Overheard at Institute

"What are we going to do on Thursday night?"
"Rock the fuck out!"
"Pshita! But..."

Jeremiah was a fellowship, he was a good friend of mine

If you're in the DC area and meet the qualifications, this new fellowship, named after one of our greatest prophets, is a fantastic opportunity! Here's the blurb:

***

Jews United for Justice is proud to partner with the Progressive Jewish Alliance to bring an exciting new social justice training program to DC!
The Jeremiah Fellowship educates and trains a select cohort of young adults (ages 25-35) to become the next generation of Jewish social justice change makers.

• Empower yourself through in-depth training in professional and leadership skills .
• Expand your knowledge of what Jewish text, tradition, and history have to say about putting ethics into action.
• Acquire tangible organizing and activism skills within a Jewish context.
• Explore pressing social, political, and economic issues facing our region.
• Become a member of a lasting community of vibrant and engaged leaders.
• Access a dynamic network of organizers, advocates, rabbis, artists, and renowned scholars.

During the nine-month course, Fellows come together twice monthly to learn different models of putting ethics and values into action, for intimate conversations with leaders in Washington's Jewish and social justice worlds, and for intensive study of Jewish history and texts. Two Fellowship retreats during the year offer in-depth training in professional and leadership skills, study of Jewish tradition and history, and intensive community-building activities. Participants leave the Fellowship with concrete skills in community organizing, activism, and grassroots fundraising, better equipped to pursue their own volunteer work and careers in the social justice field.

We are seeking creative, dynamic, and engaged young Jews who are:

• Already volunteer leaders or have leadership potential
• Passionate about making our community better
• Actively interested in building community
• Committed to using the skills gained through the Fellowship

The Fellowship is committed to the diversity of each cohort, and believes that a breadth of experience adds to the richness of the program. People of all Jewish backgrounds are encouraged to apply, and prior knowledge of Hebrew or Jewish texts is not required.

Applications for the Jeremiah Fellowship will be considered on a rolling basis, with a final deadline of September 8th. Submit your application as soon as possible for the best chance of acceptance. For more information and to download an application, go here.

You can also call the JUFJ office at 202-408-1423 or email jeremiah at jufj dot org.

Desperate measures

One solution to not having the kitchen fully set up yet:

Fast for 25 hours!

Goodbye New York, hello Maryland!

This is Mah Rabu's first post from its new home just a few feet away from the District of Columbia!

Michael Jackson tribute

I would be remiss if I didn't link back to this.

Still no Bacon number, though

Today's xkcd inspired me to investigate my own Erdos number, and I have determined that it is at most 7!

According to this site, Rudolph Marcus (winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Chemistry) is 4.
Therefore, John R. Miller is 5, Andrew R. Cook is 6, and I'm 7!

Cesspool on the Potomac

This summer, Mah Rabu is relocating its base of operations to the DC area! More precise details on when and where are still to be determined.

על ידי חופה וקידושין

Assuming an egalitarian* Jewish paradigm, what do you see as the conceptual differences between kiddushin (eirusin) and nisuin? Should there be a difference?

* defined here as one in which there is no substantive distinction between same-sex and opposite-sex marriage

Oops!

The new Koren Sacks Siddur (which is, apart from the nitpicking in this post, an impressive work) has a section in the back entitled "A Halakhic Guide to Prayer for Visitors to Israel". Among other things, this includes the various opinions regarding what 2-day-yom-tov observers should do about yom tov when they're in Israel. One of these opinions is (in part):

On the day after Shemini Atzeret (Simhat Torah in the Diaspora, Isru Hag in Israel), one abstains from labor, but says weekday (or Shabbat) prayers (putting on tefillin in the morning, if not Shabbat).

5 points to the first person who catches the error.

A Conspiracy Unmasked

For the last four years, I've been certain that my students had never discovered this blog. The reason I was so certain was that I figured if the students had seen it, they wouldn't keep quiet about it (but, rather, would be quick to show off their sleuthing). Therefore, by the contrapositive, since I hadn't heard any students talking about the blog, I could be sure they hadn't found it. QED.

