Religion

Lurie 2, straw men 0

(Crossposted to Mah Rabu.)
I don’t really feel like writing this post. Instead of taking the bait and responding to Margot Lurie’s latest hit piece on independent minyanim, my time would be better spent on actually organizing an independent minyan. If you’re in the DC area this weekend, you’re all invited to Segulah on Shabbat morning. We’ll be meeting in the Tifereth Israel building, 7701 16th St NW (entrance on Juniper St), Washington DC, starting at 9:30 am. (Yes, we rent space from a synagogue, and no, that’s not a secret.)
But I’m taking the bait anyway, because I guess someone has to.
But before I do that, a number of people have asked me if I was going to respond to Noam Neusner’s oped in the Forward. (It seems to be Crap-On-Independent-Minyanim Month in the Jewish press.) The answer is that I already responded 4 years ago. And that’s all I have to say about that. (I would think that Neusner, as a former Bush speechwriter, would understand that independent minyanim aren’t taking away synagogues’ share of the pie, but are making the pie higher.)
Back to the story. Margot Lurie wrote a fanciful review of Empowered Judaism by Elie Kaunfer, in the Jewish Review of Books. I took it apart last fortnight right here on this blog. The review also got attention in other parts of the world, including from Shmuel Rosner on the Jerusalem Post website. Rosner then ran a letter from Kaunfer, correcting Lurie’s fabrication about “organized community money”. Then this week, Rosner did an interview with Lurie, asking some followup questions. (I don’t know whether either Rosner or Lurie has read my original fisk; neither of them reference it directly, though they both refer in general to criticism.)
In this interview, Lurie once again conjures up straw men, and then defeats them. She criticizes independent minyanim for failing to live up to goals that they never claimed to have in the first place.
From the top:

Let’s start with factual questions. You write that “There is an open secret about Hadar: like many other minyanim, it is funded by lots of organized community money, offered by institutions eager to keep young Jews connected to their heritage.” Hadar’s Elie Kaunfer writes: “Independent minyanim are overwhelmingly self-supported by the supposed slacker population that attends it.” Can you both be right?

“Shape of Earth: Views Differ”

I was referring to things like Hillel campus subsidies for leaders of independent minyanim which draw college students,

I’ve never heard of these subsidies, so I’m unable to respond to this. Does anyone know what she’s talking about?

as well as the subsidized rent and other in-kind contributions that most independent minyanim receive.

This is clearly a retcon (or in Aramaic, chisurei mechsera v’hachi katanei). There is no way that the plain sense of “funded by lots of organized community money” is “in-kind contributions”; by definition, “in-kind contributions” can be anything but money. Lurie got caught in an error, and then instead of saying “Oops, my bad” and printing a correction, she’s doubling down.
But addressing her claim at face value, I’m curious how she arrives at the figure of “most independent minyanim”. There are, roughly speaking, three types of independent minyanim: 1) Those that meet in participants’ homes or other “free” spaces. As a commenter pointed out in the previous thread, these spaces represent in-kind donations. However, that doesn’t involve the “organized community”. 2) Those that meet in non-Jewish spaces. These generally don’t receive any “subsidized rent”; their relationship with their host space is purely a landlord-tenant business relationship. 3) Those that meet in Jewish spaces. These include a) those that receive donations of space (and for you minyan entrepreneurs out there, I don’t recommend this: your host institution will want something in return; you just don’t know what it is yet), and b) those that pay rent. It’s hard to determine which minyanim in group 3b are receiving “subsidized rent” and which aren’t — they pay whatever level of rent they negotiate with their hosts, and the hosts don’t necessarily have a standard rate for renting out space, to which the minyan’s rate can be compared to determine whether they’re getting a subsidy. Lurie is claiming that 3a plus part of 3b adds up to “most”, and I’d like to see some justification for that.
I just did a quick back-of-the envelope estimate: I’ve been to at least 25 independent minyanim, so I listed the ones I could think of, and about half of those meet (or most recently met, if the minyan no longer exists) in Jewish buildings. That’s an upper bound for how many of them are getting “subsidized rent” from the “organized community” (since some of them may be paying full price, however you define that). So I don’t think “most” is correct.

As for Hadar in particular, the minyan is only one of its three affiliated institutions, the other two of which report receipts of funding from the organized community.

The minyan is also the only one of the three institutions that is a minyan! The original article said “Hadar, like many other minyanim”, suggesting that it was talking about a minyan named Hadar, not a yeshiva named Hadar or a star named Hadar.
The three (terrestrial) Hadars are two separate legal entities, with separate budgets (Yeshivat Hadar is a program of Mechon Hadar, but Kehilat Hadar is separate). If you want to accuse them of money laundering, then come out and say it.

You write that “It is no accident that of the three leaders of Yeshivat Hadar, both Kaunfer and Ethan Tucker are the sons of prominent Conservative rabbis, and Shai Held is the son of a late professor at the (Conservative) Jewish Theological Seminary.” Is this more proof that independent minyanim aren’t really “independent” or more indictment of the Conservative movement’s inability to retain its best and brightest?
The term “independent” suggests a self-sustaining body outside the traditional synagogue structure. But most minyanim are not independent in that sense.

