It's time to reclaim religion

At a moment when the world seems to be spinning out of control, religion might feel irrelevant -- or like part of the problem. But Rabbi Sharon Brous believes we can reinvent religion to meet the needs of modern life. In this impassioned talk, Brous shares four principles of a revitalized religious practice -- and offers faith of all kinds as a hopeful counter-narrative to the numbing realities of violence, extremism and pessimism.

I was a new mother

and a young rabbi

in the spring of 2004

and the world was in shambles.

Maybe you remember.

Every day, we heard devastating reports
from the war in Iraq.

There were waves of terror
rolling across the globe.

It seemed like humanity
was spinning out of control.

I remember the night that I read

about the series of coordinated bombings

in the subway system in Madrid,

and I got up and I walked over to the crib

where my six-month-old baby girl

lay sleeping sweetly,

and I heard the rhythm of her breath,

and I felt this sense of urgency
coursing through my body.

We were living through a time
of tectonic shifts in ideologies,

in politics, in religion, in populations.

Everything felt so precarious.

And I remember thinking,

"My God, what kind of world
did we bring this child into?

And what was I as a mother
and a religious leader

willing to do about it?

Of course, I knew it was clear

that religion would be
a principle battlefield

in this rapidly changing landscape,

and it was already clear

that religion was a significant
part of the problem.

The question for me was,

could religion
also be part of the solution?

Now, throughout history,

people have committed
horrible crimes and atrocities

in the name of religion.

And as we entered the 21st century,

it was very clear that religious extremism
was once again on the rise.

Our studies now show

that over the course
of the past 15, 20 years,

hostilities and religion-related violence

have been on the increase
all over the world.

But we don't even need
the studies to prove it,

because I ask you,
how many of us are surprised today

when we hear the stories
of a bombing or a shooting,

when we later find out
that the last word that was uttered

before the trigger is pulled
or the bomb is detonated

is the name of God?

It barely raises an eyebrow today

when we learn that yet another person

has decided to show his love of God

by taking the lives of God's children.

In America, religious extremism

looks like a white,
antiabortion Christian extremist

walking into Planned Parenthood
in Colorado Springs

and murdering three people.

It also looks like a couple

inspired by the Islamic State

walking into an office party
in San Bernardino and killing 14.

And even when religion-related extremism
does not lead to violence,

it is still used
as a political wedge issue,

cynically leading people
to justify the subordination of women,

the stigmatization of LGBT people,

racism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.

This ought to concern deeply

those of us who care
about the future of religion

and the future of faith.

We need to call this what it is:

a great failure of religion.

But the thing is, this isn't even the only
challenge that religion faces today.

At the very same time

that we need religion
to be a strong force against extremism,

it is suffering
from a second pernicious trend,

what I call religious routine-ism.

This is when our institutions
and our leaders

are stuck in a paradigm
that is rote and perfunctory,

devoid of life, devoid of vision

and devoid of soul.

Let me explain what I mean like this.

One of the great blessings
of being a rabbi

is standing under the chuppah,
under the wedding canopy, with a couple,

and helping them proclaim publicly

and make holy the love
that they found for one another.

I want to ask you now, though,

to think maybe from your own experience

or maybe just imagine it

about the difference
between the intensity of the experience

under the wedding canopy,

and maybe the experience
of the sixth or seventh anniversary.

(Laughter)

And if you're lucky enough
to make it 16 or 17 years,

if you're like most people,
you probably wake up in the morning

realizing that you forgot to make
a reservation at your favorite restaurant

and you forgot so much as a card,

and then you just hope and pray
that your partner also forgot.

Well, religious ritual and rites

were essentially designed
to serve the function of the anniversary,

to be a container in which
we would hold on to the remnants

of that sacred, revelatory encounter

that birthed the religion
in the first place.

The problem is that after a few centuries,

the date remains on the calendar,

but the love affair is long dead.

