Independent minyanim members check bulletin board at recent conference at Brandeis.
by Carolyn Slutsky Staff Writer
Every Friday night and every other Saturday morning, in the Women’s Building in San Francisco’s Mission District, a group of Jews from different religious, political, sexual and ideological backgrounds meet for Shabbat prayer in a room with three seating options: men’s, women’s and mixed.
“A lot of people are not interested in stepping foot in a synagogue building, but will come to a communal space,” said Emily Shapiro Katz, one of the Mission Minyan’s many lay leaders. She said both she and her husband, who happens to be a rabbi, though he does not serve as one for the community, are “knowledgeable, skilled in our Judaism and couldn’t really imagine being passive participants in synagogue life.”
The Mission Minyan, with its eclectic, informal, do-it-yourself contemporary
style, coupled with a rigorous commitment to traditional prayer, is one of the many iterations of the independent minyanim, or prayer groups, that have been cropping up throughout the United States — and Israel — over the last 10 years.
Minyanim members, feeling hemmed in by Judaism’s traditional denominations, are part of a culture of young Jews who feel a deep need to build their own communities and define how to live engaged Jewish lives for themselves.
There are now some 80 minyanim across the country, mostly in coastal urban settings like New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and San Francisco, though some have made their way inland as far as Kansas City and south to Atlanta. They cater to Jews under 40 who are increasingly waiting longer to marry and have children. The groups they form are generally rabbi-less, though many rabbis and others with strong Jewish backgrounds are members. They are inexpensive to run, usually existing mostly in a virtual space with just a Web site and e-mail address, the only major expense a rented space in which to meet.
And they are open to all forms of Jewish expression and usually share an egalitarian, pluralistic spirit that says anyone who wants a Jewish prayer experience is welcome to come and help create it.
But the independent minyanim movement, as it heads into its second decade, is now entering a kind of second phase. The minyanim are no longer “the next new thing” in Jewish worship, yet they are also not institutionalized into the system from which they have broken away.
This moment of creative tension was on view earlier this month at a conference held at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., and funded by the Samuel Bronfman Foundation, traditional Jewish bastions by any account. Members of 32 independent minyanim from across the country met to hash out what pieces of traditional Judaism they desire to take with them as they forge new, self-determined prayer communities.
As befits a maturing movement, a sense of introspection is taking hold. The minyanim are struggling to figure out the role rabbis have in a community in which they are not necessary to perform life-cycle events, read Torah or even counsel during moments of crisis. They are wondering what will happen to the communities they’ve built so meticulously once they have children and settle into a firmly grounded adulthood.
And they are questioning what role, if any, the minyanim will have with the synagogues that, to this point in their Jewish development, they have chosen to ignore.
“The founders [of the movement] say, ‘None of the options were working for me’; it wasn’t that they were angry at synagogues but there were enough people to get together and make something new,” said Suzanne Kling, a member of the Washington Square Minyan in Brookline, outside Boston. “I think that’s an American thing right now, the beyond-the-melting pot thing. You don’t have to write in the suggestion box and hope that someone else will do it; you can do it.”
“Generation X wants to run their own show and develop their own conclusions,” agreed Beth Cousens, who worships at the DC Minyan in Washington. “I’d rather a diffuse leadership structure, that one person doesn’t have to do it all but a ton of people can do it, because that means I can do it, and that’s a really powerful feeling.”
But that system was challenged at the Brandeis conference. One of the key issues discussed at the conference and among participants in minyanim is the role of rabbis in this newly developing scene. Most minyans have rabbi-participants but are not rabbi-led.
“I don’t know at this point what anyone would need rabbis for,” said Meg Lederman, a leader of the Washington Square Minyan in Brookline, Mass., noting that lay leaders can marry couples, perform brits and baby namings and handle all aspects of the weekly service. “We do need help making halachic decisions and try as much as we can to follow halacha. When questions come up people in the gabbai group solicit opinions from rabbis they know, study sources together and decide where we want our minyan to go.”
Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, dean of Hebrew College’s rabbinical school and a longtime participant in independent minyanim, recognizes the good rabbis can do beyond the pulpit. But she acknowledges that in many aspects of prayer communities, they are simply not necessary and so become like “frustrated salespeople rather than the midwives of people’s Jewish lives.”
Still, said Rabbi Cohen Anisfield, the rabbi does have a function that is hard to replace. “The rabbi’s main role is love,” she said.
But Rabbi Mark Baker, head of the Gann Academy, a pluralistic Jewish high school in Boston, questioned whether a leadership role for pulpit rabbis is truly defunct, and wondered, without the classic authority structure that has long sustained Judaism, what is left?
