February 15, 2024 • 52 mins
Rabbi Sharon Brous joins Chelsea to talk about why failing a friend offers the best opportunity for growth, the importance of community during times of grief, and the power of curiosity to change even the most obstinate minds.
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Executive Producer Catherine Law
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, Catherine, Hi Chelsea, how are you.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
I'm great, you're here in person, I know, and.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
I'm dehydrated because I just got off a plane. Oh
I just found my visiline and my bra look at that.
When I yeah, when I have my little Plaine meal,
which I have now started eating plain food because that's
how desperate I am. I have no food in whistler,
my refriger. I mean, I have food, but I just
can't cook anything, so I just don't really eat. All
I have are protein shakes and protein bars. And it's
(00:25):
really one of the most unhealthy times of my life.
And Margarita is I mean, yeah, I'm just like, oh,
I need food, and then I'm like, here's a protein.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Sometimes you need just like lazy food. That's just like Okay,
this is here. I can put it in my body
and like keep going for the day.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
That's right. That's right. So between that, what else has
been happening? Yeah, So I came back to La. I'm
doing a guest star role in this show called Not
Dead Yet on ABC and Hulu. My friend is the
producer on it and asked me to come do a
guest star So I came back for two days to
do that and then a little photo shoot for my
Netflix is a Joke Festival, which is on May eleventh. Fantastic.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
I am very excited about your Netflix's joke show.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Oh oh, it's going to be so fun. Yes, yes,
I'm going to sneak on in there. And I was
in Saskatoon and Winnipeg, Canada this week. Saskatoon sounds like
it's a made up place. It sounds like Sascat's Asakatakaku.
And they are two cities with sheets of ice. So
when you look out, you are in the plains of
Canada with just two ice sheets. So there's that. Yeah,
(01:24):
just pretty flat and cold. I had to sleep under
the covers with a robe on and my hat, my
two as they say in Canada. And so those are
the two probably coldest cities I will have been too.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
But you made it.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
I did. I made it.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
Now did you do super Bowl party anything like that?
Speaker 1 (01:41):
I did go to a Super Bowl party. I skied yesterday. Well,
it took me a lot of time to get ski
because I have the twins on the weekends because I'm
a single parent. Actually no, I'm not a single parent.
My buddy's the mother and I'm the father, so I
have the girls on the weekend. So first I went skiing,
but that didn't really I didn't get very far skiing
because I got stuck at a bar at the Umbrella
Bar Unwhistir and then I so I didn't get on
(02:02):
the mountain till our skiing. Well yes, during I didn't
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,
(02:24):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Yeah, then you can like casually snuggle on the couch
a little bit, or you're not really snuggling, but you're like, oh.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yeah, yeah, they had a little casual snuggle. So that
was cute and it was worth it. And then I came.
I left before the game ended, but I saw that
the Chiefs won, and Taylor Swift rigged the whole thing. Apparently,
of course, all conservative news outlets the Super Bowl. Okay, well,
our guest today is an author. She's a spiritual leader
and the founder and your rabbi at e Car, which
(03:02):
is a non denominational Jewish congregation based in la And
everyone I know has talked to me about this woman
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
(03:23):
our broken hearts and world. So please welcome Rabbi Sharon Brouse. Hello,
good morning, Hi, Thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
I'm so happy to be with you.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
We have so many people in comment that go to
synagogue with you, and I have never been, and so
many of my Jewish friends are like, oh my god,
you would love her. You guys have so much in common.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Yeah, you got to come.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
I will. I know, I one day I will. I'm
never in la, that's the problem. So I just finished
your book, The Amen Effect, which was really moving. There
are many sentiments to it, but the big takeaway from me,
and there's something that really resonated with me, was the
constant theme of connectivity and showing up. I mean, there's
a lot of ways to show up for people, but
(04:09):
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
(04:33):
comes naturally to you?
