How to Create Community

We have all heard It takes a village to raise a child, and the funny-but-true reaction that many of us have to this in the modern world is a version of Well, where’s the f*ing village, then?  

If we dig into this, though, I think it’s notable that the word is “village.” It’s not “partner” or “extended family” or “best friend.” The idea of a village is a community of people you’re connected to even though they are not your blood relatives or your closest people. It’s the community of people who will be there for you because, in some way, they’re your people, even when the ties are less obvious.

It is this village, these ties, that I think we are often feeling we miss. Today’s conversation is about the idea of that community, those connections — about how they are important, why they matter when we are joyful or grieving, and how we can show up for our village, for our people. The origin of this conversation is Rabbi Sharon Brous’s new book The Amen Effect, and we talk through the lessons she pulls from her religious practice. But this isn’t a conversation about religion, and I think it will resonate with many of you. Enjoy!

To spark your interest, here are three highlights from the conversation:

What is the central message of your book?

That message just seems to me to be the most profound and important message of our time, and especially when so many of us feel so powerless because of all the sorrow in the world and because of all of the detachment that we’re experiencing socially, to have an ancient call saying, “You are not powerless. You have agency to take what may appear to be very simple and small steps toward other human beings, but that could actually have a very powerful reverberating effect on you and your life and your community and actually the world.” That feels to me to be a very empowering message precisely at the moment that many of us are wondering, “What kind of agency do I even have to respond to the challenges that we’re experiencing right now?”

Why is it important for us to celebrate together?

It reminded me of how it’s hard sometimes to step out of our lives that are so busy, to be there even for those moments where I very much want to be.

If, God forbid, something had gone wrong with your friend’s delivery, you would’ve been right there with her, so then why do we hesitate to show up when it’s time to celebrate? It’s almost like I think that we downplay the importance of togetherness, of presence and friendship, when things are going well, and we shouldn’t, and so I think that’s really critical. 

There are studies now that show that the experience of sharing your joy has as much of an impact or more on your body and your spirit than even experiencing the joy in the first place. So in other words, your friend having this baby was probably this incredibly beautiful, blessed, ecstatic moment, but then seeing you take her baby into your hands, it continues the joy. It might even have this exponential impact. So I think that we do diminish the impact of joy and we shouldn’t. Joy is a necessity. It’s a biological necessity and it’s a spiritual necessity. Sharing joy is absolutely essential to the practice of joy.

How do we create meaningful relationships with others? 

In the book, I talk a little bit about an interpretation of relationships that comes from Maimonides, from Rambam, who’s the great medieval Jewish thinker. He writes that there are different kinds of friendships and relationships that we root ourselves in. The most basic is a utilitarian relationship, which is, it’s just functional. You need something from me and I need something from you. It’s mutually beneficial. But as soon as the need disappears, the relationship disappears. Unfortunately, I think people root in relationships like that too often because they’re the easiest and they’re very accessible to us, but they leave us feeling unfulfilled. Those are not people who show up for us for the long haul. 

The second level are relationships of mutual care and concern. These are people you worry about when you haven’t heard from them. Your life is enhanced by being around them. You have an affinity for each other, you like each other. I think that most really real friendships and real partnerships are in that category. 

Then the third category are relationships of shared purpose. That’s where the two of us are in a relationship because we share a dream of something that’s possible that’s bigger than both of us. I feel like the really powerful communal relationships that we should seek to build are at the intersection of two and three, the ones where we have some shared vision, some shared sense of purpose, and we also know how to care for each other and how to love each other and how to show up for each other. 

That does not have to be in a synagogue or in a church or in a mosque; that could be in a book group, like the shared purpose is expanding our sense of understanding about the world by talking about great fiction together. It could be in some political action group. So what we try to build in our faith community is, can we build something right at the intersection of those two spaces where we share a vision of what a world of love and justice could look like? And we actually take care of each other along the way.

Full transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain small errors.

