[00:00:00] We can either keep killing each other, living by the sword, or we can find a way to live together. But actually, neither of us can be safe until the other people is safe. Neither of us can live in full freedom, with full rights, with full flourishing of life until the other people is able to do that too. Because circumstances, right, of history has brought us together in this place and we are literally inextricably linked.
[00:00:30] I'm Courtney Martin, and this is The Wise Unknown. We live in a time of fame, fanaticism, and egos run amok. Am I right? Well, welcome to the exact opposite. On this podcast, I ask famous people—actors, writers, chefs, spiritual leaders—to introduce me to the wisest person they know that no one has ever heard of.
[00:00:54] And then, I kick the famous person off the line. It's pretty fun and very countercultural. As you might imagine, these wise unknowns don't have a million followers on Instagram, but they reliably drop knowledge that rattles around in my brain for days and days to come. Today's episode is one that takes us into a portal of war. Generations of war. Decades of violence. You guessed it, the Middle East.
[00:01:24] We traveled into this portal with our guests during an all-too-brief but important ceasefire. And now, we are sharing it with you when that ceasefire has been obliterated. The Pope just died after one last call for peace. He said that he was, quote, thinking of the people of Gaza, where the terrible conflict continues to cause death and destruction and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation.
[00:01:51] So, I tell you this because, as we see it, our podcast is not about responding to the day's news. Our podcast is about taking the longest, most expansive view we can of what wisdom is and where it lies, dormant or at least very quiet.
[00:02:10] As such, we struggle to figure out how to voice the gap between when we recorded this conversation and when it's being published and the gap between the form of this podcast, which is deliberately not focused on the news of the day, and the fact that this conversation sent us down a portal of the most heartbreaking news of the day. I actually don't have something perfect or resolve to say about those gaps. I just want to say that we, my producer Golda Arthur and I, see them.
[00:02:40] This conversation doesn't solve anything, but it does honor quiet and expansive wisdom. And that's our aim here with The Wise Unknown. So, we offer it to you in that spirit. I have admired Rabbi Sharon Browse's work for a long time. She's a celebrated rabbi in LA who has written a beautiful book called The Amen Effect, given viral sermons, and was Ezra Klein's go-to voice of moral reason after October 7th, 2023.
[00:03:09] She's one of those people who has really held up as a capital W, capital F, wisdom figure. So, I was curious who she would choose as her wise unknown at a time of such heightened tension. Who is the true north inside of her head when she's writing a sermon, weighing an issue, counseling a congregant? Turns out it's Leah Solomon, the chief education officer at an organization called Encounter.
[00:03:37] She's unsurprisingly humble, courageous in the midst of violence, and has so much to teach us all about the kind of intimacy that builds peace. Without further ado, meet Rabbi Sharon Browse and her wise unknown, Leah Solomon. So good to see you, Rabbi Sharon. I'm so delighted that you agreed to do the Wise Unknown today, and I can't wait to meet your person.
[00:04:06] So, please introduce me. Okay. My person is Leah Solomon. I'm absolutely thrilled for you to know Leah and for your listeners to know about her. The question that you asked was, who's the person of great wisdom who I turn to when the world is mixed up and confused and want to get clear on my own thinking, who many people might not have heard of before, but who's actually a thought leader behind the thought leaders. And so, I immediately thought of Leah.
[00:04:34] In her official capacity, Leah is the chief education officer at Encounter. She's been now for, I'd say, 25 years working as an experiential educator and a peace builder. And the reason that I think it's so important for folks to hear from Leah is because she is, I won't say singular,
[00:04:56] but one of very few voices in this crazy, mixed up, morally confused world that is able to anchor in a set of core values that will always, always strive to lift up the dignity of every human being. Leah is a Jewish educator. Leah lives in Israel.
[00:05:20] And she is so deeply committed to the humanity of the Jewish people and the Palestinian people and all human beings that I want the whole world to know about you, Leah. I want everybody to listen to you, to hear you, to just imbibe your wisdom. And it just strikes me that we are living through a time of such zero-sum, false binaries. It's either the Gaza Mar-a-Lago plan on one side or burn Tel Aviv to the ground on the other.
[00:05:48] And in the midst of all of this, people who are feeling deep grief and trauma feel like they have to attach to one of these narratives or the other. And it's so critical that we continue to lift up and to amplify the voices of people who are insisting that there is a third way, that we are building that third way with love, that we can continue to open our hearts. We can love our own people and also build healing bridges to other people. We can be gentle with ourselves and with each other.
