Life Will Be the Death of Me with Chelsea Handler - Victims, Heroes & Learners with Rabbi Sharon Brous

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

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.   * Get The Amen Effect here. * Need some advice from Chelsea? Email us at [e-mail] * Executive Producer Catherine Law Edited & Engineered by Brad Dickert * * * * * The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the Podcast author, or individuals participating in the Podcast, and do not represent the opinions of iHeartMedia or its employees.  This Podcast should not be used as medical advice, mental health advice, mental health counseling or therapy, or as imparting any health care recommendations at all.  Individuals are advised to seek independent medical, counseling advice and/or therapy from a competent health care professional with respect to any medical condition, mental health issues, health inquiry or matter, including matters discussed on this Podcast. Guests and listeners should not rely on matters discussed in the Podcast and shall not act or shall refrain from acting based on information contained in the Podcast without first seeking independent medical advice.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicist for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Ben Stiller, and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us.

Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle, I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinheiro, and I travel by myself

because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Katherine. Hi, Chelsea.

How are you? I'm great. You're here in person. I know, and I'm dehydrated because I just got off a plane. Oh, I just found my Invisalign in my bra. Look at that. When I have my little plane meal, which I have now started eating plane food because that's how desperate I am. I have no food in Whistler.

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 really one of the most unhealthy times of my life. And margaritas and Moscow mules. Yeah, I'm just like, oh, I need food. And then I'm like, here's the protein. 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.

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. Excellent.

And then a little photo shoot for my Netflix is a Joke Festival, which is on May 11th. Fantastic. I am very excited about your Netflix's joke show. 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 Saskatchewan. 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, just pretty flat and cold. I had to sleep under the covers with a robe on and my hat, my toque, as they say in Canada. And so those are the two probably coldest cities I will have been to. But you made it.

I did. I made it. Now, did you do Super Bowl party, anything like that? I did go to a Super Bowl party. I skied yesterday. Well, it took me a long time to get skiing 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 on Whistler. And then I, so I didn't get on the mountain. Before skiing? Well, yes, during. I didn't get on the mountain until 12. Then I went to the Umbrella Bar and then I was there till 1.30.

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 some she's a girl but we call her my son great 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 pie at the Super Bowl party that she wanted to meet so obviously that's a priority yeah then you can like casually snuggle on the couch a little bit but you're not really snuggling but you're like 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, according to all conservative news outlets. She is rigging the Super Bowl. Okay, well, our guest today is an author. She's a spiritual leader and the founder and senior rabbi at IKAR, which 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, it resonated. It's called the Amen Effect. It's ancient wisdom

to mend our broken hearts and world. So please welcome Rabbi Sharon Brous. Hello. Good morning. Hi. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm so happy to be with you. We have so many people in common 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. Yeah, you got to come. 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 for me, and that'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 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 comes naturally to you? What a great question. Yeah, I think on some level I was this kind of empathic five-year-old. I mean, I think that I was a person growing up who when I saw pain, it pained me and I always felt like I wanted to do whatever I could to help people and even in sometimes unhelpful ways, I think. But I think the idea of moving toward pain instead of running away from it is, for many of us, is counter instinctual. 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 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. 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. 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 going to wait to reach out. And I said, no, you have to reach out right away. Like it doesn't. 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, 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 is a strength of mine. And I take a lot of pride in it because a lot of

people think it's can be meddlesome and it's like, well, it's not meddlesome when you really care about somebody and you're just there giving yourself. It's not 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 the human spirit. Yeah. And we have to be present in ways that are 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 loss, she had a friend who came right into her house and got into bed with her and snuggled her. And 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 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, Marcelo, 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 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 this, I was, I felt so defensive and I had all these great reasons why I think I had little kids. I had a community, 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 we're 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, but that we will be here and we'll 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. And also what a gift Rabbi Marcello gave you by 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 gift. 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, he, 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 that you can do better, that that's actually a gift of real love, which, which connects to something that I speak about in, 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 Torah

that God says is not good. That every day, at the end of every day, it's good, it's good, it's good, it's really good. And 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 partnered. 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 we allow to see us. But the language that the text uses 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, hey, I really needed more from you than you were able to give me. That that could be an incredible gesture of love because it helps us grow. Those kind of relationships are the ones we grow from. 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, we're talking about you. So I'll talk to you about this later. She's going to be like, were you talking about me? You're like, yes. Talk about the story about separateness,