 In the spring of 2020, one of the very last things that I did before everything shut down was a play at my kid’s school. We all got together, we watched the kids do their performance, we went home, and then pretty much the next day, they gave us a packet and we didn’t see anyone else for a long time.

It was more than a year later that I got together again with all those same people, with that same community. And this time we were outside. We were there to celebrate the end of a complicated but ultimately successful school year. And I remember so distinctly the feeling of being with those other people in this community of people that I cared about, who cared about my kids, and just how amazing it was to be around others.

And I think about that now every time I spend time in that community. My son is now in the same third grade play that was the harbinger of the pandemic. And I can’t wait to sit there with all those people and watch the kids sing Nemo and be with my people.

I think we learned a lot of things in the pandemic, but this idea of this need for connection to other people is one of them that came out most significantly for me. Loneliness has always been a problem. Maybe it’s a growing problem, but the pandemic really made it worse.

But of course, it’s not just being around people. So you can stand in the middle of Grand Central Station that doesn’t serve your need for human connection. Really, what we’re almost always looking for is a community, some place where we feel held and where we feel that we share joy and sorrow and values.

We get a lot of that from our families, but I think we often find we don’t get everything we need from our immediate family. I talk to a lot of new parents who say, “Well, people say it takes a village. Where’s my village?” And I think sometimes we’re all looking for community, that village, those people who are going to be there for us, even if they’re not our mom or our dad or our partner.

Today’s podcast is a conversation with Rabbi Sharon Brous, whose new book, “The Amen Effect” is about community and finding wisdom in old religious texts. But it really reframed a lot of how I think about the importance of being with other people, and really being with them and thinking about who we want to be with and how we can be with a broader community of people and try to see them and try to connect with them.

I loved the book and I loved having this conversation. I want to name that I don’t think you need to be religious to get something out of this conversation. I myself am not religious. Rabbi Sharon, of course, is religious. But we talk here about the idea of community very broadly and about connection very broadly and about all of the ways that we might be able to find that.

So after the break, Rabbi Sharon Brous.

That message just seems, to me, to be the most profound and important message of our time, and especially when so many of us feel so powerless because of all the sorrow in the world and because of all of the detachment that we’re experiencing socially, to have a ancient call saying, “You are not powerless. You have agency to take what may appear to be very simple and small steps toward other human beings, but that could actually have a very powerful reverberate effect on you and your life and your community and actually the world.” That feels, to me, to be a very empowering message precisely at the moment that many of us are wondering, “What kind of agency do I even have to respond to the challenges that we’re experiencing right now?”

Just to be clear, she lives 45 minutes away on the train. It’s not like I had to get on an airplane. It’s not even a hard thing to do. But even that, to find the time, I felt like, “I’m going to have to move this around.” But then, of course, I thought to myself, “What are you doing? This baby’s only going to be one week old for one week. You better get your butt there,” and I did, and it was amazing. I got to hold somebody else’s baby and then give it back, which is the greatest thing about your friend’s babies, I think. It reminded me of how it’s hard sometimes to step out of our lives that are so busy to be there even for those moments where I very much want to be, there’s nothing better than that. But it’s hard to pull ourselves out of a routine.

If God forbid something had gone wrong with your friend’s delivery, you would’ve been right there with her, so then why do we hesitate to show up when it’s time to celebrate? It’s almost like I think that we downplay the importance of togetherness, of presence and friendship when things are going well and we shouldn’t, and so I think that’s really critical. I also think that my grandma, her assumption that we would automatically show up for the hard times is basically the rest of the book, which is, I don’t think that that’s a fair assumption that most of the time we don’t show up because we’re scared of loss. There’s so many reasons why we retreat from each other’s pain. But the joy part should be obvious, and yet, it’s not. We don’t understand how absolutely critical it is that when somebody experiences joy that they can share it.