[00:06:15] And Leah, you are a constant reminder for me of that small voice that lives inside of me and that I try to lift up for my community here in the States. And I'm just so deeply grateful for all that you share every day and just for the way that you walk through the world. And absolutely thrilled for you to be on Courtney's radar. That's so beautiful. Leah, what is that like to hear? It's very moving, actually, to hear that, Sharon.
[00:06:43] And Leah is holding her hand on her heart as she says that for our listeners. That's really, really beautiful. Thank you, Rabbi Sharon. We are kicking you off now and you will get to listen to this conversation along with our listeners. But I am just, again, so grateful. And I feel like the way you just described how Leah moves through world and what she offers is exactly why this podcast exists. So you couldn't have chosen more exquisitely. Thank you.
[00:07:10] I imagine in your conversation together, you'll talk not only about Leah's thought leadership and wisdom, but also about the work of Encounter, which is really transforming the conversation in such important ways. And I feel so grateful. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to introduce the world to Leah Solomon. Yay. Have a beautiful day. Bye, Sharon. Well, Leah, let's start there since Rabbi Sharon sort of led us to it. Tell us a little bit about Encounter and the work that you all try to do there.
[00:07:37] Our vision focuses on sort of cultivating Jewish leadership on the Israeli-Palestinian reality. And I'm using that term intentionally. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but really the Israeli-Palestinian reality as a whole. Cultivating Jewish leadership that is more courageous, more resilient, more constructive,
[00:08:01] and in some way or another leading to a transformation of this conflict into a reality that will, as Sharon was saying, and she said it so beautifully herself, I feel like I don't even need to say anything now. But a reality in which both Jews and Palestinians can live on this land, where I'm sitting right now speaking to you from Jerusalem, in security, in dignity, with rights. We're a nonpartisan organization.
[00:08:25] We do not advocate for specific policies, you know, not on a macro level of advocating for a one-state solution or two-state solution or confederation or something like that. And also not like we're not a political advocacy organization. Sometimes we talk about being a consciousness-raising organization. And the other piece that I think is really important to mention is, you know, people will say to us, well, what's your agenda? You know, you say you're nonpartisan, but it's so political.
[00:08:54] I would never say we're an apolitical organization. We are a very political organization in the sense that the content that we're dealing with, which is really people's lives, real people's lives, and this year, the past two years, even more so, we're really dealing with life and death questions. It's absolutely political, but it's not partisan in that policy sense. When people ask what our agenda is, I point to our values.
[00:09:22] The three that I think are most important for me to lift up are, the first one is, in Hebrew we say, ahava Yisrael, the love of and commitment to the Jewish people. The second one is the dignity of all human beings. And the third is inextricability. These are three values which are very much linked together. We are told over and over again that you need to be pro-Palestinian.
[00:09:49] And if you are pro-Palestinian, then you are anti-Semitic, or you are anti-Zionist, or you are anti-Israel, or you can't possibly care about Jews if you care about Palestinians. Or you can be pro-Israel. And if you're pro-Israel, then you can't care about Palestinians. It automatically means that you don't care about the Palestinian people. And I want to say not just that that's a false binary and you actually can be both. It's not just that that's possible. Encounter is third value of inextricability.
[00:10:18] We believe that it's actually not possible to choose because our lives and our futures on this land are inextricably linked. There are about 7.5 million Jews and 7.5 million Palestinians living between the river and the sea. God willing, no one is going to wipe out the other people. And we have either two choices. We can either keep killing each other, living by the sword, or we can find a way to live together.
[00:10:44] But actually, neither of us can be safe until the other people is safe. Neither of us can live in full freedom, with full rights, with a full flourishing of life until the other people is able to do that too. Because circumstances, right, of history has brought us together in this place. And we are literally inextricably linked. It's not about choosing between do you care about your own people or do you care about some sort of universal values.
[00:11:12] You actually have to care about each if you care about the other. That sort of encounter in a nutshell, but we believe it's our responsibility to understand Palestinian perspectives and experiences and beliefs, and then to take responsibility for our part in transforming the reality for the better. Wow. So beautiful.