Thelonious, because in your book, you talk about Adam and Eve and what's in the Torah about that. So talk a little bit about that. I had never read that before. 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 1,500, 1,700 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. Human beings were created on the sixth day, according to the narrative of the Torah. And so the 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 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 just wept with him and held him all night until the dawn came. And I think that the story 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, you know, the intimacy of that heartache in 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 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 blessings even in the dark of 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 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 somebody to- I always want a foot massage. I don't care what the fuck is happening. I need a foot massage and I'll take one from anyone. From 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 who was really beloved to die by suicide. And the family found his body on Friday and it was horrible. I mean, the reverberative trauma in the community, like the pain, 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 and the world into his body. And it just kind of metastasized inside his body. But I found out years later that a couple in 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. 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 and showing up that doesn't actually intrude on someone's privacy and doesn't make it about your

need as the caregiver rather 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. I think we can give each other those gifts of love much more than we do and much more than we think we can. It's kind of like the strength that people have when they're like, when you see the hostages' families, like Hersha'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 analogous 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 muster up the courage and the strength to charge forward just when you think you don't have another step left right right and what rachel has demonstrated hersha'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 suspended between life and death. I mean, she has no idea. And even 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 a Palestinian woman, both of them elderly, wrinkles on their face from laughing so much together, And, you know, their teeth browned from all the tea that they drank together, watching their sons and their grandchildren playing together. Like she's calling us to imagine a different kind of 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 they don't want to trigger the bereaved. They don't want to trigger the person who's experiencing loss 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 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 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 is we're saying, I see you on your planet and I acknowledge that 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. Okay. On that note, we're going to take a break and we'll be right back.

with Bel Air Direct and save. Get a quote at belairdirect.com. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice

next to my ear saying, Shut up. Don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive.

Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club,

part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island to deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story.

I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. From best-selling authors and your favorite BookTok creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives,

smart pop culture conversations or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport and Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook on the Big Money Players Network. Our show is extremely accessible to first-time listeners. Each week, we talk to someone in show business aka the biz and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicist for letting them do our show we've had a lot of great guests like sarah sherman not that great actually

can you help me can you help me shape this yeah how about we flip it on his head right how about we flip the script okay what is the surprise woman who actually you think is the straight man is actually the one who's acting weird adam scott this entire time you've been expecting adam sandler to come to visit the show i i would never let go of that i have i would never set expectations for something like that it seems like if the universe allows for something like that to happen i'm open to it i'm always going to accept you know danny mcbride fine yeah it's all this fragile masculinity exuding i could smell it walking down the hallway to be honest with you i was like is that weed nope it's fragile masculinity ben stiller no because a lot of times

in out of context people don't get it or even know what a circle is you know what i mean like they're like oh what's this state everyone's so dumb except for you fake right fake and and also not interested or just like oh i've got my life i don't care about your life and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Oh, and by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally he loves the show and he wants to be a guest on every episode, but he's just so busy. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. 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 this 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 should just kind of be doing it on my own. I don't want to bother them, that sort of thing. 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 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 2000 years ago. And the ritual was that people would ascend to Jerusalem, which is a city on a hill. And then they 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 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 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 a dress and dance like everyone. And I didn't want to be there at all. And I wonder what it would 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 in this ritual, it's so powerful because the ancients understood something about the human 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 brokenhearted person, stop, look into their eyes, and then ask a simple question. What happened to you. Tell me your story. Why does your heart ache? And then that brokenhearted 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 were there on the pilgrimage, who, by the way, their instinct is to not notice the brokenhearted 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 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,

degrade 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, 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. 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 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. Well, first of all, Amanda's not her real name, just in case. Now people are scrolling through all their friends at IKAR wondering who Amanda is. No, well, when you read the book, you would

know that she can't use her real name. So yeah. Right. Anything that's really a little bit challenging about a person, I'd change it to just protect 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 and priests because they can, because we're soft targets for that. 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

screams and curses and blames, you know, I like, I'm taking it into my body and I can feel I'm getting hot. I'm getting red. I'm thinking like, I do not deserve this. I do not. 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 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 handled that so well. I'm such a hero that they lost my luggage and I kept

my cool and I just moved right through it and, 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 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 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. And suddenly I see her not as 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. 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, 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 pastor to her. I can actually help her.

And more importantly, I feel 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. 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 kid who was the son of the guy from the KKK having dinner. Can you talk about that story a little bit? 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 is not only depleting- What does atomization mean?

