1장
When Faith Becomes a Bridge, Not a Barrier
Have you ever felt that strange, indescribable connection when someone truly sees you in your darkest moment? Or experienced the profound relief when a stranger holds your hand through grief? This is what Rabbi Sharon Brous calls "the amen effect" - the transformative power of sacred companionship that helps us navigate life's challenges with greater resilience and meaning. In her groundbreaking work, Brous draws from her nearly two decades leading IKAR, an innovative Jewish community she co-founded in Los Angeles that has revitalized religious practice for a generation increasingly identifying as "spiritual but not religious." What makes this book extraordinary isn't just its wisdom, but its timing - arriving when America faces unprecedented levels of isolation and polarization. Oprah Winfrey called it "a balm for our divided times," while brain researcher Daniel Siegel praised it as "a scientifically sound, spiritually rich guide to well-being." Through personal stories, ancient wisdom, and modern science, Brous offers something increasingly rare: a path to meaningful connection in a fractured world.
2장
The Sacred Art of Showing Up
My grandmother Millie had an unwavering rule: "Go to the simha!" - you show up for celebrations. If you'd fly in for a funeral, you'd better make it for the wedding too. At ninety-eight, having danced nightly with my grandfather and never turning down a pre-dinner Dewar's, Grandma Millie embodied this principle until her final days.
This sacred presence forms the foundation of our humanity. I witnessed it powerfully when my congregant Dode, in the midst of divorce while his mother was dying, showed up at services and joyously held the prayer shawl over a newly engaged couple. When I asked how he could celebrate amid his own pain, he simply said, "I felt their love in my bones. How could I not celebrate?"
We need to share joy to make it real. When my daughter Sami showed her sunrise photos to strangers, I recognized this fundamental human need. Research on mirror neurons confirms this biological imperative - monkeys' pleasure centers fire just watching someone enjoy gelato. We're hardwired to experience joy at another's joy, wonder at another's wonder.
My children have repeatedly taught me to see light amid darkness. Three-year-old Eva once pointed out the patch of blue sky I'd missed while grieving. Years later, during national turmoil, my son Levi asked when we could discuss good news. When I brought his question to our community, people shared profound personal joys that transformed our collective perspective.
Showing up for grief proves equally essential. After failing to be present when my rabbi lost his mother, I amended Grandma Millie's rule: Show up for celebrations AND funerals. Err on the side of presence. The Mourner's Kaddish isn't about theological content but the sacred dialogue between mourner and community - the vulnerable act of standing before others and being held in response.
3장
The Lifeline of Human Connection
During the pandemic, my son Levi and I regularly checked on our elderly neighbor Sarge. When he fell while reaching for something, we instinctively ran to help him up, despite knowing physical contact might be dangerous. What would have been the greater peril - not reaching out at all?
COVID-19 stripped us of our best tool for connection - loving, physical presence - precisely when we needed it most. I worried about community members like Pat, greeted weekly by young people; Laurie, grieving her wife's cancer death; James, living alone; and Jacqui, an extrovert who thrived in crowds. One congregant, Tamar, confessed that without weekly Shabbat at IKAR, she feared no one would notice if she disappeared.
Loneliness - the subjective feeling that we lack needed social connections - was a public health crisis even before COVID-19. The Torah emphasizes twice that being alone is "not good," first for Adam and then for Moses attempting leadership in isolation. We are hardwired for connection; relationships of mutual concern and shared purpose form the emotional heart of our lives. Without them, we suffer.
Research confirms this biological imperative. Social isolation increases mortality risk by 29%, comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes daily. Loneliness correlates with higher rates of heart disease, stroke, dementia, depression, and suicide. During the pandemic, the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness an epidemic, noting that 36% of Americans reported "serious loneliness."
Our bodies and souls need connection like oxygen. When we're deprived of meaningful human contact, something essential within us begins to wither. The pandemic merely intensified what was already happening - our growing isolation from one another, accelerated by technology and changing social patterns.
4장
The Divine Image in Everyone
During rabbinical school, I went backpacking with family in a remote New York forest. Caught in a severe thunderstorm on a mountaintop, we spent the night in lightning-brace position, defenseless against nature's fury. Miraculously, we survived what turned out to be a devastating storm.
Upon returning home, I learned that a nineteen-year-old woman named Layla had died that morning when a storm-weakened tree fell as she pushed her baby brother to safety. Feeling it could have been me, I contacted her grieving mother Denise, who welcomed me into her home. My seminary classmates and I raised funds for Layla's burial.
The tree had threatened residents for years. Denise had warned officials, "What are you going to do - wait until this tree falls and kills someone?" When she sued the city, an attorney offered a small settlement, dismissing Layla as "a single, Black teenage mother living in the projects." Denise's response was powerful: "You have no idea who my daughter was, or who she could have become. She could have been the first Black woman president!"
