Ikar, the unique and progressive synagogue in Los Angeles, will celebrate its 21st birthday this year. But Rabbi Sharon Brous, one of Ikar’s founders and its rabbi, has been interrogating the roots and intellectual basis of Judaism for more than three decades.
Raised in the New Jersey suburbs, Brous grew up in a Jewish-identified but not a Jewish-religious home “We were part of the Reform synagogue,” she said, “but my parents really were Reconstructionsts. My grandmother’s uncle was Mordechai Kaplan [the founder of the Reconstructionist movement]. Rabbi Kaplan married my parents. They always had this little rebellious edge in the Reform environment. They knew they didn’t fit exactly right.”
While she was growing up, her parents left the Reform synagogue and started a little breakoff Reconstructionist community, “one that exists to this day.” This gave her a strong sense of Jewish community and identity growing up. But she explained, it left her without “a very strong context of what the broader Jewish community looked like. And no idea about traditional Jewish practice or learning or ritual or engaging.”
Active in the Reform community, she attended Columbia University because “a quarter of the students were Jewish.” She was in for a surprise.
While her parents took her to synagogue growing up, it was “a kind of cloudy environment. We had a Jewish life. We were frum on Passover. We took everything out of the house. Every Friday night we ate dinner in the dining room instead of the kitchen. We always had challah. And we went to synagogue, not just on High Holy Days.” She immediately discovered that her understanding of the Jewish community was “very narrow.” The young woman who eventually chose the rabbinate was struck by “how much I didn’t know.” She lacked even the basic knowledge. “It’s embarrassing and painful to realize that something you think is yours — you have a very thin relationship [with] in reality.
“I realized the Judaism I was raised in gave me a very small slice of the broader Jewish picture,” she said. It was especially painful because “it was so central to my identity.” But her initial interactions turned her off. “I really was repelled by the Jewish community, which seemed aggressively judgmental – and impenetrable.”
She refused to be discouraged. She started showing up in Jewish environments in college, “going to Shabbat services at Hillel, which was not called Hillel at the time. And going to Shabbat dinners and placing myself in Jewish environments where I recognized quickly there was a whole Jewish language I was completely ill-equipped to engage.”
Brous interpreted each delay as a learning experience. She engaged with life in New York City, studying African-American history and culture and Eastern religion. She viewed herself as a citizen of the world.
That sense of self was shattered by the 1992 attack on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires. “I felt my heart ripped out of my chest,” she said. “I was so stunned by my own reaction … Why did I feel this particular pain. It felt like it was my family, even though I never had been to Israel. I was very uncomfortable with that awareness.” Jews were attacked a world away in Argentina, and Brous decided she had to investigate.
“My dear friend David, who, years later, would become my husband, had grown up in the Ramah system, going to Ramah camps. His mother was a Jewish educator in Philly. I reached out to her. I asked her to help me find a synagogue where I could learn.
“She handwrote a list of every synagogue in New York City. Thankfully I was in a city with a lot of synagogues. Part of my story is David and I would go every Friday night for almost a year to a different synagogue in New York City.
“I really got a good understanding of the broader Jewish community. In the Orthodox synagogues and most of the Conservative synagogues, nobody ever said what page we were on.” She walked in as “a Jew searching for a way to connect with my own tradition.” Everybody was engaged, she said, but no one helped her to figure out how to engage.
“I desperately wanted it. I went into Reform synagogues and felt, like, I already know all of this. I’m left functionally illiterate. So it doesn’t help. I really struggled. One Friday night we went to the next one on the list, on the Upper West Side, B’nai Jeshurun. Remember, David was a knowledgeable Jew. This was different from the others. From the moment I walked in, I felt I was embraced in a kind of community that I desperately had been searching for.”
The service was in Hebrew, but she felt “as if I understood every word. It was because the music was so moving, so emotional. And then the preaching was so profound. I felt as if I had been invited into a kind of Jewish practice that was spiritually deep, traditionally rooted and deeply invested in the world we were living in now — and how to make it more just and more loving.”
Rabbi Brous talks about this moment as if it occurred an hour ago. It was, she said, “transformative … I remember the night well. I was bawling. Every week after these failed Friday night experiences, I’d leave crying. We’d go out to dinner, and this is part of our falling-in-love montage because David would say, ‘It’s okay, we’ll find a better place for you next week.’”
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