The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World

by Sharon Brous

I had always imagined that the role of clergy was to navigate moments of crisis and rupture with the right combination of solace, inspiration, and challenge: from the pulpit, at the graveside, in public protest. Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable!

It is rooted in an ancient, hard-won wisdom that offers us tools to navigate times of heartache and uncertainty with a deeper sense of meaning, direction, and connection.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel had offered a scathing critique of American religious life: “Religion declined, not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.” “What young people need,” he wrote, “is not religious tranquilizers, religion as diversion, religion as entertainment, but spiritual audacity, intellectual guts, the power of defiance!”

vitriol, and violence. God and faith abused, contorted, and distorted to serve the political interests of the powerful rather than the spiritual needs of the people.

In other words, the forces of repression learndd to use religion precisely as those working for liberation were forgetting its true purpose and value.

What we had was a shared conviction that faith communities needed to be spiritually alive and morally courageous at the same time. The coffee should be good, the music should be great, the sermons should be brave, and the ethos should be ever evolving.

we needed to translate timeless ideas for a generation that was intellectually curious and spiritually hungry.

There’s an assumption embedded in my grandma’s rule: you’ll show up for the celebration because you’d obviously be there for heartache.

many of our people instinctively turned to one another with compassion and care in those early years. But as their rabbi, I had never spoken of this as a religious commitment or spiritual practice. I realized I needed to be explicit about our obligation to love each other in the hardest moments as in the best of times. To show up, to err on the side of presence

This became clear to me: the path to manifesting the beloved community out in the world had to begin with building a beloved community in our own home.

How to realize the beloved community.

I shared that built into our tradition—and so many faith traditions—is the spiritual and moral mandate to show up.

the “dignity of inestimable worth.”

Another Rabbinic text, this one from the ninth century, declares that every person is accompanied, at all times, by a procession of angels crying out, “Make way, for an image of the Holy One is approaching!” Every person, like royalty. And yet, again and again, the image of the Holy One is controlled and contained, humiliated and degraded, incarcerated and incapacitated, shot and killed before our very eyes.

Neighbor against neighbor. A cynical, concerted, legal effort to quash human goodness.

I was challenged to marry not only past and present, the timeless and the urgent, but also to embrace the tension between scholarship and activism, the particular and the universal, the secular and the religious, the spiritual and the political.

Anastrophe, I now believe, can also be a bitter lived reality, when a tragedy upends the natural order, disturbing the expected flow of a life. Like the literary device, it’s so jarring that it rouses the observer to pay close attention to a particular truth or reality, especially one we might otherwise have wanted to ignore.

The moment the glass windows were smashed at the Capitol on January 6. When Len told me my cousin Lizzie, his sister, had been diagnosed with a very aggressive colon cancer.

The way she places personal tragedies alongside global tragedies is such a deep, profound, and (for me) radical theological and pastoral move.

To be religious doesn’t mean to pray vigorously and sing praises to God. It means to emulate God by manifesting Divine attributes in our behavior every day.

It counters all of the normative messaging of our culture to realize that we don’t need to save someone who is suffering; we just need to accompany them. Sometimes the holiest work is not to pray them into the light, but instead to join them in the dark.

In our time, we increasingly perceive one another’s positions not only as incomprehensible, but as morally repugnant. The last thing we want to do is find our way to one another.

Two countervailing forces have driven this crisis: social alienation—the disintegration of collective bonds, leading to the fragmentation of our society—and tribalization—harsh lines of social division that carve up the population into exclusive, homogenous, often oppositional groups. These forces are not unique to our time, but both are exacerbated by digital technology and social media. These tools of connection have, paradoxically, led to what Sherry Turkle terms an erosion of empathy, dragging dangerous, malignant forces from the margins to the mainstream. The convergence of these trends is leading us right to the edge of the abyss.

Such a genius diagnosis of our moment.

We need a spiritual rewiring that enables us to see one another, in our pain and in our fear, in our joy and in our yearning. In our humanity. It’s what I’ve been calling throughout this book the amen effect: repeated, ritualized encounters with the other, designed to train our hearts to see that we are all bound up in one another.

Focusing on polarization rather than on political and religious extremism, oppression, and abuse of power can be dishonest, dangerous, and a betrayal of those most vulnerable.