This taught me Judaism's most important theological principle: every person, created in God's image, has endless potential. The Rabbis teach that destroying one life is like destroying an entire world, while saving one life saves an entire world. Rabbi Greenberg calls this the "dignity of inestimable worth." While we protect priceless artwork, we allow thousands of human beings - each worth far more - to sleep on streets. This teaching corrects the normalized oppression in our culture, reminding us that every person holds endless potential.
I felt this loss deeply after mass shootings at Mother Emanuel Church, Tree of Life synagogue, and mosques in New Zealand. The Rabbis teach that every person is accompanied by angels crying, "Make way, for an image of the Holy One is approaching!" Yet repeatedly, these divine images are humiliated, incarcerated, and killed before our eyes.
The moral imperative to recognize the divine in everyone has driven my religious life. Rabbi Israel Salanter once refused kosher certification to a bakery that mistreated workers, asking: How could food be kosher when human dignity is trampled? The biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah warns us about societies that criminalize compassion. Despite their natural abundance, these cities sealed borders, targeted the poor, and punished anyone showing kindness. When Plotit, who secretly fed a starving man, was executed for her compassion, her cry awakened God to the injustice.
5장
Answering Your Soul's Call
Micah, one of my seminary classmates, married Erin, an erudite and sophisticated woman who perfectly complemented his exuberant spirit. Their life with two young sons was abruptly interrupted by Erin's stage IV breast cancer diagnosis. Despite her fierce will to live and the love surrounding her, the cancer progressed rapidly. During her final months at a cancer retreat center, Erin wrote a profound challenge: "What is your soul calling you to do? What is the mission, the meaning, only you can fulfill? Where have you hidden away your most profound desires and aspirations? Can you unearth them? Most importantly, how are you actively thwarting their accomplishment?"
Erin's parting message urged us to discern our core purpose and live into it fully, however much time we have. Her words echo Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel's call: "Every human being has had a moment in which he sensed a mysterious waiting for him... What is expected of me? What is demanded of me?"
I've experienced that mysterious waiting, that soul-call, several transformative times in my life. First in college, during a semester in Jerusalem, when I realized with startling clarity that I believed in God and wanted to be a rabbi - only to have ultra-Orthodox men suggest I should instead be a rebbetzin (rabbi's wife). Later, during rabbinical school, when news of women stranded in trees during Mozambique floods triggered a spiritual crisis about the relevance of my studies. This led me to nearly drop out, until a human rights professor convinced me to integrate both worlds - scholarship and activism. And again when my beloved rabbi used the midrash of the sun and moon to tell me it was time to leave his shadow and shine as my own light. Each time, I was called to become more fully myself.
At our community's tashlikh ritual after Erin's death, I asked people to answer one question: "What are you waiting for?" Their responses revealed profound yearnings - to be told they're beautiful, worthy of love, encouraged to write books or start bands. Many were waiting for permission to become themselves. As Ernest Becker wrote, "Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level." Too often, clarity of purpose arrives only with crisis. Rabbi Eliezer taught: "Repent one day before you die." Since we never know when that day will come, we must live purposefully now.
6장
Holding Both Joy and Sorrow
The High Holy Days represent the spiritual center of the Jewish year, calling us to confront life's precious and precarious nature. From Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur, when we fast, wear white, and remember those who have died, we immerse ourselves in the reality of our mortality. We recite "Who will live and who will die," acknowledging that some present won't be there next year. These rituals aren't meant to punish but to bring clarity about what truly matters by recognizing our vulnerability. The intention is that encountering these ancient practices will empower us to live with both humility and urgency.
Two ancient stories teach complementary wisdom about grief and joy. After the Temple's destruction in 70 CE, many survivors became ascetics, refusing to eat meat or drink wine that reminded them of Temple sacrifices. Some rabbis even advised against marriage, questioning how one could bring children into such a painful world. Rabbi Yehoshua challenged this thinking: "If you won't eat meat or wine, you shouldn't eat bread either... or fruit... or even drink water" - all items once used in Temple offerings. His point was clear: while mourning is necessary, perpetual deprivation is wrong. Instead, he offered practical guidance - leave a patch of wall unpainted, omit one delicacy from feasts, forego one piece of jewelry when dressing up. The moral: even in deepest suffering, there is still joy. We must grieve, and we must live.
In the second story, generations after the Temple's destruction, a rabbi became disturbed watching wedding guests celebrating as if nothing had been lost. He grabbed a precious white glass and smashed it, sobering the revelers and reminding them of their connection to suffering. This became the tradition of breaking glass at Jewish weddings - even in moments of greatest joy, we must remember the heartache that exists in the world. The moral: even in our greatest joy, there is still heartache.