I (inadvertently) had a central enough role in the popularization of the term “independent minyan” that I feel qualified to play Marshall McLuhan and say “You know nothing of my work.”
That’s not what “independent” (in “independent minyan”) ever meant. “Independent” means two things: 1) not affiliated with any of the Jewish denominations. (The denominations all have formal membership for congregations, so there’s no gray area here. None of the denominations accept being founded by the son of a rabbi of that denomination as a substitute for a membership application.) 2) not part of a larger organization, such as a synagogue.
That’s all. “Independent” doesn’t mean completely self-sufficient, with your own power generator and a basement full of canned food. The United States is an independent country, even though it imports goods from other countries, and even though its founders were originally British subjects. Independent candidates appear on the same ballot as other candidates. Rosner and Lurie are trying to play “gotcha” (and they’re not the first), but this stems from a misunderstanding of the claims that independent minyanim are making.

Or, more accurately, their independence extends only to serving the needs of their members for prayer and learning, and that’s it. As soon as someone wants to get married or divorced, or arrange for a funeral, then, well, no minyan is an island – it needs the resources of the larger community, on which it is very much dependent.

Independent minyanim don’t claim to be one-stop shops for everything Jewish in their participants’ lives. In many (most?) cases, they don’t even claim to be one-stop shops for prayer and learning: as Lurie noted in her original review, many (most?) independent minyanim don’t have services every week, so anyone who wants to pray with a community every week has to look elsewhere some of the time. No one denies this. Independent minyanim are very openly a-la-carte, intended to function as part of the larger Jewish ecosystem. They focus on the areas where they have a comparative advantage, and let other organizations do the rest. No minyan claims to be an island. This is in contrast to many synagogues, which do attempt to be one-stop shops for everything Jewish, regardless of whether they’re any good at it. This is understandable in places where one synagogue really is the only game in town, but wasteful in big cities with many Jewish congregations.
Tikkun Leil Shabbat is an excellent example of an independent minyan that engages strategically with the broader community. TLS is a community committed to social justice, and decided from the beginning that rather than putting together its own half-baked “social action programs” (with great effort and minimal impact), it would connect its participants with organizations that are already doing real social justice work, both inside and outside the Jewish community. This leads to the maximum benefit for everyone.
As far as the specific examples that Lurie cites:
Jewish marriage doesn’t require any institutional infrastructure; it just requires two witnesses. Lots of independent minyan participants have organized their own weddings.
Jewish divorce is a big mess, and that’s a problem that independent minyanim can’t solve, but apparently neither can synagogues.
Funerals and burials do, of course, require infrastructure. But most synagogues don’t operate their own funeral homes or cemeteries either. They work with funeral homes and cemeteries in the larger Jewish community, and there’s no reason an independent minyan couldn’t do the same. For example, the Newton Centre Minyan does its own funerals (led by participants), and has its own section in a local Jewish cemetery.

Independent minyanim speak to the portion of the Jewish community that is interested in traditional prayer and ritual practice, in progressive halakhah, in modernization, and in women’s full participation in services—in other words, Conservative Judaism.

Independent minyanim come in many flavors. Not all of them are “interested in traditional prayer and ritual” (depending on how “traditional” is defined), and not all of them are gender-egalitarian. So a good number of them don’t fit into even this overly broad definition of Conservative Judaism.
As for those minyanim that do display all these traits, it’s a logical fallacy to say “X has these traits, Y has these traits, therefore X=Y.” Conservative Judaism defines itself by other aspects besides these, including a structure for religious authority that independent minyanim do not recognize. (And by the way, not all Conservative congregations are gender-egalitarian either, so this isn’t a defining feature of Conservative Judaism.)

One Conservative rabbi has said that my problem with independent minyanim is that they aren’t Orthodox. Nothing could be farther from the truth. My interest is in having a vigorous liberal Judaism that can hold its own next to Orthodoxy. In my article I gave my reasons for thinking that the minyan movement doesn’t hold the answer.

“These do-Nothings profess a commitment to social change … and then abstain from and discourage all effective action for change. They are known by their brand, ‘I agree with your ends but not your means.’ They function as blankets whenever possible smothering sparks of dissension that promise to flare up into the fire of action.” –Saul Alinsky
If your interest is in creating a vigorous liberal Judaism, how is attacking the people who are trying to do something about it going to advance that interest? Early on in her review, Lurie writes that “the suburban mausoleum that is the liberal synagogue was, at best, built for a sociological reality decades out of date”, so surely she would agree that attempting incremental change within those institutions is not a recipe for success. Nor is it possible to have alternatives to those institutions descend from heaven in flames, fully built, like the Third Temple. So the remaining option is to start small and build from there, even if the alternative communities don’t start out fixing every problem in American Judaism from day one.

I moved to New York’s Upper West Side from Iowa, so I can attest to the fact that people in small or struggling Jewish communities see the minyan movement (to the extent that they’re aware of it at all) as largely irrelevant to their concerns. There are much more significant issues facing American Judaism, and much greater challenges for young and energetic leaders with big visions.

So what should these “young and energetic leaders” outside of Iowa be doing differently that would have a more positive impact on the Jews of Iowa? Bear in mind that most of us have day jobs.

Did you expect this article to become so controversial – did you think you’re going to be criticized in such way? Do you think independent minyanim have become the sacred goat [SACRED COW?] of contemporary Judaism?

Ok, that was weird. Is “[SACRED COW?]” a copy editor’s note that got left in by mistake? I’ve never heard of “sacred goat” before.

I knew I was going to kick up some dust. Still, the extent of the hysteria brought on by one person’s dissent is a little telling, don’t you think?

And if no one had responded, Lurie would instead have written “Still, the deafening silence brought on by one person’s dissent is a little telling, don’t you think?”

I’m certainly not calling—or capable of calling—for the dismantling of independent minyanim, which are, as I say in my article, a response to the spiritual bankruptcy and the organized failures of the Conservative movement.