Then today, my last day teaching high school for the foreseeable future (last day of classes, that is; we still have exams and such), two students (graduating seniors) told me that they had been enjoying my blog. As in, they've been aware of it for some time (they may even be reading this post) and hadn't mentioned it until now. So I had underestimated their self-control, and/or forgotten that seniors aren't the same as freshmen.

There isn't actually anything incriminating here. As I've said from the beginning, there has always been a possibility that students would find this blog, and even though I don't use my real name on the blog, it's not particularly anonymous (there are plenty of places elsewhere on the Internet that connect my name to this blog). So I don't talk smack here about my students, colleagues, or supervisors, and I don't discuss anything personal that I would worry about falling into the wrong hands. So the biggest consequence of this discovery is that it means the students will find out that teachers have lives outside of school. But it's ok, since they're about to graduate anyway.

Lesson for teachers: Never underestimate your students.

Soon by you

Being engaged means that, at family weddings, when people say "You're next!!!", it doesn't come off as obnoxious anymore, but just as factual.

Phish 6/4/09 Jones Beach: commentary

So first of all, my predictions were completely off. It seems that my whole premise (picking songs that hadn't been played since the second hiatus) was off; I only got 3 songs right, and 2 of them were among the 3 I chose that had been played since the hiatus. In the actual setlist, the only songs that hadn't been played since the hiatus (besides Drowned, which I nailed) were Dirt and Meatstick.

Even my realtime predictions were wrong; during Ghost, I could have sworn that they were teasing Seven Below, but they didn't go there.

I was right about the ocean/beach theme, though wrong about the specifics. In addition to Drowned ("Let me get back to the ocean / Let me get back to the sea"), there was Squirming Coil ("Tried yesterday to get away and hitchhiked to the beach"), NICU ("A slipper of sand dollar day at the shore"), Punch You In The Eye ("I come from the land where the oceans freeze /
Spent three long months on the open seas", etc.), and Water in the Sky ("Rising tides and ocean walls"; this song was also no doubt connected to the rain that fell throughout the first set, though by the time they played it to open the second set, the rain had stopped).

Anyway, beyond this little game, it was an amazing show. Phish is really back! Since they've been gone for almost 5 years, I wasn't sure what to expect as far as the scene. I've always had an arm's-length relationship with the scene. I'm into veggie quesadillas, but I don't use drugs or alcohol. (Though if I had to choose between being surrounded by drunk people or stoned people, I'd definitely pick the stoned people. And I'd choose the smell of pot smoke over the smell of cigarette smoke.) The people who changed our flat tire at Coventry get a thumbs up; the people who push and litter get a thumbs down. Anyway, as soon as we arrived in the parking lot, I couldn't get over my shock. It was as if the last 5 years had never happened -- everything was back as it always was (for good and for ill, though probably not as much for ill). I was sort of expecting everyone to be 5 years older (and certainly, many of us are), and figured that the 18-year-olds wouldn't be there, since they were 13 when Phish last played and wouldn't have heard of it. Nope - they were there, and fully acculturated. How did that happen? Have they been selling grilled cheese in the lots of other bands during the interim?

As far as the music, my relationship is not so arm's-length. And all five members of the band were really on. They went to 11 on Divided Sky, which seems to be continuing to develop in that direction - that was how I felt about the "last Divided Sky ever" at the Tweeter Center 8/11/04. Drowned is by The Who, which already went to 11 on everything, so I'd have to say that Phish took it to 13. (So much that the Live Phish release split it into "Drowned" and "Jones Beach Jam". This seems arbitrary, since Ghost also had a Type II jam, but is just listed as a single track. I think it's for copyright reasons -- Drowned is a cover of someone else's song, but Phish can claim Jones Beach Jam as their own composition.) I approve of the two new songs (Ocelot and Time Turns Elastic), and I'll have to listen to them more (especially the latter) to really get them.

Next stop Maryland 8/15/09!

