Thursday, February 11, 2010

Decade In Review: Independent Minyanim

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

Jewschool’s decade-in-review series began with the best JewFilms of the 2000s, and continues with this roundup of the independent minyan phenomenon.

Though the independent minyan wasn’t invented in the last 10 years, this decade has seen the tipping point in the growth of grassroots Jewish prayer communities, both in numbers and in impact on the overall Jewish scene. These communities differ from one another in their approaches to Judaism and Jewish practice, but they share a volunteer-led structure and a participatory ethic, and they operate outside the denominational institutions. They range in size from 10 people gathering in a small apartment on a Friday night to 500 people crowding into a church basement for Kehilat Hadar’s Yom Kippur services.

It’s nothing new that many Jews feel alienated from establishment Jewish institutions, but the independent minyan surge has happened in the past decade because, now more than ever before, the means, motive, and opportunity to act constructively on that alienation are all in alignment. The means: More people are Jewishly educated, and come out of college with experience organizing Jewish communities through venues such as Hillel. In addition, the children of the first-wave havurah founders are now adults, and are well-versed in grassroots Jewish community. Furthermore, as this surge continues unabated, involvement in the newer wave of minyanim gives more people the skills and experience to start still newer minyanim when they move to new places. The motive: In the liberal Jewish world, educated laypeople don’t see a place for themselves in top-down synagogues where the rabbi is seen as the repository of all Jewish knowledge, and want other options besides becoming rabbis, becoming Orthodox, and dropping out of Jewish life. In a separate but concurrent development in the Orthodox world, many people want to see increased ritual participation for women in ways that have been deemed acceptable by halachic decisors, but not by longstanding customs of existing synagogues, leading to the creation of free-standing “partnership minyanim”. The opportunity: The Internet removes many of the barriers to starting new communities, making it possible to gather a large number of people with little effort, and freeing minyan organizers to focus on content rather than on getting the word out. The Internet also enables people to hear about like-minded communities in other places and be inspired to start their own, and enables communities to share best practices.

Each of these communities attracts people with a wide range of Jewish identities, and many of them have avoided making normative statements about which approach to Judaism is the correct one, and have instead developed various pluralistic practices to accommodate multiple identities within a single community. Many independent minyanim cannot be placed neatly into denominational boxes, and some have novel liturgical styles that defy easy categorization: Kol Zimrah uses musical instruments for an all-Hebrew service, DC Minyan has separate seating for men and women and egalitarian ritual participation, and Havurat Shalom and Zoo Minyan have been adapting the Hebrew text of the prayers to make them grammatically gender-balanced.

As the decade has gone on, a trend that began outside of formal organizations has spawned new organizations and transformed existing ones. At the turn of the century, the National Havurah Committee was an aging organization with a relatively static constituency; now, thanks to a culture of openness and the financial support of the Everett Fellows Program, the largest demographic at the NHC’s annual Summer Institute is people in their 20s, and the NHC network has been instrumental in linking and catalyzing many new grassroots communities. Kehilat Hadar began in 2001 as an apartment minyan, and it has since inspired Mechon Hadar, which organized a national conference for leaders of independent minyanim, and Yeshivat Hadar, the only full-time egalitarian yeshiva in North America. But these organizations are not new denominational movements, since there are no formally affiliated congregations; they simply offer resources and networks to any communities that are interested.

Over the course of the decade, there has also been a sea change in the stance of the establishment institutions toward (new and old) independent minyanim. Independent minyanim have gone from ignored (simply not on the radar) to reviled (and blamed for keeping young adults away from synagogues) to embraced (to the point that everyone wants a piece of the magic, and the Conservative movement is offering grants to minyanim that will partner with their synagogues).

