The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World

longing to connect with others who can help hold the pain, a need to share what we’ve learned in the trenches, and a desire to give, even when we ourselves have barely caught our breath.

The world was made—gorgeous, tender, broken, dangerous—we know not why. —Reverend Victoria Safford

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel had offered a scathing critique of American religious life: “Religion declined, not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.”

You’ll also see in these pages hints at the intersection of ancient Jewish wisdom and neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology.

“What young people need,” he wrote, “is not religious tranquilizers, religion as diversion, religion as entertainment, but spiritual audacity, intellectual guts, the power of defiance!”

to reclaiming the prophetic tradition and working with multi-faith partners to build a society of equity and equality, compassion and justice.

I don’t quite know what to say, so I mostly listen. I’ve found during the past forty-eight hours with Gail and Colin that my role as their rabbi is less to dispense wisdom—I wouldn’t dare—and more to engage in the very holy work of not running away.

Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable!

Hebrew Bible, which encompasses the Torah, Prophets, and Writings, the Talmud, an immense, multigenerational record of stories, laws, and ideas, and the Midrash, ancient and contemporary Rabbinic Jewish interpretations of the Torah.