I’ll just share one, I found this to be so interesting, but there are studies now that show that the experience of sharing your joy has as much of an impact or more on your body and your spirit than even experiencing the joy in the first place. So in other words, your friend having this baby was probably this incredibly beautiful, blessed, ecstatic moment, but then seeing you take her baby into your hands, it continues the joy. It might even have this exponential impact. So getting engaged could be such a joyous moment in a person’s life, but then calling your loved ones to tell them that you just got engaged, it carries the joy forward in such a powerful way. So I think that we do diminish the impact of joy and we shouldn’t. Joy is a necessity. It’s a biological necessity and it’s a spiritual necessity. Sharing joy is absolutely essential to the practice of joy.

But you think and think, “There’s no way that I can fit this life moment into my calendar,” but those are the moments that make our lives worth living. So that’s why I think the rule is so important because the rule helps us remember that we have to punctuate time with moments of togetherness. Sometimes they’re really big moments like weddings and sometimes they’re smaller moments of driving over to your friend to just sit for an hour and talk about how hard her marriage is right now and where she might find strength or just to hold the baby ’cause you haven’t seen the baby in two weeks now. This is a reminder that those critical moments actually matter and so does the work. The is important, and we have to make the work a little bit more fluid so that there’s room for these moments of holy connection.

This is already, you can feel the kind of tension or the discomfort in this encounter. But what would happen is, as they would pass people who are coming from the other direction, the people that were coming from the right would stop and they would look into their eyes, and they would ask them this simple question, “Malak, what happened to you? What’s your story? What does the world look like from your vantage point?” That person who’s brokenhearted would say, “My father just died a couple of months ago, and I’m upside down about it,” or, “My partner just left,” or, “I found a lump,” or, “I’m really worried about my kid,” or, I lost another pregnancy,” or whatever the pain is that’s in their heart, or, “I just feel so alone in this world. Literally nobody sees me.” Then the people who are going from the right after hearing the words of the bereft, the bereaved, the ill, the brokenhearted would give them a blessing.

They would say, “May the one who dwells in this place hold you as you navigate this chapter of darkness,” or, “May you feel the love of friends and community as you walk through your illness,” or, “May your loved one’s voice always echo in your head and be present for you always,” and then that was it. That was the end of the interaction. They’d continue to circle and then they’d all leave and go have dinner. What I realized about this ritual is that the power in it, it’s very old. It’s 2000 years old, and the power of it is that none of the parties that are involved want to be in that interaction at all. So the person who’s broken-hearted who just lost their loved one, for example, the last thing in the world they want to do is get out of bed and get dressed and show up in a place with hundreds of thousands of people who are having the best day of their lives. It’s just the cognitive dissonance, the spiritual dissonance is so profound.

I just was speaking a couple of weeks ago with a friend whose child died after battling cancer for two years, and it was a terrible, terrible illness and loss. About a month after the death of the child, she had a very dear friend’s wedding, and she was really struggling, “Do I go to the wedding? How do I not go to the wedding?” She was dreading going to the wedding. She went to the wedding, and it was horrible for her to be at the wedding because people were full of joy and ecstasy and she’s just totally shattered, and she left upset and alone. So it’s the last thing that we want to do when we’re in that state of brokenness is show up, and yet, the ritual says you show up and you don’t pretend you’re like everybody else. You don’t put on your dancing shoes and circle in the direction of everybody else, but you engage in a way that lets people know, “I’m not okay right now.” You’re honest about the fact that you’re experiencing this pain,

Then for the people who are okay that day, they also don’t want to have this interaction. They probably saved up and waited and planned and prepped their whole lives. Think about what people do to go to the Hajj in Mecca. It’s a lifelong dream to do that pilgrimage. When you finally get there, some strangers walking towards you and puffy red eyes and not looking, okay, the last thing you want to do is leave your family and friends and say, “Hold on a minute, I got to go check on this stranger with a broken heart,” and yet, that’s exactly what they’re called to do. So I realized that this ritual carries this very profound psychological message for us about what it means to enter into the kind of relational connections that our hearts need, especially when we’re least inclined to do them. When everything in the world is pulling us away from each other how desperately we need each other, and there’s so much to the ritual that I really felt…

