'Self-annihilation?' LA rabbi wants to heal a 'world on fire'

One could see Brous’ need to convey to others the human capacity for grace and the language of wonder. One sensed she is the kind to wake in the middle of the night to jot down a thought. No moment or syllable should be wasted — now is the only time granted us. She told the audience that in an age of multiplying crises, the world needed sacred relationships and solidarity. She spoke of healing and urged people to “look at where the brokenness lives.”

Brous was a 30-year-old rabbi with a master’s degree in human rights from Columbia University — her thesis focused on how Maimonides’ rules of forgiveness could help childhood soldiers return to their homes in Sierra Leone and Liberia — when she started what would become IKAR in Los Angeles. Polls showed that many young Jews were abandoning institutional religion. “We were in a crisis,” said Brous. “They were hungry for community. But they were not finding it in the great synagogues.”

Melissa Balaban, then an assistant dean at the University of Southern California Law School, had heard about “what this young rabbi” was trying to do. The two met and laid out a plan. They held meetings in living rooms from Long Beach to Pasadena and arranged Shabbat services in different venues, including an actor’s studio. “It was completely organic,” said Balaban, IKAR’s executive director, who is overseeing a more than $50-million expansion of the organization’s property on La Cienega Boulevard into a campus that will include an art studio and housing for formerly homeless seniors. “Sharon engages you in what it means to lead lives of beauty and purpose.”

IKAR’s early donations came from Brous’ parents and grandparents, Balaban’s relatives and others, including a friend who gave $180. “We didn’t know if we’d be around in six months,” said Brous. “There was no role model for what we were doing.” The young rabbi also risked being blacklisted for starting a nondenominational community that has since grown to more than 1,200 households.

“Sharon was challenging” the establishment, said Bronznick. She added that more traditional Jewish leaders thought of Brous as, “‘we’ve let you in and now you’re telling us what we were doing wasn’t good and you have a better way.’ She wasn’t singular in this, but she was one of the great leaders transforming Jewish community life.”

IKAR had no budget for copiers. Balaban borrowed a Torah, which she drove to services and kept in her garage. Brous’s brother-in-law, a writer, offered his bungalow on the Fox lot to do her pastoral work. “It was so Hollywood,” said Brous. “But we had nothing.”

The community grew and eventually bought 300 prayer books. But she was adamant about one thing: “No pews. There will never be pews at IKAR,” said Brous, who today, at the gym, stands before a sea of folding chairs, bleachers and basketball championship banners. “Pews are the death of the spiritual life. Sometimes, you just need to get up and dance.”

IKAR’s services reverberate with the music of Hazan Hillel Tigay, who once belonged to the Jewish rap group MOT and is the son of biblical scholar Jeffrey H. Tigay. Hillel blends Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Eastern Arabic styles into ancient and contemporary rhythms, as if one had wandered into a desert tent where Peter Gabriel was opening for Ezekiel. “Sharon’s message is poetic and deeply rooted into what our ancestors were saying,” he said. “I want the music to be like a soundtrack. Sharon’s sermon is the script and the music gives emotional impact.”

The mood is decidedly un-pewlike. Small children play on the floor, jokes are told, those mourning loved ones are consoled. Brous’ father died in August, and during a recent service, she walked through the congregation, as if teacher and talisman strolling through the embraces of a large family. Her sermons are pointed, riding cadences, quoting the old books and personal anecdotes, like the one three weeks after Oct. 7, when she had returned from visiting her brother and his family in Israel, where she met those who had survived the Hamas massacre.

She was on sensitive terrain, speaking to grief-stricken followers, one of whom had family members killed in the attack, yet holding to her convictions. She spoke of how Israel’s retaliation against Hamas was a “just war.” But noted that the Jews killed in the militant attack had not even been counted when calls of “Gas the Jews” rang out in Sydney, Australia. She said that U.S. college campuses— her oldest daughter attends Columbia University —have veered from open-mindedness to intolerance. Hatred of Jews was exposed as Hamas was praised as “the resistance” by students and teachers. “What Trump gave to the white nationalists,” she said, “these professors are giving to the antisemites.”

Brous then widened the moral lens, urging her followers to understand the breadth of the tragedy. She spoke of the “shattering” loss of Palestinian lives in Gaza. “As a mother, as a daughter, as a human being, as a Jew, I am heartsick because we don’t have to choose. You either believe that every single person is an image of God or you don’t actually care about human life.” She invoked Abraham, the meaning of being a Jew, and peace with the enemy. A Jew, she said, will “hold the humanity of the Palestinians at the forefront of our hearts and minds.”

Brous, who jogs in the morning and runs late for meetings, arriving with the damp hair of one with an overbooked calendar, has noticed a change in her voice since Oct. 7. “I feel that anguish in my body,” she said, noting in a sermon in March that “my day starts with heartache.” Particularly upsetting to her, she said, was the resurgence of antisemitism and the betrayals of many on the left:“ People got morally confused so fast,” she said. “Somehow Hamas, this misogynist, messianic, ultranationalist movement became a hero of the left. That’s nuts.”

What’s frightening too is the direction of America. “We’re at a very dangerous moment,” she said, an age of disinformation, conspiracies and deepening rifts over the nation’s identity. The demagogues of the far left and right — she noted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claim in 2018 that a Jewish space laser started a California wildfire — are instigating imbalance and anger that can lead to tyranny. She quoted Hannah Arendt’s dictum that “terror can only rule absolutely” over people who are isolated and feel powerless.

“This is a time of crisis,” she said, “because we’re living in an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. It is not only a crisis for our bodies, it is a crisis for our democracy.” She later added: “Can we find our way to one another before the 2024 election?”

She spoke of the 2,000-year-old ritual of Jews walking in a circle around the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. While most flowed in one direction, the distraught and the brokenhearted walked in the other, forcing those not suffering to encounter face-to-face those in misery. Attention had to be paid in acts of consolation. Brous said she didn’t understand the text as a young rabbi. But as she comforted people over deaths, failed marriages and lost pregnancies, she said, she grasped how hard it is sometimes to confront the brokenness of another. But, she said, we must.

“How do we choose to see each other’s humanity?” she said. “Are we willing to go on a path of sacred accompaniment with one another?”