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new takes on old words a few articles on innovation in prayer

heard ‘round the world in recent years

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December 2014 Kislev 5775 תשע״ה

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!!The Independent Minyan and Havurah Phenomena Everything old is new again. By Tobin Belzer San Francisco's Mission District has its first new Jewish community in almost a decade.

!With the appearance of the Mission Minyan in 2005, the neighborhood has emerged as a bustling center of Jewish community for young adults in their 20s and 30s. In less than a year, the Mission Minyan grew from a small group that met in someone's living room into a thriving community. Today, the Women's Building, a multi-cultural community center in the area, hosts more than 120 young adults for volunteer-led Friday night services each week.

The emergence of this community is not unique to the early 21st century. In the 1960s and 1970s, young adults were similarly creating independent, lay-led prayer communities, which they called havurot. Initiated by baby boomers, then in their 20s and 30s, havurot were that generation's effort to create Jewish communities that reflected their values and lifestyles. Nor is this type of gathering unique to San Francisco. In the past decade, Jewish post-boomers (contemporary young adults in their 20s and 30s) have founded more than 48 independent minyanim across the U.S. They are located in cities of all sizes, from those with the largest Jewish populations like New York City, to those with smaller Jewish populations, like Denver and Phoenix. Because of their independence from mainstream Jewish institutions and lack of denominational affiliation, these communities have come to be called independent minyanim.

What Drives People to Pray? To gain insight into this expression of Jewish identity and community, I conducted an ethnographic examination of the Mission Minyan. I added quantitative data to my study using sociologist Steven Cohen's 2007 National Spiritual Communities Study, a survey of more than 800 participants in independent spiritual communities, which includes responses from 61 Mission Minyan participants.When examining the Mission Minyan in relation to other independent minyanim, a number of salient themes emerge, including the desire for authenticity, a focus on gender roles, and independence from the denominational movements. These themes also resonated in the havurah communities of the 1970s. Drawing a comparison between contemporary independent minyanim and havurot in decades past can highlight significant continuities and differences in the ways that young adults create Jewish identity and community.In both havurot and independent minyanim, participants tended to be highly educated, Ashkenazic, heterosexual, middle class, and in their 20s and 30s. In both populations, participants had varying degrees of Jewish education and affiliation growing up. In both, individuals with the most Jewish education (or those with a strong desire to learn) emerged as core participants and leaders. Yet their access to Jewish education differed significantly. Since the 1970s, there has been a proliferation of Jewish educational opportunities in the U.S. to which women and girls have had unprecedented access. So both young men and women in

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independent minyanim have been exposed to more Jewish education than their counterparts in havurot.

The Aesthetics of the Prayer Service Individuals in both groups were motivated by the desire to participate in prayer services they found personally meaningful. How that desire manifested in each group, however, was very different. In her book Prayer and Community (1989), Riv-Ellen Prell describes how havurah participants engaged in a process of reflection about the meaning of the prayers in order to establish a personal connection with the Shabbat service. They sometimes changed the traditional liturgy and incorporated the use of both English and Hebrew in an effort to make prayer relevant to their contemporary lives. In contrast to havurot, most independent minyanim tend to conduct services with an emphasis on Hebrew. For many participants in independent minyanim, authenticity comes from a feeling of connection to history that is evoked through their use of traditional liturgy.

A Search for Meaning While havurah participants brought relevance to their prayer by integrating contemporary music, art, and culture into the service, participants in independent minyanim integrate contemporary music of another sort. Many, including the Mission Minyan, use Hasidic-style melodies composed by Shlomo Carlebach, a 20th-century charismatic Orthodox rabbi and singer/songwriter. The incorporation of Hasidic-style music (however contemporary) is a way that participants further experience a connection to tradition. Like members of havurot, participants in independent minyanim endeavor to incorporate their contemporary values into the service with regard to women's roles. The Mission Minyan community employs various strategies to address participants' both progressive and traditional ideals in terms of gender. Those participants who observe halakhah (Jewish law) require separate seating for men and women. For those who are uncomfortable with gender segregation, mixed seating is important. To address the differing needs of community members, the seating on Saturday mornings is arranged as a "tri-chitzah," with a men's section and a women's section that are separated by mixed gender seating in the middle. Other independent minyanim are also experimenting with this seating style, while others have a more traditional mechitzah, and still others have mixed seating. At havurot, mixed seating was the norm, reflecting their views about how to enact egalitarianism.

