By Debra Cash

This small volume is apt to become a classic that is passed hand to hand.

The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World by Sharon Brous. Penguin Random House. 218 pages, $29

No one alive escapes a broken heart.

At the personal level, the losses of disappointment, disenfranchisement, and death. At the social, well, where do I start? Enmity, assault, war, climate disaster.

The timing of the publication of Rabbi Sharon Brous’ book The Amen Effect has been uncanny — and much needed. The broken hearts of people in the Jewish community cross national boundaries, playing out against a backdrop of resurgent antisemitism, the brutality of Hamas and the what feels like unsolvable war in Gaza, rupture among our friends and between American Jews on the right and on the left who feel betrayed by those who, until very recently, they believed were our allies.

Add to this the not-yet-processed years of pandemic shutdowns and losses, the “pandemic of loneliness” that even the US surgeon general cites as a public health threat, and a coming Presidential election that may determine the very fate of American democracy, and contemporary challenges seem insurmountable.

But you don’t have to be Jewish to draw deeply from the lessons of The Amen Effect. Very much like the late Rabbi Harold Kushner’s bestselling 2004 When Bad Things Happen to Good People this small volume is apt to become a classic that is passed hand to hand.

Brous is the founder and rabbi of IKAR,  a remarkable congregation — they like to call it a “spiritual community” instead of a synagogue — in Los Angeles. Many people — Jews and non-Jews — were introduced to Brous and her principled leadership when her October 15, 2023 sermon We’ve Lost So Much. Let’s Not Lose Our Damn Minds went viral. The Amen Effect takes that argument further, and anchors it in Jewish tradition and in messages derived from others in other traditions, who have struggled against despair in a time of “moral crisis.”

The Amen Effect was sparked by Brous’ discovery of a relatively obscure passage from the Talmud (Mishnah Middot 2:2). Struck by the passage long before she could absorb its message, she summarizes it this way:

The text speaks of an ancient pilgrimage ritual, when hundreds of thousands of people would ascend to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the focal point of Jewish religious and political life in the ancient world. The crowd would enter the Courtyard in a mass of humanity, turning to the right and circling — counterclockwise — around the enormous complex, exiting close to where they had entered.

But someone suffering, the text tells us, the grieving, the lonely, the sick — someone to whom something awful had happened — that person would walk through the same entrance and circle in the opposite direction. Just as we do when we’re hurting: every step, against the current. And every person who passed the brokenhearted would stop and ask, “What happened to you?” “I lost my mother,” the bereaved would answer. “I miss her so much.” Or perhaps, “My husband left.” Or, “I found a lump.” “Our son is sick.” “I just feel so lost.”

And those who walked from right to left — each one of them — would look into the eyes of the ill, the bereft, and the bereaved. “May God comfort you,” they would say, one by one. “May you be wrapped in the embrace of this community.”

Two thousand years ago, the Rabbis constructed a system of ritual engagement built on a profound psychological insight: When you’re suffering, when your loved one hovers between life and death, when you feel hemmed in by the darkness, when all you want is to self-isolate—because who would understand anyway? — you show up. You root your suffering in a context of care.

But even as you step into community, you don’t pretend that you’re okay. You’re not okay, which will be obvious to anyone who looks at you. You wear your troubles on the outside: The whole world moves seamlessly in one direction and you in another. And even still, you trust that you won’t be marginalized, mocked, misunderstood. In this place, you will be held, even at the ragged edge of life.

This “sacred companionship” is

A longing to connect with others who can help hold the pain, a need to share what we’ve learned in the trenches, and a desire to give, even when we ourselves have barely caught our breath.

This is, she says, “the spiritual and moral mandate to show up.”

Pilgrimage events to a central location like this Temple ascent, or the Hajj to Mecca are one thing – but what happens when a community cannot be brought together in one place, or even more challenging, when it is interacting over Zoom screens?

Brous answers that. In her description of IKAR during the Covid years, she says she was shocked to discover that IKAR’s online prayer services and courses were even more popular than the in-person gatherings had been. Some of this is surely related to people being shut out of their regular connections, and some the result of Brous’ personal charisma, but she reports that the numbers have not dropped off since in-person activities became possible again.

Call it pastoral community organizing.

By beginning with the question what happened to you? people have the experience of feeling recognized and validated in their broken-heartedness. The vessel of ritual holds the opportunity and the obligation for everyone — who might otherwise be at a loss for how to act — to show up.

The Amen Effect is a mix of anecdotes about the traumatized, dying and bereaved men and women of her circle, apt quotes from Jewish tradition (and not the usually recycled ones), and mentions of non-Jewish sources (Sojourner Truth, Atul Gawande).  Some citations will resonate more, some less, but all are chosen with care. She may try to see the good — or at least the broken — in everyone, and not to write anyone off, but Brous is no Pollyanna. Just in time for the 2024 elections she cautions “focusing on polarization rather than on political and religious extremism, oppression and abuse of power (italics hers) can be dishonest, dangerous, and a betrayal of those most vulnerable.”

Drawing close to the broken-hearted can be frightening, awkward, even retraumatizing. But, as Sharon Brous promises in The Amen Effect, that commitment to reach out with care may help to heal ourselves along the way as we navigate a broken world.

Sharon Brous will be interviewed by Judith Rosenbaum of The Jewish Women’s Archive on March 14 at 8 p.m. ET.

Debra Cash, who works at The Jewish Women’s Archive, is a founding Contributing Writer at the Arts Fuse and a member of its Board.