Speaker 2 (04:34):
What a great question. Yeah. I think I think on
some level I was this you know, kind of empathic
five year old. I mean, I do. I think that
I was a person growing up who when I saw pain,
it pained me. And I always felt, like, you know,
I wanted to do whatever I could to help people,
and even in sometimes unhelpful ways. I think so, But
(04:57):
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
(05:18):
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,
(05:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Yeah, because it is so it's a gift that you're
giving to the person and that you're giving to yourself,
and I think many people don't necessarily see it that
way because they haven't practiced it enough. And I remember
a friend of mine's partner dying a few months ago
and another friend of mine saying, should I don't think
I'm just gonna wait to reach out And I said, no,
you have to reach out right away, Like it doesn't
(06:16):
and he said no, she's consumed with texts and she's
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
(06:37):
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
(07:00):
the human spirit.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yeah, and we have to be present in ways they're
attentive to the needs of the person who's struggling and suffering.
And someone just told me the other day that when
she had suffered a lot, she had a friend who
came right into her house and got into bed with
her and snuggled her, and the whole time she was thinking,
can you get out of my house? I don't want
you to be here, like this isn't what I need,
this is what you need. And so I think our
responsibility is to try to be attuned to what the
(07:23):
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
(07:45):
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,
(08:06):
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,
(08:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
And also, what a gift Rabbi Barcelo gave you by
his giving you his honesty instead of just being like, oh,
that's not a friend of mine anymore, because that's another
thing people do when people don't show up for them
in their times of strife, they're like, oh, that person's
dead to me. He said to you, you failed me.
Next time you better be there. That's right, is what
he said. And that's a.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Gift all It's such a gift because I think that
we also think that our relationships are supposed to be
supportive in the sense that you know, I need you,
I need you to support me and to help me
see why I did this right. And instead, what he's
teaching me is that real what he taught me is
that real friendship is sometimes saying to someone, you know,
here's a way that you failed me, and I know
(09:18):
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
(09:38):
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
(09:59):
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.
(10:19):
That that could be an incredible gesture of love because
it helps us grow. Those kind of relationships are the
ones we grow from.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Yeah, I always think that when anyone ever says that
person's dead to me, it's like you're missing an opportunity
to explain that you'd be willing to give them another
chance if they actually saw the situation in a more
holistic sense instead of from just their side. So it
is kind of always a missed opportunity. Actually, one of
my friends who I know is listening and we're talking
about you, so I'll talk to you about this later.
(10:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
I mean, one of the most It's an incredible story
that comes from this is a midrash, an ancient rabbinic
commentary to the Torah that's maybe fifteen hundred and seventeen
hundred years old, and it tells this. It imagines what
happened at the end of the sixth day of creation.
This is the first day that human beings were alive.
We were human beings were created on the sixth day,
according to the narrative of the Torah. And so the
(11:25):
sun starts to set and they've never seen darkness 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
(11:47):
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
(12:08):
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
(12:29):
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
(12:50):
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
(13:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Always want a foot message. I don't know where the
fuck is happening. I need a foot massage, and I'll
take one from anyone.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
Ever, anyone. But maybe you're one of the rare people
who doesn't want a foot massage, but that's what your
friend wants to get. But I'm going to just like
there's a there's a beautiful story that I that I
found out about years years years after it happened. But
we had a tragic death in our community of someone,
a young person was really beloved to die by suicide
and the family found his body on Friday, and it
(13:59):
was I mean, the reverberative trauma in the community, like
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
(14:20):
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.
(14:42):
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
(15:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
It's kind of like the strength that people have when
they're like when you see the hostages, families like Hirsh's mother,
when you see people who are able to comport themselves
through what they're going through, it's almost like you're tapping
into a part of yourself that you didn't even know
was there, you know, Like it's kind of it's analogous
(15:44):
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
(16:05):
muster up the courage and the strength to charge forward
just when you think you don't have another step.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Left, right, right. And what Rachel has demonstrated Hersh's mother
through this time is I mean, I think she is
a prophet in our time because she has been able
to give words to the anguish of a mother who's
in profound grief and sort of suspend it between life
and death. I mean, she has no idea, and even
(16:31):
through that, she has been able to lift her gaze
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
(16:54):
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
(17:15):
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
(17:38):
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
(17:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Okay, on that note, we're going to take a break
and we'll be right back, and we're back.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
If you are the person who is bereaved or who's grieving,
or who's going through a hard time, we get a
lot of emails on the show from people who are
lost and grieving. What would you say to someone about
how to reach out to that eve who can come
sit and weep with them, or to someone when they
know they need help but they feel like, well, I
(18:41):
should just kind of be doing it on my own.
