Rabbis of LA | Grief Helped Pave a Career Highway for Rabbi Anne Brener

One can never know when an epiphany will present itself. For Rabbi Anne Brener, a psychotherapist, author, academic and public speaker, it occurred in the summer of 1985 when she was asked to lead a widows’ group at Jewish Family Service’s Freda Mohr Center.

At first, the women were not responding to her therapeutic language, but when she started talking about Jewish matters — such as asking others for forgiveness on Yom Kippur — the women reacted. “When I saw how they resonated to the psychological meaning of the rituals, it pulled back something inside of me,”she said. “So I took what my grief had taught me, or perhaps had not yet been processed, and I just threw it into writing about the Jewish cycles of grief and the psychological wisdom in them.” Eight years later, she published her first book, “Mourning & Mitzvah, A Guided Journal for Walking the Mourner’s Path Through Grief to Healing,” was published. A history of the Jewish traditions that face death in a positive way, the book — now in its third edition — includes over 75 guided exercises. 

Grief was something Brener knew too well.  Her father died when she was an infant; when she was 23, her mother and 18-year-old sister died three months apart. She has also survived two devastating bouts of cancer. 

After suddenly losing her mother and sister, she became more focused on her internal world. She used video as a therapeutic tool. “I would carry around a video machine that weighed about 60 pounds,” she said. “I would videotape people either talking about themselves in a therapy session or while interacting with other people.” Brener would then ask “What were you trying to communicate?” With a scant amount of formal training, she participated in many workshops – and owing to the back-to-back family deaths, she had been in therapy.

Moving to Northern California, Brener taught at a community college in Ukiah. At the same time she was also working with a group of women who founded one of the first shelters in the country for battered women. “We had to prove to people that domestic violence was something that actually happened,” she said, reflecting on 1970s attitudes. “One thing I would do is get the women to say ‘No,’ and then we would play it back without the sound, and they would see themselves as they developed their emotional strength.”

Brener was born in Leominster, Massachusetts, in 1948, and grew up in New Orleans. In 1967, when she was 19, Brener was living in Israel. Trying to figure out what she was going to do with her life, she remembered her work with video. “I thought if there was television and people could see each other’s lives, they would have more compassion for each other,” she said. “Television would be the tool to do that … “It seems almost laughable now,” she said, shuddering at the memory. “It makes me want to cry.”

Returning to the States, she earned a Master’s degree in broadcast communications, and not long afterward the double family deaths struck. Building a career in Northern California, Brener recalled being “very far from a Jewish life when I lived in Mendocino County.”

Judaism was the bedrock of her social values. She saw her faith in terms of politics, civil rights and social action.

And Judaism was the bedrock of her social values. She saw her faith in terms of politics, civil rights and social action. As a way to calm her mind, Brener developed an intense yoga practice.  “At one point,” she said, “I pushed myself up, my hands, my feet and legs, and turned into a bridge. When I came down, I felt a curtain pull apart inside of me. I felt as if I had not lost my mother and my sister, and that I still had access to them.”

The moment was so profound that suddenly, “out of nowhere, for the first time in years, I started to chant the Shema.” 

Not long afterward, Brener met Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, one of the founders of the Jewish Renewal Movement. She asked if her reaction was what the Shema was about.  He told her it was. “But I don’t think I had considered Judaism as a spiritual path,” she admitted.

Growing up with an adoptive father from an Orthodox family and a mother who was Reform, “I went to a Sunday school at a Reform synagogue where we went most of the time.” It was, she said, an ideal upbringing. “I had the social awareness of the Reform, but I had the heart and the calendar of Orthodoxy.”

She reflected on her childhood days when her adoptive grandfather, Philip Brener, suffered a stroke. Notably, he had spent his life raising money for Palestine, then for Israel. After the stroke, he was paralyzed on the right side. Young Anne had the honor of feeding him, holding the feeding tube. “When I finished, I went into his study. I saw a plaque saying ‘If I forget thee O Jerusalem, may my right hand fail and my tongue cleave, too.’” She was in the third grade. “That was one of the most significant moments of my life. I didn’t think about God again until 20 years later when I was doing yoga.”

Asked if she always had been on a trail to the rabbinate, Rabbi Brener, ordained in 2008, thought it was an intriguing question. “When I was being educated,” she said, “it was not a possibility. I think if women were being ordained then, and I had seen that as a possibility for my future, it would have been a likely choice. But it wasn’t.”

Fast Takes with Rabbi Brener

Jewish Journal: Favorite place to travel outside of Israel?

Rabbi Brener: New Orleans. After my mother and sister died, I had to get away because every corner and tree held a memory. I return now for the same reasons. 

J.J.: Your favorite spare time activity?

R.B.: I like to do yoga and I like to write. 

J.J.: Best vacation ever?

R.B.: Before COVID, an Israeli travel agency organized a trip for rabbis that was all about art, music and dance.