Phish 6/4/09 Jones Beach: setlist

I:
Grind
The Divided Sky
Ocelot
Squirming Coil
Punch You In The Eye
Dirt
NICU
Ghost*
Antelope

II:
Water in the Sky
Birds of a Feather
Drowned >
Meatstick
Time Turns Elastic
Waste
You Enjoy Myself

E:
Rock and Roll

* glowsticks

Commentary to come later. For now, just wow.

Phish 6/4/09 Jones Beach: predictions

I:
Drowned
A Song I Heard The Ocean Sing
The Wedge
AC/DC Bag
Vultures
Waves
Fast Enough For You
Scents and Subtle Sounds
The Divided Sky

II:
Walls of the Cave
The Lizards
Guyute
Billy Breathes
Col. Forbin's Ascent
The Famous Mockingbird
Glide
Run Like An Antelope
Golgi Apparatus

E:
The Mango Song

(All but three songs on this list have not been played since the second hiatus.)

Chicken over rice

I'm a frequent enough patron of the halal food truck near where I work that they recognize me and know my order (falafel). I don't eat the meat, but I find myself wondering about it as an intellectual question. I don't have enough information to answer the question, and even if I were to answer it in the affirmative, I'm not sure I would actually act on it -- as a flexitarian meat-reductionist, I don't feel like I need to give myself more opportunities to eat meat. But it's still an interesting question to ponder.

As I understand it, kosher meat and halal meat both must be slaughtered by a particular process and the processes are similar, and both must have the blood removed. So the question is: can someone who keeps kosher eat halal meat (from a kosher species)?

The most obvious answer is "No, of course not!" This is because kosher meat must be slaughtered by a Jew, a requirement that is obviously not met by halal meat. But what if we weren't concerned about this particular requirement? This change might be motivated by a sense of inclusion: Muslims are "people of the book" (as it were), and their slaughter is also performed in the name of the One God, and not idolatry. Or it might be motivated by the opposite sentiment: outside of Hazon conferences, liberal Jewish communities generally don't do their own slaughter, and so the Jews who slaughter the meat that we eat are far outside our communities, and are so alien that it wouldn't make much of a difference if they were Muslim. Or some linear combination of both reasons. So if this requirement were to be lifted, would it be ok to eat halal meat?

For beef or lamb, the answer is still no. In mammals, the gid hanasheh (sciatic nerve) and cheilev (the fats that would have been offered on the altar) are not kosher and must be removed. (This is done by the butcher before selling the meat.) Halal meat has no such rules, and therefore must be under the presumption of containing these forbidden parts. Most of us casual meat-eaters can't look at meat and identify what part of the animal it comes from (especially when it's in shwarma form).

But what about halal chicken? Gid hanasheh and cheilev don't apply to birds, and my recollection is that the regulations for slaughtering birds are less strict than for mammals. So the question is whether the procedure for slaughtering halal birds would qualify under the rules of slaughtering kosher birds, and likewise for the procedures for removing blood from halal/kosher meat. I can't answer these questions; I haven't studied shechitah in any depth (beyond the Mishnah, and that was a long time ago), and don't know the specifics of halal slaughter. (And if I'm going to study any masechet in the next few months, it's going to be Kiddushin.) So can anyone with more knowledge on the subject weigh in on this question?

Fallen tabernacle

I returned today from the 8th (my 6th) Hadar Shavuot Retreat, and I have a couple questions about the davening culture at Hadar that I've been meaning to ask for a while.

• When the Carlebach Mi Chamochah is sung at Hadar in the morning, the standard way it is broken up into lines is:
  
  Tehilot le-Eil Elyon, baruch hu umvorach
  Mosheh uvnei Yisraeil
  Lecha anu shirah
  Besimchah rabah ve-ameru chulam
  Mi chamochah ba-eilim Adonai
  Mi kamochah ne'dar bakodesh
  
  Nora tehilot oseh fele
  Shira chadashah shibechu ge'ulim
  Leshimcha al sefat hayam
  Yachad kulam hodu ve-himlichu ve-ameru
  Adonai yimloch le'olam va'ed
  Yai dai dai dai dai dai dai...
  
