2003-08-18 - 4:12 p.m.
THE MINYAN SNATCHER
Dinner was late the other night because of the minyan snatcher. According to legend (or my father�s stories which sometimes amount to the same thing), a minyan snatcher in the old days was a man who lurked outside a synagogue, ready to snag teenage boys who preferred to spend the afternoon playing baseball outside and pull them inside with a bunch of older men so that the synagogue would have the obligatory thirteen men for afternoon and evening prayers. (Observant Jews pray three times a day but tend to combine the afternoon and evening service into one efficient package.) While individual Jews can pray some prayers individually, other prayers are only properly said if there is a minyan.
But this minyan snatcher was a bit different. First, this minyan snatcher came into the 21st century. This minyan snatcher did not stand outside in the heat. This one believed in modern inventions. This minyan snatcher used the phone, calling at ten o�clock the night before. And this minyan snatcher did not want bodies in a synagogue. This minyan snatcher wanted bodies in a house up the street and this minyan snatcher was female.
With all the modernity, you would think that this minyan snatcher would want women as well as men for most of the congregations around here now count women as well as men in counting for a minyan. But the modernity ended with the phone and the femininity of the minyan snatcher. Only men counted and she was after Mr. Philately. He was needed for a minyan the next evening at a neighbor�s house where the people were in mourning for a ninety-one year old woman. Mr. Philately dutifully agreed to go.
But Mr. Philately is not particularly well versed in the ways of more Orthodox Jews, the type that would count only men in a minyan. He was nervous that he might make a mistake during the service, which he expected to be a bit different than ours. I considered going with him but I was not sure that was a good idea. If they were really Orthodox, as the only-men-count suggested, then the women would have to be in another room during prayer anyway. I wouldn�t be able to help him. So I went over the customs, assured him that they would be so grateful that they would overlook any faux pas (unless he were a relative, which he wasn�t), told him I would hold supper for him, and sent him off.
He reported afterward that they were surprised and thrilled to see him. They used a familiar prayerbook and made him feel at home. He felt like an important part of the community for people that he did not know who were mourning a woman he barely knew. He had waved at her a few times over the years and shouted, �Howdy� as she sat in her wheelchair on the porch.
And that, I explained to him after, is what minyans at their best are really about. They are a way of holding communities together, of making them interdependent, and of reminding them that a group is generally more powerful than a single person.
Besides, now he can tell his father-in-law that he, too, has encountered the legendary minyan snatcher.
LAST YEAR: on vacation
TWO YEARS AGO: no entry�I am not sure why
IN CASE YOU MISSED THEM:
You�ve Come a Long Way, Boys
I Am NOT Frodo
Needing God
Under the Stairs
Zit
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Copyright 2006 by Ellen |
