In her 2024 The New York Times best-selling book, The Amen Effect, Rabbi Sharon Brous shares an obscure passage from The Mishnah, a written record of ancient oral laws meant to guide daily life. The text describes a pilgrimage ritual in which hundreds of thousands of people would enter the massive courtyard of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Judaism's holiest site, and circle the complex from right to left before exiting.
Two groups, however, would enter and turn left, forcing them to walk against the crowd: the bereaved and the menudeh, people ostracized from society for serious transgressions, a rare and severe punishment. As Brous discusses, such exclusion was a kind of social death for the menudeh, who were banned from homes, meals, and prayers. They were required to stay eight feet from others. Members of both groups were mourning a profound loss, whether that of a loved one or their own place in the community. Each step against the current embodied their pain and grief.
But while their walk was difficult, it was not without solace. Custom required those walking from right to left, the unafflicted, to stop and ask every person walking the other way, “What happened?” After hearing the person’s story, they would offer words of comfort and prayer.
While the value of a community that consoles the bereaved is clear, the twin imperative to lift up people who were exiled due to their own actions proved difficult to understand. The Mishnah provides two different explanations for the act. Rabbi Meir believed the solacer’s prayer asked God to inspire the community to once again accept the transgressor. Rabbi Yose objected to this interpretation, saying that such clemency might imply that the community banished the menudeh unjustly. He instead proposed that the words of the community would inspire the offender to mend their ways in order to earn their place in the community back.
Brous writes that she finds it “astonishing that the menudeh, the outcast, the ostracized, was included in the Temple ritual at all. But it’s clear that the Rabbis wanted to envision a world in which no one is outside the circle of the community.” Such a community could both exact punishment and allow for the possibility of redemption.
Furthermore, Brous believes that by sharing in the pain of others, a person implicitly acknowledges that they themself will not remain free from suffering. Tomorrow, they might be entering and turning left. Someone might have to stop and ask them “What happened to you?”
In Downstate, Bruce Norris shows us a moment of impact between characters joined by a terrible crime. Throughout the play, they circle one another, judging, blaming, and castigating each other as they grapple with what happened and its lasting effects. What are they–and the audience–looking for? Justice or vengeance? Compassion or cruelty? Acceptance or exile? Perhaps more importantly, what are they willing to offer?