Althought S3K is out of the ‘emergent’ business, our research into emerging (pardon the pun) Jewish community trends informs our current work with synagogues. Independent minyanim are one form of new community. What do you think?
WALTHAM, Mass. (JTA) — When Kehilat Hadar met for its first Shabbat morning service on Manhattan"s Upper West Side in 2001, about 60 people showed up, some of them spilling into the hallway at the apartment of Ethan Tucker, one of the minyan"s founders. Three weeks later the number had ballooned to more than 100.
“It was a wide range of people already there and I didn"t know half of them,” said Rabbi Elie Kaunfer, another of Hadar"s three founders. “That"s when I actually got a sense that this was bigger than just a couple of friends getting together.”
Seven years later, Hadar now attracts some 200 worshipers on a typical Shabbat and has a mailing list of about 2,500. More significantly, it has been joined by some 55 so-called independent minyanim across the country.
The Jewish institutional world is beginning to take notice.
On Monday, representatives of dozens of the minyanim met with academics and communal professionals at Brandeis University for the second independent minyanim conference. The meeting provided a chance to discuss the manifold ways these communities pose both a challenge and an opportunity for established Jewish organizations.
“I think ultimately there will be a necessary transformation in what American Judaism and what the institutions of American Jewish life look like in the 21st century,” said conference participant Felicia Herman, the executive director of Natan, a foundation that supports several emergent Jewish communities, including independent minyanim. “This is part of that reinvention. We"re helping to build a new infrastructure, but we have no idea what it"s going to look like.”
Though the minyanim by nature are independent of the mainstream institutions of Jewish religious life, their rapid growth has made them difficult to ignore. Typically they are lay-led communities with spirited prayer and an ability to attract the elusive cohort of 20- and 30-something Jews that the organized community has struggled to engage in Jewish life.
There appears to be widespread agreement that the minyanim provide an avenue of engagement for what sociologists increasingly describe as a new developmental stage: the post-college and pre-marriage period, when many young Jews often fall off the communal radar.
Hadar"s original Shabbat morning prayer community has spawned Mechon Hadar, an institute creating the first egalitarian yeshiva in the United States to train a corps of leaders for the minyanim, which require highly educated participants for their rabbi-less communities.
And while both Kaunfer and Tucker have recently received major grants from Jewish foundations, there has been some hesitation to fund minyanim that are seen as catering to a population that is highly educated and already relatively well-connected to Jewish life.
“We felt in the beginning that our added value in the field was focusing on unaffiliated jews,” Herman said. “That"s changing over time and we"ve become much more willing to consider organizations that are developing Jewish leaders and that are just giving all kinds of Jews creative new expressions for their Jewish identity.”
Most minyanim cluster around a point on the ideological spectrum between Orthodox and Conservative Judaism, finding a number of innovative ways to balance an egalitarian impulse with an otherwise traditional prayer service. Most members define themselves as nondenominational, according to survey results presented at the conference.
They also seem to reject what several participants refer to as a consumerist model of Judaism, where members pay dues to synagogues in exchange for services provided, in favor of a more participatory experience.
But in creating communities with no rabbinic leadership, and where participants are unlikely to affiliate in traditional ways—through synagogue membership, for instance, or by donating to federations—the minyanim pose particular challenges to existing communal structures.
Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, the dean of the Hebrew College rabbinical school and a longtime member of a Boston-area minyan, joked that by existing communal standards, she probably would be counted as an unaffiliated Jew.
“Significant numbers of Jews are rejecting a consumer model of Judaism and opting for a model where they see themselves as co-creators of Jewish life,” Cohen Anisfeld said. “In a culture of rampant commodification, this is an amazing achievement.”
The minyanim also pose significant challenges to the rabbinate. Most of the communities are led by extremely knowledgeable lay leaders who conduct services and deliver Torah commentaries, as well as carry out many of the functions typically performed by rabbis. Even those minyanim that might want a rabbi may find themselves rubbing up against institutions that limit the range of positions their rabbis can assume.
“Independence is not compatible with the protectionist guild system that has a stranglehold on the American rabbinate, and I would say on rabbinic creativity,” said Tucker, the Hadar co-founder.
Though Tucker, speaking in a session on minyanim and rabbinic authority, argued for changes to rabbinic roles and training, he and several others at the conference agreed that no long-term minyan model was viable without some rabbinic guidance.