These complementary stories form a coherent wisdom: as long as this world remains unredeemed, the most human thing we can do is build a spiritual consciousness that holds both heartache and happiness. Holocaust survivors demonstrated this after liberation, holding weddings amid immeasurable grief, fiercely reinvesting in life while carrying their losses. Cultivating hearts capable of holding both sorrow and celebration is deep spiritual work, as I experienced when my cousin Lizzie was diagnosed with aggressive cancer just before my sister Nancy's wedding. The family danced through tears at the wedding, experiencing a desperate, aching "sorrow-joy" knowing Lizzie would soon be gone.
7장
The Wounded Healer's Journey
In many faith traditions, visiting the sick is considered not just kindness but duty. The obligation appears in ancient Jewish texts, with Abraham's story serving as a model - God instructs reluctant angels to visit Abraham after his circumcision, saying "If you won't go, I'll do it myself." To be religious means emulating divine attributes through daily behavior - just as God clothed the naked, visited the sick, and consoled mourners, so must we. Our presence when someone suffers is imbued with divinity, with ancient rabbis suggesting each visit alleviates one-sixtieth of a patient's pain - not enough to transform the situation completely, but significant enough to be felt.
I reflect on this after visiting Mia, a sensitive teenager who attempted suicide despite being raised with love and care. The visit left me lightheaded, requiring me to steady myself on the hospital railing, deeply worried for Mia and all children bearing invisible wounds. Despite the difficulty, I hoped my presence mattered, showing Mia she wasn't alone. But this raises an important question: what happens to the healers who repeatedly absorb others' pain?
The story of Rabbi Yohanan illustrates this dynamic - a scholar who transformed his own traumatic losses into healing presence for others until he himself fell ill and needed someone else to lift him up. What made Rabbi Yohanan an effective healer was his ability to meet others' grief from within his own pain. True healing requires vulnerability - showing up not fortified but fragile, recognizing we're part of the network of dependency and care, not above it.
This approach carries risk, which is why many prefer superficial engagement over deep human encounter. But as Henri Nouwen's concept of the "wounded healer" suggests, we cannot take away suffering without entering it ourselves. When visiting the sick, power imbalances exist - the visitor healthy and standing, the patient unwell and lying down. The vulnerable healer instinctively addresses this by knocking before entering, asking permission, and sitting down to create a "fellowship of suffering." I witness this among breast cancer survivors in our community who support the newly diagnosed with rituals, advice, and unspoken understanding born from shared experience.
I often wonder what happens to all the pain that healers absorb - the one-sixtieth from each person they help. The field of vicarious trauma studies shows the cumulative toll on caregivers manifests as cynicism, avoidance, numbing, rage, fear, addiction, and hopelessness. Yet caregivers resist seeking support themselves, feeling guilty about diverting attention from those in greater need. Many build internal pain resistance, burn out, or worse.
8장
The Power of Bearing Witness
I remember sitting with Shifra, whose partner Michael had just been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Life changes in an instant, as Joan Didion wrote. This brings to mind Jacob's biblical wrestling with an angel, where despite being injured, Jacob demands a blessing before releasing his opponent. I've long held this as truth - that after every struggle, some blessing will emerge. Not that suffering exists to teach us lessons, but that we can orient toward blessings even in darkness.
I've shared this wisdom with many congregants in crisis, but I've come to question not the blessing part but the "morning" part - sometimes the night of suffering never ends. Gidi's mother suggested that perhaps it's not about blessings that come in the morning, but blessings found within the night itself. This is what I share with Shifra - finding "true hope" not in false promises but in embracing precious moments in the darkness.
I recall being with my Grandma Millie during her final days at age ninety-eight. After a fall, I stayed by her hospital bedside, watching her charm doctors despite deteriorating rapidly. The caregivers kept falsely reassuring her that she'd be "playing bridge again in no time" and that "everything's going to be just fine," denying the reality of her approaching death. Though my rabbinical work involves helping people confront mortality, I found myself unable to have an honest conversation with my grandmother about dying.
I contrast this with palliative care specialist Susan Block, who once turned her car around on the Bay Bridge to have a crucial end-of-life conversation with her father before surgery. I regret joining the chorus of false hope instead of giving my grandmother a chance to narrate her own closing chapter in truth.
I've made other mistakes too - like being paralyzed by fear when I should have called Rachel, a young congregant with stage IV breast cancer. I was afraid of saying the wrong thing, knowing that when clergy cause harm, "it tends to stick." My rabbi Marcelo advised me that I was "taking up too much space" and not "leaving any space for God." People often say hurtful things to those suffering - from trivializing comments like "You need to cheer up!" to theological malpractice like "God only gives what we can handle." I eventually realized I didn't need perfect words, just to "show up and make space for something holy to flow through us."