That's when we find ourselves
in endless, mindless repetitions

of words that don't mean anything to us,

rising and being seated
because someone has asked us to,

holding onto jealously guarded doctrine

that's completely and wildly out of step
with our contemporary reality,

engaging in perfunctory practice

simply because that's the way
things have always been done.

Religion is waning in the United States.

Across the board,
churches and synagogues and mosques

are all complaining

about how hard it is to maintain relevance

for a generation of young people
who seem completely uninterested,

not only in the institutions
that stand at the heart of our traditions

but even in religion itself.

And what they need to understand

is that there is today
a generation of people

who are as disgusted by the violence
of religious extremism

as they are turned off

by the lifelessness
of religious routine-ism.

Of course there is
a bright spot to this story.

Given the crisis of these two
concurrent trends in religious life,

about 12 or 13 years ago,
I set out to try to determine

if there was any way

that I could reclaim the heart
of my own Jewish tradition,

to help make it meaningful
and purposeful again

in a world on fire.

I started to wonder,

what if we could harness
some of the great minds of our generation

and think in a bold and robust
and imaginative way again

about what the next iteration
of religious life would look like?

Now, we had no money,
no space, no game plan,

but we did have email.

So my friend Melissa and I
sat down and we wrote an email

which we sent out
to a few friends and colleagues.

It basically said this:

"Before you bail on religion,

why don't we come together
this Friday night

and see what we might make
of our own Jewish inheritance?"

We hoped maybe 20 people would show up.

It turned out 135 people came.

They were cynics and seekers,

atheists and rabbis.

Many people said that night
that it was the first time

that they had a meaningful religious
experience in their entire lives.

And so I set out to do the only
rational thing

that someone would do
in such a circumstance:

I quit my job and tried to build
this audacious dream,

a reinvented, rethought religious life

which we called "IKAR,"

which means "the essence"
or "the heart of the matter."

Now, IKAR is not alone

out there in the religious
landscape today.

There are Jewish and Christian
and Muslim and Catholic religious leaders,

many of them women, by the way,

who have set out to reclaim
the heart of our traditions,

who firmly believe that now is the time
for religion to be part of the solution.

We are going back
into our sacred traditions

and recognizing that all of our traditions

contain the raw material
to justify violence and extremism,

and also contain the raw material
to justify compassion,

coexistence and kindness --

that when others choose to read our texts
as directives for hate and vengeance,

we can choose to read those same texts

as directives for love
and for forgiveness.

I have found now

in communities as varied
as Jewish indie start-ups on the coasts

to a woman's mosque,

to black churches
in New York and in North Carolina,

to a holy bus loaded with nuns

that traverses this country
with a message of justice and peace,

that there is a shared religious ethos

that is now emerging in the form
of revitalized religion in this country.

And while the theologies
and the practices vary very much

between these independent communities,

what we can see are some common,
consistent threads between them.

I'm going to share with you
four of those commitments now.

The first is wakefulness.

We live in a time today

in which we have unprecedented access

to information about every global tragedy

that happens on every corner
of this Earth.

Within 12 hours, 20 million people

saw that image
of Aylan Kurdi's little body

washed up on the Turkish shore.

We all saw this picture.

We saw this picture
of a five-year-old child

pulled out of the rubble
of his building in Aleppo.

And once we see these images,

we are called to a certain kind of action.

My tradition tells a story
of a traveler who is walking down a road

when he sees a beautiful house on fire,

and he says, "How can it be
that something so beautiful would burn,

and nobody seems to even care?"

So too we learn that our world is on fire,

and it is our job to keep our hearts
and our eyes open,

and to recognize
that it's our responsibility

to help put out the flames.

This is extremely difficult to do.

Psychologists tell us that the more
we learn about what's broken in our world,

the less likely we are to do anything.

It's called psychic numbing.

We just shut down at a certain point.

Well, somewhere along the way,
our religious leaders forgot

that it's our job
to make people uncomfortable.

It's our job to wake people up,

to pull them out of their apathy

and into the anguish,

and to insist that we do
what we don't want to do

and see what we do not want to see.

