The Amen Effect

Have you ever felt the ache of loneliness—the longing for someone simply to see you, to stand beside you in joy or grief? In The Amen Effect, Rabbi Sharon Brous argues that human beings are fundamentally relational creatures. We are wired not only to love, but also to be witnessed in our pain and wonder. Her central claim: the remedy to our fractured, polarized, and lonely world lies in rediscovering sacred connection—the act of saying “Amen” to one another’s lives with our presence, our empathy, and our courage.

What the Amen Effect Means

At its core, the Amen Effect is an ancient spiritual practice reframed for modern times. “Amen,” from the Hebrew word emunah (trust or faith), embodies not passive agreement but an active affirmation of another person’s reality. When you say “Amen” to someone’s grief or joy, you’re communicating, “I see you. I believe you. You are not alone.” Brous uses this archetype to describe a broader way of being—a moral and emotional posture of showing up for one another even when we don’t have the right words or solutions.

Drawing on Jewish tradition, psychology, and lived experience, Brous contends that reclaiming connection must become a spiritual and social mandate. Through encounters in her community, IKAR in Los Angeles, she has seen how presence transforms despair into healing. Whether it’s standing beside mourners at a graveside or celebrating milestones together, community becomes sacred precisely because it allows people to hold one another through life’s unpredictable mix of sorrow and sweetness.

Why Sacred Companionship Matters

Brous opens with a vivid parable: a lost child in a forest who meets another lost child. Their salvation isn’t in one finding the way out—it’s in taking each other’s hand and journeying together. This image encapsulates her ministry and the thesis of this book: our brokenness becomes bearable only when shared. Over twenty years of pastoral work, she realized that presence in both crisis and everyday life—hospital bedside, protest lines, weddings, grief counseling—is what sustains the human spirit.

She argues that we’ve built institutions obsessed with perfection and success, but in doing so, we’ve neglected the ordinary power of showing up. Communities thrive not because of charisma or ceremony but because of consistent compassion. For Brous, faith is not certainty—it’s courage in uncertainty, refusing to detach when the world feels too painful.

The Ancient Roots of Human Connection

Brous grounds her vision in a striking text from the Mishnah, a third-century rabbinic teaching about ancient pilgrims to Jerusalem. The text describes crowds moving clockwise around the Temple Courtyard, but those grieving or suffering were instructed to walk in the opposite direction. Every passerby would stop and ask, “What happened to you?” and offer the blessing, “May the One who dwells in this house comfort you.” Through this ritual of turning toward suffering—literally walking against the current—ancient Judaism made compassion a communal discipline. This is the original Amen Effect: to face, not flee, another’s pain.

In this practice, the brokenhearted were not marginalized but honored. Suffering became visible, and empathy became liturgy. Brous interprets this as psychological and spiritual wisdom: healing begins when we’re recognized. It’s a lesson for a world that renders pain private and hides vulnerability behind curated screens.

Why Our Age Needs This Message

The author situates her argument within the modern challenges of loneliness, disconnection, and polarization. The “epidemic of isolation,” as described by U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy (see Together), has left people feeling unseen and unsafe. Brous believes this crisis is not only psychological but also spiritual—the plague of disconnection is a modern “plague of darkness” where people can no longer see one another. Her aim is to reawaken communal empathy through ritual, story, and moral imagination.

From the founding of IKAR—a space for justice, joy, and radical community—to her interactions with people facing loss and renewal, Brous illustrates how sacred encounter changes lives. She contrasts religion “that is deadly” with religion “already dead,” urging us to build spiritual spaces that are both morally courageous and spiritually alive.

Where the Book Will Take You

Over eight chapters and a final practice section, Brous invites you to learn how showing up, holding on, seeing no stranger, coming alive, grieving and living, holding the healers, bearing with-ness, and cultivating wonder can transform you and your community. Each chapter blends ancient Jewish insight and modern science—from neuroscience’s mirror neurons to Brené Brown’s research on vulnerability and belonging.

Ultimately, Brous calls you to reimagine connection as a revolutionary act: to acknowledge the fragility of life, to open your heart in dark times, and to say “Amen” to the sacred stories that unite us. By practicing compassion and curiosity, she believes we can mend not only our personal relationships but also the torn fabric of our society. The Amen Effect is not a lament—it’s a manifesto of hope for how human presence can heal a wounded world.

