Rabbi Sharon Brous adresses a crowd of young people at a 2007 Los Angeles Hanukka celebration.
Photo courtesy IKAR
April 24, 2008
In her fourth year of rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Sharon Brous had a crisis of faith. In an article in The New York Times, she read about the women of Mozambique climbing trees, with their babies in their arms, to escape the flooding in their country.
“What the world needs is rescue helicopters, not me studying Talmud all day,” she told herself.
Nevertheless, Brous continued through ordination — with a commitment to combine social justice and spiritual engagement.
The result is a model that just earned the New Jersey native a spot on Newsweek’s list of Top 50 Influential Rabbis and Top 25 Pulpit Rabbis.
Brous, who grew up in Livingston and Short Hills and at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in Short Hills, is founder of IKAR (“essence” in Hebrew), a four-year-old congregation in Los Angeles. (Her parents, Marcia and Rick, still live in Livingston.)
Just 34, she has tapped into the (you’ll excuse the expression) holy grail of Jewish life: creating a Jewish community for 20- and 30-something Jews said to be alienated from established Jewish organizations.
IKAR, with 370 family member units, regularly attracts hundreds of people to Friday night services. High Holy Day services can attract upwards of a thousand people. Although she bristles at the idea even of calling it a synagogue, some call IKAR “BJ West,” referring to the packed, song-filled services of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
In fact, Brous found her first spiritual home, and later trained, at the Manhattan synagogue.
Speaking by phone to NJJN, Brous explained how her own empathy for disaffected Jews played a critical role in founding IKAR.
“In the 1950s, when Jews were not allowed to join country clubs, they needed a place to come together where they wouldn’t be alienated and wouldn’t be the ‘other.’ Because of the guilt they felt, and their being rooted in the sense of otherness from Christian America, the synagogue really spoke to my parents’ generation,” she explained.
But guilt and separateness are no longer motivating factors for belonging, she said.
“All doors are open to Jews in this country. We don’t need a Jewish country club. We can go to film screenings, and Jewish collectives. We have no need to be in an exclusively Jewish community,” she said.
Instead, she suggests, we ought to be looking “at what’s happening in this country and what people want to be part of.” There’s a desperate thirst for meaning, involvement, and action, she explained.
Arriving at Columbia University, Brous considered herself profoundly connected to Judaism, but suddenly discovered she was “functionally illiterate” in ritual and other aspects of Jewish life.
A spiritual journey brought her to B’nai Jeshurun, and ultimately to rabbinical school at JTS. She was ordained in 2001.
She went on to serve on the faculty of REBOOT, a Jewish think tank that encourages new ideas in Jewish community building. “I learned from this that even the best synagogues were not giving points of access for people really searching for meaning,” she said.
IKAR is not a synagogue, she will tell you, but a community. They don’t have a building, and she worries about getting too connected to a particular space.
“No matter how intensive our Torah shiur [class] is, many people won’t even look to a synagogue for spiritual inspiration,” she said.
So she holds house parties in different parts of LA, outside Jewish institutional space. Hosts invite friends for dinner or cocktails, with Torah study as part of the evening’s activities. The events have been oversubscribed since they began.
Brous keeps IKAR non-denominational, although she says with Arnold Eisen as the new chancellor of JTS, Conservative Judaism’s flagship institution, she’s proud to be personally identified with the institution.
She calls her approach “lowering the bar of entry, and raising the bar for participation.” So many people who come to IKAR, she said, “have not been to synagogue in 20 years, so there’s no judging. But then I keep the bar high because I want to be in a community where I can daven and feel spiritually challenged.”
Crisis of faith
Spiritual engagement is not enough for Brous, nor was it even when she was in rabbinical school. In her fourth year, she had her crisis of faith over women in Mozambique.
“How am I saving the lives of people dying from poverty and AIDS?” she began asking.
She walked out of class and straight to the Columbia University Center for the Study of Human Rights, where she eventually earned a master’s degree. With the head of the department, she realized that rabbinical school was a different kind of answer.
“I realized I wanted to be a rabbi. The great agents of change in the world — Gandhi, King, and Heschel all had faith at the core.”
Today, she combines her two passions in a way that resonates with the people in her community. IKAR has groups organized around social justice interests, and they serve the needs of local and international communities.
“I have a profound sense of responsibility to bring my Jewish commitment to a new awareness of social responsibility,” she said. “We need to connect our spiritual practice with our obligation to pursue justice.”
It’s something she learned with her mentors at B’nai Jeshurun in Manhattan, where she served as rabbinic fellow. She hadn’t really planned to start a new movement in LA, but when she arrived there with her husband, a comedy writer, she found no synagogue that fit her vision. So she took a job working at a community day school.
She was approached by several couples who were alienated from synagogue life, asking her to tutor their children. She turned them down, she said, and instead shared her vision for a vibrant community instead.
“They said, ‘We have to do this. We’ll make it happen,’” she remembers. She put together a vision statement, and they sent it to friends inviting them to a Friday night service. They rented a small space, set up 25 chairs, and 135 people showed up.
“They weren’t looking for an ecstatic religious experience, they were just fed up [with the options out here] and something happened and we knew,” she said. “I gave notice on Monday.”
The group grew “explosively,” she recalled.
Where once she might have considered herself in rebellion against her Essex County upbringing, today she looks back in gratitude.
For a long time, she said, “I felt resentment toward my past. But that has transformed into gratitude because the real incredible gift has come from a place of alienation. I understand the people who are not insiders,” she said. “Had I grown up at USY and Camp Ramah, I would be a very different rabbi than I am today. ”
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