Counterculture/Subculture Because it was purposely positioned outside of mainstream institutions, the havurah phenomenon was often referred to as the Jewish counterculture. Participants published books and articles criticizing American Judaism. They also spoke publically and even organized sit-in style protests, critiquing the Federation system for what they perceived as its imitation of Protestant, middle-class values.

Independent minyanim are not outside of the Jewish mainstream; they are on the margins of it. In fact, many independent minyanim have strong ties with Jewish institutions. Some receive funding from Jewish foundations, others gather in borrowed spaces in synagogues, and still others use Torah scrolls loaned from area congregations.

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Rather than the latest incarnation of a Jewish counterculture, independent minyanim represent a Jewish subculture. A subculture is a group that differentiates itself from the larger culture to which it belongs, while borrowing and transforming the symbols, values, and beliefs of that culture. Subcultures form as a collective solution to problems arising when a group of people feels that its position in the broader community is ambiguous. In the case of participants in independent minyanim, most are in a lifecycle stage of emerging adulthood, a population that often feels underserved by existing Jewish institutions. They created their own communities to make a place for themselves where it did not previously exist. Scholars and communal leaders have characterized the independent minyanim subculture as emergent, entrepreneurial, and innovative. Yet in a larger historical context, the phenomenon is far from unique. It is the most recent manifestation of a development that occurs in every age, as Jews find and create ways to congregate that reflect the particularities of their time and place. It seems that for every generation, everything old is new again.

!!!!Why Synagogue? A reply to a reply (a provocation) What to do about shul? And about prayer? And about God?

!www.jewschool.com by Aryeh Cohen · Monday, February 10th, 2014

The Jewish people are in crisis. The synagogue is in crisis. And, of course, Pew. One need not even remember the whole name of this latest diagnosis of the demise of our people. It suffices to just hint at it to strike terror in the heart of the terror-stricken.Amichai Lau-Lavie has the latest salvo. He has put together something called Lab/Shul which is apparently the evolving answer to the problem. What however is the problem? It seems that the problem is shrinking synagogue membership or affiliation or some such. Why is this a

problem? Because Pew said it was. Well, actually, Pew just said it was happening. Actually Pew (currently the reified voice of Jewish demise) said that just like the rest of America, Jews were affiliating religiously, or actually that they were identifying themselves as having a religion, at a lower rate than before. So this might just be a problem like rising tides is a problem. It is a phenomenon, but its only a problem if your house is close to the ocean at low tide. The solution then is not to try to stop the tide from rising. The solution probably has something to do with moving your house.According to Lau-Lavie the problem is that there are too many bars to entry. The synagogue is a wonderful place, potentially, but the rabbis just prattle on and on, and people mention God. A lot. Lau-Lavie’s friends don’t like that. At all. The answer is a place where other terms are used instead of “God,” and maybe there is more music,