One of Brous’s most repeated teachings comes from her Grandma Millie: “If you’d fly in for the funeral, you’d better find a way to make it for the wedding.” Showing up, in celebration and in sorrow, is the cornerstone of human connection. This idea defines the first chapter, where Brous learns that erring on the side of presence is a spiritual discipline that transforms both giver and recipient.

Presence Over Perfection

When Gail and Colin lost their two teenage children, Ruby and Hart, Brous discovered the holiness of community presence. Their home was packed with people who had no idea what to say—but they came anyway. The simple acts—tears, fruit platters, and awkward hugs—became sacred gestures. The “Amen” wasn’t spoken in words but embodied through shared vulnerability.

This echoes her rediscovery of the Mourner’s Kaddish: a prayer whose meaning lies not in theology but in participation. The mourner rises, proclaims pain publicly, and the community responds, “Amen.” It’s this mutual witnessing, not intellectual answers, that brings comfort. You don’t need eloquence; you need to stay.

Joy Shared is Real Joy

Counterintuitively, Brous insists that joy also demands communal witnessing. Drawing on neuroscience’s discovery of mirror neurons (the same empathy response seen in monkeys watching someone eat gelato), she explains that joy becomes more vivid when shared. Her daughter’s sunrise photos became meaningful only when other people admired them. Celebration without witness, Brous argues, feels unreal.

Her stories of weddings and community dances illustrate this principle. When an IKAR member named Dode—grieving a divorce—danced joyously beside a newly engaged couple, he reminded everyone that pain and celebration coexist. This echo of Grandma Millie’s rule turns out to be neuroscience and theology intertwined: we need each other to experience fullness.

Err on the Side of Showing Up

Presence, however, is often inconvenient. We fear saying the wrong thing, intruding, or triggering sorrow. Yet the Jewish tradition repeatedly commands physical accompaniment—from graveside lines of comfort to seven days of shiva. Even the act of placing soil on a coffin says: “I am here with you.” These rituals make grief communal, not solitary.

Brous concludes that “Showing up is not an option; it is a moral and spiritual obligation.” When we attend the funeral or dance at the simha (celebration), we enact the Amen Effect. Walking together, praying together, mourning together—these aren’t side rituals, they are the heart of human life. As Rabbi Yonah of Girona and St. Francis both taught centuries apart, the soul’s purpose is service: we belong to one another. Start by showing up.

“The deepest darkness,” writes Brous, quoting a Polish rabbi, “is when one cannot see his neighbor.” Chapter 2, “Please, Hold On,” explores loneliness as a modern plague—one that threatens not only individuals but societies. For Brous, the only cure is radical connection: turning toward each other when isolation tempts us to withdraw.

Loneliness Is More Than Solitude

The pandemic becomes Brous’s lived parable of disconnection. When physical touch became dangerous—no hugs, no bedside visits—she saw how much spiritual care depends on presence. The loss of proximity stripped meaning from life. Borrowing from Surgeon General Vivek Murthy (Together), she distinguishes between the feeling of being alone and the deeper wound of not being seen.

For congregants like Tamar, who feared she could vanish without notice, loneliness became existential. Brous connects these individual stories to a cultural love affair with “rugged individualism” and technology’s false connectivity. Smartphones, she notes, create constant contact but rarely genuine encounter.

Created for Companionship

Returning to Genesis, Brous reads God’s pronouncement—“It is not good for a person to be alone”—as the moral foundation of humanity. She imagines Adam and Eve, once merged back-to-back, separated so that they can finally face each other. This ezer k’negdo relationship—a helpmate who “stands opposite”—is the divine model for companionship: someone who sees, challenges, and loves you in your vulnerability.

The Rabbis even describe nightfall in Eden as the first lesson in resilience: when fear came, Adam and Eve wept together until dawn. From this story, Brous derives two questions: Who will sit beside you in the dark? And for whom will you be that presence?

Building Beloved Community

The chapter evolves from personal loneliness into collective healing. IKAR’s circles of care—check-ins, phone calls, act-of-service networks—are examples of spiritual infrastructure for belonging. Drawing on Maimonides, Brous distinguishes between relationships of mutual concern (love rooted in trust) and shared purpose (collective vision for justice). Both are essential. People living with these bonds, she notes, not only thrive psychologically but also live longer (supported by JAMA’s longevity studies on faith communities).

