Minyan

Divre Harav – February, 2024

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There is something majestic about the architecture of a large sanctuary that draws one’s attention upwards towards God’s presence. A room full of people absorbs and mutes some of the sound, but the acoustics of a well designed sanctuary amplify the power of the leader’s voice. On Rosh Hashanah, in between sets of shofar sounds, I like to let the sound echo and die down before continuing on with the next set. It is a reminder that when we do a mitzvah, the effect of that action resonates through the world like the rings of waves coming off a stone thrown into a pond.

Because of pandemic precautions on keeping our distance from other people and increasing concerns about the security of gathering in a space without an emergency exit, we have been almost exclusively using our Sanctuary since resuming in-person services on June 13, 2020, after temporarily suspending services in the building the previous March 18. Our weekday minyan has used the chapel and we did hold several festival services in the chapel on Sundays when All Souls was using the Sanctuary, but for almost four years, we didn’t use the chapel on Shabbat mornings.

We began meeting in the chapel again on Shabbat morning the first week in January, after installing an external exit and a camera to broadcast the service online. I’d gotten used to the feel of 25-35 people in the sanctuary. The first several times meeting in the chapel, it felt crowded, as if there were too many people impinging on my space. We need a certain amount of personal space, but we also tend to like the warmth of the presence of others. The sounds of many voices fill the space of the room, a room full of bodies absorbs and softens the sound, reducing harsh echoes. The quality of the sound and the feeling of community quickly dispel the sense of claustrophobia. This reminds me of a midrash found in Pirke Avot (5:5), that one of the miracles which took place in the Temple was that on Yom Kippur, people were packed in the courtyard like sardines, yet when the time came for them to fall prostrate upon hearing the name of God, each person had ample room to do so comfortably. The sense of being packed into a cramped space cheek to jowl gave way to a more expansive reality.

It is true that we can fulfill our role as Jews in the world without entering a synagogue. Yet our tradition teaches that whenever people gather for prayer or to study Torah, God’s presence rests on the assembly. We can pray alone, but our prayers are intensified by the music of the blended voices of a community. Here are some times that you might make a special effort to come to shul on Shabbat morning:

  • On the Shabbat before a Yahrtzeit, to say Kaddish and take an aliyah in memory of your deceased loved one.
  • When someone in your family is ill and you want their name to be included in a prayer for healing.
  • When a communal tragedy has happened and you don’t want to be alone.
  • When we are having a monthly Shabbat lunch.

A community like Ahavas Israel depends on a certain number of people we can count on every week to make a minyan, but we also count a larger group of people to come at regular intervals to fill the room with warmth, voices, and your participation. Please mark your calendar at some regular interval to join us as a part of our synagogue’s Shabbat community.

Hebrew Words of the Month:

  • Kehillah, community
  • Shekhina, the Divine Presence

Divre Harav – December, 2022

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Monday through Friday, we meet for weekday morning prayers. Each day but Thursday, we meet online at 8:00 a.m. using zoom and we pray without a minyan. Thursdays, we meet in person at 7:15 a.m. in the chapel. We would like to have a minyan, although it is rare that we have one. Every day, I wake up and take myself and all of my baggage into the service.

  • • Some mornings I wake up with anxiety or worries that I’m carrying from the day before or the previous week.
  • • Some mornings I wake up with anxiety or worry because of some particularly difficult talk or conversation or meeting I need to handle that day.
  • • Some mornings I just wake up tired or low energy and don’t feel like getting moving.
  • • Some mornings I wake up with the sun streaming in the window and leap out of bed ready to greet a new day!

No matter in what state I find myself when I wake up, when I take time for a little morning prayer, I feel emotionally and spiritually centered and better able to begin my day.

