September, 2008

Over the coming year, our community will be working to find avenues for all of our members to become more engaged with their Judaism. However, for our community to be able to do this, each one of us must lend our support in as broad a way as possible. It is not sufficient only to support those community programs that you care about, or those that you regularly take part in. Each of us is responsible for the entire community.

In this light, I want to bring to your attention the sad fact that there have been a few days recently where our community has not had a minyan for morning services. The morning I am writing this, Monday, we were unable to recite Kaddish and unable to read from our holy Torah for want of a minyan. If morning minyan ceases to exist, our community will have failed itself, and we will have failed all of our ancestors who preserved our practice of communal prayer and communal Torah reading through even the most difficult of times.

Here is my proposal. I am asking every member of this congregation who works to help make a minyan once a month on the date that corresponds to your birthday. If your birthday is May 15, you would make a commitment to come to morning services every month on the 15th. If that date falls on Shabbat, come on Friday or Sunday (and Shabbat too!). I am also asking every member of this congregation who does not work and does not have small children at home to help make a minyan once a week. Pick a day and commit to coming every week on that day. In return, I will meet with anyone who is interested to help them learn the Hebrew letters and vowels and to understand the structure and meaning of the morning service. Those of us who come regularly to morning minyan do so because it is meaningful to us – and it can be meaningful for you too.

I know that life is busy, and that it is easy to find reasons not come to services, but ask yourself: if we were giving out checks for $1000 to anyone who came to minyan, would you show up? If so, I would encourage you to think about what that says about your priorities. Morning minyan fills an important communal need. I understand that reciting the Amidah aloud and hearing the Torah read, are activities whose importance to the community might not seem so great. To you I say: picture the woman, torn apart by grief at the loss of her husband, who comes to morning services seeking solace in community, in Jewish tradition, in reciting the prayers uttered by generations of Jews – and we have to tell her, “I’m sorry. You cannot recite Kaddish today. Kaddish can only be recited in a community of ten, and the community just didn’t show up today.”

Rabbi Ben Kramer

Return to Home Page