Minyan Rabbi David L. Abramson Tikvat Israel Congregation First Day of Rosh Hashanah September 25, 2014 A little Jewish man is sitting in a bar in a frontier town in the Old West. He s surrounded by big, burly men wearing rugged clothes and ten-gallon hats. Trying to look inconspicuous, he quietly sips his sarsaparilla. Suddenly, a big, burly man bigger and burlier than all the others, whose hat appears to be a twelve-gallon ambles into the room. Ah hear there s a Jew in here, he growls. Our guy is staring down at his drink, desperately hoping that the moment will pass. Is there a Jew here? the cowboy demands. Slowly, our guy raises his hand. I am he murmurs. The cowboy approaches, looms over our guy for a moment, then bends over, his menacing face only inches from the little man s nose. Then, he speaks again: We need a tenth for a minyan. Minyan is a serious concern. Synagogues that have strong minyanim (i.e., those that get a minyan more often than they don t) take pride in that strength. Synagogues that have weak minyanim (i.e., those that more frequently experience the disappointment of not having the requisite ten or more people) bemoan that weakness and sometimes castigate members for not supporting their minyan frequently enough, especially for letting down the mourners in the community who require a minyan in order to recite Mourners Kaddish. Recent discussions in our Religious Practices Committee have centered on what to do about our daily minyan how to encourage more minyan attendance; how to make our weekday minyan more inviting, more accessible, more meaningful. A task force of the Religious Practices Committee has worked long and hard, sensitively discussing different strategies and considerations, and are now prepared to unveil our new minyan revitalization program. I ll have more to say about that in a little while. Of course, minyan revitalization programs are nothing new in synagogues. Some synagogues are able to sustain their strong minyan year after year. In other synagogues, minyan strength goes through cyclical patterns, waxing and waning as the years go by. And as you hear me talking about minyan revitalization, some of you might be trying to not visibly roll your eyes since you might remember Tikvat Israel minyan revitalization efforts from years past. But that s not a bad thing, necessarily. It s quite possible that our current efforts to revitalize our daily minyan will succeed and then, ten or fifteen years from now, Tikvat Israel will be talking again about minyan revitalization. But for now, let s take a step back, and ask a basic question: Why minyan? Why should our daily minyan be a high priority for our congregation? Many of us might ask ourselves individually: Why should I or why should my spouse and I, or why should my teenage children and I be concerned about supporting our daily minyan? For many people, the first reason that comes to mind is: to make it possible for mourners and those observing yahrtzeit to say Kaddish.
הּ א ה 2 That is an important and laudable reason. As a rabbi, I ve found myself in recent years being more and more assertive with bereaved families, urging mourners to avail themselves of the healing power of Kaddish. Kaddish in all of its forms including the Mourners Kaddish can be said only in the presence of a minyan, a quorum of ten adult Jews. This is important not only because of some abstruse point of Jewish law, although Jewish law is quite clear about the fact that a minyan is required for Kaddish, which is considered a davar she-bikdushah, a prayer of particular sanctity. But more important than that, Kaddish requires a minyan because it is a communal prayer. As important as it is for mourners to say Kaddish to model faith for the congregation by verbalizing praise of God, to facilitate their own healing through this act of devotion to their loves ones memories and their reconnection with God perhaps even more important is the role of the community. By responding with their Amens and their.* י שׁ מ * בּא מ ב the community is fulfilling the mitzvah of niḥum avelim, comforting mourners; the community is liturgically wrapping the mourners in its healing embrace. However, I believe that facilitating Mourners Kaddish must never be a primary purpose to encourage minyan participation; it must never be the primary focus of minyan revitalization efforts. Niḥum aveilim, comforting mourners, is important, of course. The interplay in minyan between avelim and menaḥamim, between mourners and the community of comforters, is crucial but it shouldn t be our primary focus. To make Mourners Kaddish the primary focus of minyan encouragement is wrong for numerous reasons. For one thing, some might feel that every time they don t support a minyan or every time someone else doesn t support a minyan that person is guilty of the sin of insensitively refusing to comfort mourners. Beyond that, Mourners Kaddish as the primary focus of minyan turns our daily minyan into a memorial service. And by extension, it turns Judaism into a cult of the dead. Mourners Kaddish and comforting mourners are important parts of minyan very important parts but they must remain a secondary focus of our minyan concerns. To put it another way, there are many other reasons that minyan should be a high priority for any synagogue, and that supporting our minyan should be a high priority for many of us. A thriving minyan is a hallmark of a successful shul. I like that saying. I wrote it. It s a good motto for a minyan revitalization program. But it s more than a pithy slogan; it s also true. A synagogue is, first and foremost, a faith community, and gathering to express and explore matters of faith is one of the most important functions of a congregation. When we do that successfully that is, when we frequently have the requisite number of people to have a complete service that success colors all the rest of our efforts and all of our other programming. A successful weekday minyan that is, regularly scheduled weekday services in which we get a minyan more often than we don t is a source of pride for any shul, a reminder that we must be doing something right, that we are fulfilling one of the most important and meaningful functions of a congregation. Abraham Joshua Heschel calls prayer the essence of spiritual living, and gathering regularly for communal prayer is our opportunity to meet the spirit again and again, the spirit of