If I am feeling good, I notice the portions of liturgy which remind me to be grateful. If I am feeling tired, the morning blessings remind me that God, who infuses energy into the world, will also restore me to my fully charged state. If I am worried about something I need to do, my prayers remind me that God redeems, supports and protects me. As long as I do my part by being prepared and fully present for the encounter, I’ll be OK and the outcome will lead to something positive. And if I’m still carrying anxiety from the day or week before, the liturgy reminds me that today is a newly day created for me by God so that I can let yesterday go and forget yesterday’s mistakes and start over again with a fresh slate.

Some religious traditions prefer to take one idea, such as compassion, and sit in meditation for an hour with that word in one’s mind and heart. Our tradition prefer to give us a cascade of words and ideas to throw at your soul, because what sticks today is not necessarily what will stick with us next week. Perhaps today we need to have compassion for ourselves or our partner, but next week what we need to to see more justice in the world around us, and next month we want to know that God forgives us when we don’t live up to our best selves. That which I need may be different than that which you need. We read the same prayers, but we may come away with different pieces of liturgy echoing in our souls.

Prayer is a practice. That is to say, prayer takes practice. It doesn’t necessarily work immediately. It takes time to become comfortable with the prayers, to understand them well enough that a certain pattern of words can fly by and wrap themselves around our heart. At that moment, we might experience deep satisfaction. We might stop and sit with those words for a while to puzzle out what they are trying to teach us about they way we are or should be living our lives.

I wake up each day to go to online or in-person services because the experience of praying with other people, minyan or not, is more powerful than praying by myself. Perhaps you’ll join me. 

Hebrew Words of the Month:

  • Shaharit – The morning service, from the word meaning ‘dawn.’
  • Minha – The afternoon service, from the world meaning ‘gift.’
  • Ma’ariv – The evening service, from the world meaning ‘evening.’

Divre Harav – January/2022

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In a small congregation in a pandemic world, it is not easy to get a minyan. Yet we have done exactly that, nearly every Shabbat and holiday, since October 23, 2020. Thanks to a remarkably dedicated core of Shabbat regulars and to group of people who have answered the minyan call when we were in danger of falling short, we reestablished our Shabbat minyan.

Our minyan regulars who could be counted on weekly, semi-weekly, or monthly, included Rhonda Reider and Mike Halpern, David and Karen Reifler, Stuart Rapaport, Jim and Patti Flood, Harry Krishef, Lennox Forrest, Elisabeth Rosewall, Dovid Ben Avraham, Connor Hess, Robin Turetsky, Sandy Freed, Mark Silverstein, and Marisa Krishef.

Those who responded to the call to make up for a projected shortfall in our minyan or just showed up to surprise us occasionally were Ken Strauss, Jason Cook, Grant and Taylor Winkelman, David Alfonso, Jan and Bill Lewis, Leigh Rapaport, Jim Siegel, Ed Miller, Barb Freed, Diane Rayor, Barb Wepman, Judy Subar, and Toby Dolinka.

Our weekday Zoom minyan remained strong for about 18 months and then began to taper off. But we still have a core group of about nine who continue to participate, even without a minyan. We are grateful for Judy and Buddy (of blessed memory) Joseph, Karen and David Reifler, Cliff and Jean Shekter, Stuart Rapaport, Fred Meyerson, Binyamin Mehler, Sandy Freed, Harry Krishef, Rhonda Reider, Sol Krishef, Marc Silverstein, Esther Bookbinder, Marni Vyn, Cathy Winick, Dale Kramer, Barb Christiaans, and Mike Halprin for being part of the every-day minyan core, for being semi-regular participants, or for pitching in to make a minyan when we fall one or two short.

Our online minyan was an important component in our efforts to maintain a community during the worst of the pandemic. The halakhic basis for a zoom minyan is rooted in the notion that a person leaning into a window can be counted in a minyan taking place inside the room. In other words, they are counted as physically present, even though they are separated by a wall, as long as they can hear and be heard, see and be seen.