I don't want to bother them that sort of thing.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
So thank you for that question, Catherine. One of the
spiritual practices that I write in the back of the
book because I'm trying to not just put forward this
idea about how we need to think about each other
and our encounters differently, but how can we actually operationalize this?
What are some simple things that we can do every day,
And one of them is tell the truth, don't grin
(19:06):
and bear it, don't pretend you're okay when you're not okay.
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
(19:28):
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
(19:48):
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
(20:09):
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
(20:32):
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
(20:52):
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,
(21:13):
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
(21:35):
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
(21:57):
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,
(22:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
In the book, you talk about someone named Amanda as
part of your congregation, somebody you have a kind of
not an acrimonious relationship with, but just not a smooth relationship.
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
(22:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Well, first of all, Amanda is not her real name,
just in case. In case, now people are scrolling through
all their friends at the car wondering who Amanda is.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
But no, well, when you read the book, you would
know that you can't use her real name.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
So yeah, right, anything that's not that's really like a
little bit challenging about a person. I changed it to
just protects people's privacy. And yeah, I mean this has
happened not once. I love that you're a little surprised
by it. But unfortunately, people often bring their rage and
their trauma into relationship with their rabbis and pastors, you know,
and priests because they can, because we're soft targets for that.
(23:41):
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,
(24:02):
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
(24:25):
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
(24:46):
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
(25:07):
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
(25:28):
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.
(25:50):
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,
(26:10):
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,
(26:33):
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
(26:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Yeah, at the end of the book, you talk about
the kind of divide that we have throughout the world
right now and especially in America, So curiosity being the
opposite of that, because you know, when you're curious about people,
you grow, you learn, and you cite many examples of
different conversations between people that are unexpected bedfellows, like the
(27:37):
kid who was the son of the guy from the
KKK having dinner. Can you talk about that story a
little bit?
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Oh, yeah, for sure, for sure. And just like the
principle here is that most of the book is talking
about loneliness, isolation, social alienation, and the instinct to retreat
from one another when we must turn to one another
with compassion in times of joy and in times of pain.
And then in this last chapter, I talk about how
this social alienation, the atomization that is definitional to our society,
(28:07):
is not only depleting.
Speaker 1 (28:08):
What does atomization mean.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
Like separating out individuals one from the other, the myth
of radical individualism, the idea that we're going to go
it alone, that I don't need anybody, and so I
am totally separate and apart from everyone. We are all
bound up in the in the bond of life together,
and we need to recognize that. And so, but what
happens is with this myth of radical individualization, we think
(28:34):
we don't actually need each other, and we can go
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
(29:00):
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
(29:21):
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.
(29:41):
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
(30:02):
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
(30:24):
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
(30:46):
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,
(31:07):
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
(31:29):
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
(31:49):
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
(32:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:22):
Ton of listeners who it's not the neo Nazi at college,
but it is Uncle John, or it's mom or dad.
So can you talk a little bit about in the
context of your family, having someone who.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Has these totally opposing views.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
And when to sit down and have curiosity, and when
it's maybe too toxic to do that.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Right, well, I do believe that we have to be safe.
And you know, when we are encountering someone whose worldview
is dramatically different from ours, that could be something of
kind of in the realm of intellectual curiosity, and that
could be in the realm of danger. And so I
think the first thing we have to do is assess,
you know, am I the person who can be in
(33:03):
this relationship, and sometimes ending relationships is actually an act
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
(33:23):
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
(33:45):
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
(34:07):
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
(34:28):
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
(34:48):
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
(35:09):
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
(35:31):
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
(35:53):
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,
(36:16):
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
(36:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
Do you have experiences where you feel like you didn't
have or you failed, or you weren't able to provide
what was expected from you as a rabbi?
Speaker 2 (37:07):
Oh God, there's so many. There's so many of them.
I mean, in the category of staying at the table
in curiosity. I mean, one of the stories that I
share there is when I went to sit with a
pretty prominent public figure who was writing views that I
found really dangerous, not just like cruel, but actually dangerous
to people I love. And I went to sit with
(37:28):
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
(37:50):
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
(38:11):
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
(38:33):
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.