[00:11:40] I have like a million questions, but I want to start with that word inextricability because it's such a special word and such a special teaching you just gave. And it strikes me that it is one that we can extend far beyond the reality where you live, that our inextricability is really what's up globally for all of us to try to wrap our minds
[00:12:05] around. What do you think that word means in an even bigger scale for those of us who have perhaps been brokenhearted witnesses to what's going on in your region of the world, but also are brokenhearted about like a million other things that this might be healing to understand? The idea of inextricability, I mean, I think many, many people have written about it. Sharon writes about it, speaks about it. You know, there are many people who write about it. For us,
[00:12:32] one of the places that it came from that sort of inspired that value, you know, as one of our organizational values was actually Martin Luther King. So it's source in his letter from Birmingham jail where he speaks about the fact that we are all sort of one fabric. All human beings are one fabric, and none of us can be free until all of us are free. And I'm not quoting him precisely because I don't have the quote in front of me. But I think that in any reality, in any reality of conflict, and,
[00:13:01] you know, this is not my expertise, but you do work with many people who have, you know, researched or gone to learn from other places of conflict. There are a lot of organizations that are actually doing the work with Israelis and Palestinians or looking at the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians who are constantly looking to other conflicts in the world,
[00:13:23] to, you know, Northern Ireland, to Colombia, to Rwanda, to South Africa, to many, many places. I think everybody in the midst of a conflict, we believe that our conflict is absolutely unique, that it has all sorts of characteristics that no other peoples, no other nation has experienced before. And actually, we have a tremendous amount to learn from, not just from other conflicts,
[00:13:49] but from other conflicts that have moved past the stage of conflict to have managed, not just to manage the conflict or to resolve a conflict, but to transform a conflict. And I think that inextricability, the idea of inextricability is at the root of all of those. It's recognizing that living by the sword forever just results in more and more people dying. And, you know, I know many, I work with a lot of, because we bring Jews to meet Palestinians
[00:14:16] who come to speak to the groups. We have a network of about, you know, 300 Palestinians, constantly expanding pool. One of the things that they often talk about is that some of the people who meet with our groups speak about is that the conflict will be transformed, will be resolved. We will stop fighting each other when we realize that the cost of war is actually greater than the cost of peace or of resolving the conflict. Again, that's linked to inextricability. You continue
[00:14:45] fighting only if you think you can actually eliminate in some way the threat from the other side. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we'll hear more from Leah on everything from empathy to war to parenting. Don't go anywhere. Hey, it's Courtney, and I want to tell you about my Substack newsletter, Examined Family. It's weekly
[00:15:14] for people who get all twisted up inside about the brokenness of the world and wonder how the heck to live in it. Loving and humble, but brave as hell. The comment section is on fire. Seriously, the community is wise and engaged. People are talking. People are giving each other tips. There's so much goodness there. Nuance is everywhere. Subscribe today. It's free. I have a feeling that if you delight in this podcast, you're going to dig Examined Family. See you there.
[00:15:54] Hey, it's Courtney, and I want to tell you about my Substack newsletter, Examined Family. It's weekly for people who get all twisted up inside about the brokenness of the world and wonder how the heck to live in it. Loving and humble, but brave as hell. The comment section is on fire. Seriously, the community is wise and engaged. People are talking. People are giving each other tips.