Constituting a remote minyan in which the participants are not physically together was a concession to sha’at ha-dhak, exigent circumstances, a crisis situation. Early in the pandemic, when we keenly felt a sense of isolation, the zoom minyan was vitally important to provide connection and spiritual nourishment.

It is clear to me from my work on the Scare Resources Allocation Committee at Spectrum Health, an extension of my work on their ethics committee, that we are still in a serious situation. Hospital have reached crisis levels of demand and are instituting new measures to allocate the scarce resources of beds and staff fairly. Nonetheless, I have been looking to establish an objective criteria for establishing the end of of the sha’at ha-dhak. As the positive test rate for COVID-19 continue to climb to unprecedented levels (the 7-day average at the beginning of December was above 23% in Kent County), we continue to do what we can to slow the spread. Even though we know that vaccinated people who contract COVID are less sick and much less likely to die, we don’t want to become a vector for spread among the unvaccinated.

I am proposing that the next time that the positive test rate in Kent County goes below the level at which the CDC recommends masking at indoor gatherings (currently, 8%) that we end the sha’at ha-dhak. At that point, our online morning service will no longer constitute a minyan, even if we have 10 or more Jewish adults participating. We will try to resume a daily minyan once a week if we can get at least 10 people to commit to regular attendance. However, we will continue to offer zoom services for as long as we have a group of people who wish to participate. Members from Holland, Big Rapids, metro-Detroit, Texas, and Arizona, who are unable to attend an in-person morning minyan, have found value being able to join with other for morning prayers, even when we are unable to say Kaddish.

אבינו מלכנו … כלה דבר וחרב ורעב ושבי ומשחית ועוון ומגיפה ופגע רע, וכל מחלה וכל תקלה וכל קטטה וכל מיני פורעניות וכל גזירה רעה ושנאת חינם, מעלינו ומעל כל בני בריתך

Our Father, our Sovereign … end pestilence and sword and famine and captivity and corruption and iniquity and plague and evil harm, and every disease and every mishap and every quarrel and all kinds of calamity and every evil decree and senseless hatred, from us and from all of your covenanted peoples.

Divre Harav – October/2020

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When this pandemic is over, we will have fundamentally altered the definition of community. A minyan has long been defined as a mini-community. The boundaries of minyan are defined by the space of a room. You are either in the room and in the minyan, or out of the room and out of the minyan. If the room’s door or windows are open, however, and if someone is leaning in the window or standing in the doorway, than the liminal space is included in the minyan-space. And that slight extension of minyan opened the door, so to speak, for a kind of online minyan – at least for exigent circumstances. We treat your computer screen as a window into another space. And if a collection of spaces are connected in real time and there are 10 individuals within those spaces, it is as if a collection of individuals have become a community, a minyan. 

We began our online Monday through Friday minyan as a temporary measure to maintain some semblance of connection as pandemic closures began cutting us off from human contact, never thinking that more than six months later, we’d still be meeting, approaching our (God willing) 150th consecutive weekday morning minyan. We have people participating regularly in our minyan who have rarely or never come in person. Their is no question that they form a community that looks forward to seeing each other every weekday morning. 

When we begin broadcasting our Shabbat morning services online, several of those who had been coming in person decided to try out the online service at home. It’s convenient, to be sure. It’s great for those who cannot travel to Grand Rapids every week, those who have other mobility challenges, and those with health concerns about being in a closed space with others. But it does not create community. There is no connection among those who are watching, or between the leaders and the watchers. The Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards has ruled that once a minyan is properly constituted, those watching may participate fully as if they were within the minyan, even saying Kaddish. But we need a minyan in the sanctuary for this to fully happen. So I have a request: If you are watching the broadcast and you hear me say that we are short of a minyan: if you are able to grab a mask and help make a minyan, would you come to the synagogue and help out?