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and the translations are tweaked so that even if God is in the Hebrew, “source” or “creator” is in the English translation. So that, perhaps, a famous Israeli pop-musician will sing a beautiful unplugged version of Kol Nidrei—despite the fact that he is singing a bit of legalese that blessedly few people understand—and the emotion will suffice for the shul which wants “authenticity”.Now, in truth, I have no problem with Lab/Shul, or with any of Lau-Lavie’s previous kiruv projects—Rebbetzin Haddasah, or StorahTelling. They are all to be applauded. I do have a problem with thinking that there is one answer, or even one problem. Or that the problem is the same everywhere.To begin with, why is it a problem for Lau-Lavie’s friends not to be in shul? The missionary, or kiruv professional, starts with the assumption that they have the perfect product, and then ask why isn’t anybody buying. When I go to minyan during the week, I go to my local Conservative shul’s daily minyan. Its a no-frills affair which takes 30-35 minutes on days when there is no Torah reading, 45 minutes when the Torah is read. Longer if Hallel is said. This kind of minyan would probably fit Lau-Lavie’s exact definition of the problem (except that most of the new and experimental minyanim don’t meet daily). There is almost no singing, no conversations, and there’s a lot of God language. Yet, there is a regular attendance at this minyan, which is a very welcoming community of people—mostly people who need to say kaddish, but not exclusively (I am thankfully of the latter). When, for example, one of the minyan members underwent surgery the minyan organized a Psalms vigil at the hospital for her. There is a real warmth and caring amongst the minyan members. (Bagels and lox on special celebrations.)But, you might say, what about the hundreds of people who don’t come to the daily minyan? Where are they? Well, I will answer you in the same credulous tone, they are not there—and perhaps do not need to be. The minyan should perhaps be looked at as a function of a community. That is, a community needs a minyan. Just as a community needs a Torah and a Torah reading. Each individual is not obligated in Torah reading—the community is. Perhaps we should think of a minyan in the same way—especially daily minyan. The community has to have a daily minyan, but not every Jew in the community needs to be at the minyan. In truth, most every community I have ever been a part of that has had a daily minyan (which means basically Orthodox or Conservative) has had a small percentage of their community in attendance. The announcement “please help out at the daily minyan” in one form or another, was a staple of the rabbi’s shabbat announcement. I’m pretty sure that this is a feature and not a bug. The community sustained a minyan. Just as the community sustained a megillah reading or bagel breakfasts with the rabbi.Shabbes is a destination davening though. It is supposed to be transformative. Meaningful always and everywhere. But why? There are many reasons that people come to pray in community. One of them is to pray. One of them might be to be transformed. However, I would bet that most people don’t go to shul to be transformed. Moved, maybe. I’m not even sure of that. There are, of course, those who want to be moved and transformed. There are those who don’t understand why other Jews would go to shul if they weren’t going to be moved or transformed. However, I remind myself, when I was twenty I didn’t understand how anybody could be so superficial as to pray the silent amidah prayer in less than fifteen or twenty amazingly intense minutes. Yet,

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people did. And I do now. Proudly. As a feature not a bug. Because prayer is a part of my life and not my life. Not even a large part of my Jewish life.So, as we engage in this ongoing discussion of the crisis of the Jewish people, I would ask for a larger dose of humility from everybody involved. Not only in regards to the answer. More importantly perhaps, in regards to whether or not there is a question. !!!Women rabbis at forefront of pioneering prayer communities by Anthony Weiss, JTA, December 15, 2014 !A decade ago in Los Angeles, two organizations opened their doors with a call to prayer — or they would have if they had any doors to open. Ikar, led by Rabbi Sharon Brous, and Nashuva, led by Rabbi Naomi Levy, were conceived separately. But when they launched in 2004, both offered a novel, and in many ways similar, approach to Jewish spirituality and community — regularly scheduled, rabbi-led services that were not affiliated with any movement or institution, that met in rented space, and that were avowedly not synagogues. “We were trying to walk into the conversation about Jewish identity and community and ritual without preconceived ideas about where we would land,” Brous told JTA, describing the beginnings of Ikar. “What we were trying to do didn’t follow any model that already existed.” Since then, however, the format pioneered by Nashuva and Ikar has become its own recognizable model, and similar spiritual communities with a noticeably common style have sprung up in a number of other cities across the country. Prayer is designed to be heartfelt and arouse the spirit. Often there is clapping, dancing and singing without words. Worshipers tend to skew young, informal and hip. The groups don’t own buildings; typically they meet in up-and-coming or already desirable neighborhoods. The communities are led by charismatic rabbis who stress innovation and outreach to Jews who feel alienated from existing Jewish institutions. They are nondenominational. They often don’t know exactly how to describe themselves. And most, but not all, have one more common element: They were founded, and are still being led by, women rabbis. In 2006, Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum launched The Kavana Cooperative in Seattle. In 2011, Rabbi Noa Kushner opened The Kitchen in San Francisco and Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann initiated Mishkan Chicago in the Windy City. In 2012, Rabbi Lori Shapiro started Open Temple in the West Los Angeles neighborhood of Venice.