[00:16:20] There's so much goodness there. Nuance is everywhere. Subscribe today. It's free. I have a feeling that if you delight in this podcast, you're going to dig Examined Family. See you there. I was also thinking about inextricability, not only as it relates to conflicts, but as it relates to climate, which also fits what you just said, which is we do need to lose some things if we're going to
[00:16:45] save the planet. We need to fly less. We need to slow down. We need to consume less, like all these supposed losses. But if we really recognize our inextricability, those losses are much less painful than the extinction of various species and all the things that we're, you know, experiencing. So anyway, I think it applies in so many interesting ways. I read something, I think you wrote it quite
[00:17:08] a while ago, so you may not even remember writing this, but about intimate empathy versus intellectual empathy. I was wondering if you would talk about that a little bit, because I do think whatever conflict we're talking about, and certainly when we talk about the war that you've been experiencing, as an outsider to it, I feel there's so much intellectualization and argumentation and analysis,
[00:17:35] and it feels like part of what you're doing through your work and through the way you move through the world is asking people to drop into something more soulful, more spiritual. Can you talk about that empathy difference between intellectual empathy and intimate empathy? You can have education where you're sitting in a classroom reading a book learning about something, even seeing something on TV, right, through a very flattened, through a screen,
[00:18:01] which is, you know, physically, it's flat. It flattens the reality. You know, the work that I do every day, the work that we do at Encounter every day is experiential education. It's actually taking people into the places that things that are very scary for them most of the time are happening, right? When people look at this conflict, we start dehumanizing the other, demonizing the other. We talked about, you know, I've heard Palestinians say that, you know, until they actually met an
[00:18:27] Israeli Jew, the only thing they saw was soldiers, armed soldiers who are there to make their lives incredibly difficult to oppress them, right? All they saw was violence. Most of the Israeli Jews, I know, most of the Jews I know, for that matter, think of Palestinians as all terrorists. They're all monsters. You know, they're not even human. What they were able to do on October 7th, the atrocities
[00:18:54] that were committed, the brutal atrocities that there were Palestinian, you know, members of Hamas and others who did commit brutal atrocities. It's very easy when you don't actually have that intimacy, when you don't have any direct contact, when you don't have any actual experience with, in quotation marks, right? The other. It's very easy to flatten and to speak in absolute generalist
[00:19:23] terms about them, all of them. Well, and it strikes me when you said there's no intimacy, but the examples of the Jewish soldiers and the violence that was committed on October 7th, there is a profoundly intimate encounter in both of those settings, but it's one single kind of intimacy. So it's like that Chimamande Adichie has this idea of the danger of a single story, and it sounds like it's like danger of a single intimacy. Interesting.
[00:19:53] If you have that one kind of intimacy, but not the variety of intimacies that you create through encounter, then you can't get to empathy. It's interesting. I wonder if you can think about, like, encountering someone holding a gun pointed at you, whether Israeli or Palestinian. It's an interesting thing to think about. It is a certain kind of intimacy, right? A person coming into direct physical contact or, you know, within a couple
[00:20:18] meters of contact. So yes, I do hear that. I think that there are many other kinds of intimacy, right? And if you only have that image, and also, right, most people don't even have that. Most people are hearing about that or seeing about that on television. And when you actually experience something, when you actually meet people, when you meet people in all of their complexity, right? It's not like, you know, I said we're a non-partisan organization. I'm not
[00:20:47] interested in convincing anyone that I meet to bring Palestinians because this person is right, or that person is right, or you should agree with them, or you should disagree with them. It's more about recognizing there is a kaleidoscopic lens, right? Moving from a very narrow singular lens to a kaleidoscopic lens and recognizing there is so much more diversity there and so much more opportunity, right? Like, you know, you might say, well, I saw what this person or this group of
[00:21:17] people did. We can never live with them, right? Because they're all that we see. So I don't generally think of myself as such a religious or spiritual person, but then I think about education, and I think in particular about experiential education, about bringing people into experiences with others who are different from them. And there I have like, I have like a faith in that, in the power of those
[00:21:41] kinds of encounters. And by the way, I think it's really important to say, like, we are in many ways focused on the bringing Israelis, Jews in general, Jews, whether American or Israeli, into contact with Palestinians. But we also have a lot of focus as a Jewish organization on intra-Jewish dialogue, right? Because it is, if we want to talk about inextricable links, right? We're just as inextricably linked within our own people, and there is tremendous division also within the Jewish people,
[00:22:10] right? So everything I'm saying about coming into conversation, into contact, into more intimate relationship with, quote unquote, the other, that also takes place within our societies. And here there is, I think, tremendous relevance to the polarization we're seeing also in America, right? Like, that's not my area of expertise. But I think the Democrats and Republicans, like people actually stop speaking to each other. I know people who have met, family members have stopped speaking to each
[00:22:37] other because they just can't bridge those divides. And often I ask, you know, my friends who are Democrats, like, do you have any relationships with people who are Republicans? And often the answer is no, and vice versa. Yeah, so powerful. I'm wondering that faith that you described, where was the seed of that for you? Did you have an experiential education experience that changed you in some important way?