  And the hurry-up-and-wait nature of the last three lines has always mystified me. Why jam lots of syllables into the antepenultimate line, only to have extra beats left over for yai dai dai? Why not just
  
  Yachad kulam hodu
  Ve-himlichu ve-ameru
  Adonai yimloch le'olam va'ed
  
  ?
• Melodies go through cycles of popularity. This is in part influenced by ordinary use -- if a particular melody is used successfully, it might be emulated by other shelichei tzibbur and slowly gain popularity; on the other hand, it might also become overused and then (silently) deprecated. A melody can also be placed on the fast track through mass exposure if it is taught in a large-group setting such as the Shavuot Retreat or the melody classes preceding the High Holidays. When a melody becomes popular, it's often possible to trace a mechanism by which it spreads. But I was away from New York and Hadar for a year (2007-08), so whatever happened during that year is outside my firsthand experience. So can someone explain what the deal is with "Im Eshkacheich Yerushalayim"? Don't get me wrong, I like it and I use it. But I generally use it only in instances that call for a specific mood, e.g. the Three Weeks, and that's the type of situation where I had previously encountered it in davening (e.g. selichot). And then I come back to Hadar in summer 2008, and Im Eshkacheich Yerushalayim is everywhere! It's just become a stock "slow" niggun, seemingly stripped of its specific associations. So I'm just curious how and when this happened.

And another question that isn't specific to Hadar:

• I noticed a few weeks ago that Amos 9:11 says "sukkat David hanofelet". And "hanofelet" has an etnachta, so if there were a special pausal form of this word, it would already be there. So why do some benchers say (in birkat hamazon) "hanofalet"? Is it just a hypercorrection? The actual Tanakh text is presumably authoritative.
  
  A quick survey of some of the benchers in my apartment shows that the bencher population is distributed fairly randomly:
  
  Nofelet: B'Kol Echad, B'Osher Ashir, L'chu N'ran'nah, Livnot, Mizmor Shir, UJA, Yedid Nefesh, Zimrat Yah
  Nofalet: Ain Sof, Anim Zemirot, Artscroll, Eit Hazamir Higiyah [sic], Kolot, Limmud, Nevarech, Zemirot Yomeiru
  
  And that's just benchers; I didn't even get started with siddurim.

This last item isn't really a question:

• At havdalah on the Shavuot Retreat, everyone got an individual teabag for besamim. At that point, everyone in my section simultaneously got the idea that this havdalah felt like it had been sponsored by Fox News. Of course, this probably wasn't Hadar's fault, because Hadar plans things well in advance, so this had likely been in the works before it had been usurped by the astroturfers. But it plays into a larger trend, since it is reminiscent of the fiasco at the 2005 Shavuot Retreat, when Hadar gave out free Nalgene-style bottles. A great souvenir, with just one problem: the bottles (and the folders for that retreat) were orange, so we couldn't be caught in public with them for many months afterward. Again, not Hadar's fault: the color scheme was inspired by The Gates, and the bottles and folders had been ordered well before the anti-disengagement movement took root. The point is this: time and again, the Hadar Shavuot team has shown an uncanny ability to predict the next inane right-wing meme (or at least the superficial symbols associated with it). They should start thinking of ways to capitalize on this. Does Intrade have a category for what color or prop will be waved in the protests against Obama's second-term agenda in spring 2013?
  

Hanhu chavurata #6

We've gotten word of many more stories in the independent minyan world since last fortnight's column!