The celebratory mood at Mishkan Chicago services. Photo courtesy of Mishkan) This new paradigm represented a sharp break with the past and has found a receptive audience among a younger cohort. As noted by David Myers, the chair of the history department at

the University of California Los Angeles, 20th-century American Judaism was defined in large

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part by building brick-and-mortar institutions. But the new rabbi-led communities are part of a 21st century spate of innovation outside the the established boundaries of Jewish institutional life. “[Younger] people feel that it’s much more important to find their spiritual voice than to build up an institution for the institution’s sake,” Myers told JTA. Thus, these communities founded by women are part of a much broader landscape. A number of male rabbis also have formed and led innovative spiritual communities. Two are in New York: Rabbi Andy Bachmann founded Brooklyn Jews in 2003 and later folded it into the borough’s Temple Beth Elohim, and Rabbi David Ingber started Manhattan’s Romemu, a Jewish Renewal shul, in 2006. Other models have proliferated, too. Manhattan’s Kehillat Hadar, founded in 2001, helped launch a movement of independent, lay-led minyanim that formed in cities throughout the country to pray without clergy or professional staff. The 6th & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, restored and relaunched in 2004, is now among several organizations housed in former synagogue buildings that host a combination of prayer services and community events. Well-established synagogues also have experimented with prayer services featuring nontraditional music, looser structures and an emphasis on a warmer, more communal feel. In Denver, for example, Rabbi Bruce Dollin of the Hebrew Educational Alliance synagogue instituted a second service — with drumming and a “davening team” to help lead worship — that took a page from independent spiritual communities. But rabbi-led spiritual communities, unaffiliated with a movement and untethered to a single home building, have become one part of the Jewish world where female rabbis have not only found a foothold but have taken the lead as pioneers and innovators.

Rabbi Naomi Levy and the Nashuva band drum playing on the beach. Photo by Phyllis Osman !It hasn’t been easy. The women who founded these communities have struggled to build organizational

structures from scratch, to scrape together funds to rent space and pay salaries, and to connect with a target audience that often is disconnected from the normal channels of the Jewish communities. Some have even had to bypass roadblocks set up by existing Jewish institutions and colleagues who have seen them as rivals. “It’s a double-edged sword because on the one hand, the excitement of creating something from nothing is that you don’t have to deal with, ‘Well, we’ve always done it this way,’ ” Levy told JTA.  “The frightening part is not having any structure. When we started Nashuva, we had no money, we had no staff, we had no people. There was no community.” Yet the enormous challenges also provide the opportunity for women to revolutionize spiritual and institutional life. “Many women aspire to leadership, but they also aspire to change how leadership is offered,” said Shifra Bronznik, founding president of Advancing Women Professionals and the Jewish

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Community, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting female professionals in the Jewish world. “That’s actually easier to do if you’re building from the ground up.” As noted by a number of the rabbis, as well as a number of Jewish communal professionals, traditional Jewish institutions — and the lead roles in them — have been shaped largely by men. Thus, the increasing prevalence of female rabbis opens up the space to rethink certain patterns. “By definition, having a woman rabbi in your community means you’re not going to do things the way they’ve been done for the last 2,000 years,” Ikar’s Brous, 41, told JTA. “That creates a space for fluidity in organizational life.”

The Kitchen celebrating Sukkot at the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco. Photo by Elizabeth Waller !Some of those changes involve aspects of organizational life with a gendered component to them — for example, the role of

