November 6, 2008
One of the benefits of leaving the rabbinate to pursue other interests is the ability to daven at many different synagogues. I have taken that opportunity from New York to Los Angeles to Canada, visiting large and small synagogues. What has been most intriguing, for me, are the small boutique minyanim that have sprung up like mushrooms almost everywhere I go.
Most of these small minyanim (sometimes called independent minyanim or emergent congregations) have much in common. Young people run the services, read Torah, deliver a d’var Torah — all without the benefit of a rabbi. The congregation is eclectic, drawing from the Modern Orthodox, to Camp Ramah Conservative Jews, to those who are ba’alei teshuva, or newly religious. All want an egalitarian but traditional service. They also want a service that is quintessentially theirs, a spiritual environment that emerges organically from the grassroots upward, rather than from a rabbinic presence downward.
I recently attended one such service, the DC Minyan, which meets at the Washington DC Jewish Community Center. The men and women, most of whom are in their 20s and early 30s, sit separately, although there is no mehitza, or physical barrier, to separate the sexes. Some, but not all, of the women wear kipot and tallitot, and men and women participate equally in the davening.
The service itself was filled with spirited singing, and when the time came for the silent Amida, there was real silence, an environment of prayer. The young people had come together to pray, to celebrate Shabbat, and to feel part of a community. When services were over, congregants stacked chairs along the edge of the wall, brought out tables for a modest kiddush, and exchanged greetings and socialization.
We can draw important lessons from these boutique minyanim.
First, there is an element of individual responsibility for the community. Each person has a role to play, whether as a Torah reader or as someone responsible for the kiddush. There are no “professional Jews” given ritual tasks. Spiritual and intellectual meaning and significance is everyone’s struggle and task.
The results of these struggles for meaning and significance are not always profound. The leaders who lead the davening are often not up to par, and sometimes the service has a scruffy quality. But what the boutique minyanim might lack in professionalism, they more than make up in the individual and family connection with community. At least, that seems to be the goal.
Second, these minyanim are nondenominational, for the most part. The service is traditional, very little of the classical liturgy is left out, and yet, at the same time, most are egalitarian. It is almost as though these davening venues have deliberately transcended the partisanship of the various denominations in favor of a more all-encompassing and embracing ethos.
Third, these minyanim have left behind the struggle for equal rights between men and women. The halachic, or Jewish legal, restrictions that have left women behind a mehitza have been removed. To have women daven and read Torah seems natural and right.
Are these minyanim the wave of the future? I am not sure. Eventually, these young people will have children who will need to be Jewishly educated. Not everyone can afford a Jewish day school education, and afternoon Hebrew schools, despite their weaknesses, are subsidized and maintained by large synagogue institutions.
These minyanim, populated by the relatively young, are not hospitable to an older crowd. As these same young people age, they may find themselves estranged from the very community they created.
Furthermore, I have found that those who create these community minyanim become a self-selected elite. Having come together as a community, they sometimes reach a point where they close ranks and are not welcoming of strangers.
Still, these minyanim are an interesting and significant development to which the larger Jewish institutions need to pay attention. There is a resurgence among many young people for a religious forum and a religious environment where the classical liturgy and the Torah narrative can be expressed through personal involvement regardless of gender and denomination.
The talents, skills, and, most of all, profound commitment to Jewish life that the young people in these minyanim represent are a welcome and refreshing addition to the Jewish landscape and may very well be a hopeful sign for the future.
Rabbi Azriel C. Fellner has served as religious leader of several Conservative congregations, and retired from Temple Beth Shalom in Livingston. He is also a filmmaker and film and television critic. This article is published courtesy of the Washington Jewish Week, where it first appeared.
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