The Conservative movement doesn’t have a monopoly on spiritual bankruptcy and organized failures. Independent minyanim are responses to the spiritual bankruptcy and the organized failures of all the movements.

But the tendentiousness of the independent minyan movement’s critique of synagogue life needs to be addressed, as it has real, and not unrelated consequences.

Here, Lurie (or Rosner?) links to an article about the shrinking membership numbers in the Conservative movement (and some inside baseball in the other liberal denominations). Is she really suggesting that these shrinking numbers are a consequence of independent minyanim? A few paragraphs earlier, Lurie wrote that minyanim are “largely irrelevant” to “people in small or struggling Jewish communities”, and now they’re the reason those communities are struggling.
According to the article, USCJ congregations lost 37,100 member families. Let’s conservatively (as it were) estimate an average of 2 people per family, for a total of 74,200 members. By all estimates, this is far greater than the total number of people involved in independent minyanim. There’s just no way mathematically that independent minyanim can be a significant factor in this decline.
Furthermore, these population trends began before the independent minyanim discussed in Empowered Judaism were founded. To the long list of problems that independent minyanim haven’t solved, add time travel. It seems that post hoc ergo propter hoc doesn’t even need the post hoc part anymore!

The elitism and uncritical self-regard of these communities are a big problem.

“Elitism” : independent minyanim :: “socialism” : President Obama
Think about it: they’re both self-perpetuating accusations that get thrown around repeatedly because everyone else is doing it, to the point that they have become almost completely divorced from the actual meaning of the word or the actual facts about the accusee.
Rather than debunk this yet again (not that that would be any more effective at staving off further accusations of “elitism” than asking what exactly is socialist about cutting taxes on millionaires), I’ll just link to my old comments here and here. There’s probably more too – bonus points for finding them.

For one thing, I don’t think it’s a random statistical point that independent minyanim are so age-specific.

No one has claimed that it was random. There are many causal explanations for it. All we said is that it wasn’t an intentional decision by the minyan organizers.
Some of the explanations: The founders of many minyanim were in their 20s and 30s, and the word spread first to their friends, and their friends’ friends, and people tend to be friends with people around the same age. Why were the founders in their 20s and 30s? There’s an age explanation and a generational explanation. Age explanation: people in their 20s and 30s have more time and energy to devote to this kind of thing. Generational explanation here. Why haven’t more people of other ages gravitated to these minyanim? In the case of older adults, many of them have been involved with other Jewish communities for years and are attached to their existing community. In the case of parents and children, there’s a coordination problem, since there’s a need to be in a community with other children. Finally, the most obvious explanation is that people in their 20s and 30s feel most out of place in establishment Jewish institutions, and therefore have the greatest motive to find (or found) alternatives.
These explanations apply to some minyanim and not others. The independent minyanim founded in the ’60s and ’70s may have been founded by people in their 20s and 30s, but their participants have aged, and now those communities have older (as well as younger) populations. And some of the new minyanim have attracted more multigenerational crowds. One successful example is Segulah, which has all ages from babies to over-70. See you this Shabbat!

52 thoughts on “Lurie 2, straw men 0

  1. Just in case she actually cares enough about truth to follow your post: Ms. Lurie, it’s far more than one dissenting voice!
    As it happens, I currently belong to a synagogue. Not because I think independant minyanim are bad, but because of the combination of where I work and the lack of an indie minyan within walking distance (I don’t drive on shabbat). I suspect that this is a reason why many people don’t belong to indie minyanim.. there isn’t one currently available to them, and possibly not enough population to support one. If I ever live close enough to one I like, I’ll go back to it.
    Why people are so excitable about this is beyond me. We seem, in the Jewish community, to believe that institutions last forever. They don’t: not buildings – we spend tons of money on them so we can put up plaques, and then the buildings are sold at a loss… about every 30 years or so; not the movements – they have come and gone as long as there’s been Judaism, not the shul- something like them will be around, but that doesn’t mean they’ll look like expected. In fact, in some ways, indie minyans are much truer to the history of Judaism in structure – the only difference is the lack of a rabbi, and there are certainly ways one could include rabbis in them, without them taking on a synagogue structure (in fact, I wish that this would happen: rabbis more or less cease to be protestant pastors and go back to making their living by teaching or working in other fields (see the recent Masorti “yellow pages” poster on the subject); the Jewish community subsidizes rabbinical training for more people; rabbis now serve in minyans by attending them, giving an occasional drash, teaching a class or two per week, and being available to research and answer halachic questions. Maybe not just one but several, and it won’t be “theirs” but the community’s. Then the communities can go back to doing what *they’re* supposed to do, such as developing chevrot kadisha for mourners, bikur cholim, dowering brides, helping the poor, and a whole assortment of other community tasks that these holy societies used to do (not the rabbi, as seems to be the case nearly everywhere today) and we can once again use the word “community” properly, since in most shuls, what we have is not communities, but meeting spaces, where people see each other occasionally – most of them significantly less often than once a week, making indie minyans that meet less often than weekly no less regular in effect (and the ones that meet weekly, probably more traditional and communal than many synagogues).
    And if they take money from an established community? Well, so what? Really! That means the established community sees value in them. Perhaps they have somewhat more vision than Lurie does.

  2. BZ ftw.
    I think it’s time for a duel. Err, maybe a debate would be better. What would happened if you challenged Lurie to a public debate based on your respective writing on this subject? Who could credibly convene such a thing?

  3. Seems like it’d be good for it to be in-person since then it could have sharp, witty lines and “aha!” moments. We could definitely host video, audio, or co-sponsor.