a rabbi as the traditional male “breadwinner,” with a wife to take care of the family. “There’s an old-school model where the rabbi is married to the congregation,” said Nussbaum, 38, of Kavana. “That’s the rabbi’s first priority, and the role is sort of boundless around that.” In other ways, that sense of reimagining can also penetrate approaches to the religious texts as well. “Women need to reinvent Judaism in order to see themselves reflected in the Jewish narrative,” said Bronznick, who has worked with several of these rabbis on issues related to women’s organizational leadership. “They’re creating something that never was, which is a Jewish narrative authored in the voice of woman,” she said. Strikingly, many of the innovative female rabbis come from the Conservative movement, the most recent of the denominations to ordain female rabbis, in 1985. Levy, Brous and Nussbaum all were ordained by Conservative Judaism’s flagship Jewish Theological Seminary, while Heydemann, 33, attended the movement’s Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at American Jewish University in Los Angeles. Kushner, 44, ordained at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, is a Reform rabbi like her father, Lawrence Kushner, who is also an author, while Shapiro, 43, was ordained at the nondenominational Academy for Jewish Religion in Los Angeles. Not all of the female-led communities have broken the mold in the same way. Thus, for example, Ikar and Nashuva, the two early innovators in the field, have taken somewhat different paths. Levy, 52, describes Nashuva as “a spiritual outreach community” aimed squarely at Jews who feel disconnected from Jewish life. Nashuva operates on a shoestring budget, with a payroll consisting only of Levy and the members of its eight-piece band, and most of the year meets just twice a month — for Friday-night services at the Brentwood Presbyterian Church and on a Sunday for a community service event. This is precisely as Levy wants it — she says she has no desire to open a religious school, expand her staff or institute any kind of membership model. Instead, Nashuva raises money only through voluntary contributions, including a suggested donation of $350 for the High Holidays. !

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Although Nashuva remains nondenominational, Levy has retained close ties to the Conservative movement. A member of the first class of women admitted to the Jewish Theological Seminary’s rabbinic program, she served on the executive council of the movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, and she travels regularly to speak at synagogues about how they incorporate some of Nashuva’s innovations into congregational life. Ikar, by contrast, has expanded rapidly. Brous is now one of two full-time congregational rabbis, along with a permanent staff of 14, plus seasonal and teaching staff, and Ikar operates a preschool and religious school. It offers tiered membership plans and charges non-members for High Holidays tickets. (This reporter has been a member of Ikar since 2009.) In certain ways, Ikar also has served as the mother ship of the rabbi-led spiritual community movement and helped create a mentoring network among several of the congregations. When Nussbaum left her suburban Seattle congregation to start Kavanah, she sought out Brous for advice. And when Kushner decided to start The Kitchen, she spoke to Nussbaum and Brous. Heydemann, in turn, served as a rabbinic fellow under Brous at Ikar, and already had known Kushner at Stanford University while she was an undergraduate and Kushner was the Hillel rabbi. Each of these communities, in turn, has developed its own distinctive shape and culture. Kavana is based on a cooperative model in which members are expected to take an active volunteer role in helping to put together and run events, and are encouraged to attend at least one community event per month. The Kitchen has embraced an experimental, start-up ethos. The founders partnered with a design firm, IDEO, to help think through not only a design aesthetic for the community’s materials (modern typefaces, no Judaica motifs), but also the service itself from the ground up. As befits its name (chosen to suggest an open, familiar place to experiment and try things out), The Kitchen has also made a point of partnering with trendy local restaurants for Shabbat meals. Mishkan Chicago has established itself as a younger-skewing congregation particularly focused on singing and prayer. Open Temple, founded to reach out to Jews with very little Jewish background, has focused on education, and on community-building through events celebrating major holidays and b’nai mitzvot. The community already has a Hebrew school and b’nai mitzvah program, and is preparing to introduce regular Shabbat services in the coming year. !Open Temple holding its family Rosh Hashanah service. Photo by Jordan Teller Several of the communities are moving toward affiliating with one another in a more formal way. In May, Brous, Kushner, Nussbaum and Heydemann — along with Romemu’s Ingber, Amichai Lau-Levie of Lab/Shul in Manhattan and Rabbi Scott Perlo (a former rabbinic intern at Ikar) from Sixth & I Historic Synagogue — met at the Leichtag Ranch north of San Diego to discuss ways to work together more closely and potentially articulate a common vision. The group’s participants, who jokingly call themselves the G7, said the discussions had not yet turned into anything concrete, but suggested that something more definite would be forthcoming in the coming weeks and months. They all stressed that they were not looking to form any sort of movement.

