you talk in this sermon about your deep disappointment and real anger, um, at that abandonment; I think you called it "existential loneliness."

Brous: Right.

Very quickly what emerged right after October 7th was this false binary, which manifested itself on the public stage in this, um, equation that was set up that you either care about this people or you care about that people.

So if you care at all about justice for Palestinians, then that means you have to justify atrocities committed against Israelis.

But of course, that false binary is false.

It doesn't make sense.

You can, and you should, and I do, and we all must care deeply about justice for Palestinians.

They, like everybody, deserve liberation.

They deserve to live in dignity, they deserve to have a just and safe and secure life, and they deserve self-determination.

That doesn't justify rape, abduction and murder of innocents.

So I think that people -- what I argued in this sermon was that people were losing their damn minds, because they couldn't bring themselves to say that there is no justification for acts of violence against innocents.

And we must continue to fight for a just future for Palestinians and for Israelis.

This conflict needs to be resolved.

Both of these people have nowhere else to go.

There are millions of Jews and millions of Palestinians who live in that land.

Both people call that land home.

At the end of the day, we're going to have to figure out how to have a shared future in that land.

And so I think that people didn't have the language to articulate that.

So instead, they just got really quiet about really horrific atrocities that were committed against babies, against elders, against men, parents and children.

It was, it was really heartbreaking to see how hard it was for people to find basic language to condemn.

And how many people -- professors, scholars -- actually found language to celebrate atrocities under some kind of decolonization justification, including on my daughter's college campus, where some of those professors had used some of the most egregious language, calling it a "stunning achievement," um, and other -- "astonishing, an astonishing success."

I wanted to say it out loud to say it clearly, to condemn that language, to condemn those atrocities.

And also to warn us that it already seemed clear that people had lost their minds and that the road ahead was going to be really complicated for us.

Because when people go to the extreme, we might be tempted to go to our own extreme to combat their extremism, but then we're just living in a world of extremes.

And that we had to hold our moral core, our moral voice.

It is wrong to attack innocents, even if you believe that a cause is just.

And there is a just cause, which is everybody in that region deserves to live in freedom and in justice.

In the world of false binaries, nobody wins.

If we don't have an assumption of collective liberation, there's no liberation for anybody.

You can't have a world in which some people are free and other people are victims of atrocities.

That doesn't work.

Franklin: Is it your sense that the people -- many of the people who were silent or even celebrating, deep down are anti-Jewish, antisemitic?

Brous: In New York City at protests, people were holding up images of swastikas right away.

On college campuses, they were shouting, "We charge you with genocide!"

Israel had not yet retaliated.

So what makes people respond to the news that 1200 innocents have been mutilated and murdered by celebrating and bringing old antisemitic imagery to the forefront?

There has to be something that's under the surface.

And I've spent a lot of time thinking about this over the last several years.

You know, for the first, I'd say 16 years of my rabbinate, I never spoke about antisemitism.

There were hints of antisemitism still, but I felt like the more important work was actually working toward a kind of collective liberation, was speaking and working in this country towards strengthening our democracy.

Um, I did not feel that Jews were on the front lines.

There were many, many people whose rights and dignities and freedom were much more at risk than Jewish people, I believed.

And then, um, 2016, that started to shift.

It started to change during the election, during the run-up to the election that year.

2017 was a tipping point, because when the neo-Nazis and white nationalists marched in Charlottesville and chanted, "Jews will not replace us, Jews will not replace us," we couldn't even process that, because we didn't understand why would these white nationalists who were protesting the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue be shouting, "Jews will not replace us?"

What do the Jews have to do with this?

Then October 7th, 2023.

And all of the sudden, you, you're faced with silence from good people, who anywhere else in the world if they witnessed mass atrocities, would've been devastated, holding vigils, you know, calling anyone they knew who was connected to that region.

And many people just, just didn't respond that way.

And you have to wonder what's going on.

And I have, I've really felt over the past many years that the great danger for Jews is not antisemitism from the right or antisemitism from the left.

It's when an overt antisemitism meets a latent antisemitism.

Something that's more above ground meets something that's more subterranean.

And that not only endangers Jews.

