Talks & Entertainment

In a time of loneliness and isolation, social rupture, and alienation, what will it take to mend our broken hearts and rebuild our society? 

In The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World, Rabbi Sharon Brous—named America’s #1 Most Influential Rabbi by Newsweek and The Daily Beast—makes the case that the spiritual work of our time, as instinctual as it is counter-cultural, is to find our way to one another in celebration, in sorrow, and in solidarity. To show up for each other in moments of joy and pain, vulnerability and possibility, to invest in relationships of shared purpose and build communities of care as pathways to a world built on love, rooted in justice, and propelled by our moral imagination.

By honoring our most basic human instinct and biological need—real connection—we reawaken our shared humanity and begin to heal. This kind of sacred presence is captured by the word amen, a powerful ancient idea that we affirm the fullness of one another’s experience by demonstrating, in body and word: “I see you. You are not alone.”  

Brous draws from ancient and contemporary wisdom, sharing heart-driven stories from the Jewish tradition and from her experience building and pastoring to IKAR, a leading-edge faith community over the past two decades.

Rabbi Brous will be in conversation with Jonathan Capehart, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, anchor for the “The Saturday/Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart” on MSNBC, opinion columnist at The Washington Post, and host of the “Capehart” podcast.