• This week's top story is Los Angeles's newest prayer community, the Westside Minyan. Founded by people who moved west from New York, it is modeled after Kol Zimrah: full liturgy, guitar accompaniment, mostly singing, two-table potluck, etc. The Westside Minyan is actually the second minyan in LA that can claim lineal descent from Kol Zimrah: Minyan Malei Shirah was inspired by Kol Zimrah Jerusalem z"l (which was founded by people from the original Kol Zimrah in New York, but had a different style from the beginning, hence the two styles now coexisting in LA). As far as I know, there is no connection to the West Side Minyan on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (the minyan founded in the '70s that later became a part of Congregation Ansche Chesed and spun off Minyan M'at).
• In my hometown of Chicago, this past Friday night was the first meeting of the brand-new apartment minyan in Lakeview, a neighborhood with a hopping Jewish scene. It's so new that it doesn't have a name yet, but one of the founders wants to call it Mitzpeh Yam (i.e. Lakeview, or perhaps Seaview, but it's a Great Lake).
• We also hear that there are new minyanim in Charlottesville, Virginia (home of the University of Virginia) and Princeton Junction, New Jersey (home of the Dinky). That's all we know so far.
• Minyan Tehillah in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a "10+10" minyan: they define a quorum as 10 men and 10 women. (This requires twice as many people as either an egal minyan or a conventional non-egal minyan.) For large minyanim that have this policy, such as Shira Hadasha in Jerusalem, a quorum is always present anyway. Smaller "10+10" minyanim can be put to the test when they have to decide what it means for them if they don't have 10 of each: Do they continue as if there is a minyan? Do they continue as if there is no minyan? Do they wait indefinitely? We have previously linked to an account of one minyan's struggle with this issue (the Mission Minyan in San Francisco). Because Tehillah has not always had 20 people of the appropriate genders, they called a town hall meeting for last night to determine what to do in this case. No word yet on the results.
• What we reported last time about the bike ride home from the Hadar Shavuot Retreat was too good to be true; the bike ride was cancelled due to insufficient registration. The same cannot be said for the retreat itself; as usual, it has sold out and there is a waiting list. For some reason, people don't seem to want to bike 50 miles so soon after staying up all night.
  

Hanhu chavurata #5

After a long hiatus, the independent minyan gossip column is back!

• The next big thing in the Boston area is the temporarily-named JP Minyan (not affiliated with JP Morgan), in the southern Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain. JP is a booming area where many young Jews are moving but where not much organized Jewish activity has been happening yet. The new minyan, which has met twice so far, meets on the first Friday night of the month in participants' apartments for services and a potluck Shabbat dinner, and people are explicitly invited to come for either or both.
• Moving further south, to the demilitarized border region between DC and Maryland known to (some of) its residents as "Sheish Esrei Elyon" (Upper 16th St): Minyan Segulah will meet for the first time this coming Shabbat morning. This new project's name alludes to the inchoate Purple Line (currently locked in a tight competition with New York's Second Avenue Subway; which will be finished later?). Segulah will be meeting three times over the next few months in participants' homes for full-liturgy egalitarian services and Shabbat meals. Unlike JP, the neighborhoods of Shepherd Park and Silver Spring have a wide array of Jewish congregations of many flavors, and this adds another option to the mix.
• Further down the pipeline, we hear that a new Friday night thing is starting up in Vancouver. That's all we know for now; let us know if you hear anything.
• There's also something in the works for Shabbat morning in Center City Philadelphia, aiming to start on Shabbat Noach 5770 (October 2009).
• Here in New York, Techiyah of Harlem has been a victim of its own success, attracting not only Harlem residents but people from Morningside Heights, the Upper West Side, and elsewhere. We hear that this has led to communal soul-searching, since the minyan strongly identifies with Harlem (the name means "Renaissance") and meets in apartments, but there is now a shortage of hosts who actually live in Harlem. Techiyah has begun exploring its boundaries and occasionally meeting west of Morningside Park or south of 110th St (though not both, rachamana litzlan).
• People from all these communities and elsewhere will be gathering in New Hampshire at the National Havurah Committee Summer Institute, which is 3 months away and filling up faster than ever. In a year when everyone predicted that attendance would be lower due to the economy, Institute registration has been counterintuitively countercyclical: 205 people have already signed up, and 4 courses are full. The Institute could actually sell out Franklin Pierce University this year! So if you're thinking about going, register ASAP if you want to guarantee a spot.
• Not to be outdone, the Hadar Shavuot Retreat, in cooperation with Hazon, is offering a 50-mile bike ride as one option to get back from the retreat to New York City. I'm so there (and, given today's rain, glad in the end that I didn't register in time for the Five Boro Bike Tour).
  

Independent minyanim in the Washington Post

(Crossposted to Jewschool.)

