Synagogues don’t have the resources to give congregants one-on-one devotional training, but can they use daily minyans to give their spiritual athletes a challenging workout?

Rabbi Avi Finegold
FOUNDER, THE JEWISH LEARNING LIBRARY, MONTREAL

Rabbi Philip Scheim
BETH DAVID B’NAI  ISRAEL BETH  AM CONGREGATION, TORONTO

Rabbi Finegold: I want to follow up on what we wrote about last time regarding the work of preserving a spiritual life throughout the year. In my personal practice, I have tried to adopt a paradigm of the soul needing exercise just like the body. I have to set up “gym time” for spiritual work at regular intervals, whether that’s daily tfillah or a check-in to see how I’m doing in some area of life. If I find I’m slipping, then I need to work that “soul muscle group” a little more.

What are some of the concrete steps that you take, or suggest your congregants adopt, to help with this process? Is there anything that may be unique to your denomination’s perspective that you find particularly useful? 

Rabbi Scheim: I like your image of a spiritual workout. In an ideal synagogue world, rabbis, cantors, and ritual directors would fill the role of personal trainers. In my admittedly limited experience in the gym, my trainer would take me from one exercise machine to another, back and forth, in the process, activating muscle groups I never knew existed. Similarly, a spiritual trainer could take one through various aspects of Jewish traditional life. Unfortunately, we don’t have the resources for one-on-one training for every congregant. 

Short of the full workout experience, daily minyan is a good starting point, in that it offers prayer, community, and some study in a nurturing environment. Our two daily morning minyanim are largely populated by men and women who began attending while saying Kaddish, and who continued to attend on a regular basis long after the Kaddish period had ended, because of the variety of needs, spiritual and otherwise, minyan fulfils.

Rabbi Finegold: I remember training for my first race. Every run had a very specific role in the lead-up to the big day. Even if I didn’t want to run on a given day, I knew that I had to because I needed to get the miles in to be able to cross the finish line. And yet within three weeks after it was over, I had tapered off to a single run a week, barely enough to stay in shape. When I realized what was happening, I immediately signed up for another race, and found a coach (my running rebbe) to push me out of my comfort zone. 

What would the next race be for people who have finished a year of Kaddish? They know how to pray by that point and are certainly capable of getting up early or leaving work and going straight to Minchah. But they often do not, because the obligation is no longer felt, even though it really hasn’t gone away. It is understandable in the sense that they no longer have the same filial feeling of responsibility, but perhaps we can create something within the parameters of daily prayer that can push them to go another year and another after that.

What can we do with the routine of minyan to activate new spiritual muscle groups, and continue to challenge our spiritual athletes?

Rabbi Scheim:  In a way, the juxtaposition of the word “race” with the word “minyan” can be problematic, because, too often, minyan is a race with the clock, the goal being to finish as quickly as possible. The age-old conflict between keva and kavanah, between fixed routine and experiential prayer, is confronted on a daily basis. When we hurry through the weekday service, because people need to be somewhere else soon, those who want to focus on the words of the siddur, sing a few more melodies and inhale the davening experience are frustrated. Likewise, when a prayer-leader sings every melody, elongates every passage and “shleps out” the service, those pressured by schedules become impatient. 

The search for that illusive happy medium, where some semblance of kavanah can be achieved, while limiting the service to a realistic time-frame, can be truly daunting. But both will be necessary for us to convince year-long Kaddish-sayers to return to the minyan once the mourning period has ended. As much as our daily services have to move, time-wise, likewise, they have to move us emotionally or spiritually, even in some small way, every day.