3 oneself and the spirit that hovers over all things. 1 Or, as Blu Greenberg describes it, Formal fixed-time prayer functions as a kind of checking-in operation checking in with God, checking in with one s immediate community on a regular basis; in fact, checking in with the Jewish people in a way that goes far beyond the boundaries of time and space. 2 There s a wonderful old aphorism: Ginzburg goes to shul to commune with God; I go to shul to commune with Ginzburg. Communal prayer is our opportunity to connect with our Jewish community with the people who literally are sitting in the chapel with us, but also with Jews all over the world, and even with Jews of long ago and Jews of years to come. Communal prayer offers us a brief opportunity to broadens our horizons both spatially and temporally. I once had a friend in rabbinical school who suggested that, for him at least, the quick, simple weekday minyan was more meaningful than the longer, more elaborate synagogue services of Shabbat and holidays. On Shabbat, he said, I have all sorts of ways to feel Jewish, to connect with Judaism and the Jewish people. But I need weekday minyan even more those momentary opportunities to bring God, and religion, and Judaism, and Jewish identity into my largely secular week. Supporting a minyan is both an obligation and an opportunity. I had a striking experience once when I was in high school. I was walking home from school one afternoon with my best friend, and we were about a block away from our homes. A woman whom we barely knew came out of her house, held out her hand in front of us, and said, We need two more people for a minyan. My friend was momentarily clueless, but as we walked into the woman s house I briefly explained to him that someone in the family had died and we were being asked to participate in a shiv ah minyan. Now, for two high school boys, the last thing we wanted to do at that moment was to go into a house full of strangers and an uncomfortable situation, to boot and to daven Minḥah. We far more wanted to go home, have a snack, hang out, watch Star Trek reruns, or even get started on our homework. But on a certain level, we didn t have a choice: As young Jews who had both been bar mitzvah a few years earlier, we had an obligation to go in, so we did. Fifteen minutes later, we were on our way home and filled with an inexplicable feeling of pride for the mitzvah we had done, for the surprisingly spiritual experience we had had, and for the feeling of Jewish connection we had created. So, if communal prayer is so important, why do most of us not to come to minyan more frequently than we do? I think the primary reason is inertia: Most of us are just not in the habit of coming to minyan. That s a shame, but just as bad habits can be broken, good habits can be developed. Sometimes, the process of mourning can habituate us to communal prayer. Over the years, in different times and places, I ve known people who have come to shul with regularity during their period of mourning and then, when their period of Kaddish was over, discovered that they had become minyan regulars, discovered how meaningful those relatively few minutes of weekday communal prayer had become for them. Certainly I had this experience as a youngster when I accompanied my dad to daily minyan in the months following my grandfather s death. (I shared some of this with you in my Torah E-mail a few weeks ago.) In those months, I learned about the unexpected profundity of weekday davening, about the satisfaction of connecting with the Jewish community and helping 1 All Heschel quotations, other than those noted otherwise, are from Man s Quest for God: Studies in Prayer and Symbolism (1954). 2 How to Run a Traditional Jewish Household (1983).
פ 4 פ 4 4 to create Jewish community, about what Heschel calls the tremendous implications of simple acts. 3 One of the primary reasons that people don t come to minyan more frequently, though, is intimidation. Many people resist minyan because they feel that they re not sufficiently familiar with the prayers, they fear that at worst they ll be uncomfortable, and think that at the very least they ll find the services meaningless. These are valid concerns, but one significant response is that participation even semiregular participation is a great antidote to unfamiliarity. The more one comes to minyan, the more familiar it all becomes, the more comfortable one gets, and the more meaningful the experience becomes in time. And the best advice I can give to a would-be minyan participant is: Don t worry that you re not more familiar with our Prayerbook or with the experience of davening. In fact, there are many different levels on which different Jews relate to prayer. Some Jews understand all the Hebrew of the service; know the background of the prayers; recognize the biblical allusions; and understand how, in composing our traditional prayers, the Rabbis sometimes changed biblical passages to make striking midrashic points (e.g., changing Jeremiah s פ/ א נ י ה ' ו א א [heal me and I shall be healed] 4 to פ/ א נ וּ ה ' ו נ א [heal us and we shall be healed] and, in so doing, making a profound statement about the isolation of illness and the healing power of connection to other people). But how many of us are that familiar with the language, content, and background of our traditional prayers? I certainly am not; I m not a scholar of Jewish liturgy. I may understand most of the Hebrew and get at least some of the biblical allusions and Rabbinic references but, in the meantime, my davening experience is still meaningful, despite my relatively low level of understanding, knowledge, and appreciation. There are some Jews who are quite knowledgeable liturgically: They re familiar with the prayers, proficient enough to lead services. Our congregation is blessed with many such people. If one were to ask some of them, though, How much of the Hebrew prayers do you actually understand?, some might admit that they understand relatively little and yet, their davening is meaningful to them and creates meaningful experiences for others. There are other shul regulars who are familiar with the prayers but not sufficiently proficient to comfortably lead the congregation in prayer. And yet, they are familiar with the liturgy, its choreography, its melodies. They have their favorite parts of the service whether it s Shabbat, holidays, or weekday and they look forward to hearing the cantor or prayer leader chant this part or that part, or to singing along with another part. Certainly, for such people their davening is meaningful and fulfilling. Years ago, I knew an elderly minyan participant who couldn t read a word of Hebrew. And yet, she was in minyan regularly. When it was her turn to have an aliyah on a Monday or Thursday morning, she d read the b rakhot from the transliterated cheat sheet. I used to wonder: How meaningful can minyan be to her if she can t even read the Hebrew? But clearly it was meaningful to her because she was there, week after week, month after month, year after year and she taught me a valuable lesson about how different people relate to prayer on different levels and in different ways. As many of you are aware, I m not a weekday minyan regular at Tikvat Israel because I m from out of town (Bethesda is not the same town as Rockville!), and because my other work 3 God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (1955). 4 Jer. 17.14.
