Rabbi Sharon Brous places individual care and relationships at the heart of meaningful community.
Relationships of mutual concern are rooted in both love and trust. These are people we know will hold our hearts with care. We’re prone to forgive them when they make mistakes, and we hope they’ll do the same for us. We feel accountable to one another. We want to share with them our important moments, both the hardships and the joys. We thrive when we’re together. Relationships of shared purpose are rooted not only in a commitment to one another, but also to a shared dream….
If the sweet spot … is the intersection of mutual concern and shared purpose, I want to root in a community that stands at that same intersection. Such a community sees every ritual, every service, and every gathering as an opportunity for a deepening of connectivity. It invests in people as complicated, multi-faceted, wounded, beautiful individuals, each one essential to the greater whole. This kind of community is fueled by questions like “Who are you, and what brings you here?” rather than “Where do you work?”… This kind of community establishes spiritual anchors—regular opportunities for people to pray, sing, grieve, learn, and reflect together. It recognizes the collective power of people of good will working to help heal the broader society and prioritizes creating pathways for the holy work to be done. It invests in the creation of sacred space that fosters not inclusion, but belonging, intimacy and authenticity, love and accountability. [1]
Recognizing the collective loneliness and despair experienced by so many in our culture, Brous’s community made a deeper commitment to meeting people where they were.
Our work is not only to preach a theology of love and belonging, but to ensure that our communities strive to embrace that mandate. I am certain that this is the most important work we have done. That is the amen effect—the sacred mandate to hear each other, to embrace each other, to love each other up, especially on the hard days. To say to one another, “Amen.”
To take this mandate seriously means to do everything we can to free our sacred spaces of shame and stigma. It means to speak honestly and openly about disconnectedness and loneliness, depression, anxiety, and addiction…. Communities of love and belonging are spaces where even at our most vulnerable, we’re still willing to show up and start walking, trusting that our community, those circling toward us, won’t look away.
The scientific data and spiritual insight here are in strong alignment. Disconnection is a plague on our society, a plague of darkness. The antidote is rich, meaningful connection. We all need an ezer k’negdo [2]—someone to meet our vulnerability with concern and care, to weep with us through the night, and to stand with us in the trenches, working with love to build a better world. [3]
References:
[1] Sharon Brous, The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World (Avery, 2024), 39, 41–42.
[2] Ezer k’negdo is the Hebrew word found in Genesis 2:18. It is usually translated as helpmate, but it really means someone to help you (an ezer) by standing opposite you (k’neged lo). Someone to face you, even when everyone else looks away (Brous, 35–36).
[3] Brous, Amen, 44–45.
Image credit and inspiration: Joel Muniz, untitled (detail), 2020, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. In a simple act of solidarity, this photo captures people delivering food to a food bank during the pandemic—a quiet reminder that real change happens when we show up for each other.
Story from Our Community:
I recently learned that many of the desert abbas and ammas, such as Black Moses and Theodora, are of African descent. I’m now reimagining the desert mystics living in communities where skin color was not a defining factor, unlike many of the spiritual and religious communities I grew up in. As a child of African origin, I wish I had been given the complete picture about these desert ascetics, Christians who worshipped Jesus and looked like me. How would I have experienced Christianity differently if I hadn’t been taught to worship the unrealistic image of a blonde, blue-eyed Jesus? I believe that telling the whole story about these legendary individuals and communities could provide genuine healing to Christians and an important counter-narrative to narrow-minded American religious stories.
—Roberta T.