“There is often a vacuum of leadership,” said Rabbi Baker of the minyanim. “People need to be led, they need to be inspired, and rebuked.
Despite the movement’s internal debates, Jonathan Sarna, a Brandeis professor who spoke at the conference’s closing plenary, said the minyanim are poised to grow and make a huge impact. “When we look back we will decide this is the most exciting development in American Jewry since the havurah movement 30 years ago,” Sarna says.
The groups, he says, have taken hold because they stem from other important recent trends in the Jewish and American communities: the women’s movement, the increased pull toward spirituality and text within Judaism and the start-up spirit present in the business world and beyond.
A comparison can be made between the minyanim of today and the havurah movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but the parallel isn’t exact. Today’s minyanim are characterized by a commitment to intensive and thoughtful prayer (minyan meaning “to count,” and referring to the number of people necessary under Jewish law for prayer) while havurah speaks more to “fellowship,” and the idea of gathering to build a community. The havurah movement was countercultural and anti-establishment, whereas independent minyanim tend to draw very engaged Jews who are inside the establishment but seeking something traditional yet contemporary.
Sociologist Steven M. Cohen has studied this phenomenon, finding that most minyanim participants began their Jewish educations early in life. In a recent survey of more than 700 participants in independent minyanim that tracked Jewish engagement, Cohen found that 39 percent of minyan-goers had attended Jewish day schools, 25 percent had experienced a Jewish connection in high school, 23 percent had been active in Hillel and other Jewish activities in college and only 13 percent came to independent minyanim with no previous Jewish engagement. Cohen refers to these as “bloomed,” Jews, versus the “groomed,” ones situated within traditional Jewish life.
The minyanim present a challenge to some people firmly rooted in the Conservative movement, who see their creation as a defection by some of the movement’s brightest, most engaged members.
Rabbi Jerome Epstein, executive vice president of the United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism, laments the fact that many minyan participants come from Conservative backgrounds but find the movement lacking as they conceive of their adult prayer experiences.
“I think people are really looking for an ideology, many of them, a practice that is somewhere in the framework known as Conservative Judaism, but they don’t find it in their Conservative synagogues,” says Rabbi Epstein, who urges the leaders of minyanim to hold their services in and otherwise affiliate with Conservative synagogues, rather than use the churches or community centers many choose.
But Rabbi Elie Kaunfer, who in 2001 founded Kehillat Hadar here, one of the first independent minyanim, and remains active in providing resources for independent prayer groups ,said that today’s Jewish milieu is one in which people are more interested in collaboration than competition, and that there needs to be a recognition that the community hasn’t been able to reach this demographic of post-college/pre-family Jews effectively.
“Jewish life is so much more textured than three big Jewish boxes,” says Rabbi Kaunfer. “The investment of the Jewish community in camps, day schools, Israel, Hillel, has paid out in many ways, including minyanim. No one should be disappointed that someone invested in by the Jewish community is excited enough to start their own community.”
Rabbi Kaunfer says the minyanim are filling a hole in the tapestry of Jewish life, a space that traditional Jewish life cannot reach in the modern world.
“When it’s such a consumerist society, to have Jews willing to stand up and be producers is an amazing accomplishment,” he says.
One of the newest is the Forest Hills Minyan in Queens. Co-founder Daniel Werlin, who describes his neighborhood as, “where you go when you’re married and have children and get priced out of Manhattan,” started the minyan together with two others just last month as an alternative to services at The Forest Hills Jewish Center, his local Conservative synagogue.
The style at that synagogue, says Werlin, is, “the cantor and rabbi all the way in the front of the room facing the congregation with the cantor singing at the congregation instead of really leading with the congregation. ... The Forest Hills Jewish Center doesn’t have empty pews, it’s doing well, but it wasn’t doing it for us.”
Unlike some minyans, which consciously use space outside the traditional Jewish community, in Forest Hills the new minyan leaders have a congenial relationship with the rabbi at the synagogue where they meet, and members of the congregation sometimes join their group of 30-50 participants on Shabbat mornings. The United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism also gave the minyan a grant to help with the affiliation, and though the future, according to Werlin, is unwritten, the relationship seems fluid and collaborative.
“We weren’t repudiating the synagogue,” he says. “We just felt that a different style of prayer would be more conducive to our needs.”
Or, as Rabbi Cohen Anisfeld put it, “people need to be their own midwives and give birth to their own religious lives.”
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