(38:54):
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,
(39:14):
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
(39:35):
you down. And those moments become transformational moments for us.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
I agree. I wanted to talk about the subject of
Israel and what's happening to the Palestinians and to the
Israelis right now. I know you've gotten a lot of
blowback from certain Jewish communities and Israelis about being pro
Palestinian and pro Israel. Those two things can coexist. I
don't know a single woman who is happy to see
(40:04):
any sort of violence in the world, Like I don't
know that that's possible for females to not be consumed
by what is happening to innocent children, to innocent people
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.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Yeah, I mean, really, at the heart of my theology
and my understanding of the world is that every single
human being is created in God's own image and therefore
deserves to live in dignity and in peace and injustice.
And so I mean, I've spent many years as an
(40:43):
activist working to build a more just and loving world
and speaking very frankly and openly about the need for
Palestinians to achieve justice and to achieve self determination, which
I believe is also the only way that Israel will
have a safe and just future. And so I don't
see the humanity honoring the humanity of Israeli Jews as
(41:06):
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
(41:27):
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
(41:47):
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,
(42:08):
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
(42:29):
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
(42:49):
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
(43:12):
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
(43:33):
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
(43:55):
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
(44:20):
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
(44:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:00):
I would just be so much easier and so much
more humane if women were in charge of Like when
you talk the way you're talking and I'm thinking about
net and Yahoo, it's like, yeah, he's in pain and
he's not going to get out of it in our lifetime.
Like I don't want that person running the show. I
want women. I want like four women going in there
and coming out with a solution and you know, like Condeliza,
(45:21):
Rice and Angela Merkel and Oprah let Oprah go figure
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.
(45:44):
Why do you have to reduce yourself to the dumbest way.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Yeah, And people don't like in this conflict the language
of cycle of violence because it feels like it's giving
a moral equivalency to the different kinds of violence. I mean,
nobody likes that language. And yet we literally hear people saying,
we are engaging in this violence because of what they
did to us, right, I mean that is the driving force.
Because they hurt us, we are going to hurt them.
(46:10):
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,
(46:32):
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
(46:53):
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
(47:14):
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
(47:37):
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
(47:58):
get there eventually. The question is how many more people
have to die before we do?
Speaker 1 (48:02):
Yeah, Okay, we're going to take a break and we'll
be right back. And we're right back with bye bye,
Sharon Rauss. This was very eliminating. Thank you so much
for being on the podcast today. I just want to
before you go to talk a little bit about Eycar.
Speaker 2 (48:19):
Oh yeah, oh yeah. So we built this community in
two thousand and four. Remember two thousand and four, when
we thought that things were so bad and they couldn't
possibly get worse. It was like it was the war
in Iraq. It was the you know, the Bush era
Post nine to eleven. And I moved out to la
from New York, and really I really felt that we
(48:39):
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,
(49:00):
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,
(49:22):
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,
(49:45):
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
(50:07):
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
(50:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:49):
Well, thank you so much. It was a pleasure to
meet you. I'm going to see you again in person,
hopefully sooner than later.
Speaker 2 (50:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (50:55):
And the book is called The Amen Effect, and it
was really beautiful and it was the very I was
really what the doctor ordered. So I hope you pick
up a copy. And yes, thank you so much for
being here.
Speaker 2 (51:06):
Take care, thank you, be well.
Speaker 1 (51:09):
Okay, So, Chelsea Handler is my name, and comedy is
my game. Comedy and therapy are my games. I'm sorry,
I misspoke. I have added more shows. I added a
second show in Vancouver, so I have two shows in Vancouver.
March twenty ninth March thirtieth, I am coming to Calgary Victoria, Colowna.
Then I've added another show in Sydney, Australia on July thirteenth,
(51:32):
So i have two shows in Sydney July twelfth and thirteenth.
For other shows in Australia and New Zealand, go to
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
(51:53):
Vanessa Gonzalez and Fortune Femster and Sam Jay. Those are
my updates and more shows are coming, so pay attention
to If you'd.