Because we know
that social change only happens --

(Applause)

when we are awake enough
to see that the house is on fire.

The second principle is hope,

and I want to say this about hope.

Hope is not naive,

and hope is not an opiate.

Hope may be the single
greatest act of defiance

against a politics of pessimism

and against a culture of despair.

Because what hope does for us

is it lifts us out of the container

that holds us and constrains us
from the outside,

and says, "You can dream
and think expansively again.

That they cannot control in you."

I saw hope made manifest
in an African-American church

in the South Side of Chicago this summer,

where I brought my little girl,

who is now 13

and a few inches taller than me,

to hear my friend Rev. Otis Moss preach.

That summer, there had already been
3,000 people shot

between January and July in Chicago.

We went into that church
and heard Rev. Moss preach,

and after he did,

this choir of gorgeous women,
100 women strong,

stood up and began to sing.

"I need you. You need me.

I love you. I need you to survive."

And I realized in that moment

that this is what religion
is supposed to be about.

It's supposed to be about
giving people back a sense of purpose,

a sense of hope,

a sense that they and their dreams
fundamentally matter in this world

that tells them
that they don't matter at all.

The third principle
is the principle of mightiness.

There's a rabbinic tradition
that we are to walk around

with two slips of paper in our pockets.

One says, "I am but dust and ashes."

It's not all about me.

I can't control everything,
and I cannot do this on my own.

The other slip of paper says,
"For my sake the world was created."

Which is to say it's true
that I can't do everything,

but I can surely do something.

I can forgive.

I can love.

I can show up.

I can protest.

I can be a part of this conversation.

We even now have a religious ritual,

a posture,

that holds the paradox
between powerlessness and power.

In the Jewish community,

the only time of year
that we prostrate fully to the ground

is during the high holy days.

It's a sign of total submission.

Now in our community,
when we get up off the ground,

we stand with our hands
raised to the heavens,

and we say, "I am strong,
I am mighty, and I am worthy.

I can't do everything,
but I can do something."

In a world that conspires
to make us believe that we are invisible

and that we are impotent,

religious communities and religious ritual

can remind us that for whatever
amount of time we have here on this Earth,

whatever gifts and blessings
we were given,

whatever resources we have,

we can and we must use them

to try to make the world
a little bit more just

and a little bit more loving.

The fourth and final
is interconnectedness.

A few years ago, there was a man
walking on the beach in Alaska,

when he came across a soccer ball

that had some Japanese
letters written on it.

He took a picture of it
and posted it up on social media,

and a Japanese teenager contacted him.

He had lost everything in the tsunami
that devastated his country,

but he was able
to retrieve that soccer ball

after it had floated
all the way across the Pacific.

How small our world has become.

It's so hard for us to remember
how interconnected we all are

as human beings.

And yet, we know

that it is systems of oppression

that benefit the most
from the lie of radical individualism.

Let me tell you how this works.

I'm not supposed to care

when black youth are harassed by police,

because my white-looking Jewish kids

probably won't ever get pulled over
for the crime of driving while black.

Well, not so, because
this is also my problem.

And guess what?
Transphobia and Islamophobia

and racism of all forms,
those are also all of our problems.

And so too is anti-Semitism
all of our problems.

Because Emma Lazarus was right.

(Applause)

Emma Lazarus was right
when she said until all of us are free,

we are none of us free.

We are all in this together.

And now somewhere at the intersection
of these four trends,

of wakefulness and hope
and mightiness and interconnectedness,

there is a burgeoning, multifaith
justice movement in this country

that is staking a claim on a countertrend,

saying that religion can and must be
a force for good in the world.

Our hearts hurt from
the failed religion of extremism,

and we deserve more
than the failed religion of routine-ism.

It is time for religious leaders
and religious communities

to take the lead in the spiritual
and cultural shift

that this country and the world
so desperately needs --

a shift toward love,

toward justice, toward equality
and toward dignity for all.

I believe that our children
deserve no less than that.

Thank you.

(Applause)