Our task isn't to repair broken hearts but to accompany those who suffer. Sometimes the holiest work is "not to pray them into the light, but instead to join them in the dark." Christopher, who lost his son Charlie, explains that grieving people need "with-ness" - not to be abandoned but to have someone willing to sit with them in their pain.
9장
Bridging Divides Through Wonder
What happens when connection becomes not just uncomfortable but dangerous - when another person's presence feels threatening? My congregant Hannah encountered Asher, a religious extremist, the day after witnessing a violent stabbing at the 2015 Jerusalem Pride Parade. Despite her revulsion, Hannah found herself curious about who Asher really was and how he could hold such views.
Social disconnection creates a "sick society" vulnerable to extremism. Nearly a third of Americans report no interactions with neighbors, and 20% have no close relationships at all - a number that has doubled in the past decade. This isolation leaves people without support during illness, crisis, or grief. Political philosopher Hannah Arendt warned that social alienation creates fertile ground for violent extremism: "Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other." When isolated, we become powerless to act together toward the common good.
While humans are hardwired for connection, we're also tribal beings who instinctively build relationships with those similar to us. Though tribal attachments can provide belonging and strength, they have a dangerous side: the stronger our bonds within our group, the weaker our connections to outsiders, leading to indifference or hostility. Curiosity is the birthplace of compassion, but psychological distance diminishes our interest in understanding others. Without wondering about others' thoughts, feelings, or pain sources, our hearts close, leaving us entrenched in our own narratives and vulnerable to fringe views.
I once met with a formerly respected author who transformed into a "shock jock" spreading bigotry through his platform. Despite driving hours to meet him and pleading that his rhetoric endangers lives, particularly trans people, I found no reflection or empathy in his eyes. Though he promised to speak with those affected by his words, I knew he was lying. While the meeting failed to change him, I valued the attempt to pierce his hatred, hoping that accumulated encounters might eventually reach him.
In contrast, I recall meeting an ultra-Orthodox Israeli rabbi who initially confronted me angrily after I spoke about Jewish religious extremism. When he admitted feeling hurt, we sat down for a three-hour conversation. Though we found little common ground, the human connection prevented us from seeing each other as caricatures. Two years later, I learned this same rabbi had broken with colleagues to speak out against violent religious extremism, with associates citing our lunch as influential.
Returning to Hannah and Asher's story, Hannah remained at the table with someone whose sympathies lay with perpetrators of hate crimes. Though burning to speak, Hannah addressed the bat mitzvah girl instead about keeping her heart open amid societal brokenness. A week later, Asher reached out, transformed by the encounter. Within three years, he'd become a Pride Parade participant and LGBTQ ally, having completely renounced his former extremism. Hannah reflects that her achievement was "simply not walking away."
10장
Writing a New Story Together
Bryan Stevenson's work with the Equal Justice Initiative includes building the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice to help Americans confront painful historical truths. He once shared a powerful story about volunteers collecting soil from lynching sites. When a white man approached a Black woman volunteer at one site, instead of conflict, they ended up kneeling together collecting soil, with the man expressing concern his grandfather might have participated in the lynching.
This encounter embodies the "amen effect" - the life-changing power of true connection. Validating others' suffering doesn't diminish our own, and collective liberation requires wanting to know each other's stories. Like the Jewish burial ritual but inverted, the two people digging up soil together were putting to rest an old story while planting a new future.
The Practice section offers concrete ways to implement the book's principles. My father-in-law Ivan was instructed to tear his best suit at his father's funeral as part of the Jewish mourning ritual of kriah. He compromised by tearing his best tie instead. The torn garment, which may be roughly stitched after a week and carefully repaired after a month, becomes like scar tissue - forever changed but functional. This metaphor represents how we can heal our torn hearts and society through collective effort, with each person taking turns holding frayed edges and stitching.
Practical suggestions include: Always go to the funeral rather than waiting for grand heroic moments; meet your neighbors to foster connection with those in closest proximity; honor the divine image in everyone you encounter; start by serving others to discover your purpose; take joy-breaks even amid grief; don't grin and bear it but tell the truth about your pain; be present without trying to fix others' discomfort; and breathe and stay at the table during difficult conversations.
These practices transform inspiration into daily action, helping us create what Martin Luther King Jr. called "the beloved community" - a world where we recognize our fundamental interconnectedness and responsibility to one another. The "amen effect" isn't just about personal healing but about collective transformation - creating a society where no one walks alone through darkness or celebrates joy in isolation. It's about becoming, as Heschel said, "a reminder of what could be but is not yet."