Speaker 3 (52:01):
Like advice from Chelsea, shoot us an email at Dear
Chelsea podcast at gmail dot com and be sure to
include your phone number. Dear Chelsea is edited and engineered
by Brad Dickert executive producer Catherine Law and be sure
to check out our merch at Chelseahandler dot com
Hi, Catherine, Hi Chelsea, how are you.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
I'm great, you're here in person, I know, and.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
I'm dehydrated because I just got off a plane. Oh
I just found my visiline and my bra look at that.
When I yeah, when I have my little Plaine meal,
which I have now started eating plain food because that's
how desperate I am. I have no food in whistler,
my refriger. I mean, I have food, but I just
can't cook anything, so I just don't really eat. All
I have are protein shakes and protein bars. And it's
(00:25):
really one of the most unhealthy times of my life.
And Margarita is I mean, yeah, I'm just like, oh,
I need food, and then I'm like, here's a protein.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Sometimes you need just like lazy food. That's just like Okay,
this is here. I can put it in my body
and like keep going for the day.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
That's right. That's right. So between that, what else has
been happening? Yeah, So I came back to La. I'm
doing a guest star role in this show called Not
Dead Yet on ABC and Hulu. My friend is the
producer on it and asked me to come do a
guest star So I came back for two days to
do that and then a little photo shoot for my
Netflix is a Joke Festival, which is on May eleventh. Fantastic.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
I am very excited about your Netflix's joke show.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Oh oh, it's going to be so fun. Yes, yes,
I'm going to sneak on in there. And I was
in Saskatoon and Winnipeg, Canada this week. Saskatoon sounds like
it's a made up place. It sounds like Sascat's Asakatakaku.
And they are two cities with sheets of ice. So
when you look out, you are in the plains of
Canada with just two ice sheets. So there's that. Yeah,
(01:24):
just pretty flat and cold. I had to sleep under
the covers with a robe on and my hat, my
two as they say in Canada. And so those are
the two probably coldest cities I will have been too.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
But you made it.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
I did. I made it.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
Now did you do super Bowl party anything like that?
Speaker 1 (01:41):
I did go to a Super Bowl party. I skied yesterday. Well,
it took me a lot of time to get ski
because I have the twins on the weekends because I'm
a single parent. Actually no, I'm not a single parent.
My buddy's the mother and I'm the father, so I
have the girls on the weekend. So first I went skiing,
but that didn't really I didn't get very far skiing
because I got stuck at a bar at the Umbrella
Bar Unwhistir and then I so I didn't get on
(02:02):
the mountain till our skiing. Well yes, during I didn't
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,
(02:24):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Yeah, then you can like casually snuggle on the couch
a little bit, or you're not really snuggling, but you're like, oh.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yeah, yeah, they had a little casual snuggle. So that
was cute and it was worth it. And then I came.
I left before the game ended, but I saw that
the Chiefs won, and Taylor Swift rigged the whole thing. Apparently,
of course, all conservative news outlets the Super Bowl. Okay, well,
our guest today is an author. She's a spiritual leader
and the founder and your rabbi at e Car, which
(03:02):
is a non denominational Jewish congregation based in la And
everyone I know has talked to me about this woman
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
(03:23):
our broken hearts and world. So please welcome Rabbi Sharon Brouse. Hello,
good morning, Hi, Thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
I'm so happy to be with you.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
We have so many people in comment that go to
synagogue with you, and I have never been, and so
many of my Jewish friends are like, oh my god,
you would love her. You guys have so much in common.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Yeah, you got to come.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
I will. I know, I one day I will. I'm
never in la, that's the problem. So I just finished
your book, The Amen Effect, which was really moving. There
are many sentiments to it, but the big takeaway from me,
and there's something that really resonated with me, was the
constant theme of connectivity and showing up. I mean, there's
a lot of ways to show up for people, but
(04:09):
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
(04:33):
comes naturally to you?
Speaker 2 (04:34):
What a great question. Yeah. I think I think on
some level I was this you know, kind of empathic
five year old. I mean, I do. I think that
I was a person growing up who when I saw pain,
it pained me. And I always felt, like, you know,
I wanted to do whatever I could to help people,
and even in sometimes unhelpful ways. I think so, But
(04:57):
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
(05:18):
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,
(05:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Yeah, because it is so it's a gift that you're
giving to the person and that you're giving to yourself,
and I think many people don't necessarily see it that
way because they haven't practiced it enough. And I remember
a friend of mine's partner dying a few months ago
and another friend of mine saying, should I don't think
I'm just gonna wait to reach out And I said, no,
you have to reach out right away, Like it doesn't
(06:16):
and he said no, she's consumed with texts and she's
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
(06:37):
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
(07:00):
the human spirit.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yeah, and we have to be present in ways they're
attentive to the needs of the person who's struggling and suffering.