  4. It wouldn’t be a fair fight – she’d win, since I’d feel constrained by facts
    First, ZING. Second, we could do a fact-check afterwards. I’m beginning to think seriously about this idea. It could be a live-streamed affair, and then we’d post the video after. Anyone have any notion of how likely it’d be for Lurie to agree to this?

  5. Interesting that R’ Elie says that there should be a distinction made between Kehilat Hadar and Mechon Hadar. I wonder where Yeshivat Hadar fits in. Regardless of who turns the lights on, that place is flush wish cash from the kehilla’s coffers. They couldn’t have paid me to learn at Yeshivat Hadar and attend Kehilat Hadar on Shabbos otherwise.

    1. Yeshivat Hadar is a program of Mechon Hadar. Kehilat Hadar is a separate organization. This is not “R’ Elie says that there should be”; this is a fact.

      1. When I lived in New York, I was a New York City employee. My city paycheck enabled me to live in NY and attend Kehilat Hadar on Shabbat. This doesn’t mean that Kehilat Hadar was funded by government money.

  6. BZ, your logic is off. Yeshivat Hadar and Mechon Hadar are intimately connected to each other, the bottom line is that the minyan attracts different versions of the same people because each different Hadar, which claims its own independent constituency without having it, is a different version of the same thing. Its like saying that the Hebrew University is independent from the State of Israel because one is a university and the other a government, or that YU is independent from Orthodox Synagogue life, even though YU trained rabbis go on to become members and leaders of various orthodox synagogues around the country. The fact is that Mechon, Kehilat and Yeshivat Hadar feed into each other, if you disagree I say you are blindly following the rhetoric of your leader.

    1. Nehemiah Stuckett writes:
      BZ, your logic is off. Yeshivat Hadar and Mechon Hadar are intimately connected to each other, the bottom line is that the minyan attracts different versions of the same people because each different Hadar, which claims its own independent constituency without having it, is a different version of the same thing. Its like saying that the Hebrew University is independent from the State of Israel because one is a university and the other a government, or that YU is independent from Orthodox Synagogue life, even though YU trained rabbis go on to become members and leaders of various orthodox synagogues around the country. The fact is that Mechon, Kehilat and Yeshivat Hadar feed into each other, if you disagree I say you are blindly following the rhetoric of your leader.
      We’re not talking about constituencies, or ideologies, or rhetoric — we’re talking about the budgets of nonprofit organizations. Mechon Hadar (sponsor of Yeshivat Hadar) and Kehilat Hadar are separately incorporated organizations, with separate budgets, each with its own income sources and expenses. You can look up their Form 990s. In discussing their finances, it doesn’t matter how many people they have in common, or how much they “feed into each other” in intangible ways. Either money is changing hands between Kehilat Hadar and Mechon Hadar (and they are lying about it), or it isn’t (and you and Lurie are full of shit). This is not a matter of opinion or “disagreement” any more than saying that Barack Obama was born in the United States, or that 2005 and 2010 had the highest global average temperatures on record.
      Who is my “leader” whose rhetoric you think I am “blindly following”? Elie Kaunfer? With whose rhetoric I have publicly disagreed on multiple occasions (particularly on the issue of defining “independent minyanim” as a category that began in 1996 or 2001 or whatever it is now, and on creating sharp distinctions between “minyanim” and “havurot”)? We don’t always agree on rhetoric, but we agree on simple facts.

  7. The kehilla pre-existed the other organs for several years, right? Doesn’t this make it plainly obvious that the kehilla can/does/did exist independently of the yeshiva?

    1. zt writes:
      The kehilla pre-existed the other organs for several years, right? Doesn’t this make it plainly obvious that the kehilla can/does/did exist independently of the yeshiva?
      Nehemiah Stuckett writes:
      zt, no. the yeshiva grew out of Mechon Hadar, and is funded by the establishment’s money.
      What do you mean “no”? Kehilat Hadar was founded in 2001, and Mechon Hadar (which sponsors Yeshivat Hadar) was founded in 2006. These facts are indisputable. Your response is a non sequitur.

  8. Ideally, all communities in a neighborhood or city that draw roughly the same constituency will “feed into each other” rather than compete with each other. All of them, affiliated or not, can work together to improve the Jewish community in the whole area. Why would that be a bad thing?

  9. zt, no. the yeshiva grew out of Mechon Hadar, and is funded by the establishment’s money. The bottom line to me is that often independent minyans use the rhetoric of anti-establishment rebellion, but in reality, their leaders are drawn from, and draw on, the establishment’s finances to support their own causes. I think it was absolutely right for Lurie to highlight the fact that Hadar’s leaders are the children of Jewish elites, and judging by the resumes of the constituents, they are inseparable from the evolving tastes of the establishment. The bottom line is that nothing ideologically innovative arises from Hadar, it just seems like an idealist version of Conservative Jewish elites who didn’t want to feel like they were dancing directly in the shadow of their predecessors. This is what divides true innovation, like the Brody Kloyz, from Kehilat Hadar.