Through stories of Jonathan, a congregant recovering from shame after job loss, and the community’s response to suicides by Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, Brous shows how vulnerability activates care. The communal promise repeated in her text—“Please, hold on”—became more than a slogan; it saved lives. Loneliness needs tenderness, not lectures.

Her final challenge: make space for honesty. Talk about depression as freely as cancer. Love must dismantle stigma. The Amen Effect demands we create safe havens where people can say, “I’m not okay,” and others can answer, “Amen, we’re here.”

“See no stranger,” Brous insists, borrowing Valarie Kaur’s phrase. Every person, she teaches, is an image of the Divine—infinitely valuable, irreplaceable, and worthy of love. This third chapter expands compassion into a moral revolution: to see God in the eyes of those marginalized, even the ones we’re trained to avoid.

From Theological Principle to Moral Imperative

Through the story of Denise and her daughter Layla, killed by a falling tree in the Bronx, Brous learns that recognizing divine dignity means witnessing potential beyond circumstance. Denise’s defiant faith—“My daughter could have been the first Black woman president!”—illustrates Genesis 1:27: every person carries worlds within them. The Rabbis taught that destroying one life is destroying a whole world; saving one is saving the world entire.

When faith communities fail to honor that image, Brous warns, religion itself collapses into oppression. She uses historical parallels from Sodom and Gomorrah to Nazi Germany to expose what happens when cruelty is legalized and empathy criminalized.

Extending the Circle of Care

Mother Teresa once said, “The problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small.” Brous puts this into practice through community acts of radical compassion, like her congregant Hanne, who invited an unhoused man named Ryan into her home for a year. Friends feared disaster; what happened was redemption. Ryan survived, healed, and later declared at her funeral, “She saved my life.”

For Brous, this story exemplifies the Amen Effect’s ultimate challenge: to move from judgment to curiosity, from avoidance to empathy. The question shifts from “What’s wrong with him?” to “What happened to him?”—the same question pilgrims once asked the brokenhearted in the Temple Courtyard.

From Stranger to Sibling

Seeing no stranger is not a metaphor—it’s a practice. Ask yourself, “How can I see this person’s dignity?” Whether it’s someone unhoused, incarcerated, or ideologically opposed, the moral task remains the same: humanize, not demonize. Brous’s message resonates with other thinkers who link spirituality to justice—Bryan Stevenson’s call to “get proximate,” Desmond Tutu’s Ubuntu (“I am because we are”), and Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of the beloved community. Each reminds us that redemption begins with recognition.

In the end, Brous translates ancient faith into civic ethics: treat everyone you meet as if angels announce their approach. Seeing the divine in one another is not naïve—it’s revolutionary.

Life, Rabbi Brous tells us, demands more than survival—it demands awakening. “What is your soul calling you to do?” asked her friend Erin, a young mother dying of cancer. Erin’s question becomes the soul of chapter four. To come alive, Brous writes, we must listen to that mysterious inner summons and translate it into service.

Hearing the Call

Through her own story of discovering the rabbinate as a woman in a patriarchal world, Brous shows what it means to heed an improbable calling. When Orthodox men told her, “You should be a rebbetzin,” she felt both anger and clarity. God was calling, not those men. Later, when academic study in rabbinical school felt disconnected from the suffering of Mozambican women climbing trees to escape floods, she responded by joining human rights work alongside theology. The crisis taught her that purpose is found not in escape but in engagement.

Each of Us Is an Angel

Brous reimagines biblical angels—messengers who intervene in moments of peril—as metaphors for human calling. Hagar’s angel shows her the well when she despairs in the desert; Abraham’s angel stops him from harming his son. Every person, Brous says, arrives with a unique mission suited to this generation. “This generation calls us to great things,” writes the Slonimer Rebbe, a Hasidic master she quotes. We are those angels when we refuse to look away from suffering and instead ask, ma lakh—Tell me your story.

She illustrates this through Andrew, the stranger who saved a woman named Allie after a car accident, holding her broken body until help arrived. Andrew may never view that moment as divine calling, but Brous insists it was. “He may not have realized that he himself was the help.”