And someone just told me the other day that when
she had suffered a lot, she had a friend who
came right into her house and got into bed with
her and snuggled her, and the whole time she was thinking,
can you get out of my house? I don't want
you to be here, like this isn't what I need,
this is what you need. And so I think our
responsibility is to try to be attuned to what the
(07:23):
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
(07:45):
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,
(08:06):
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,
(08:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
And also, what a gift Rabbi Barcelo gave you by
his giving you his honesty instead of just being like, oh,
that's not a friend of mine anymore, because that's another
thing people do when people don't show up for them
in their times of strife, they're like, oh, that person's
dead to me. He said to you, you failed me.
Next time you better be there. That's right, is what
he said. And that's a.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Gift all It's such a gift because I think that
we also think that our relationships are supposed to be
supportive in the sense that you know, I need you,
I need you to support me and to help me
see why I did this right. And instead, what he's
teaching me is that real what he taught me is
that real friendship is sometimes saying to someone, you know,
here's a way that you failed me, and I know
(09:18):
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
(09:38):
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
(09:59):
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.
(10:19):
That that could be an incredible gesture of love because
it helps us grow. Those kind of relationships are the
ones we grow from.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Yeah, I always think that when anyone ever says that
person's dead to me, it's like you're missing an opportunity
to explain that you'd be willing to give them another
chance if they actually saw the situation in a more
holistic sense instead of from just their side. So it
is kind of always a missed opportunity. Actually, one of
my friends who I know is listening and we're talking
about you, so I'll talk to you about this later.
(10:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
I mean, one of the most It's an incredible story
that comes from this is a midrash, an ancient rabbinic
commentary to the Torah that's maybe fifteen hundred and seventeen
hundred years old, and it tells this. It imagines what
happened at the end of the sixth day of creation.
This is the first day that human beings were alive.
We were human beings were created on the sixth day,
according to the narrative of the Torah. And so the
(11:25):
sun starts to set and they've never seen darkness 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
(11:47):
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
(12:08):
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
(12:29):
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
(12:50):
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
(13:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Always want a foot message. I don't know where the
fuck is happening. I need a foot massage, and I'll
take one from anyone.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
Ever, anyone. But maybe you're one of the rare people
who doesn't want a foot massage, but that's what your
friend wants to get. But I'm going to just like
there's a there's a beautiful story that I that I
found out about years years years after it happened. But
we had a tragic death in our community of someone,
a young person was really beloved to die by suicide
and the family found his body on Friday, and it
(13:59):
was I mean, the reverberative trauma in the community, like
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
(14:20):
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.
(14:42):
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
(15:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
It's kind of like the strength that people have when
they're like when you see the hostages, families like Hirsh's mother,
when you see people who are able to comport themselves
through what they're going through, it's almost like you're tapping
into a part of yourself that you didn't even know
was there, you know, Like it's kind of it's analogous
(15:44):
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
(16:05):
muster up the courage and the strength to charge forward
just when you think you don't have another step.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Left, right, right. And what Rachel has demonstrated Hersh's mother
through this time is I mean, I think she is
a prophet in our time because she has been able
to give words to the anguish of a mother who's
in profound grief and sort of suspend it between life
and death. I mean, she has no idea, and even
(16:31):
through that, she has been able to lift her gaze
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
(16:54):
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
(17:15):
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
(17:38):
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
(17:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Okay, on that note, we're going to take a break
and we'll be right back, and we're back.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
If you are the person who is bereaved or who's grieving,
or who's going through a hard time, we get a
lot of emails on the show from people who are
lost and grieving. What would you say to someone about
how to reach out to that eve who can come
sit and weep with them, or to someone when they
know they need help but they feel like, well, I
(18:41):
should just kind of be doing it on my own.