  10. Lurie seems heavily influenced by her small midwestern community. The centrality of Synagogues in these far-flung, sacred cow infested places is still important.
    But she ignores that in larger communities, independent Jewish communities have long been a staple. Workplace orthodox minyans dont threaten the OU. Nor do Shiva minyans. So what gives- it has to be a zero sum gain?
    Would it be different if we called them Shteiblach? Indie minyans in Chicago have no such sense of elitism, so maybe it’s an east coast thing. None of them get funds from some big donor or institution. I’m scratching my head. It must a real secret if they’re getting this secret stash of money. And if they do, more power to them.
    Why does Lurie pick on Hadar? Because its founded by the author of the book she skewers. I would like to know how many other minyans she has attended, if she attends a congregation at all or if she’s just another armchair Conservative Jew angry that those moved to action by the spiritual bankruptcy she cites aren’t attending the same shul she refuses to attend.
    Lurie is pretty young to know so much about so many minyans having just recently arrived in New York from Iowa by way of Hah-vahrd (talk about elitism).
    Perhaps Lurie, raised on the same midwestern corn-fed kosher beef as I, had a bad experience eating Tofu at some indie minyan potluck and was either scarred by the experience or socially shunned for spitting it out. I would understand that. I’ve been there. I could even imagine it eliciting elitism by Tofu Fascists.
    Come one Margot. Let’s go out for a steak and discuss the midwest. And elitism. Then we’ll hit your favorite Conservative Synagogue for Ma’ariv, and when they can’t make a minyan, we’ll blame that on Hadar too. Yeeee-haw!

  11. Let me clarify some of the facts about the relationship between Kehilat Hadar and Mechon Hadar. (Disclosure: I served as a gabbai of KH from July 2006 to October 2008.) KH and MH are (and have always been) separate nonprofit organizations, with entirely separate governance structures, bank accounts, e-mail lists, etc. They jointly operate some programs (e.g., the weekly Community Beit Midrash, Yeshivat Hadar Shabbatons at Kehilat Hadar), often publicize each other’s events, and include many of the same participants, but they are nevertheless distinct institutions. This was a conscious decision at the time when MH was founded. Both alternatives (having them actually be one organization, and having completely separate names and less interaction) were discussed, but the leadership of both groups felt that having two separate but symbiotic organizations would be most advantageous to both. The shared name has evidently been the source of some confusion, so both organizations include clarifications on their websites.
    Nehemiah writes: “each different Hadar, which claims its own independent constituency without having it.” Leaving aside the complications of finding a formal definition of “constitutency,” it’s simply not true. Many of the students at YH rarely attend Shabbat davening at KH (sometimes because they don’t live on the Upper West Side and don’t travel on Shabbat), and plenty of people who are actively involved in KH rarely attend events at YH. MH’s other programs, such as its online resources, are used by people in many places other than New York. While I don’t have any data about how the two organizations’ donor lists compare, much of MH’s funding comes from outside grants, so it really isn’t being propped up financially by people from within KH (as Frederick claims).

  12. frederick rosenshvigger writes:
    They couldn’t have paid me to learn at Yeshivat Hadar and attend Kehilat Hadar on Shabbos otherwise.
    They paid you to attend Shabbos services? Who paid you? Would you have gotten less money for failing to attend Shabbos services? (They didn’t pay you on Shabbat, I hope.)

  13. Certainly, much of the criticism of independent minyanim is overblown and silly. But I do think there’s another side to one of the points BZ made that I haven’t really seen addressed anywhere:
    Independent minyanim are very openly a-la-carte, intended to function as part of the larger Jewish ecosystem. They focus on the areas where they have a comparative advantage, and let other organizations do the rest. No minyan claims to be an island. This is in contrast to many synagogues, which do attempt to be one-stop shops for everything Jewish, regardless of whether they’re any good at it.
    Synagogues generally know they’re not good at everything, but feel something of an obligation to try to provide “one-stop shops”, or at least to push themselves to do as much as possible to meet the needs of the community. More than a few people who attend a certain independent minyan on Shabbat come to my shul when that minyan isn’t meeting, whether that’s on chagim or for weekday events like fast days, Hoshana Raba or Siyyum for Fast of the Firstborn that the minyan decides are not convenient to hold themselves. Those people assume the shul is going to be there for them when they need it, but in fact we are constantly struggling to get by, not just financially but also in terms of the number of Jewishly-educated volunteers willing to do stuff.
    The independent minyan folks could make a huge difference if they wanted to, and while I don’t entirely blame them for wanting to do their own thing, I wonder what happens if the shul ceases to exist and all of a sudden they don’t have anywhere to go for weekday minyanim, Hoshana Raba, Thanksgiving Shabbat, etc. In just the past 5 years or so, my shul has reduced significantly the number of services we have on weekdays because we can no longer guarantee that we’ll have a minyan, and I don’t see anyone else making up the difference. No one really seems to want to start an independent minyan for Tzom Gedaliah…

  14. First of all, so there’s no confusion, I am not Margot Lurie. (The recent article refers to her as “ML”. Way to take a guy’s net handle 😉
    I’m surprised no one mentioned this dig by Lurie:
    “The jumping-off point for my article was Kaunfer’s book, a poorly-written, poorly-organized exercise in self-gratulation that was greeted with wild praise and enthusiasm by every single notice preceding mine.
    Tell us how you really feel!

  15. I wonder what happens if the shul ceases to exist and all of a sudden they don’t have anywhere to go for weekday minyanim,
    They’ll start their own.

  16. Anonymous shul complainer – explain please.
    1. Shul used to have weekday services.
    2. Shul has not enough people for these services
    3. Shul cancelles services.
    4. People start other minyan not on weekdays.
    5. Shul blames other minyan for the cancellation of services on these days?
    I’m missing something.
    Also, many shuls in the Orthodox world have one crowd on weekdays and another on weekends. In fact, many only have either kind of minyan, no rabbi, and a very small budget or even just small contributions (people give money when they get an aliya, or put money into the air conditioner when they want it). This is not an option that is completely off the wall. A shul with no salaries to pay could afford to stay open longer hours, be a place for a volunteer community, house people who want to learn and pray, and not force them to come to three-hour long performances with Rabbis and cantors.