What do the 2010s have in store for the independent minyan phenomenon? Contrary to some predictions, one thing that won’t happen is that this will all turn out to be ephemeral, that all the independent minyan participants will come back from their rumspringa and return uncritically to become passive members of the synagogues they once eschewed. (Some may join synagogues, but primarily synagogues that are open to change, and these synagogues will look very different a few years down the line.) The question of “What will happen when they have children?” is not a question for the future: not only have older grassroots communities been answering this question in various ways for decades, but the newer wave of minyanim are already answering it too. The 25-year-olds of the turn of the century are now 35; many of them have children, and many of them are still involved in independent minyanim. As time goes on, some independent minyanim will continue and evolve with their existing participants as they get older (just as older minyanim have done for 30 or 40 years), some will become more multigenerational, some will have a continuously cycling set of transient participants, and some will cease operation (as some already have) and make way for other initiatives. And new minyanim will be founded in new cities and new neighborhoods, with new populations and with new Jewish approaches. As this phenomenon becomes more multigenerational, it will become harder to dismiss it as simply a “young adult” thing, and it will have a more profound impact on the Jewish community as a whole. Tune back in in 2020 and we’ll see how this all played out.

10 comments:

  1. And now there's even a book about them: http://www.mechonhadar.org/empowered-judaism

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  2. I look forward to reading it! I'll post a review when I do. Because of its publication date, the book just missed the 2000-09 roundup, but may be the first major independent minyan event of the 2010s!

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  3. Of course, there was no year 0, so the decade is really 2001-2010 and not 2000-2009.

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  4. When "the" decade starts/ends can be debated, but is totally irrelevant. You could just as easily review the ten years from 1997-2006 if you wanted to. The prevailing custom is to consider the decade as ending last year - but since this is a pluralistic blog, you can certainly hold another opinion and organize another minyan or blog around it. :)

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  5. I'm curious...

    Of the roughly 5.5 million Jews in the US, how many do you think are involved with independent minyanim?

    Is it a few hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand?

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  6. @LenM -

    Yes, the numbers are probably relatively small, but the impact is not.

    Perhaps we're subscribing to some informal version of Veblen's approach to "conspicuous consumption", where a privileged class sets broader societal valuations through their public behavior.

    Except in this case, it's "conspicuous davenning". And the "class" position comes from levels of (Jewish) education, presence in urban centers, and the relatively young age of the participants -- meaning they are likely among the future leaders of many communities and institutions, and they also have relatively more time and energy to build something new.

    BZ may have left out one of the likely conduits for that impact: "alums" transforming synagogues into something that looks a lot like the independent minyanim they're used to. They may have buildings -- but so do JCC's and other institutions that host independent minyanim (often several). They may have rabbis, but ones that eschew 20th-century rabbinic roles (they don't often give sermons, or lead the davenning, or sit up on a bemah, or....). But they may successfully avoid the edifice complex, the formal / stilted davenning, the status / money games, and the general stodginess and alienation that drove many people away in the first place.

    Like many social movements that become co-opted in the midst of having their chief goals adopted by the broader society, that outcome may be the greatest legacy of independent minyanim -- if not by the 2020 review, maybe in another generation.

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  7. Shalom writes:
    BZ may have left out one of the likely conduits for that impact: "alums" transforming synagogues into something that looks a lot like the independent minyanim they're used to.

    I didn't leave it out; I wrote (albeit in parentheses) "Some may join synagogues, but primarily synagogues that are open to change, and these synagogues will look very different a few years down the line."

    And it should be noted that it would not have been possible for these people to skip the intermediate stage and just set immediately to work transforming synagogues, rather than starting independent minyanim first and then joining synagogues later. This is because the independent minyanim provide a successful proof of concept, and it's more convincing to say to a synagogue community "Let's try to be more like that successful minyan across the street, which you visited and were impressed by" than to say "Let's make changes away from the familiar toward something you've never seen in action before".

    As for the numbers, I've seen estimates of 10,000-20,000. It's hard to come up with anything precise or accurate, because most newer independent minyanim don't have membership, and therefore don't have membership numbers. You can look at the number of people on their email lists, but that's not a very useful number, since while it's uncommon for people to be members of multiple synagogues, it's very common to be on email lists of many many independent minyanim, so there would be lots of double (and triple, quadruple, etc.) counting.