I don't want to bother them that sort of thing.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
So thank you for that question, Catherine. One of the
spiritual practices that I write in the back of the
book because I'm trying to not just put forward this
idea about how we need to think about each other
and our encounters differently, but how can we actually operationalize this?
What are some simple things that we can do every day,
And one of them is tell the truth, don't grin
(19:06):
and bear it, don't pretend you're okay when you're not okay.
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
(19:28):
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
(19:48):
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
(20:09):
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
(20:32):
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
(20:52):
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,
(21:13):
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
(21:35):
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
(21:57):
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,
(22:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
In the book, you talk about someone named Amanda as
part of your congregation, somebody you have a kind of
not an acrimonious relationship with, but just not a smooth relationship.
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
(22:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Well, first of all, Amanda is not her real name,
just in case. In case, now people are scrolling through
all their friends at the car wondering who Amanda is.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
But no, well, when you read the book, you would
know that you can't use her real name.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
So yeah, right, anything that's not that's really like a
little bit challenging about a person. I changed it to
just protects people's privacy. And yeah, I mean this has
happened not once. I love that you're a little surprised
by it. But unfortunately, people often bring their rage and
their trauma into relationship with their rabbis and pastors, you know,
and priests because they can, because we're soft targets for that.
(23:41):
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,
(24:02):
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
(24:25):
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
(24:46):
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
(25:07):
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
(25:28):
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.
(25:50):
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,
(26:10):
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,
(26:33):
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
(26:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Yeah, at the end of the book, you talk about
the kind of divide that we have throughout the world
right now and especially in America, So curiosity being the
opposite of that, because you know, when you're curious about people,
you grow, you learn, and you cite many examples of
different conversations between people that are unexpected bedfellows, like the
(27:37):
kid who was the son of the guy from the
KKK having dinner. Can you talk about that story a
little bit?
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Oh, yeah, for sure, for sure. And just like the
principle here is that most of the book is talking
about loneliness, isolation, social alienation, and the instinct to retreat
from one another when we must turn to one another
with compassion in times of joy and in times of pain.
And then in this last chapter, I talk about how
this social alienation, the atomization that is definitional to our society,
(28:07):
is not only depleting.
Speaker 1 (28:08):
What does atomization mean.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
Like separating out individuals one from the other, the myth
of radical individualism, the idea that we're going to go
it alone, that I don't need anybody, and so I
am totally separate and apart from everyone. We are all
bound up in the in the bond of life together,
and we need to recognize that. And so, but what
happens is with this myth of radical individualization, we think
(28:34):
we don't actually need each other, and we can go
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
(29:00):
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
(29:21):
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.
(29:41):
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
(30:02):
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
(30:24):
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
(30:46):
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,
(31:07):
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
(31:29):
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
(31:49):
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
(32:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:22):
Ton of listeners who it's not the neo Nazi at college,
but it is Uncle John, or it's mom or dad.
So can you talk a little bit about in the
context of your family, having someone who.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Has these totally opposing views.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
And when to sit down and have curiosity, and when
it's maybe too toxic to do that.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Right, well, I do believe that we have to be safe.
And you know, when we are encountering someone whose worldview
is dramatically different from ours, that could be something of
kind of in the realm of intellectual curiosity, and that
could be in the realm of danger. And so I
think the first thing we have to do is assess,
you know, am I the person who can be in
(33:03):
this relationship, and sometimes ending relationships is actually an act
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
(33:23):
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
(33:45):
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
(34:07):
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
(34:28):
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
(34:48):
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
(35:09):
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
(35:31):
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
(35:53):
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,
(36:16):
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
(36:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
Do you have experiences where you feel like you didn't
have or you failed, or you weren't able to provide
what was expected from you as a rabbi?
Speaker 2 (37:07):
Oh God, there's so many. There's so many of them.
I mean, in the category of staying at the table
in curiosity. I mean, one of the stories that I
share there is when I went to sit with a
pretty prominent public figure who was writing views that I
found really dangerous, not just like cruel, but actually dangerous
to people I love. And I went to sit with
(37:28):
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
(37:50):
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
(38:11):
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
(38:33):
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.