Today’s Washington Post has a story on independent minyanim, with a focus on communities in DC. There’s no breaking news for those who are familiar with this scene; like the New York Times piece in November 2007, it primarily introduces the phenomenon to a general audience. But this may be the first mainstream (non-Jewish) media source to report on the USCJ grants for minyanim. (This grant program was pooh-poohed to some degree here on Jewschool, but anecdotal reports suggest that it seems to be taking off. Is there any data on how many minyanim are participating so far? What’s the breakdown between previously existing minyanim and new ones?)

Gathering in group homes and college dormitories, in rural woods and apartment buildings, a growing number of young Jews are spurning traditional synagogues and forming worship communities that blend ancient traditions with modern values in ways that religion scholars say could redefine American Judaism.

The young people represent some of the most devout of their generation and, worried that they are being lost, rabbis and other Jewish leaders in the Washington region and elsewhere are working hard to bring them back into the fold, including offering financial grants to independent groups who are willing to create partnerships with traditional worship communities.

This article shares many strengths and weaknesses with the NYT article. The tone is generally positive, stressing that independent minyan participants are committed to Judaism. For the most part, this article addresses independent minyanim on their own terms, and is less caught up in Jewish institutional baggage than are similar treatments in the Jewish press (though somewhat more so than the NYT article).

Then there are the serious problems. As I wrote in regard to the NYT article:

The word “traditional” is being overloaded with at least two different meanings (which is par for the course): “conventional” (as in traditional IRA vs. Roth IRA), vs. “traditional Judaism” (whatever that means). Is a “traditional synagogue” one that has a rabbi and a building and conventional institutional structures, or one that follows “traditional” Jewish practice? There isn’t really a positive or negative correlation here, and there’s no way to tell which is being referred to except from context.

One commenter argued that the NYT article consistently used “traditional” to mean “conventional”, but that’s much harder to argue here. Compare:

• “a growing number of young Jews are spurning traditional synagogues” -> “conventional”
• “independent groups who are willing to create partnerships with traditional worship communities” -> “conventional”
• “the large denominations that have traditionally divided Jewish worship life” -> “conventional”
• (in the same sentence) “Reform, the most liberal, Conservative and Orthodox, the most traditional” -> “traditional Judaism” (probably referring to “Orthodox”, but I initially read it as referring to “Conservative and Orthodox”; this is why God invented the serial comma)
• “in a break with tradition, women lead parts of the service. ” -> “traditional Judaism”
• “the traditional children’s parade that is part of the Jewish festival observing Purim” -> unclear

I’m not just griping about word choice. It’s intellectually sloppy to conflate these two concepts, and a misrepresentation of the significance of the independent minyan phenomenon. In terms of Jewish ideology and practice, independent minyanim are all over the map, and so are synagogues. Independent minyan participants may be “spurning traditional synagogues” in the sense of conventional institutions, but are neither moving (en masse) toward or away from “traditional” Judaism. Some may be moving toward “more traditional” practices and others toward “less traditional” practices (insofar as these comparatives are meaningful) and others neither, but that’s not the interesting story. The interesting story is that people all over the Jewish map are creating active participatory Jewish communities.

Small errors:

DC Minyan and Rosh Pina use the Orthodox liturgy, but some worshipers follow along in the Conservative prayer book. Both have separate seating for women and men, but Rosh Pina uses a partition as in Orthodox services and, in a break with tradition, women lead parts of the service.

I’m not sure the reporter realizes how small the differences between “the Orthodox liturgy” and “the Conservative prayer book” are (though the bring-your-own-siddur trend is significant even when the siddurim share basically the same Hebrew text). DC Minyan also has “women lead parts of the service”. This may be a “break with tradition” within the Orthodox world, but is not so for participants in these minyanim who come from egalitarian backgrounds; rather, the separate seating and fixed gender roles are the real “break with tradition” for those participants.

With the people interviewed for the article, the framing gets worse.

I think it’s the rule that Jonathan Sarna has to be quoted in these articles.

“It is an interesting mix between the egalitarian, pluralistic, inclusive values coming from the left and the values of learning and of observance coming from the right,” said Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. “They are making a new synthesis of these traditional and modern values that we haven’t seen before.”