In this respect, as in many others, the minyanim have looked for inspiration to the havurah movement, which saw the rise of similar lay-led and self-governed communities in the 1960s and 1970s. They were sort of a Jewish religious version of the larger countercultural movements of the time.
Rabbi Arthur Green, the rector of the Hebrew College rabbinical school and one of the founders of Havurat Shalom in Boston in the late 1960s, said during the closing plenary that a rabbi would have helped havurot avoid another pitfall that threatens the independent minyanim—the tendency toward cliquishness.
Green recalled how Havurat Shalom had twice rejected a candidate for membership who had all the qualifications, but was deemed to be a somewhat obnoxious personality who would not get on well with other members.
“That was one of my failures of leadership,” Green said. “Had I been the rabbi of that group I might have been able to say, ‘We stand for something. We"re not just here to satisfy ourselves, we"re not just here to have fun." I couldn"t do that because I was just one of the group. We didn"t believe in professional leadership.”
Though some of the independent communities are organized around a paid rabbinic leader, most are not, which makes a knowledgeable lay community integral to the continued growth of the minyanim.
“The No. 1 scarce resource for the minyanim is not dollars, it"s human capital,” said Kaunfer, now the executive director of Mechon Hadar. “What"s crucial about these communities, it"s not a single person who"s in charge. It"s not even five people. There"s a premium on having a wide variety of people running services, teaching, etc. The question is how do you develop that pipeline of participant leaders who can continue to work and grow communities.”
Tony Jones reports the difficult news that our friend Dieter Zander, with whom so many of us spent time at the January 2006 gathering, has suffered a stroke and remains under sedation.
Updates about Dieter’s situation are available here.
Dieter is a true emergent-religion pioneer. In the mid-1980s, he founded the first-ever GenX Church, New Song, in West Covina, California. In the mid-1990s, Willow Creek’s Bill Hybels invited him to launch Axis, Willow’s church-within-a-church for GenXers. Since 2000 he has lived in the Bay Area, where he and Mark Scandrette cofounded Re-Imagine; he now is the Pastor of Arts and Spiritual Formation at BayMarin Community Church, working with David Cobia, who also was with us in January 2006.
Our prayers for a speedy and complete healing, healing of body and healing of spirit, are with Dieter and his family.
…In late 2005, some of us emergent Christians were invited to meet with a group of young and innovative rabbis. Meetings between Jewish and Christian leaders are nothing new, and a lot of us, on both sides, had been involved in previous meetings (though not with each other). However, we were committed to making this meeting different. In the blogosphere, we began taking heat for even announcing the meeting, especially my quote in the press release that I was excited to meet with the rabbis to ‘‘talk about the future and God"s Kingdom."" Some of my Christian friends made it clear that Jews could not possibly be involved in kingdom of God work because they did not profess belief in Jesus. To emergents, this kind of thinking binds God"s work to the church and implies that outside the lives of professed Christians, God is handicapped.
Rejecting this belief, I set to work with Shawn Landres, the director of research at Synagogue 3000, the group that convened the meeting …to bring together the emergent Christian leaders and the emergent Jewish leaders. We decided that we would ask no one to leave anything at the door—who you were in your synagogue or church is who we wanted you to be at this meeting. To that end, Shawn began our meeting. We were all sitting in a circle—about two dozen of us—and Shawn said, ‘‘To my fellow Jews, I want to let you know that these emergent Christians are going to talk openly about Jesus and the Bible. This may make you uncomfortable at first, but that"s what they believe, so that"s what they"re going to talk about."" I went on to say something similar to my Christian peers about the rabbis talking about the Torah.
The resulting conversation was a thing of beauty. Though occasionally awkward, those moments were far outweighed by times of great poignancy. I led a meditation on a story of Jesus, and Troy Bronsink led songs he has written about Jesus. The rabbis taught from Torah, and the cantors led us in songs of Jewish faith. No one held back, which ultimately led to more candor and openness about what we really believe. And that, in turn, led to deeper friendships, since openness and authenticity are such important qualities in making friends. One instance from the gathering represents this best. In one small group, the question was raised about whether rabbis from older, established synagogues might bless and assist young rabbis who are attempting to start something new. After some discussion among the Jewish members of the small group, Tim Keel, pastor of Jacob"s Well in Kansas City, spoke up. He told the story of Eli and Samuel, found at the beginning of 1 Samuel, and of how the very old prophet, Eli, and the young boy and prophet-to-be, Samuel, formed a mutually beneficial and nonhierarchical relationship.