That endangers democracy.

That endangers any minority, because antisemitism is really the bellwether for the health of a society.

And it endangers all of us.

It endangers civil society.

Because you can't have this noxious, toxic hatred at the heart of a society and have a healthy, vibrant culture.

And so that is a great concern for me, since, over the past many years, but especially in the last year.

And I want to say part of what I said in that October 14th sermon was that it feels incredibly lonely right now, but we're not alone.

And there actually are allies.

I would say first among them were some of my Palestinian friends in Los Angeles.

And that is really very powerful.

And that's because we've been building relationships for many years, um you know, working together to build a better Los Angeles and to you know, to build, hopefully to build relationships between Jews and Muslims.

We're all in so much pain.

We're in so much grief and sorrow.

They're full of sorrow like I am, and I want to meet them, one broken-hearted person to another, and together dream about what different kind of world we could live in, what, what alternative is there to endless war?

Franklin: I think another thing that people may not realize is there are groups like "Standing Together" that are Palestinian citizens of Israel Brous: Yeah.

Franklin: …and Jewish citizens of Israel together for a different future.

People may not realize that's the case, that there even are Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Brous: Right.

Franklin: So there's a lot of confusion.

And I think one other thing I noticed is that I don't know that people realize that some of the people who were massacred were actually peace activists in the kibbutzes down there, Vivian Silver being one of them, who actually were living near Gaza so that they could come in and out and help Gazans, Gazans get to their medical appointments, even employ Gazan men.

Brous: What you're saying is exactly right.

Most of the people who live in the Gaza Envelope, which is the area on the Israel side of the border, who built those kibbutzim, they built them precisely because they wanted to be close to Gaza, because they were peace builders, and they really believed that there was a different kind of future that they were going to, that they were helping to create.

And of the young people who were at the, at that dance party, they were also idealists in many ways.

They're part of this, you know, international community of people who work for peace between human beings and also with the earth.

I mean, these are the people who were cut down that day.

Franklin: Now, you know, you and I are speaking before this, well before this program's going to air.

But pretty much whole swaths of Gaza are leveled.

Many, many people have been obliterated by Israel's response.

Brous: Yeah.

Franklin: How are you navigating all of this, your heart, your head?

Brous: Yeah.

Franklin: You know, because I'm assuming you're not in support of the massive retaliation to this point.

Brous: Well, I mean, the reality on the ground in Gaza is beyond devastating.

Um, I mean, this is an unimaginable amount of loss, and it's absolutely devastating.

And the threat of famine is unthinkable.

I come from a faith tradition that believes that the death of one innocent is a moral catastrophe.

It's part of the reason that I was so completely devastated by October 7th.

So I apply the same faith principle to Gaza, of course.

And if we believe that the death of one innocent is a moral catastrophe, so what about the death of thousands?

It's just, it's an unbearable, unimaginable amount of loss.

And the only thing that really gives me hope here is that, I mean, I literally just came back from Israel.

There are thousands and thousands of people in the street every single day and every single night screaming that this war must end.

Who are calling for a ceasefire with the immediate return of the hostages and flooding Gaza with humanitarian aid and efforts to rebuild, before more innocent people lose their lives there.

I am called and we are called both to love our Jewish family and really to love and honor the Palestinian people.

And thankfully, I don't believe that we have to live in a world where there's a victor and there's a victim.

I think that we can imagine a reality in which each people, both peoples, are able to live peacefully and with self-determination and with dignity and in peace.

Franklin: It's been tried so many times over just your and my lifetime, you know.

Brous: Well, Yuval Noah Harari, who's like the great Israeli public intellectual, said, "Peace is the only answer.

And I know that some of you are thinking, "We tried peace, it didn't work."

And he said, "Guess what?

We tried war and that didn't work either, so let's try peace again."

At the end of the day, there will be peace.

The question is, how many people need to die before we get there?

Franklin: Do you think Israel will be here 75 years from now?

Brous: I hope and pray that it will.

For Israel to survive and to thrive, it has to take seriously not only its external threats, but also the internal threats.

And that has to do with the growing extremist threat in Israel.