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The innovative communities and their rabbis are increasingly being cited as models for the Jewish future. Several were honored in the Slingshot Fund’s newly issued directory of innovative Jewish organizations, and Levy says she travels on a monthly basis to speak to synagogues about spiritual outreach and creativity. How precisely these communities will evolve remains an open question. And in certain ways, they already have — adding new services as the congregations grow and as members’ needs and desires change. Kavana has created a Hebrew immersion preschool and religious school, and has added adult education programs as its cohort of older congregants grows. The Kitchen’s “Shabbatify” program organizes Shabbat dinners of 12 to 20 people in participants’ homes, and the community is in the process of opening a store to sell its self-designed prayer books and a Passover game. But Myers, an Ikar member from its early days, says that as the communities grow and evolve,

those that wish to survive in the long term will inevitably need to develop their institutional forms and find new ways to generate and harness energy. Ikar celebrating Havdalah to close out Yom Kippur. Photo courtesy of Ikar

“Ironically, the way to marshal and galvanize that new energy is probably to get a building,” he said. Indeed, Ikar for the past several years has been looking into buying or constructing its own building. That would represent a profound symbolic move from its early days. “Ikar,” Myers says, “was the anti-building form of spiritual community.” But ultimately, the rabbis argue, the measure of their success or failure has nothing to do with buildings, denominations or labels. Rather, staying true to their mission involves not differentiating themselves but staying relevant. “I don’t think I’m re-creating Jewish world,” Kushner told JTA. “I’m doing my part for my generation. These ideas of trying to bring immediacy, relevancy, meaning — these are not brand new ideas. They’re ideas that every good rabbi struggles with.” !!!

Minyan Man After starting his own prayer group, Elie Kaunfer is

teaching others to do the same By Samantha M. Shapiro|February 19, 2010 7:00 AM !!

I first met Elie Kaunfer in 2001 when a friend of a friend invited me to a Saturday morning prayer service that Kaunfer and friends had organized in a Manhattan apartment. Kaunfer, then 27, was working as a corporate-fraud investigator, and the minyan was his side project. But Kaunfer is hyper-organized, passionate, and single-minded; his hobbies are not like yours and

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mine. That minyan soon started meeting regularly in a rented church basement. It acquired a name—Kehilat Hadar—a website, subcommittees, spreadsheets, weekly Torah Study sessions, and an annual Shavuot retreat attended by hundreds. In the past nine years, roughly 60 independent minyanim, or prayer groups, have cropped up around the country. None is affiliated with Judaism’s three main denominations. They usually lack a rabbi, and they tend to start out meeting in apartments, following the Hebrew liturgy used at most Orthodox congregations. Although about a third of the minyanim adhere to what they call a “partnership” model in which women are not allowed to lead all parts of the service, they all push women’s participation and leadership, and they tend to be gay-friendly. They also are free of the stilted air of duty that typifies many Reform and Conservative services; at independent minyanim, people pray like it’s the most fun they’ve had since karaoke night. The mainstream Jewish world has greeted this unexpected surge of youthful excitement with wary enthusiasm; some skeptics worry that the minyanim are draining the most committed Jews of the next generation away from established denominations or structures, which will leave them weakened. Kaunfer didn’t invent independent minyanim, but he’s pursued the movement more doggedly than anyone else and brought fledgling signs of organization and coherence to it. Kaunfer quit his job and entered rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2002; now an ordained rabbi, he’s going further with his study, pursuing a doctorate in liturgy at JTS. He co-founded an institute, Mechon Hadar, that serves as a clearinghouse for independent minyanim and a think tank that helps them tackle halachic issues in their own communities. Kaunfer also co-founded Yeshivat Hadar, the only full-time egalitarian yeshiva in North America which offers text study 14 hours a day, along with yoga classes and organic lunch. And this month, he published Empowered Judaism , a manifesto for the movement. He and I met to discuss it in the slightly rundown West End Synagogue in New York City, where his yeshiva rents space. !How is the independent minyanim movement different from Havurah movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, which basically also spawned independent congregations? The general cultural context is different. The Havurot were part of the general countercultural 1960s youth movement. Both the independent minyanim and Havurot are invested in meaningful spiritual prayer, but what that looks like is different. For the Havurot, it was cutting and reducing some of the prayers and being very focused on the Torah discussion—they would often have a 30- to 40-minute Torah discussion. It was also a sense of prayer being in fellowship—everyone sat in a circle and they would have a real intense relationship, both in prayer and outside. The minyanim are less intense on that scale—you come to daven, not necessarily to form a close-knit community. In terms of prayer, the minyanim return to the traditional liturgy and the innovation is in the singing. The seating at independent minyanim is in rows, the more traditional layout. If the Havurah movement was reflecting that ‘60s counterculture moment, what does the independent minyan movement reflect? The very first thing is that there is a new demographic that didn’t exist: post-college, pre-whatever. People are getting married and having kids later, if at all, and there is an institutional vacuum for that group of people. The second thing is that the minyanim reflect the general internet culture. In the old days, there were three networks—ABC, NBC, and CBS—and it was the same with Jewish life—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform. Now it’s much more normal for people to carve out their own space, both in secular culture and in religious culture. The D.C. Minyan has separate seating with no