Living as an Angel in the World

To come alive is to respond to the world’s demand. Following Heschel’s question—“What is expected of me?”—Brous calls readers to integrate spiritual audacity with moral courage. Rather than waiting for crisis to bring clarity, she urges intentional living now: ask daily, “What am I waiting for?” In her community’s ritual of writing these words on cards, people revealed their hidden yearnings—for love, forgiveness, courage, creativity. Each waiting becomes a doorway to awakening.

Coming alive, then, is not about perfection but participation. The Amen Effect teaches that your existence is a divine appointment. You don’t wait for angels; you become one.

In times of loss, Brous teaches, do not choose between sorrow and celebration. Life requires hearts spacious enough to hold both. Chapter five, “Grieve and Live,” unfolds through stories of tragedy—from a child’s death to her cousins’ cancer—and through ancient tales of resilience after catastrophe. The message: grief and joy are not opposites but twins.

Ancient Wisdom for Modern Mourning

After the destruction of the Temple, Rabbi Yehoshua rebuked survivors who swore off wine, meat, and marriage in mourning. “You must mourn,” he said, “but to mourn too much is wrong. The challenge is to find a way to grieve and live.” His practical advice—leave one wall unpainted, omit one delicacy—embodies spiritual tension: acknowledge loss but continue living fully.

Centuries later, another rabbi shattered a glass at his child’s wedding, creating the modern ritual under the huppah. The broken glass is a reminder that even in joy, we carry the world’s pain. These inversions form Judaism’s theology of coexistence: celebrate with trembling.

Personal Stories of Sorrow and Splendor

Brous relives her family’s series of heartbreaking losses—her cousins Lizzie and Nancy, both dying of cancer within two years. In one scene, they dance at Nancy’s wedding knowing it will be their last. “I’ve never danced like that in my life,” Brous recalls, describing it as joy fueled by awareness of fragility. This “sorrow-joy” becomes a spiritual state, echoed in psychologist Lucy Hone’s research that resilient people accept suffering as part of existence: “They get that shit happens.”

Just as the Israelites carried both whole and broken tablets in the Ark, we carry fullness and fracture together. The broken pieces, she says, may be holier than the whole—they tell the story of survival.

The Practice of Honest Joy

For Brous, honest joy is an act of faith. It defies death denial and moral numbness. When her community celebrated a bar mitzvah the day after a child’s funeral, they wept and danced simultaneously. That paradox embodied the Amen Effect. “Rejoice with trembling,” says Psalms; we are all like aspen trees, connected through invisible roots of shared grief.

To live spaciously, you must grieve and live, live and grieve—all at once. Mourning acknowledges impermanence; celebration renews the will to love. Humanity, Brous concludes, exists in that sacred interdependence of ache and awe.

If showing up for others heals them, who heals the helpers? Chapter six is Brous’s compassionate reflection on caregivers—the rabbis, nurses, parents, and friends who carry other people’s pain until their own hearts crack. Her question: How can you care for others without being crushed by compassion?

The Sacred Duty of Visiting

In Jewish tradition, visiting the sick (bikur cholim) mirrors God’s own acts of compassion. The story of God visiting Abraham after his circumcision models divine tenderness: presence in uncomfortable places is holy. Brous reinterprets this as spiritual neuroscience—each visit lifts “one-sixtieth of a person’s pain.” Even a small gesture—holding a hand—changes molecular sorrow.

But she cautions that multiplying visits doesn’t make pain vanish. The work of compassion is cumulative, not curative. Healers absorb fragments of suffering, often until they overflow.

When the Healer Breaks

Through Rabbi Yohanan’s Talmudic story, Brous illustrates that even miracle-workers need care. After lifting countless people from their sickbeds, Rabbi Yohanan himself falls ill and can’t recover until another colleague takes his hand and raises him. The moral: “A prisoner cannot free himself.” Even healers must be held.

Brous parallels this with her own experience—ministering through decades of loss until grief lodged physically in her shoulder. When a healer in Costa Rica told her, “If you don’t metabolize the suffering, the suffering will stop you,” she understood at last how trauma inhabits the body. Healing requires release, not endurance.

Fellowship of Suffering

Henri Nouwen’s concept of the “wounded healer” anchors this chapter. Those who minister must enter the pain they wish to relieve. Brous describes moments when shared vulnerability—not strength—brought transformation: a bereaved mother comforted by another mother who lost her child, or congregants supporting each other through chemo. True empathy, she writes, sits low and listens before it lifts.

