The Brian Lera Show on W.N. YNYC, good morning again everyone. We're about to meet one of America's

most prominent rabbis, Rabbi Shannon Brows, with a new book called The Amen, or does she say a man will ask her a fact

ancient wisdom to mend our broken hearts and world it's largely a blueprint for

bringing disaffected young people into religious communities

by abandoning religious extremism, but also by making those communities more relevant.

She gave a widely shared TED Talk a few years ago criticizing religious

extremism but also what she called religious routineism.

Sharon Brass grew up in Short Hills, New Jersey, went to college at Columbia and now leads a major

congregation called the Carr in Los Angeles in a progressive Jewish community that

she founded.

She's blessed two presidents at the White House,

was once named America's number one most influential rabbi

by Newsweek magazine, and has been grappling hard with the post October 7th

world including what progressive Jews should think and say about how Israel is

fighting the war in Gaza and how she has felt abandoned by some of her

usual allies on the left who did not wholeheartedly denounce the Hamas terror

attack in Israel or even denounce it at all in some cases.

Here is part of the sermon Rabbi Brows gave on that to her congregation back on October 14th.

And as I found myself saying again and again over the course of the past week, adding to our shock and our anguish and our heartache and our fear is an existential loneliness. I have felt it and I know that many of

you have too. The clear message from many people in the world, especially from our world, those who claim to care

about justice and human dignity, is that these Israeli victims somehow

deserved this terrible fate.

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