[00:23:01] I became interested in and committed to pluralistic education in college. I grew up in, actually in LA, where Sharon is now. And I grew up in a very, like, I don't know how much your listeners are familiar with the inner workings of Jewish denominational life, but, you know, you have Reformed Jews, you have Conservative Jews, you have Orthodox Jews, you have beyond that. But I would say, like,
[00:23:28] the message, I was sort of, I grew up in a conservative Jewish family, which when, if you look at it from the outside, often will get described as like sort of in the middle, right? We're not Orthodox and very adhering to Jewish law, halakha, and like sort of strict observance, and we're not Reform, which is, you know, sort of a more modern. The way I would describe what I was taught growing up is that being a conservative Jew is the right way to be. Reformed Jews are essentially,
[00:23:55] might as well be Christian. Orthodox Jews are just crazy, right? They're nuts. They're backwards. And conservative Judaism is the right way. This gets to your intergroup dialogue that you were talking about, right? Yeah. Exactly. And I went to college and I went to Harvard in the 90s, and there was a very, very thriving Jewish life at Harvard, at the Harvard Hillel. There was a thriving group of Reform Jews
[00:24:21] who met regularly. There was thriving Orthodox Jewish life, thriving conservative Jewish life. And all of a sudden, it was like, I don't know, like I was seeing things in color instead of black and white. And in a way that when I was growing up, I feel like the sort of intrinsic message was, I actually don't want you to be friends with Reform Jews or Orthodox Jews because it'll threaten your commitment to your own way of living Jewishly. I found that it was exactly the opposite. Like,
[00:24:47] I learned so much from my Orthodox friends that I made in college. I learned so much from the Reform friends that I made in college. But not in a way that it actually deepened my own convictions because all of a sudden I had to articulate why I believe. I didn't just do it because that's what everybody does. It was like, oh, why is this important to me? Why is egalitarianism important to me? And it actually made my life much richer. You asked about why do I have this faith and experience? Like, I could not have learned that from a book. It's something that I
[00:25:17] see sort of on a daily basis. I say that it's sort of a faith because it's not something where you see the impact, the results right away. In this field of conflict transformation, there's like short-term impact, you know, for talking about Jews and Palestinians, you know, like maybe you go and
[00:25:43] you go help a Palestinian farmer pick their olives, right? Or you contribute to people who were displaced after the attacks on October 7th, were displaced from their homes in the area around Gaza and have been living like in a hotel in the Dead Sea and their houses burned down. You go and, you know, you do their laundry for them, right? Like these were things that were happening in the days and weeks after October 7th. These people who had no homes, maybe they'd lost half their family members. That's a very short-term impact, but it's very concrete. You know that you helped this farmer
[00:26:13] harvest their olives, even though there were threats from violent people living nearby who were coming. Or you know that you helped this family who'd lost everything be able to have clean clothing. That's short-term impact. There's the mid-term work, which is like, I think, political advocacy, largely, right? Like we're trying to change our political system. And then there's the long-term work of really shifting the discourse, of changing the way people think and feel. And those shifts, you can never know that they're happening while they're happening.
[00:26:41] Like you have to have some level of faith that what you're doing is going to make that long-term difference. That's so beautifully put. You really helped me just then connect a dot to my own work, which is I wrote this book called Learning in Public Lessons for a Racially Divided America for My Daughter's School. And it's about the unfinished project of integration in public schools in America
[00:27:10] and the ways in which in particular white moms and white parents are standing in the way of that bypass the schools where we could be forces for integration. And that, for me, was very much about that long-term faith. I mean, there are researchers who have done beautiful work now that we have had some integrated schools for many decades understanding the power of integration, and particularly on white kids that the social education they get from that kind of intimacy, going back to your intimate
[00:27:38] empathy idea, is so deep and rich and nuanced. And that's so different than at 35 years old being like, okay, let me read a book about anti-racism growing up in an educational setting where you're just constantly interacting with people from different racial and class backgrounds has such a profoundly deeper experience than reading the right book at 35. So anyway, I just really resonate so much with that. And I actually want to end by asking you about something parallel to education, which is
[00:28:08] parenting, because I know you've written about it and you're a parent of three kids, you said, right? Yeah. What is the wisdom that you have gleaned from parenting in a time of war? I can only imagine. I mean, you've parented over much violence, I'm sure, intimate and more abstract, but I'm sure the last 16 months have been quite a ride as a parent. So anything you want to share with us about what that
[00:28:35] has taught you? You know, I don't even know how to answer that. The first thing that comes to mind is like, I've been doing this particular work, working for Encounter for 10 years. And I started right after the Gaza war in 2014. My kids were obviously a lot younger then. They were 10 years younger. They were two, five and eight.