Her closing plea: Don’t “grin and bear it.” Tell the truth when you’re tired, let others feed you, rest, cry. Healing circulates; those who give love must learn to receive it. Only then can communities sustain compassion without collapse.

If the Amen Effect begins with saying “I see you,” bearing with-ness deepens that to “I’m staying with you.” Chapter seven is Brous’s meditation on accompaniment—a countercultural refusal to fix, explain, or flee pain.

The Blessing in the Night

Drawing from Jacob wrestling the angel, Brous redefines hope. Instead of waiting for morning, she says, find “the blessing that comes in the night.” True hope doesn’t promise miracles; it honors reality. When Shifra faced her partner’s terminal illness, the blessing was time itself—morning coffees, laughter, presence. It was truth, not optimism.

Psychologist Jerome Groopman (in The Anatomy of Hope) calls this “true hope”: clarity, not delusion. Brous shows that in facing mortality, love becomes purified—the work shifts from curing to cherishing.

The Courage to Be Present

Through three “strikes”—her avoidance of honesty with her dying grandmother, fear of failing a cancer patient, and misreading a mourner’s question—Brous confesses her own stumbles as a rabbi. Each failure taught her that silence, humility, and empathy are stronger than control. Rabbi Yohanan’s final story about sitting and weeping with his friend crystallizes this lesson: healing happens not through light but through shared darkness.

To bear with-ness is to abandon heroism. As Rev. Otis Moss preaches, “The darkness is all around her, but it is not in her.” Accompaniment means dancing in the dark, not denying it.

Love Is Listening

The chapter closes with the story of Hart, a boy who comforted a crying classmate by asking, “Do you want to talk or be distracted?” His instinct—asking permission to accompany pain—embodies the amen ethic. Similarly, when a pediatric ICU doctor invited Gail and Colin, newly bereaved parents, to “tell me about your children,” she gave grief language and dignity. Words became stitches holding love and loss together.

Bearing with-ness teaches that compassion is attention plus endurance. You don’t fix suffering—you share it until meaning emerges. In the night, Amen.

In the final chapter, “Wonder,” Brous turns from private healing to collective transformation. She claims that curiosity—the courage to stay at the table with those we fear or oppose—is our best hope against alienation and extremism. In a polarized world, wonder becomes political resistance.

The Social Breakdown

Brous diagnoses two intertwined crises: social alienation (people living alone, unseen) and tribalization (people bound only to those like themselves). Borrowing from Hannah Arendt’s warning that isolation fuels tyranny, she argues that disconnected hearts breed authoritarianism. “Alone and apart, we are powerless.”

To counter this, she advocates “spiritual rewiring”—training the heart in compassion through proximity. Quoting Bryan Stevenson, she urges us to “get proximate” to pain rather than judging from afar. The Amen Effect, practiced collectively, becomes civic medicine.

Curiosity Saves Lives

The story of Hannah and Asher in Jerusalem is the chapter’s axis. After witnessing a hate crime against a gay teenager, Hannah finds herself at dinner beside an extremist sympathizer. She stays, curious. Her restraint—“not walking away”—eventually transforms Asher. Three years later, he marches in the Pride Parade with his baby and a sign reading, “Hate kills. Love is the only answer.”

Brous weaves similar tales: a shock-jock writer who refuses transformation, a settler rabbi whose three-hour conversation leads to repentance. Curiosity doesn’t guarantee conversion, but it plants seeds of humanization.

Holding Complexity Without Capitulation

Wonder isn’t naïveté. Brous warns against “false equivalence” between oppressor and oppressed. Compassion shouldn’t obscure accountability. Rather, it distinguishes between sin and sinner—echoing Bruriah’s ancient wisdom: “Pray for the end of the sin, not the end of the sinner.” Even when we confront hatred, we must see the human capacity for change.

Her guiding paradox: curiosity must coexist with justice. Staying at the table doesn’t mean surrendering moral ground—it means inviting transformation. When safe, breathe and stay. Every act of wonder begins with one question: “What’s your story?”

In a world tearing itself apart, The Amen Effect’s final message is civic and spiritual: stay interested, stay human. Curiosity, like compassion, is contagious. It’s how we heal the world.