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mehitza, and men and women leading equally; it doesn’t fit on the institutional map, per se, but it’s drawing in a niche market of Jews. It’s not trying to take over the whole world with a new institutional model. It’s reflecting the larger internet culture: new niche markets are popping up and being met by these independent minyanim. Do you think that independent minyanim, by meeting in borrrowed rooms and rented basements, lose the sense of sacred space that’s created in a building specifically intended for prayer? The problem is we have often confused sacred space from a visual perspective with sacred space from an audio perspective. You can walk into a 1,000-seat sanctuary and be overwhelmed with beauty of it, but when you’re singing Kabbalat Shabbat with 50 people in that sanctuary, it sounds depressing. Independent minyanim usually start in an apartment so the space is never too big, and part of what’s going for them in the feel of the service is they have auditory sacredness. It’s the voices that are carrying people as opposed to the view.Does the movement attract people who aren’t in their 20s and 30s? The narrow view is that it’s providing an outlet for a group of people who had no institutional outlet. But the broader view is that the values the independent minyanim represent are having an impact on larger trends in American Judaism. That’s why the book is called Empowered Judaism not “Independent Minyanim.” The minyanim represent a desire that people have to own their Judaism. In past decades, in American Jewish culture, there was a ceding of knowledge and control and ownership to a vaunted clergy. What the minyanim represent is the sense that people want to take charge of their Jewish heritage. The internet makes everything available, you don’t have to wait for an expert to translate Judaism or religion, you can just have access to it. I was surprised to learn from the book is that you were your high school prom king. It was an election, and I won because the football players split the vote. There were six of them and only one nerdy guy, so all the nerdy guys voted for me. It’s how Willis won the beautify pageant, if you remember that episode of Diff’rent Strokes. I did get to dance with prom queen—she was the head cheerleader—and I met her for first time on dance floor. She was about as surprised as I was. Samantha M. Shapiro is a writer based in New York City. !Find this story online: http://tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/26047/minyin-man!!!

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An Excerpt from

Davening: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Prayer by Zalman Schachter-Shalomi with Joel Segel (2012)

!An old story tells of the Baal Shem Tov coming to a synagogue and turning back at the door, unable to enter. Too many prayers inside, he said.

'But Master,' asked his disciples, 'surely a room full of prayer is a good thing?'

‘But all the prayers are stuck there in the building,' the Baal Shem answered. 'None of them are going up to Heaven.'

You might get this feeling today. Clergy and congregants together might be dutifully singing and reciting — but somehow the prayer has no wings. You still feel uninspired. Maybe you've known the peace that can sometimes follow real prayer. Maybe you have prayed until you were drained and exhausted, for yourself or for someone you love. Maybe you've been there when a room full of people have managed to leave their individual preoccupations behind and are singing and swaying and making a joyful noise unto the Lord. If you've been blessed with such an experience, then you may have some sense of what the Baal Shem Tov mean. Sometimes we're transformed, and sometimes we're not.

That's why we talk about kavanah.