  17. Lurie’s tone, poor sourcing, and general attitude reflect the style of an Anne Coulter more than a Seymour Hersh. Sensationalism in the name of self-promotion is a good strategy, and one that Lurie has pursued in her previous writing as well – writing that is riddled with insulting, sensationalist, and juvenile rhetoric.
    I understand how a congregant at a legacy shul feels on the weeks that the shul is more full because the indy minyan isn’t meeting. It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that the shul would be full every week but for the indy minyan. It’s easy to resent the indy folk who are often not paying membership to the legacy shul that they depend on for prayer on non-indy weekends – and perhaps for other services as well. None of that, though, is a fair critique of the indy minyan movement.
    At the indy minyan conference, I learned that the indie minyan movement is dealing with big questions about its sustainability, about how to create decision-making systems that allow for institutional evolution, and about the specific mix of Jewish services and needs that the minyan feels responsible and suited for providing – and how other needs will be met by members of the congregation. What’s interesting about this is that it’s the exact same conversation that legacy shuls are having, and there is much to be gained by having them together.

  18. anonymous: Good point about non-a-la-carte shuls. As an avid indie minyan person, I definitely think people should support a shul in proportion to the extent that the shul meets their needs. If you go for Hoshanah Rabbah and yahrtzeit minyanim every year, you should also seek to get involved in those services and/or donate money in proportion to the amount of use you feel you get from the shul.
    But Amit’s right. If the shul has the only good Hoshannah Rabbah services around, and everyone who cares about Hoshannah Rabbah services goes there, and there’s no competition, where’s the problem? This has nothing to do with that shul’s Shabbat services and everything to do with a vibrant Jewish community in a neighborhood with multiple good options.

  19. Amit: Your sequence is wrong, in that the independent minyanim started before the shul cancelled many of its weekday services. Nonetheless, I’m not blaming the minyanim for that, and I don’t think it’s fair to read my earlier post that way. I’m just genuinely curious about whether there’s a solution out there that preserves egalitarian weekday minyanim.
    However, the “shul people” aren’t the only ones complaining. The “independent minyan” people are complaining too! At the risk of identifying the communities in question, I’ll tell you that last fall, we were asked by some of the minyan folks what time we were having Hoshana Rabah services. However, the question came just a few days in advance, by which point we had done a head count and decided we couldn’t pull off Hoshana Rabah at all. The two communities put together could almost unquestionably have gotten a minyan, and probably put together a pretty nice service, but the shul by itself didn’t have enough people, the independent minyan folks didn’t want to do the planning, and co-sponsorship had already been rejected by the leadership of the independent minyan. It seems like everyone lost out.

    1. Does the independent minyan do any of the major Tishrei holidays? (I assume the shul does all of them.) If not, perhaps it might be an appropriate ecological niche for the minyan to take the lead on minor ones like Tzom Gedaliah and Hoshana Rabbah.

  20. Interesting that R’ Elie says that there should be a distinction made between Kehilat Hadar and Mechon Hadar. I wonder where Yeshivat Hadar fits in. Regardless of who turns the lights on, that place is flush wish cash from the kehilla’s coffers. They couldn’t have paid me to learn at Yeshivat Hadar and attend Kehilat Hadar on Shabbos otherwise.
    Rosenschvigger, please explain:
    1. Are you claiming that Kehillat Hadar has “cash” or “coffers”?
    2. Are you claiming that this cash is being transferred under the table to the Yeshiva?
    3. If by “kehilla” you mean “Organized community”, why are you saying this as if it were a secret? YH publicizes their donors. It’s no secret.
    4. I was never paid to attend KH. Please refer me to the person doling out the money so I, too, may receive money for going to shul.
    If these claims you made are false, please come out and say it. Oh, and then return the money – you didn’t get paid to besmirch your Yeshiva.

  21. In response to Lurie’s claim that
    “small or struggling Jewish communities see the minyan movement (to the extent that they’re aware of it at all) as largely irrelevant to their concerns,”
    I’d just like to say that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Were she (or her ilk) only to judge IMs ‘l’fi kaf z’khut’ and maybe even try it out in these far-fetched places by starting independent minyanim out there, Lurie might not have to revert to such heavy-handed 1990’s-style ‘culture-wars’ rhetoric. East coast elitism…really now!
    One of the things our havurah in Minneapolis (YES, we are, in fact, near Iowa, Ms. Lurie!) values most is the wide range of our participants’ religious backgrounds. Few members come from a conservative background, and most would not be affiliated with a synagogue, whether or not we existed. In order to accommodate those who regularly participate in denominationally-coded communities, we, like most IMs, don’t meet every single Shabbat. Your suggestion about IMs supplementing the standard holiday calendar with lesser-celebrated occasions is an excellent one. The assertion (echoed in that Forward article about the USCJ and independent minyanim) that IMs are somehow draining synagogue life of its creativity, energy, and membership is both offensive and patently false.
    I could go on at length about this issue, but you’ve already covered so much of this so eloquently. Yasher Koach, BZ.

  22. Rosenshvigger seems to be implying that Yeshivat Hadar, Kehilat Hadar and Mechon Hadar, regardless of where they get their money, is on the UWS, perhaps the most wealthy and influential Jewish neighborhood in the good ol’ USA. YH pays there talmidim to learn, which is financed by the Jewish communal fat cats that the whole Hadar crew purport be critiquing through action. I dont think FR thinks that there is anything crooked going on, just that Hadar, and many other indy minyan are dancing from the very centers of power that they beleive they are subverting. that is fake, ridiculous and an affront to the generations of rebellious Jews who have brought forth joys upon Israel in times of great cultural ferment. Big up Poet Yosef Zvi Rimon, Musician Naftali Brandwein and S. Ansky, Yidn who could look at Hadar and see the Vaad Arba Artzos weilding their tax collecting power upon the people, and finding no meaning in their ideological drizzle.