So each chapter is actually dedicated to a different aspect of what it means to really find our way toward each other when our instinct is to retreat, including, I’m just astonished by this, but these people make their way up to Jerusalem for all that it must have taken in the ancient world to take that trip. Then they get blessed, but not by the priests and the rabbis. They get blessed by the people because it’s the other people who are called to see them. It’s the other people who carry the ability to share the gift of blessing with each other. So translating that into our terms, how can we show up more honestly for each other? How can we lean toward people who are in pain and not away? How can we recognize that each of us has the capacity to bless and to be blessed? There’s so much wisdom here for us that I think could really help us heal.

I put that how to show up here, because I think what’s so beautiful about that story is that it’s so clear from the rules about how you show up. You show in precisely this way with the asking and the receiving and the blessing. What is hard sometimes in our world is, I think, to know what is the way I can show up that will be comfortable for this person that will help and not make it worse? Of course, we always have this instinct to say, “What can I do?” “What can I do?” Is a terrible question to ask someone who’s grieving for whatever reason ’cause they don’t know.

The kids became bar and bat mitzvah at IKAR, and we knew them very, very well. This was such a shattering, tragic loss and a reverberating trauma through the community. Colin wrote this very powerful book, and in the book he writes about the terrible things that people can say that can really cause grave harm to somebody whose heart is already broken. He also talks about the cop out of saying, “There are no words,” because he says there are words. He shares this one story that I’ll share with you, which I actually share in my book as well, with his permission obviously, which is that that horrible night after the crash, when they found out that the kids did not survive, the doctor who was running the ER immediately pulled the two parents, it was midnight or 1:00 AM in this desert hospital, and immediately the doctor pulled the parents into this room and sat them down and said, “Tell me about Ruby and Hart.”

He said it was such a gift for her to ask about their children, to ask to know them just a little bit, to know some piece of their story. For him, this was the proof that there are words that you can say even in the most unimaginable circumstances, but I think that the fear of saying the wrong thing does keep us away. The fear that the loss is contagious, that if we in some way get close to somebody who just experienced loss, including especially traumatic or tragic loss, like loss of a child, it totally destabilizes the person who didn’t have the loss because then we’re forced to confront the possibility that we too might have a loss like that. We do the same thing with divorce. If we get too close to somebody who’s in the midst of divorce, it makes me feel like I have to ask all these questions about my own marriage and I have to wonder if things are really as okay as I think they are, and so we pull away from each other.

That is harming the person who is bereaved and bereft and broken because they need love at that moment, but it’s also making us less human because we are most human when we step into a relationship, not when we pull away from it. So the hope is that in talking about it and visualizing it, asking us to imagine that act of stepping toward instead of stepping away, that we can break through some of the fear, which is a real barrier to connection. I also will say that Gail and Colin did this at their shiva, and it was very powerful. Because so many people didn’t know how to respond to the tragic loss that they’d experienced, they actually spent some time and wrote out, “Here’s helpful and here’s not.” We put it at the front door at the shiva, and basically anyone who came into the house of mourning saw this list of rules. Then when they went back to work, they gave it to people and they said, “Here’s helpful. We do want you to ask about our children. You’re not going to trigger us into our grief. We’re already thinking about them.”

They found that it’s so helpful because they’re so hurt and disappointed because their friends and community really don’t know how to help hold them in their grief. We found that if you say to people, “This is what would be really helpful for me right now. I don’t want to be distracted from the grief. I want you to ask me to tell you about my loved one.” People are very grateful for those guidelines because they don’t otherwise know and they don’t want to screw it up and they don’t want to cause more pain. They want to be helpful, but they just don’t know how.