As much as I'm concerned about the extremists who are represented by Hamas among the Palestinians, I am deeply concerned about the extremists who hold a messianic, ultra-nationalist, hardline, right-wing view, and who I believe are really steering Israel off the edge of the cliff right now.

And it's going to require some really strong democratic institutions, but also some very strong resistance to extremism.

Franklin: Well, let's talk about how your book, "The Amen Effect," provides kind of a framework or a setting or a way of -- a lens… Brous: Sure.

Franklin: …for looking at these false binaries, you know, "the other" and us.

Your book grew out of a sermon that you gave where you were talking about the need to show up, basically.

To show up at celebrations, show up at a funeral, to be there for people, even if they are different from you, even if they are the stranger.

And you got such a great response to that, that eventually it turned into this book.

How, talk a little bit more about, um, how it is also predicated on a passage, on some ancient text.

Brous: Yeah.

So the main question of the book is: How do we live in a time in which so many of us are suffering from loneliness, social alienation, and isolation?

And it's not only breaking our spirits, but we know that it's hurting our bodies.

People like the Surgeon General and others are telling us that acute loneliness is essentially the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

And we know that it's endangering our democracy.

It's endangering our broader, um, civic culture.

And there is a text that has been my, um, that's really been my North Star for the last 20 years.

And it comes from, um, it's the description of an ancient Jewish ritual that would happen on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

And what would happen is on pilgrimage days 2000 years ago, Jews would come from all across the land and also from the diaspora, and they would ascend to Jerusalem, which is a city on a hill.

They would climb the steps of the Temple Mount of Jerusalem, the most sacred place on the most sacred days.

And then they would enter through one of those beautiful old arched entryways.

And they would turn to the right, and they would circle around the perimeter of the courtyard of the Temple Mount, and then they would exit just about where they came in.

Except, the text says, for somebody with a broken heart.

Someone with a broken heart would go up to Jerusalem, climb the steps, go through the same entryway, but turn to the left, when everyone else is turning to the right.

And then this sacred encounter would occur, when the person who's coming from the left would be met by someone with an open heart, who would look to them and say very simply, "Ma lakh" in the Hebrew.

"Tell me what happened to you.

Tell me about your heart."

And they would answer, saying, "I am grieving."

And this person, probably a stranger, would answer by giving them a blessing.

They would say something like, "May the one who dwells in this place hold you with love as you navigate this difficult time."

And then they would keep going.

And what I love so much about this ritual is that the sacred encounter occurs at exactly the moment that neither party wants to engage each other.

The broken-hearted person doesn't even want to get out of bed that day.

And the people who are going this way, the last thing you want to do is sort of snap out of, of your, of your walk and say, "I see a stranger who I don't know, who doesn't look okay; let me go check on them right now."

And yet, that is exactly what the sacred work is.

And so the "Amen Effect" is essentially the argument that our most important work in the world, in our lives, is actually seeing somebody who's not okay and engaging them with curiosity and with compassion and care, um, holding them in their moments of joy, in their moments of pain, being with them in solidarity, seeing their humanity.

Not only are we to see the broken-hearted with compassion and with care and with curiosity, but also the ostracized.

This is a very particular form of punishment in the ancient world that was given only to people who had done severe damage to the community.

They caused real pain to people in the community.

So that means that now coming towards you is someone who's actually hurt you or hurt your people badly.

And what you do is you don't pretend that you can't see them.

You don't like, kick 'em in the shins and walk away from them.

You actually look into their eyes, and you say, "Tell me about your heart."

Franklin: You have replicated some of this in your congregation where you have people in the congregation that check in with others… Brous: Yeah, yeah.

Franklin: …and see how they're doing.

And I know that the synagogue in Boise is interested in learning more about how to create these, um, you know, I don't know what you call them, but… Brous: Communities of care.

Franklin: …communities of care, thank you.

How does this work in reality when it's not your own congregation and your own friends that you're checking in with?

Like it's in Israel, you know, a Palestinian person, or even a member of Hamas with a Jewish person.

How does this "Amen Effect" work?

Brous: Right.

Well, first I don't think we have to go to the most extreme example.

I think we can start making change in the, in the much more local spaces.

