Right now, people across faith and place are readjusting to everyday life after the holiday season. The dawn of a new year is always an opportunity to reflect, lean on our loved ones and our communities for strength and guidance, and consider what kind of change we want to see – and manifest – in the world. This week on State of Belief, Interfaith Alliance’s weekly radio show and podcast, we will look to the past and the future to draw inspiration for the year ahead.

Multiple news outlets have named our first guest the most influential rabbi in America. Her TED Talk, titled Reclaiming Religion, has been viewed by 1.4 million people and translated into 23 languages. As we kick off a new year, Rabbi Sharon Brous, founder and senior rabbi of IKAR Jewish community in Los Angeles will join Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, host of State of Belief, to share her wisdom on the big spiritual questions ahead of us in 2023.

We can all agree that understanding where we came from is crucial to making sense of the world we live in today. But with so much of our culture and politics influenced by fictions of an American past that never was, we can lose sight of the most crucial lessons history teaches us. Dr. Julian Zelizer, co-editor of the new book Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past, will be with Paul to explore this effort to move toward a more reality-based understanding of ourselves as a nation.