  23. Stuckett:
    The first falsehood is that the Vaad was disbanded many years before those three men wrote a single word (1764, if you care).
    Second falsehood is that while the vaad took taxes, Jewish federations do not. Nobody forced anyone to contribute to the Jewish “establishment”.
    Third falsehood is that Yeshivat Hadar never had any beef with the federations or any other “centers of power”. They have a beef with synagogues and communities. They’re not revolutionaries and never claimed to be.
    Fourth falsehood is in your previous comment about Hebrew University not being an organ of the Israeli government: HU is a public institution, funded and overseen by the Council for Higher Education, an organ of the Israeli ministry of education. Ditto with RIETS (the Rabbinical Seminary affiliated with YU), which is named specifically in the charters of many synagogues as the school which must train the rabbi (usually by referring to the RCA, to which RIETS alumni automatically belong). Kehillat Hadar and Mechon Hadar, on the other hand, are distinct entities, which share idological common ground. I’m sure you wouldn’t begrudge the right of Poalei Tzion and Poalei Tzion (Linke) to exist while sharing (components of) the same name.

  24. Oh, and Stuckett, another falsehood: Rozenshvigger wasn’t pointing out your point. He was saying something about money and coffers and kehillot. I want to know whose money he’s making claims about, and why he thinks this is true. THis is a serious allegation.

  25. @ Raysh Weiss
    You say: In order to accommodate those who regularly participate in denominationally-coded communities, we, like most IMs, don’t meet every single Shabbat.
    As a committed shul yid, and an outsider to the Independent Minyan community, maybe I should stay out of this discussion (which I have followed avidly, here and elsewhere).
    But I wonder if other minyanaires would support that explanation for meeting monthly. I interpet denominationally-coded communities to mean brick-and-mortar movement-affiliated full-service synagogues — and I’ve gathered the impression that many independent minyanim were brought into being by people who didn’t find the institutional synagogue meeting their needs.
    I would hypothesize that, if a minyan meets monthly, it is because of the huge amount of volunteer effort involved in dealing with the logistics — hopefully not because the participants want to be somewhere else the other three-quarter of the time. If so, that somewhere else seems likely to be another IM, where they will have access to other approaches to worship and to a different group of compatible worshipers.
    But I could be wrong — it has happened on occasion — and if others want to corroborate Raysh’s statement, my institutional neshama will be happy to know that we’re still an acceptable alternative, even if not an exclusive one.

  26. wow amit, you seem to bow to the god of chronology, how pedantic. ayn mukdam umeukhar btayros jewschool.

  27. oh, and amit, read my responses more carefully. it is indeed possible for jews of one generation to see the wrongs of previous generations in their own communities. One could argue that Rimon, Ansky or whoever saw the exploitative power of the Vaad Arba Artzos in the powerful fat cats of their own day, just as I see you and your defense of hadar as as the kind of pandering to the elites that should be detested. talk about personality cults and gayvedik self-worship. The bottom line is that what you call falsehood is just flying below your radar.

    1. Nehemiah-
      Yes or no: Should any organization with Hadar in its name be charged with money laundering, and/or making false statements to the IRS?

  28. money laundering? false statements to the IRS? Those are your words, not his. Anyways, the amount of virulence that Lurie’s article has provoked is kind of hilarious, considering are talking about weak-golus yidn. o well.

  29. To echo Amit’s point: Nehemiah, where do you get the idea that Hadar is so anti-establishment — talking about “the Jewish communal fat cats that the whole Hadar crew purport be critiquing through action?” Can you give some specific examples? I’d say the primary reason for KH’s existence is that the people who go there aren’t satisfied with the other davening options that exist locally and want to be involved with something that meets their needs. Likewise, YH’s goal is to meeting a demand for intensive learning opportunities that’s otherwise not being met, and MH’s other programs are aimed at helping provide resources and advising to minyanim in other places. They’re not trying to tear down the rest of the Jewish world, as you make it sound, and they don’t claim to be. If you want to argue that these programs aren’t actually so innovative (with respect to previously existing ones), that’s a separate point, but your argument that Hadar’s main goal is to “stick it to the man” — and therefore shouldn’t accept money from “the man” — just doesn’t make sense.

  30. Adam,
    All one needs to do is read R’ Elie’s book and one can discern that his fundraising is based on undermining the supposed lifelessness of American synagogue life. Take for example, an excerpt published in The Jewish Week:
    “The false crisis — declining Jewish continuity, caused by assimilation and an intermarriage rate of 52 percent — has become the rallying cry of institutional Judaism. But fundamentally, it is a red herring. The real crisis is one of meaning and engagement. For the first time in centuries, two Jews can marry each other and have Jewish children without any connection to Jewish heritage, wisdom or tradition.
    Part of the problem is that there are very few places that offer Jews an opportunity to experience the power and mystery of Jewish tradition firsthand. Even people who are in-married by and large have little connection to Torah, Jewish practice and values. They are dependent on others to translate Judaism for them, and they trudge to High Holiday services to receive the requisite “Be good!” sermons, only to return to their lives unchallenged and unchanged.”
    There are plenty of intensive learning experiences available to Jewish youth who are interested. By positioning the various Hadar programs as alternatives to the emptiness of synagogue life, and taking money from funders who attend those very synagogues, it just seems lacking to me, an ahistorical and bizarre attempt to invalidate the illustrious history of independent learning and lamdonus that has characterized golus for centuries. As an alum, purely, I can just say that such an approach seemed to translate pardes and JTS 60 years ago into a room on the UWS.