5 has me at other minyanim throughout the week. Four or five times a week, as many of you know, I conduct minyan at the Hebrew Home, and I ve learned so much from my minyan regulars there. Now, while sixty to eighty percent of the residents at the Hebrew Home are Jews, the coterie of minyan regulars is a smaller percentage: maybe a dozen or two people who are there pretty regularly, 9:30 every morning and/or 3:30 every afternoon. These are not people whom the staff takes down to the synagogue at minyan time just because. They are regular members of our minyan community because they want to be there. Some are spirited daveners; some sing along in Hebrew and read along in English. Some are quite responsive to our daily, brief study of midrash; some respond verbally, others with appreciative nods or knowing glances. Others, though, don t have the Prayerbooks in front of them, because their diminished eyesight makes that superfluous. Still others are even less participatory, because their cognitive diminishment is so great that they no longer sing along, or no longer read along; some are no longer even verbal. But they re there and they re there because they want to be there and they re being spiritually nourished by the experience in that little chapel that they re finding and that they re creating. Different people relate to prayer on different levels and in different ways. One of the reasons that many people resist minyan is that many, whether more or less familiar with our prayers, have unrealistic expectations. Many expect, unrealistically, to be inspired each time they come to shul and then they re disappointed when they re not inspired. But Heschel reminds us that inspirations are brief, sporadic and rare I ll let you in on a little secret: I don t pray all that often when I m in minyan. Prayer true prayer is a rare, elusive experience. But I daven regularly. Davening is the experience of opening the book; saying the words; standing, sitting, and bowing; being with the community; and then going back to our daily lives afterwards. Prayer is the occasional experience that comes from the experience of davening. To put it another way: I daven regularly so that I can pray occasionally. But it s okay to daven regularly and to really pray only occasionally. That s the way it s supposed to work. My davening experience is the background music for my meditation, for my connection, for my escape. Sometimes my mind is more focused when I daven, and sometimes it s less focused. And that s okay too. As Blu Greenberg puts it, Prayer sometimes offers a few quiet moments to daydream, to wander without intrusions, to solve problems simply by reflecting on them. Rote can be pleasingly effortless, and it is the perfect cover for the mind or imagination to escape And finally, Blu Greenberg teaches us, it s okay to have low expectations when it comes to our davening experience: With routinely scheduled prayer, she writes, there is no need to get every last thought in each time, every iota of sincerity, depth of feeling, every pressing issue, every expansive expression of love and praise. You ll be back later in the day, or tomorrow morning, or tomorrow afternoon. There s always another opportunity to collect your innermost thoughts and set them before God So now s the time to turn our attention to Tikvat Israel s minyan revitalization program. When you came in today, you probably picked up an envelope with your name on it. Inside, there was a minyan pledge card, which I hope you will take seriously. I hope you will return your pledge card and will commit or re-commit to supporting our minyan on a regular basis. Some of you will be unable to support our minyan more
מ וּ. ת ח ב וּ ת נ ה 6 frequently, and that s okay. Some live too far away; some don t drive at night; some have other circumstances or obligations that make more frequent minyan attendance difficult. But most of us can and should support our minyan more frequently. Remember those two high school boys who learned that important lesson that afternoon. Many years after that small but profound experience, a passage from Heschel s pen articulated the lesson that I had learned: The dignity of man stands in proportion to his obligations as well as to his rights. The dignity of being a Jew is in the sense of commitment, and the meaning of Jewish history revolves around the faithfulness of Israel to the covenant. 5 So come to minyan a lot more frequently than you re presently used to, or even little more frequently. We owe it to our Tikvat Israel community yes, the mourners, as well as the non-mourners. We owe it to God. We owe it to the Jewish People. And most importantly, we owe it to ourselves. ו ת ט וֹ ב ה תּ כּ ל שׁ 5 God in Search of Man.