I ask people sometimes, “Tell me about your grief. How are you holding your grief now?” When I haven’t seen them for two months since the loss or when I’m checking in and creating an opening where people can share, asking a question that’s an invitation to conversation instead of trying to fill the space with my theology, which might not be your theology, which might feel oppressive or painful, or my lack of theology, which might undermine a place where you found comfort in faith. So there’s so many ways that we can do harm here, and I think the wisdom of the tradition is this very simple questioning, just curiosity. Can we hold compassion and curiosity as we engage one another in these most fragile and precious moments?

She had come with her three-week-old baby, her first baby. She was there with this baby, and her husband was there with this community. It felt to me, I saw in this moment, I was like, “Oh, these are the people she’s going to call when her mom leaves, and these are her people, they’re going to call her back, and that’s the community.” It was made there, that that was her community, and I realized that religion for many people delivers that in a way that it can be hard to create one’s own community. Not that you can’t create your family and your friends, but this sense of a broader community of people who are connected to you but not your bestie is something that I think people struggle with outside of religion. I’m just curious if you had thoughts about creating that kind of experience in a cyclical context.

Your life is enhanced by being around them. You have a affinity for each other, you like each other. I think that most really real friendships and real partnerships are in that category. Then the third category are relationships of shared purpose. That’s where the two of us are in relationship because we share a dream of something that’s possible that’s bigger than both of us. I feel like the really powerful communal relationships that we should seek to build are at the intersection of two and three, the ones where we have some shared vision, some shared sense of purpose, and we also know how to care for each other and how to love each other and how to show up for each other. That does not have to be in a synagogue or in a church or in a mosque, that could be in a book group, like the shared purpose is expanding our sense of understanding about the world by talking about great fiction together.

It could be in some political action group. It could be like, “These are the people who I’m working on climate justice with, and we’ve been in the work for many, many years.” Those relationships are very powerful as long as it also has the dimension of the relationships of mutual care and concern, because very often we engage in relationships of shared purpose, but we don’t actually care about each other. We don’t actually like each other and so those don’t fulfill. So what we try to build at IKAR in our faith community is, can we build something right at the intersection of those two spaces where we share a vision of what a world of love and justice could look like? And we actually take care of each other along the way. So the relationships are not part of this utilitarian framework where we’re engaging each other because we have this get out the vote campaign and we need another 200 volunteers but because we actually love each other.

In fact, this is a big piece of the book is my awareness about 10 years in that we talked every single day about building the beloved community out in the world, about what does it mean for us to do everything we can to envision Dr. King’s vision of a world redeemed, a world of justice and equity and equality, et cetera, and I hadn’t talked at all to the community about what it means for us to actually care for each other and show up for each other. So the transformative moment was when I recognized that and then realized we’re not choosing one or the other, that we have to choose both of these things. That happens not only in faith communities, the faith communities have a super structure that can hold that and hopefully enhance that. Many faith communities don’t have that.

They don’t have either. They’re utilitarian. It’s a fee for service, like, “My kid needs a bar mitzvah and so I’m going to pay for the thing.” But the goal of any community, faith community or otherwise should be, can we find our way into relationships of shared purpose where we also are holding mutual concern for one another where we really do care about each other? That literally could be the friends you do yoga with and the group that you cook or bake with or it could be your faith community. So I think it’s possible everywhere, but we have to know what we’re looking for because these things don’t happen accidentally or incidentally very often. Then you end up, you leave one school and you go to another and you wonder why none of the relationships stuck, and it’s because they were just utilitarian relationships like I needed someone to sit with at the back to school night and someone to carpool with. Those relationships, if we don’t build them into something real, they don’t last.

Once people have kids, there’s this very strong sense, especially among more secular Jews, for example, “I realize now how important my Jewish identity is to me, and I don’t know how to teach that to my kid. So I need to find a place where my kid’s going to grow up and feel proud of who we are and of our story, and I don’t want their identity to be defined for them by the outside world. I want them to come from a place of knowledge and connection and community,” and so we do see a lot of that, absolutely. Yeah.

