For the majority of my life I have had a strictly holiday attendance record at my father’s shul; my feelings on the subject of communal prayer ranging from dislike to ambivalence depending on the year. In eleventh grade, right off the heels of a summer spent learning in Israel, I stopped pretending to daven in the morning on Sundays and spacing out during school wide tefillah, but minyan played no role in this new gravity with which I treated my morning prayer. I found connection to solitary prayers and picked out my father’s office—lined from crown molding to carpet with Jewish books—as my makom kavuah, designated place. I even began to make up my own (poorly sung) tunes to the tefillot of the Kabbalat Shabbat service. In all of my attempts to improve my prayer, attending a minyan was never an end goal.
Until about five months ago, as the deep chill of January frosted the glass windows of my seminary’s bet midrash, my Jewish soul lit on fire. I began to open to the ideas of ‘Orthodox Jewish Feminism,’ something I had never considered before.
My whole world cracked open, for better and for worse. I cried and rejoiced about many truths of my life. My biggest takeaway from that portion of my journey was to take myself seriously in all aspects of my Judaism—if I wanted respect from others, I needed to respect myself; if I wanted people to raise their expectations for women, I needed to raise my expectations for myself. As an important aspect of Jewish communal life from which women are exempt, I found the idea of minyan creep under me like a pea under a tower of mattresses.
I felt that I owed it to myself to attend minyan to see if after all the years of ambivalence, the communal prayer now brought me deep pain. To be very clear, I was not looking to be counted in minyan—I have long accepted, albeit with a heavy heart, the mainstream Orthodox position on that matter. I just wanted to be serious—if I wished women could be more involved in communal life, I had to be involved myself.
I started with toddler steps—instead of davening in my room on Shabbatot in seminary I woke up in time for 7:30 AM minyan. For the first few weeks it was far worse than I expected—I sped through the words to myself and sat in my makom catching up on whatever learning I was behind on that week. But I kept going, justifying the whole of my frustrations as some sort of philosophical integrity.
I attended a coed summer camp after seminary and decided to be as punctual for minyan as my morning jello legs would allow. I started to think more about the details of minyan—things that were beautiful and things that were bothersome. During camp I decided to drop my frown of faux duty. I tried to come to minyan with earnestness, to look for the good in this communal prayer. Minyan stopped feeling like sandpaper and more like klaf (parchment used in religious calligraphy).
The test came when I left camp and built-in minyan three times a day, only to watch it recede before me like a wave after the tide. My first day home I set my alarm for 7:40 AM and slept straight through it.
The guilt came pretty quickly and still hovered over me when I went to mincha that same day, again hovering when I left shul without even thinking about waiting around for ma’ariv.
For the next month I pulled myself out of my quicksand bed at 7:40 AM, attempted to work my plans around 8:00 PM mincha and ma’ariv, and tried to learn at least one new thing from it all every day.
I left the summer with a deep appreciation for the beauty of minyan. Of course I got some strange looks, rude comments and plenty of “You don’t have to,” but as a natural contrarian and introvert, I wrote it all down and let it fuel me forward.
Surprisingly, much of this beauty that had nothing to do with my Orthodox-Jewish- feminist bend or stubborn determination for philosophical integrity, although both still played strongly in my mind. I stumbled upon these wonders of communal worship, independent entirely of my own inclinations.
I gained an intense respect for minyan-goers, even the late ones, especially on Sundays. It is not an easy gesture, nor is it a simple one. A friend once described constancy as his most difficult challenge in Judaism; he spoke of “lazy-Sundays” he could never have because of his obligation to go to minyan every morning. Those words rang in my head every morning as I walked to shul. Minyan had created a physical expression of Jewish constancy in my life.
It affected the way I planned my day. My activities were arranged around minyan times the way they used to be arranged around three daily meals. I felt my prayer grow more deliberate and less like a box to check off whenever it was most convenient for me.
It affected my learning, ensuring I would hear a d’var Torah at least twice a day, after shacharit and between mincha and ma’ariv, giving me a chance to read the footnotes in my siddur when the chazzan sang slowly or Torah-reading was dragging.
My davening was paced on the actual prayers and not the amount of sleep I received the previous night, especially for mincha and ma’ariv (the times during which I often had to fight the urge to speed race through when praying on my own). I also began to say things I had never said before, matching the chazzan and his words. I felt a part of a community as we answered “Amen” to the men and women who said the mourner’s Kaddish. I felt that power hold me as I stood each day, three times a day, before my King of Kings.
Over this journey I did not lose my appreciation for individual prayer. I still stay home some Friday nights to enjoy my own tunes for Kabbalat Shabbat. I understand the depth of meaning many women find within private prayer, including myself. At the same time, minyan serves as a focal point of our community, a place where the Torah is read, Kaddish is said, and divrei Torah are given—the commitment to community reaffirmed. The bimah serves as a communal altar; there all aspects of a congregation blend together like a spice offering, sending their a rei’ach nechoach, pleasing odor, up to God.
Sometimes, to my own surprise, I feel that perhaps God has blessed me as a woman; He has given me the privilege of gaining spiritually from both private and communal prayer. Of course there is still much room to discuss and grow in the realm of women in communal prayer, but I feel more equipped to do that from my place in the pews, where I understand the beauty of our communal prayer in ways I did not understand before.
I am now in college and during the school week a minyan is hard to come by. Still, I carry my days at summer minyan with me—the feeling of community, the added prayers, the serious headspace, the slow paced readings—holding them between the pages of my siddur even as I stand alone in my dorm room kitchenette. I try my best to go to minyan on the weekends and, when I do, I feel at home.
Sitting there on a late Sunday morning I feel the beauty of the communal shacharit prayer envelope me. I smile; there is so much more to find.