(38:54):
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,
(39:14):
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
(39:35):
you down. And those moments become transformational moments for us.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
I agree. I wanted to talk about the subject of
Israel and what's happening to the Palestinians and to the
Israelis right now. I know you've gotten a lot of
blowback from certain Jewish communities and Israelis about being pro
Palestinian and pro Israel. Those two things can coexist. I
don't know a single woman who is happy to see
(40:04):
any sort of violence in the world, Like I don't
know that that's possible for females to not be consumed
by what is happening to innocent children, to innocent people
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.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Yeah, I mean, really, at the heart of my theology
and my understanding of the world is that every single
human being is created in God's own image and therefore
deserves to live in dignity and in peace and injustice.
And so I mean, I've spent many years as an
(40:43):
activist working to build a more just and loving world
and speaking very frankly and openly about the need for
Palestinians to achieve justice and to achieve self determination, which
I believe is also the only way that Israel will
have a safe and just future. And so I don't
see the humanity honoring the humanity of Israeli Jews as
(41:06):
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
(41:27):
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
(41:47):
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,
(42:08):
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
(42:29):
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
(42:49):
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
(43:12):
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
(43:33):
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
(43:55):
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
(44:20):
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
(44:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:00):
I would just be so much easier and so much
more humane if women were in charge of Like when
you talk the way you're talking and I'm thinking about
net and Yahoo, it's like, yeah, he's in pain and
he's not going to get out of it in our lifetime.
Like I don't want that person running the show. I
want women. I want like four women going in there
and coming out with a solution and you know, like Condeliza,
(45:21):
Rice and Angela Merkel and Oprah let Oprah go figure
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.
(45:44):
Why do you have to reduce yourself to the dumbest way.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Yeah, And people don't like in this conflict the language
of cycle of violence because it feels like it's giving
a moral equivalency to the different kinds of violence. I mean,
nobody likes that language. And yet we literally hear people saying,
we are engaging in this violence because of what they
did to us, right, I mean that is the driving force.
Because they hurt us, we are going to hurt them.
(46:10):
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,
(46:32):
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
(46:53):
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
(47:14):
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
(47:37):
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
(47:58):
get there eventually. The question is how many more people
have to die before we do?
Speaker 1 (48:02):
Yeah, Okay, we're going to take a break and we'll
be right back. And we're right back with bye bye,
Sharon Rauss. This was very eliminating. Thank you so much
for being on the podcast today. I just want to
before you go to talk a little bit about Eycar.
Speaker 2 (48:19):
Oh yeah, oh yeah. So we built this community in
two thousand and four. Remember two thousand and four, when
we thought that things were so bad and they couldn't
possibly get worse. It was like it was the war
in Iraq. It was the you know, the Bush era
Post nine to eleven. And I moved out to la
from New York, and really I really felt that we
(48:39):
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,
(49:00):
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,
(49:22):
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,
(49:45):
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
(50:07):
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
(50:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:49):
Well, thank you so much. It was a pleasure to
meet you. I'm going to see you again in person,
hopefully sooner than later.
Speaker 2 (50:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (50:55):
And the book is called The Amen Effect, and it
was really beautiful and it was the very I was
really what the doctor ordered. So I hope you pick
up a copy. And yes, thank you so much for
being here.
Speaker 2 (51:06):
Take care, thank you, be well.
Speaker 1 (51:09):
Okay, So, Chelsea Handler is my name, and comedy is
my game. Comedy and therapy are my games. I'm sorry,
I misspoke. I have added more shows. I added a
second show in Vancouver, so I have two shows in Vancouver.
March twenty ninth March thirtieth, I am coming to Calgary Victoria, Colowna.
Then I've added another show in Sydney, Australia on July thirteenth,
(51:32):
So i have two shows in Sydney July twelfth and thirteenth.
For other shows in Australia and New Zealand, go to
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
(51:53):
Vanessa Gonzalez and Fortune Femster and Sam Jay. Those are
my updates and more shows are coming, so pay attention
to If you'd.
Speaker 3 (52:01):
Like advice from Chelsea, shoot us an email at Dear
Chelsea podcast at gmail dot com and be sure to
include your phone number. Dear Chelsea is edited and engineered
by Brad Dickert executive producer Catherine Law and be sure
to check out our merch at Chelseahandler dot com
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