Independent Minyan Conference
This is a first for me: I’m writing this post on my iPhone, from the back of a room during the indie minyan conference. (Mea culpa for typos.)
During the institutional frameworks session, I attended a panel on the roles of rabbis as leadership in minyanim. With one slight exception, the panelists were in agreement that the model of the top-down synagogue with rabbi as leader, teacher, pastor… Rabbis as the gatekeeper does not work for these communities, or the current generation of minyanim wouldn’t have developed (let alone the minyanim and havuros of the past few decades). But for readers of this blog, that shouldn’t be a surprise. So what roles do rabbis have in our independent communities? A similar role and responsibilty as the rest of us: to offer as high level of learning, Jewish engagement, and spirituality as possible. The panelists seemed to agree that rabbis in our communities have the possibility to have firthered their learning than many of the lay leaders, and as such can offer those insights and practical lessons (how to lead, layn, give a good dvar torah, etc.) to foster the community, but not to take it over, or change the minyan’s hierarchy. It was also refreshing to hear a dean of a rabbinical school recognize that there needs to be more options for furthering Jewish learning than telling interested youth and young adults to go to rabbinical school.
And now? A session on how minyanim participate in the larger Jewish community. The role of Jewish day schools, funding and establishing small, local organizations and/or charities, and making larger impacts… I’ll post on the opinions later today.
So what roles do rabbis have in our independent communities?
Did they distinguish between “rabbi” the job description and “rabbi” the degree/honorific?
First, it should be noted that the rabbis on the panel were not pulpit rabbis. They were mostly talking about the role of rabbis (degree/honourific) as rabbi (job description) in minyans. Most realised that they could be there for support, to add expertise, to help weigh halakha when needed, etc. But one person on the panel thought that the rabbis should serve a more rabbi-role. The example he gave was about a dvar torah. A lay member of his minyan gave the dvar torah on Rosh Hoshanah, and did a good job. But, he said, given that many people only show up on RH, and thus might only hear one dvar torah in a year, it should be more insightful and engaging than a lay leader/member could deliver – only a rabbi could deliver a dvar torah of that calibre. (I disagree.)
The example he gave was about a dvar torah. A lay member of his minyan gave the dvar torah on Rosh Hoshanah, and did a good job. But, he said, given that many people only show up on RH, and thus might only hear one dvar torah in a year, it should be more insightful and engaging than a lay leader/member could deliver – only a rabbi could deliver a dvar torah of that calibre.
I would imagine that most independent minyanim have a much smaller percentage of “only show up on RH” people than most synagogues, and that they don’t see creating a high holiday experience that suffices as the one annual Jewish experience as their primary mission.
It takes time to acquire and maintain the sort of halakhic knowledge a rabbi ought to have. Not many people learn, say, the rules of mourning, for fun, but it’s the sort of thing a community needs to know. Having lots of lay scholarship is all very well, but communities need to have people whose job is to know that sort of thing, whose duty it is to learn even the dull bits, because when the lay scholar has a day job and a family, the average Ploni feels bad about asking her lots of questions about complicated but boring technical stuff, and asks her questions elsewhere. If “a dvar torah” is the best example of the rabbinical role the panel can come up with, too many questions are being asked elsewhere.