    But one thing that is clear is that the number of people involved is both large enough to have the significant impact that Shalom describes, and small enough to be utterly insignificant in terms of bodies. That is, if the number of people involved in independent minyanim is less than 1% of American Jews, and the synagogue movements' membership has declined by 10% in the last period of time (I just made that number up), then the movements can't blame people joining independent minyanim for their own declining membership, since the numbers of people joining independent minyanim are basically statistical noise in relation to the bigger picture; rather, the movements have to look for other explanations.

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  8. I was happy to stumble across this entry. I've become interested in the independent minyan movement lately, and have been trying to do some "homework" on it.

    I've heard the thought thrown out there that the nature of denominational Judaism is undergoing a transition, and that the independent minyanim may well become a more and more potent factor in the future. I only have a little personal experience with this, having been to a couple of independent minyanim - but I don't think the idea is that far-fetched.

    If people are not finding the meaning that they seek in the current denominational structure, they will either go where they can find meaning, or they will create it for themselves.

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  9. As an "establishment" type through and through (member of the URJ board, past president of a large Reform congregation), I have no doubt that the impact of independent minyanim has been and will be potent beyond its numbers. I already see it reflected in the way we daven at my congregation -- which includes the tzim-tzum of the clergy.

    One issue which I have not seen addressed in the three recent Mah Rabu posts on IM -- what happens when the minyanaire needs a rabbi -- e.g., wedding, funeral, even pastoral counseling? (Not a problem, presumably, in the IM I recently visited, which includes in its chevra at least three non-congregational rabbis) Full disclosure: I was instrumental in establishing a policy when I was in congregational leadership that our rabbis not officiate for the unaffiliated. So I am uncomfortable with free-lance clergy serving transient needs.

    Davar acher -- in speculating about the future evolution of independent minyanim, one scenario I don't recall being floated: the possibility of an IM or a chavurah morphing into a congregation -- admittedly, that would be a congregation that look different from most of today's. Does that have any plausibility?

    Finally, and wearing my establishment kipa, I think it would be good for the Jews if your blogging about independent minyanim appeared at the Reform Judaism blog (www.rj.org), where at the very least it would do some valuable consciousness-raising.

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  10. Larry Kaufman writes:
    As an "establishment" type through and through (member of the URJ board, past president of a large Reform congregation), I have no doubt that the impact of independent minyanim has been and will be potent beyond its numbers. I already see it reflected in the way we daven at my congregation -- which includes the tzim-tzum of the clergy.

    That's great to hear!

    One issue which I have not seen addressed in the three recent Mah Rabu posts on IM -- what happens when the minyanaire needs a rabbi -- e.g., wedding, funeral, even pastoral counseling?

    None of those things "need" rabbis - they just require people who are knowledgeable in the relevant subjects, who could just be members of the community (with or without rabbinic ordination). I know several non-rabbis who have officiated at Jewish weddings (they may not be recognized as officiants by the state, but the civil marriage can be done separately). For funerals, it's important to have a structure in place, because of the quick turnaround time required and because mourners aren't in a position to be putting together DIY things themselves (the way engaged couples might be), but I've heard of independent minyanim/havurot that have created such structures, with volunteers. And likewise with pastoral counseling - there are lay-led communities that have volunteers available for counseling.

    Davar acher -- in speculating about the future evolution of independent minyanim, one scenario I don't recall being floated: the possibility of an IM or a chavurah morphing into a congregation -- admittedly, that would be a congregation that look different from most of today's. Does that have any plausibility?

    Sure - there are synagogues that started out in someone's living room.

    Finally, and wearing my establishment kipa, I think it would be good for the Jews if your blogging about independent minyanim appeared at the Reform Judaism blog (www.rj.org), where at the very least it would do some valuable consciousness-raising.

    Cool - let's talk!

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