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 bond of life together, and we need to recognize that. But what happens is with this myth of radical individualization, we think 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 20th century philosopher, wrote that social alienation and loneliness are preconditions of tyranny, that conspiracy theories and tyrannical

regimes cannot take root in a society if we know each other. And we are living in a country and in a time where 30% 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 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, 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. 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 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 Shabbos 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 meal ends and he invites him back for the next Shabbos 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 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 transformation from being a white nationalist to being a menchie guy. But I'm really interested not only in that, but also in that kid who invited him for Shabbos 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 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 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,

I spent 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 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 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

has these totally opposing views and when to sit down and have curiosity and when it's maybe too toxic to do that? 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 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 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 Venn diagram of the human experience with these overlapping circles. And generally, when we are sitting at that table with our uncle or 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 overlap

in what we do care about. So I share 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 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 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, like 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 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 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 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 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, in the struggle for justice for LGBTQ people, that the way that movement 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 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. Do you have experiences where you feel like you didn't have, or you failed, or you weren't able to provide what is expected from you as a rabbi? Oh God, there's so many. There's so many of those. I mean, in the category of staying at the table and 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 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, I really did fail. I mean, I felt like he was not listening, Catherine, like 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 hear. 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 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 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 try 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 we have this powerful idea in the jewish tradition called tohaha 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 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 you down. And those moments become transformational moments for us. 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 any sort of violence in the world. 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. 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 in justice. And so, I mean, I've spent many years as an 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 itself.

And so I don't see the humanity honoring the humanity of Israeli Jews as 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 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 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 Israelis and Palestinians on the ground who are from the depths of their anguish actually dreaming of a different kind of future, 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 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 understanding have a kind of a heart that's big enough to understand that or capacious enough to understand that maybe more so than men and I just want to say I mean I know 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 leading the movements for peace. And I am so struck by voices like Vivian Silvers. Vivian was murdered on October 7th in her kibbutz. 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 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 7th. 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 a funeral that was attended by Jews and Palestinians and Bedouin. 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 the Venn 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 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. I would just be so much easier and so much more humane

if women were in charge of the, like, like when you talk the way you're talking and I'm thinking about Netanyahu, 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 Condoleezza 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 we're it's just like the lowest form of rage is this violence it's almost like there's a smarter way to be rageful why do you have to reduce yourself to the dumbest way 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. And then you hear Rachel Goldberg, who speaks a different language, right? I'm adding her to your list of women who we wish were 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. Chelsea, one of my dear friends is a beautiful preacher here,

a Black minister here in LA. And her son was shot and killed in a terrible act of violence a few years ago. And 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 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 turn to the voices of the people who are in the bereaved families forum, for example, the parents circle

and bereaved families 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 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 in news media, because those are the voices that are actually ultimately going to bring about a different kind of future. And and we know, you know, and I know that we'll get there eventually. The question is, how many more people have to die before we do?

Yeah. OK, we're going to take a break and we'll be right back. There's no shortcut for saving time, but saving money is simple. Just combine your car and home insurance with Bel Air Direct and save. Get a quote at BelAirDirect.com. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying,

Shut up. Don't say anything. every week i'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable i knew if he woke up without a doubt he was going to hurt me i started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed and i just started screaming they are abducted stalked controlled and nearly silenced but these aren't stories about what's taken from them they're stories about what it takes to make it out alive Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.

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or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinheiro, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people

and they were like, you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're right back with Rabbi Sharon Rouse. This was very illuminating. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. I just want to, before you go, to talk a little bit about IKAR. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So we built this community in 2004. Remember 2004 when we thought that things were so bad and they couldn't possibly get worse. It was like it was the it was the war in Iraq. It was the, you know, the Bush era post 9-11. And I moved out to L.A. from New York. And I really I really felt that we 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, 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 10 years after building this amazing community, which, you know, like all the best people started coming to us. I mean, as you said, you have many friends who are, who are there and it's a community for like really good people who care deeply about the world and also like want to be able to lift their spirits in, you know, and, and, and dream of a different kind of reality. So about 10 years in, I gave

this sermon called the Amen Effect. And it was about how we who dream of building the beloved community and we were 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 cry together and show up at the bedside and show up at the graveside 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 great and the people are 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. 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. Yeah. And the book is called The Amen Effect. And it was really beautiful. And it was a very, it was really what the doctor ordered. So I hope you pick up a copy. And yes, thank you so much for being here. Take care thank you be well 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 we so i have two shows in vancouver march 29th march 30th i am coming to calgary victoria colonna then i've added another show in sydney australia on july 13th so i have two shows in sydney July 12th and 13th for other shows in Australia and New Zealand go to ChelseaHandler.com and I've added two shows in Oklahoma Norman, Oklahoma on May 3rd

and one in Thackerville, Oklahoma which is May 4th and then I'll be at the YouTube Theater May 11th in Los Angeles with Mateo Lane and Vanessa Gonzalez and Fortune Feimster and Sam Jay those are my updates

and more shows are coming so pay attention if you'd like advice from Chelsea shoot us an email at dearchelseapodcast at gmail.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.com. I survived nine months in captivity

and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the Survivor Files. Every week, I'm with survivors who lived through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicist for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests

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Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinheiro and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.