[00:28:58] One of the images that sticks in my mind most profoundly from that experience that like brought me to do this work was, so we have, you know, rocket sirens when people in Gaza, Hamas or Islamic Jihad or whoever starts shooting rockets and then things escalate. But so at the very beginning of that war, the first rocket siren, and we hadn't had one in a long time in Jerusalem, like it wasn't a common
[00:29:24] thing. It's now a thing that we've gotten used to, unfortunately. But, you know, and my husband hadn't even realized that there was a war starting. I had kind of, I'd been reading the news. He wasn't, it was at 11 o'clock at night and, you know, three kids, little kids, when they're that young, they're sound asleep. And, you know, kids sleep really deeply. They get really heavy, right? It's like dead weight. And we have a safe room, like all Israeli apartments built after a certain date. We have a, basically like a bomb shelter within the apartment, but it is the farthest room
[00:29:53] and downstairs from my kid's room where they, you know, they were all sleeping. And we had one and a half minutes, which is a lot of time in Israeli terms. Like in most other places, you have maybe a minute or 30 seconds or even 15 seconds. We had a minute and a half to get three sleeping kids from their room down to the safe room. And how do you pick? Like you have two adults and three sleeping kids. Somehow we managed to wake up my eight-year-old and get him to climb down from his
[00:30:19] top bunk and run downstairs with us. But that moment was like a very profound turning point for me because we all have American citizenship. We could have moved back to the States. And I felt like, okay, if I am making an active choice to raise my kids in this reality, I owe it to them. Like I am putting them in danger and I owe it to them to do everything I can to change this reality for them.
[00:30:52] I haven't stopped talking to them about it since then. People are always asking me like, what do you teach your kids? I try to just tell them the truth and I try to not hide things from them as much as I can at an age appropriate, right? And figuring out what is age appropriate is incredibly hard. I have learned with three kids that there is no one answer. Like all of them, I think we're ready to have these conversations at different ages. There's no right answer to when
[00:31:19] to do that. But I think the most important thing that I've done with them, and here I really, I hesitate to even say this because I don't even know, like, I don't know if it's right. I know that I'm really proud of my 18-year-old who's like post high school and in this like gap year program. And he's just been really extraordinary in ways that I feel like he argued with me for years about my work and asking me all these questions and like not telling me I was wrong, but challenging me.
[00:31:47] And now all of a sudden I see that like all the values that I tried to convey in my clarity around values, but real lack of clarity of like, I do not think there is one right way. I don't think that there's one right side. I'm constantly trying to tell you like, well, you know, you think this person's right, but have you considered this other thing? And somehow, miraculously, after all that arguing, he's actually doing many of the things that I had really hoped he would be doing. He's been
[00:32:15] advocating to bring Palestinian speakers to his gap year program. These Israeli kids have never met them, but he's also taking them to meet settlers in the West Bank. And when I said to him, like, really, is that what you want to be doing? He said, mom, it's the same values that you taught me. Like you said, we need to understand people that we don't know. Well, I don't know the settlers in the West Bank. I need to understand them. So I'm organizing a trip to go understand that. And to me, that actually is the same values, right? Like of trying to understand the people that one way or another,
[00:32:43] we are going to have to live with. So I don't know if that answered your question. Absolutely. All I can say is you cannot hide things from kids. And I think that just goes back to the education piece. When you're honest, when you share the complexity of the things that you don't know, they just, they respect you so much more and they trust you so much more because you're not hiding anything from them. Oh, that's like the first parenting advice I've ever heard that I might actually be able to
[00:33:10] to honor, right? Just to like tell the truth and try to admit when you don't know. Thank you so much, Leah. This has just been so edifying and complexifying in all the right ways. And I can't wait to share it with our audience. I love that word, complexify. It's a great word. Thank you. Thank you.
[00:33:40] Thank you so much to Rabbi Sharon Brous and Leah Solomon for this powerful conversation. I am so grateful to both of them. Check out Rabbi Sharon Brous's book, The Amen Effect, and the work of Encounter, the organization Leah Solomon helps lead online. Who's your Wise Unknown? Tell us about them. Write to me at thewiseunknown7 at gmail.com. Or send us a short voice note and we might use it on our next episode.
[00:34:06] The Wise Unknown was made possible by the Reese Foundation, where Kyle Reese is a force for good in the world, and the Einhorn Foundation, which gets wisdom better than almost any foundation we know. The show was produced by Golda Arthur, our associate producer is Jessica Martinez-Dejas, and our sound engineer is Eric Gomez. Our art is by Wendy McFaughton, and our music is by Kumar Butler. I am Courtney Martin, and this is The Wise Unknown.