Jewish prayer begins with kavanah. To daven with kavanah means to pray with focus, intention, meaning. It means praying from the heart, rather than prayer centered solely in the mind. Celebrating a Shabbos or a holiday with kavanah gives that day a deeper, richer texture. Kavanah gives meaning to our rituals of marriage and birth and death. It inspires us to perform a mitzvah on a more conscious and ultimately more rewarding level. Kavanah lies at the heart of Jewish devotional life. That one word encompasses an entire body of inner work necessary to live consciously in the presence of God.

Our Jewish path to inner awareness begins with kavanah. Our meditative lives as Jews could not be complete without it, for it is the steering wheel of all inner consciousness work. Our inner search for kavanah might at first be satisfied with a momentary boost of intention. Ultimately, though, we want our kavanah to be transformational. We seek a complete realignment of the soul, a mesirut nefesh — a handing over of the soul to God's work. We wish to become the very intention and kavanah of God.

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From the CCAR (Reform) : MISHKAN HANEFESH: Machzor for the Days of Awe ( for 2015) selections from TEN ESSENTIAL THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NEW MACHZOR ~ Rabbi Edwin Goldberg https://www.ccarpress.org !The creation of a new prayer book for the Days of Awe presents a challenge as well as an opportunity. The opportunity is great worship and transformed worshipers. The challenge is how to use the book in all its complexity without it being too complicated. To help the new adopter of the machzor, here are some important things to know:

1) Integrated Theology: The book continues Mishkan T’filah’s approach of “integrated theology.” This means that the majority of the book features the “two-page” spread design wherein the right side reflects a more faithful rendering of the standard prayers, and the left side a more creative theological approach. Some sections of the service (or in the case of Yizkor or Avodah, the entire service) are linear and have no two-page spreads.

2) Translations: The left side translations are “faithful” but not literal, recognizing there is no way to literally render a word from Hebrew into English. The best one can do is a translation that reflects both a sense of the Hebrew and the nuance of English. Since liturgical language is poetic language based heavily on metaphor, this kind of approach is far more effective than a straight, literal translation would be. Here is more on the translation approach.

3) Preparation: The machzor is not created to be used “as is.” In other words, like Mishkan T’filah, the worship leader(s) should plan on preparing a particular set of choices concerning the two-page spread as well as other features, described below. It should also be understood that no prayer book can ever be more than a sacred implement in the facilitation of a worship experience, even as no textbook guarantees a wonderful lesson. Worship leaders must make judicious choices.

4) Design: The readings on the left side pages are often marked by a grey screen, or “wash.” These pages are alternative readings or countertexts, and provide additional choices of material to consider. There are also study or meditation pages, which are marked by a blue “wash” with a black border. These are generally meant to be read individually.

5) The Individual Experience: Worshipers are encouraged to explore Mishkan HaNefesh on their own. Unlike prayerbooks from earlier eras of Jewish history, it is not assumed that everyone will always be on the same page of

Mishkan HaNefesh at the same time. The machzor was created with the underlying principle that worshipers may find themselves interested in a particular commentary, intrigued by a particular study text, or drawn to a particular meditation, and may at times make their own way through the machzor.

9) Innovations: Mishkan HaNefesh contains several significant innovations:

a. The shofar service for Rosh HaShanah morning is divided into three sections, each one located in different parts of the service. This helps the worshiper focus more time and energy on each theme of the shofar service.

b. As mentioned above, there are additional Torah reading options.

c. The Yom Kippur volume contains a newly conceived Avodah service, based on fifteen steps of ascent and holiness.

d. The Yom Kippur volume offers a minchah service with a special theme of Jewish ethical/spiritual values (midot).

e. The Yizkor service reflects a theme of seven lights of mourning and remembrance.

f. The N’ilah service reflects a general theme of God’s outstretched hand (Atah notein yad).

10) Responsive Readings: There are no readings that are explicitly meant to be read responsively, as indicated with italics in the style of older Reform prayerbooks, but the worship leader is invited to suggest certain readings be read responsively, if so wished. Some readings have indented paragraphs that may be of help for those wishing to ask the congregation to read responsively.

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