  31. Nehemiah-
    If you’re not going to answer my other question, will you at least concede that the question of whether (either) Hadar’s approach is original is separate from the question of whether (either) Hadar is lying about its finances?

  32. I have no idea what are you talking about. You are asking me to validate a claim that I never made in the first place.
    The bottom line is that both Kehilat Hadar and Mechon Hadar recieve grant money from Bikkurum and other establishment Jewish organizations. That makes its vision compatible with, and funded by establishment Jewish organizations that agree with its mission.

    1. nehemiah writes:
      The bottom line is that both Kehilat Hadar and Mechon Hadar recieve grant money from Bikkurum and other establishment Jewish organizations.
      Kehilat Hadar received money from Bikkurim between 2002 and 2005. Lurie was writing in the present tense. (Maybe she wrote the article in 2005, but then had to wait for Empowered Judaism to be written and the Jewish Review of Books to be founded so that she could publish it?)

  33. haha, maybe man, but I still think that she makes some very good points, and places her finger on the reasons that Hadar has come to exemplify the indie minyan movement. While there is an urge to market something as innovative, its mobilization here really foregrounds what Lurie seems to be getting at: Jewish Youth have no sense of historical conciousness. Everything must appear new superficially to be successful in the established Jewish community. Even if one draws their inspiration from the wrongs of their fathers, they are still indebted to those perceived mistakes. Lurie writes of Mechon/Kehilat/Yeshivat Hadar from a contextual perspective, and placing indy minyanim within the local, they seem like the offspring of upper middle class, highly educated, high achieving young Jews who have nothing to rebel against except the tyranny of their childhood synagogues. It’s cynical, I know, but as someone whose had to make his own way Jewishly, who was born into a family where Jewishness was more in racial terms than spiritual ones, the babbles of the Indy Minyan kids seems boring to the core.

  34. Hadar in no way exemplifies indie minyans. It may be one of the oldest, most stable and well-attended, but it is an outlyer and exception. Most look or behave nothing like it.
    “Jewish Youth have no sense of historical conciousness.”
    Because Avraham avinu did when he smashed his father’s idols?
    “Even if one draws their inspiration from the wrongs of their fathers, they are still indebted to those perceived mistakes.”
    So you agree then that construction of oversized kalter shuls was a generational golden calf and that Indie Minyans may grow to a greater level of success by not succumbing to the desire for excess.
    “Lurie writes of Mechon/Kehilat/Yeshivat Hadar from a contextual perspective…”
    Likely because she’s never actually attended.
    “the babbles of the Indy Minyan kids seems boring to the core.”
    But the question at hand is are they less so than the Divrei Torah of your current Rabbi? If so, your spiritual journey may yet take you into our midst!
    Above the Aron in so many shuls is written- Da Lifnei Mi Atah Omed. You’ll allow US to be cynical that in most Conservative and Reform shuls, that now refers not to God or even pulpit Rebbeim, but a building fund and dues scheme that exceeds the Half Shekel rule by just a little bit. Indie Minyans purposely dont deal with this, and even if they are ala carte, it allows them to provide a davening experience that even you would like.

    1. adam writes:
      Hadar in no way exemplifies indie minyans. It may be one of the oldest, most stable and well-attended, but it is an outlyer and exception. Most look or behave nothing like it.
      It’s only “one of the oldest” if you adopt a definition of “independent minyanim” such that only minyanim that started around the same time as Hadar or later are included. Without such an artificial definition, there have been independent minyanim long before Hadar. (This was one of my main critiques of Empowered Judaism.) Hadar has been very influential, but wasn’t the first independent minyan.
      But I agree that Hadar is unique and atypical in many ways. Even minyanim that are directly modeled after Hadar are different from it.
      I would suggest that the majority of ignorant generalizations about independent minyanim stem from the misconception that “independent minyanim” are a coherent homogeneous coordinated entity, and a significant subset of those stem from the misconception that all or most independent minyanim are like Hadar.

  35. OOOOO We’ve got a maggid on our hands! Adam’s response exemplifies the arrogance I experienced at Hadar and many other indy minyans I’ve attended and become familiar with. I’m a shul man, a shitbl-shtayger, and I’m more the wiser.

  36. What I see here is a bunch of butthurt from people who went to Hadar, apparently didn’t like it too much, and now are on a crusade to make sure that twenty- and thirty-somethings in urban communities across the U.S. and Israel don’t take initiative to have a davening/learing option that appeals to them.
    Seriously – the uplifting experience at Zoo Minyan (the only indie-minyan that I’m able to attend anymore, sadly) have nothing to do with the boatloads of cash the Hadar Twins receive from The Man.

  37. adam writes:
    I would like to know how many other minyans she has attended, if she attends a congregation at all or if she’s just another armchair Conservative Jew angry that those moved to action by the spiritual bankruptcy she cites aren’t attending the same shul she refuses to attend.
    Actually, I wonder if we both misinterpreted Lurie’s statement “My interest is in having a vigorous liberal Judaism that can hold its own next to Orthodoxy.” She never actually said that she was a liberal Jew, and this line is consistent with her being an Orthodox concern troll after all. Picture Karl Rove saying on Fox News, “My interest is in having a vigorous Democratic Party that can hold its own next to the Republicans” (as he gives the Democrats “advice” not to take positions at odds with the Republican platform, for their own good).

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