GAH! Learning is a value “from the right”?! There’s nothing right-wing about learning, and there’s certainly nothing left-wing about ignorance. This makes me long for the days when, according to the stereotypes, Reform Jews had three Ph.D.’s from German universities and Orthodox Jews were illiterate huddled masses from the shtetl.

Egalitarian pluralistic inclusive left-wing Jews who embrace learning and observance (by the appropriate definition of “observance”) aren’t moving to the right or making a synthesis with right-wing values; they’re becoming serious committed left-wing Jews rather than apathetic left-wing Jews.

Still, some researchers question the future of the groups. A previous generation of independent prayer groups started by baby boomers in the 1970s is still active but has stalled in growth. Some experts wonder whether the current generation of minyanim leaders will move from the urban centers where most minyanim are based when they have children and melt into suburban synagogues, which offer extensive educational programs for Jewish children.

Ah, “some-say” journalism at its finest. Who are these anonymous “some researchers” and “some experts”, what is their agenda, and why aren’t they willing to be quoted by name? (Are they the same ones who appeared in the NYT article? “The minyanim are noticing that some of their worshipers are getting older, and it is unclear how they might evolve as participants have children and move to the suburbs, said members and experts on the movement.”) Let’s examine their claims. What do they mean by “stalled in growth”? Individual groups growing in number of participants, or overall growth in the number of groups? If the former, then the groups that have lasted since the 1970s aren’t necessarily aiming for growth; they may be happy at their current sizes. If the latter, then obviously the number of “independent prayer groups started by baby boomers in the 1970s” isn’t ever going to grow; that number was locked in as soon as the ’70s ended. But if the “started in the 1970s” constraint is removed, then the number of groups continues to grow, and the newest generation of independent minyanim is part of that growth. One longtime NHC veteran posted on NHC-DISCUSS, in response to this line, “These new communities are exactly the growth we hoped for.”

As for the wonderings of “some experts”, why are independent minyan leaders any more likely to “melt into suburban synagogues” than they were to melt into urban synagogues? If anything, “the urban centers where most minyanim are based” offer a much wider range of synagogue options than the suburbs do, and the minyan founders still opted for None Of The Above and started something new instead, and can do the same if (if!) they move to the suburbs. Yes, many suburban synagogues “offer extensive educational programs for Jewish children” (as do many urban synagogues), but these programs wouldn’t necessarily be any more appealing to this crowd than anything else that the synagogues offer. I’m excited about the prospect of exploring new options for Jewish education for my future children beyond what has already been done. These “experts” are hiding their heads in the sand if they think this is a passing fancy.

The article ends on a happy note:

Gil Steinlauf, Adas Israel’s new senior rabbi, said the synagogue has shifted from merely “tolerating these smaller groups to welcoming them. . . . It’s a radical shift, particularly in this congregation.”

Readers, what (if anything) have you noticed on the ground in the way of recent changes in the relations between grassroots communities and established institutions?

50

טו וּסְפַרְתֶּם לָכֶם מִמָּחֳרַת הַשַּׁבָּת מִיּוֹם הֲבִיאֲכֶם אֶת-עֹמֶר הַתְּנוּפָה שֶׁבַע שַׁבָּתוֹת תְּמִימֹת תִּהְיֶינָה. טז עַד מִמָּחֳרַת הַשַּׁבָּת הַשְּׁבִיעִת תִּסְפְּרוּ חֲמִשִּׁים יוֹם וְהִקְרַבְתֶּם מִנְחָה חֲדָשָׁה לַה'. --ויקרא כג

The Torah commands (Leviticus 23:15-16) that we count seven weeks, and also that we count 50 days. Thus we count both days and weeks. For example, tonight's count is "18 days, which are 2 weeks and 4 days of the omer".

So why don't we count the 50th day??? It makes sense that we stop counting weeks after the 7 weeks are completed, and so we don't count the 50th day (Shavuot) as "7 weeks and 1 day". But why not just count the number of days without the number of weeks?

This is a real question - I don't know the answer.