So then I started going to this group because it was like here are other people, and I could see them two times a week and we would run in circles. Can you imagine something better than seeing other people and running in circles with them? It’s a dream. But I think if there’s one lesson for me from the pandemic, there are a million lessons, but one of them was just how deep the individual loneliness can be and how much we need other people, but then how hard it is to find those people. I think this is part of why it wasn’t the case that we snapped our fingers post-pandemic and everything got fixed because there were running groups everywhere. It was actually, people got used to being alone.

I thought about that a lot during those years like, are we becoming habituated to apartness right now and to not being able to connect with each other? I think that that’s a real pain point, and I think especially in kids, the damage is so profound. We’ve seen that. There’s a whole generation of kids who their high school experience was in their room on Zoom double devicing, and a lot of young adults. There’s a significant amount of impact to those years now that I think we won’t know probably for years just how profound the impact is. But for me, one of the most striking moments of the pandemic was when we started calling people in the community just to check in. This one young woman in her early 30s said to me.

The only time anyone ever knew if she was alive or dead was when she would come to IKAR on Shabbat morning and people would see her and say, “Shabbat Shalom,” and welcome her. That was it. She said, “Now, I don’t have that either.” She said, “I literally could disappear tomorrow and nobody would even know. Who would even find me, and how long would it take for them to find me?” It was terrifying to realize that I think she was speaking for many, many people during this time. You don’t quickly move from that back into, “Oh, the restrictions have been lifted, we can all go back out again now.” So I think we’re all really tender-hearted from this, and the impact is profound and real, and it’s going to continue to take time, I think.

Then we look at each other and say, “Malak, what does the world look like from your vantage point? Who are you holding today? Tell me about your loved one.” That’s part of the spiritual connection in this community, but I was nowhere to be found because I wasn’t going online. So our community had gathered online, but without the rabbi, essentially, because I couldn’t do it. Finally, I just went online and I opened up my screen and there were 200 people online basically waiting for somebody to say to them, “Tell me about your loved one.” Literally one by one, the people online just started saying the names of their loved one and just something that they were holding about them this time. So now think back to my 30 something year old who’s lonely in her house alone, and maybe she’s also holding grief and she literally has nobody to talk to about it.

Now all of a sudden through these devices, she can say to me, “I’m really missing my mom right now, and it is terrible.” I can see her and honor her and give her a blessing and we could bless each other. So I figured out a way where I could have minimal electronic engagement, like preset things, and I did a pretty good job. I did it outside of the house so my kids didn’t have to encounter it, but I went online after that for the rest of the pandemic on Shabbat, and it felt like a real connection. The technology was a godsend, actually. It felt like we were actually able to be in each other’s homes. In fact, there was even more intimacy than usual because we were in each other’s homes, literally.

We could see each other’s living rooms, and you could see my foosball table back there, and so I don’t think it’s all bad. I’m very concerned about the toll that all of this technology is taking on us. I’m very worried about AI and the hubris and in the development of the technology that ultimately is doing grave harm, not only to teenagers, but also to all of us. At the same time, it’s also a tool for connection, and so can we figure out ways to use it for the good because it’s here and we can actually connect. There are all these virtual minyan now, virtual gatherings of 10 people or more so that people can grieve together every single morning. What a beautiful way for people to connect if it’s not safe for them to be together in person or if they live far away. I do think that there’s a lot of blessing there.

Anybody who’s walking by would have no idea the fire that used to be within the life-giving fire. He said, “The job of any practitioner today is to take out your chisel and start to pick away at the cold, dead rock and find the fire inside.” I think that’s a real charge for us alive in this world today. Get out your chisel and start working on these rituals to figure out how they can be life-giving and life sustaining because they didn’t survive for thousands of years for nothing. They’re here and they’re in our hands to be used to help us live more meaningful and more purposeful lives and also to help us respond to a world of great crisis and pain and help us find a path toward healing.

Thank you so much, Rabbi. I think the book is amazing, and I think everyone should read it, and it was really a privilege to talk to you about this.

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This transcript was automatically generated and may contain small errors.

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