Looking ahead another six month to when (again, God willing) we have an effective, widely-available, vaccine against COVID-19, how do we reconstitute our face-to-face community? How much of the virtual community do we retain, even though it takes away from our in-person minyan? We have fundamentally altered what it means to be part of a synagogue community. Can we take the best of the online opportunities and the best of the in-person minyan and build out from there? We can’t really eat together virtually – for that we need to be really together – but we can hold very effective and efficient meetings without taking the time and the gas to travel to the synagogue building. Can we create a hybrid weekday minyan, gathering some people in person and others through Zoom? Can we distinguish between weekdays and Shabbat and not let technology be a substitute for true community for our Sabbath service (at least for those who are able to join in person)?

In the meantime, those of you who are young enough to imagine being a part of a 22nd century Ahavas Israel will someday look back and know that you were part of an amazing era of synagogue transformation!

Hebrew Word of the Month:

  • • Minyan – a quorum of 10 adults
  • • Mei-ayin – “from where,” as in ‘Where are you from?’
  • • Mi-nayin – “from where,” (Talmudic expression) as in ‘Where [do you know that] from?’, ‘How do you know?’

Divre Harav – January/2020

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From the writings of Abba Kovner.*

The Nazi ghetto did not make me a religious person, and I did not become a romantic in the forests with the Partizans. On the day I first arrived in Jerusalem, before even washing my face or changing my clothes, I went to the Kotel. It was 1945, and the place was narrow, crowded, dirty and depressing.  British soldiers were stationed there, armed with guns and rubber truncheons.  I had no friends or relatives who longed for those large stones. I did not go there to pray, my head was uncovered, and I had no plan to push a note into a crack between the stones.

Behind me I could hear the donkeys braying and the Arab merchants whose language I did not understand, and I was flushed with the odd sensation of fear and foreignness and the feeling that I belong somewhere else. And then someone pulled at my sleeve and asked in a whisper, “maybe you can join the minyan?”

Had the fellow called out like the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s young men who grab you by the sleeve at the bus station in Tel Aviv or on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, in a commanding tone: “Are you Jewish? Come put on tefillin!” I would have responded the way I do to the ChaBaD commandoes: “Sorry, I’m Jewish but I don’t put on tefillin.” 

But the anonymous fellow by the Kotel in 1945 said only: “we need a tenth for a minyan,” and his voice was like the voice of Avraham Leib, the shamash.

Avraham Leib was the shamash of the local shul in the city where I grew up (Vilna). In those days it was called “Jerusalem of Lita.” For morning and evening services there were enough davenners, but for Mincha, even in Jerusalem of Lita there were not many. The elderly shamash would stand in the doorway of the synagogue and, in his hoarse voice, invite Jews to make the minyan.

I’m sure you know that minyan is an important value-concept in Judaism, perhaps the most Jewish thing in Judaism, to be part of the minyan. To know that nine Jews need a tenth, and that the individual Jew needs nine more to be a people, a divine congregation. At that moment it was as if the thousands of miles that my feet had trodden from Vilna to Jerusalem disappeared.  I put on a hat and joined the minyan. I felt I’d arrived.

*Note on Abba Kovner from Wikipedia:

Abba Kovner (March 14, 1918 – September 25, 1987) was a Jewish Hebrew and Yiddish poet, writer and partisan leader. In the Vilna Ghetto, his manifesto was the first time that a target of the Holocaust identified the German plan to murder all Jews. His attempt to organize a ghetto uprising failed, but he fled into the forest, became a Soviet partisan, and survived the war. After the war, Kovner led a secretive organization to take revenge for the Holocaust; he made aliyah in 1947. Considered one of the greatest poets of modern Israel, he received the Israel Prize in 1970.

P.S. Ahavas Israel needs YOU for a minyan, Wednesdays, 7:30 a.m. and Thursdays, 7:15 a.m.

Hebrew Words of the Month:

  • shamash – “service” or “helper” light; later, describing a person who is a helper or assistant.
  • shemesh – sun
  • minyan – from the verb “mana,” to count. A quorum of 10 adult Jews.