What the "Amen Effect" is, "You can't do everything, but your neighbor just lost a loved one; bring them a lasagna."

Right?

Start with something really small.

Go to the funeral.

Just go to the funeral.

I know you don't have time.

I know you're busy.

Go to the funeral.

You never regret going to the funeral.

Um, or, you know, go to the, when the baby's born.

Like, fly in if you can, and go celebrate, go to the wedding.

If you show up for someone else in these moments of pain and moments of celebration, it actually can have a profound impact, not only on the other person, but also on you, because you realize you have agency.

But when we think about going towards somebody who's not walking toward us, but really coming, coming at us, right?

Someone whose views we find really scary or toxic or hurtful.

So I don't think we have to go right away to, you know, someone who's tried to take the life of one of our loved ones.

But we could go to somebody in our book group who, you know, who posts things on Instagram that we find really painful or problematic.

Or someone in our church or in our synagogue or in our mosque who, you know, lately has been, you know, it seems like they're taking on views that feel really dangerous or reprehensible.

Or sitting at the dinner table with a family member whose views or perspectives seem increasingly, you know, misaligned with the rest of the family.

And what the, what the ancient wisdom is, is what would happen if we shift from a mindset of anger and rage and righteousness to a mindset of curiosity and compassion?

I just want to understand you.

I don't want to beat you.

I don't want to be; I don't want to outsmart you.

I just want to understand; like, tell me more about what you see and what you feel.

Because I want to learn more about you.

And what would happen to us as a society if we were able to look toward one another more with curiosity instead of with outrage?

I think this is at its heart about reclaiming our humanity, about seeing another person in their humanity, and in so doing actually becoming fully human again ourselves.

Franklin: So what happens when somebody says, "Nice words, Rabbi Brous, lovely.

But the reality is these people hate us and they're going to murder us."

Brous: What we have to do is create a new moral imagination for our time.

We have to talk about peace even when peace seems impossible and naive.

In Ireland and Northern Ireland, did people believe that peace was going to be possible?

"No," they said.

"You killed my children.

There will never be peace."

Everything's impossible until it happens.

So yeah, it's really bad.

There are huge obstacles that will have to be overcome here.

There are very strong extremists, and not just extremists, but religious extremists in both camps here that have to be contended with.

It is a tiny sliver of land.

That has to be contended with.

There are generations of pain and anguish and trauma.

That has to be contended with.

But it's not impossible.

I want to think about what might be possible instead of only what's impossible.

Franklin: A theme that runs through this book, a thread, is "Do what you should do today, in case there is no tomorrow."

Basically, what is your higher purpose?

Brous: You got that right.

Um, because we all, it's like we're waiting, we're waiting.

And then we live with regret that we didn't do what we wish we had done.

Um, and, you know, I really feel that every person has a sacred purpose in this world, and that that purpose is often made manifest through our encounters with one another.

And sometimes even just seeing another person and saying, "Hey, are you okay?

How's your heart?

You seem like you're struggling."

Or just sitting beside somebody who's crying.

Just actually being present for another human being could be our greater purpose in this world.

And so I feel like instead of waiting to try to figure out why we're here, I would say, like, "Live that purpose now."

And use our compassion and our curiosity now.

And find our way to another human being in pain, in grief, and in joy, and do it now.

Franklin: Well, thank you for being in this present moment, because I know that you have jet lag and you're very tired.

And so I appreciate you being here and now for us and for my viewers.

Thank you so much.

Brous: Thank you, Marcia.

It's a joy to be with you.

Franklin: You've been listening to Rabbi Sharon Brous, who leads a Jewish congregation in Los Angeles called IKAR.

Our conversation was recorded at the 2024 Sun Valley Writers' Conference.

My thanks to the conference organizers for allowing us to speak with some of the dynamic authors.

If you'd like to watch this interview again, or any of the more than 75 conversations we've had at the conference since 2005, check out our playlist on YouTube.

You'll also find them on your favorite podcast platform.

Thanks so much for joining us.

For Idaho Public Television, I'm Marcia Franklin.

[Music] Announcer: Major funding is provided by the Idaho Public Television Endowment and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.