B”H
A question of minyan-rising or not
One man asked me one morning (not so recently) when we were unable to make a
minyan for
shacharis, why did I think others chose not to get up early in the morning to come to
shul to
daven. The flippant answer was, because they have so much to do and cannot wake up that early for whatever reason. Exercising my
dan l’chaf zechut muscles, I thought, perhaps someone has to work multiple jobs to support an ailing family member –say, a mother in a nursing home--, plus his multiple children and wife. Perhaps, I continued, another widowed man might be struggling to single-parent his child –or also devastating, his wife may be seriously ill and in need of nursing care in addition to his care of the child. Another man may have such financial burdens totally unrelated to family cares that he has to work longer hours or perhaps he struggles with debt or, chas v’shalom, perhaps that man struggles with a mental illness and simply cannot get out of bed each day. There are so many reasons I could go on imagining reasons for quite a while. I let the query drop out of mind until recently when I was reading the monograph by Rabbi Shalom Carmy entitled “Forgive Us, Father-in-Law, For We Know Not What to think, Letter To A Philosophical Dropout From Orthodoxy.” The ideas below are inspired by what Rabbi Carmy wrote, though not the actual gist of his essay.
Is one’s attendance at
minyan directly linked to the strength of one’s belief in Gd and Torah? That belief sets the point in the spectrum of religious observance with which one identifies. Perhaps one's position in that topographical map delineates how one behaves with respect to
minyan? One man in my general acquaintance asserted his opinion that once a man commits to the sacrifice that an orthodox lifestyle requires, it would follow naturally that this man should then participate in those communal ritual observances and that he should be thorough in his observance of halacha. His claim, I believe, was that once one has chosen this way of life to be half-hearted or non-committal would be inconsistent with the act of choosing. I then considered this more deeply. Are our
minyan-members who are communing with their pillows and mattresses at the appointed time for
shacharis primarily those among us who did not choose their religious level of observance? In other words, are they those who are
frum out of habit, because they were raised thus, or for tradition’s sake? Now, I ask you this in a rhetorical manner and certainly with no intention at all to set anyone to assessing the religious education or background of those absentee members of our congregations. I really do not wish for more dissension among our holy congregation and the idea of setting one person against another among
klal Yisrael disturbs me greatly.
Indulge me then in this
gedankenschrift or thought experiment without imposing its content on your fellow Jew please. There is an idea that we teach sometimes that a human who chooses to be orthodox might and should behave
lishma -for the sake of Heaven- as I teach it, or in more descriptive terms to borrow Rabbi Carmy’s phraseology “in which a person forgets himself in devotion to Gd, without consideration for selfish consequences” has driven scores of my former students to frustration in their lack of understanding. “Why?” their beleaguered faces would clearly ask, though none of them really ever offered that question themselves to me directly. I have found in my experience that most of the Jews who seem to understand this are
ba’alei tshuva who have made great personal sacrifices to become religious and/or who have seen what a secular life is like and come back from that saying they want something deeper and more spiritual.
One man I know who is a regular at
minyan has suggested bribing people with breakfast –be it hot apple cider, donuts, or cereal—he seems fairly sure that this might drag some people out of their beds to shul. I for one am not so sure that this would help. Of course, another
minyan man, from the
shul upon hearing this offered to make scrambled eggs one morning a week to ensure the minyan. Somehow this idea didn’t take and we never managed to bribe people to minyan. I wanted to think more about this, especially since at one point in my career as a graduate student I had quite a number of months of very late nights in my laboratory and could sympathize with those who remained abed. I found that it was utterly devastating and painful to even contemplate lifting my eyelids at 6-something in the morning by the second week of this horrendous schedule where I worked until about 3 or 4am. I was and have been quite sympathetic to the plight of these lax
minyan men. After all,
Chazal teach us that to wake a man is to steal sleep/energy from him. Those months I absolutely felt a keen sense of understanding for the crime of stealing sleep. (Mind you, that word isn’t “sheep” but sleep.)
One very revered friend of mine, who now resides in Jerusalem, taught me in college that as a committed Jew, he fashioned everything in his life around, his religious practice. Raised orthodox, he certainly was not a model of the possible (and not so probable) B.T. zealot phenomenon. In fact, he was so staunch in his belief that he actually altered his major from one field to another so that he could be at
davening at the appropriate times and made sure never to have a class that conflicted with
minyan. His dedication, however, is rare to be seen.
My only resort after this was to think to myself that the root of
minyan absence then is indeed our fascination with rational thinking. We, as humans participant in modern society, would love to be able to have justification in this modern society for all of our behaviors. Some of us, as Jews, would like also to extend that to Gd. If only we had rational explanation (for our society that demands rational explanations of everything! Science and Knowledge indeed rule!) If we could but put Gd into a mental box and caging up our deity with a label and bounds that are testable or provable, we might feel better about the strange rituals and laws that govern (or are supposed to govern) our lives. No such thing really exists though.
Just as I could not prove to you the existence of a sixth dimension nor that particles in a box “know” about each other, no more so could I prove to you that Gd exists. I simply approach belief on this leap of faith or some visceral gut feeling… and such an emotional -!- approach to life seems illogical and irrational. How could we, modern mankind, stand shameless in our irrationality?!
Ah, emotion! Men dare blame women for their emotionality and irrationality, yet no lesser men of logic and rational science than Blaise Pascal, Sir Issac Newton, among many many scores of others, took that leap of faith and believed in Gd. Rabbi Carmy noted in his essay, that Pascal even wrote about a “logic of the heart,” which is rooted in intuition and emotional intelligence regarding human relationships. I adored even, Rabbi Carmy’s assertion that the claim that “the only way to truth makes sense if Gd is a rationalist who has ordained the privileged standing of reason, but is false if Gd is a personal being.” (Ask me for an essay on women and why ten men are required for a minyan for more laughs on this subject.) In a society, where many men pride themselves for their logic and rationality, perhaps a bit of that emotional self is not cultivated. The emotional self connects a man to another man –men in communion, and ultimately in community, may find themselves dedicated to –nay! introduced even to-- a world where their egos and the power of their minds alone do not reign supreme. This is a step towards developing that sense of how the communal
mitzvah of
minyan is a responsibility borne by each individual as a part of the whole.
Communal activities are so important to us Jews. Why else would we be bound to have seven men who ate together to recite the
birkat hamazon in a certain format that allows us to invoke a Divine Name? As opposed to the requirement of six men for a similar privilege in shul? (more on this elsewhere)
Rabbi Carmy continues with the comment that “proponents of traditional religion, like me, are consciously or tacitly committed to the ultimate value of personal relations…” and here is where I would stand up and insert a thought tangential to Carmy’s assertions, but important to the idea of what is missing from our
minyan complaints. Do we turn people away from our
minyanim for lack of personal relationships? Is it rather our lack of creating the atmosphere for that nexus with Gd that keeps a man bound to his bedsheets in the morning?
I remember one year when I was involved with a particular exercise program in college. I would wake at an hour I considered ungodly then, 5am, to go train for this program. One spectre that dragged me out of bed then was that I knew one of my dear friends was waiting for me and the other was the thought of how much I wanted to succeed in this program and effort. Are both applicable here with our
minyan men concerns?
Perhaps if we are friends with our fellows –fulfilling at our utmost ability the mitzvah of
ahavat Yisrael—and correcting the
cheit of
sinat chinam, the sin of baseless hatred, we might turn the tide of our ever-dwindling
minyan? Also perhaps though if we could maintain that, after a while, might our comrades come to desire their own success in the effort of recreating a personal connection with Gd? (Rav Yehuda Amital,
shlita, has a very nice shiur on how to speak with those who have lost their faith --check the VBM website). Perhaps while one man may see his attendance at
minyan as the simple fulfillment of his sacrifice to be orthodox, and another man may see it as his personal dedication to
avodat Hashem, still among us may be men who require that introduction from the heart … and then again there are many many more people who have much more complex problems than what I describe and for all I know, my brain could be overheating and I could be totally blowing hot air and sewage out there... one should really not blog while tired... but by all means, please leave me comments, because I seek to grow from this discourse and not to preach.
First draft 5/8/05