When Tim finished, silence ensued. Then a rabbi quietly said, ‘‘Yasher koach."" Shawn told me later that"s a Yiddish version of the Hebrew yishar kochachah, which means, ‘‘More strength to you."" He also told me that it"s a traditional expression of appreciation and respect for an interpretation of Torah.
It was a moment of beautiful truth.
Thanks, Tony, for this beautiful retelling of our time together. As they say, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
For more about our groundbreaking January 2006 meeting and its continuing resonances, please click here.
Some of our Christian colleagues are having a bit of a blog & comment-fest around the future of the terms “emergent” and “emerging” to describe their work:
It’s hardly a new conversation for them, but rather goes back at least to 2005.
So what’s in a name? Brian McLaren and his conversation partners make some reference to political implications, especially vis-a-vis the 2008 elections, but there’s little exploration of the link between types of spiritual community-building and modes of political action. Kester Brewin’s conversation stays more or less at the meta-level (where he intended it to be, I think). Steve Knight’s discussion concerns language as a description of action; one commenter, Wayne, writes, “In the same way, as the number of churches deal with the change in approach, emergent will be redundant and it may just be ‘church".” What’s interesting about this (Christian) emergent discussion is how theological and ekklesia-focused it is; there is little attention paid to the organizational structure of these new groups, still less to how they actually spend their time (worship? social service? social change? evangelism? learning? personal growth?).
Over on our side of the fence, we’ve tended to be concerned with organizational structures. Thus, a group that rejects denominational structures and rabbinic authority is, hey presto, an “independent minyan.” But that hasn’t necessarily helped things. Some people like to use “independent minyan” or “indie minyan” as synecdoche, to refer to the phenomenon as a whole; it’s occurred all too often in some of the recent reporting on the S3K-Mechon Hadar Survey. The problem is that whatever else they may be, new communities such as Brooklyn Jews, IKAR, Jews in the Woods, Kavana, Kavod House, Kol Tzedek, Mitziut, Nashuva, Riverway, Saviv, Yavneh, etc., simply aren’t independent minyanim.
Most people aren’t interested in terms at all; they’re busy doing the work that they set out to do, and don’t have much interest in what it’s called, so long as it gets done. Certainly there are other metaphors one might use to describe these differences, but the initial point I want to make here is that for now, our conversations about distinctions among the “independent minyan” vs. the “rabbi-led emergent” vs. something else are letting internal organizational structure drive the discussion, or, if you will, letting ontology recapitulate phylogeny. Indeed, our survey data does show significant distinctions among “independent minyanim,” “rabbi-led emergent communities,” and “alternative emergent communities” (and yes, there’s some truth to the claim that the “alternative” category is a bit kitchen sink-like, but we do say our report is preliminary).
This initial point - the priority of organizational structure - leads to my second point: underlying these organizational differences, however, are significant similarities: commitments to community-based (rather than inner-directed) spiritual expression, deep hospitality, democratic worship, sustained confrontation with tradition, theologically-informed social change, blurring of the sacred/secular divide, and so on. Perhaps “emergent” is not the ideal term to capture these big ideas; “emerging” may be a slightly generic, though it doesn’t have the richness associated with “emergence.” Still, for now, “emergent” is serving an important purpose: to capture in a single word or phrase (”Jewish Emergent”), one not dependent on organizational structure, the broad swathe of new spiritual communities that have sprung up over the past decade or so.
And this leads to my final point, which is about where all of this is headed. I think the Christian Emergent debate about labels is more productive than what has (or, rather, hasn’t) transpired among Jewish Emergent leaders. Brian, Kester, Steve, and others are exploring the meaning of their work and looking for ways communicate that meaning not only to themselves but more broadly to the Church as a whole, in the ultimate hope that Christendom might reconsider the way it lives out its faith. In contrast, the “Jewish Emergent” conversation seems aimed less at effecting change within the broader institutional community than at coming up with new forms that at best ignore the mainstream. The broad conversations that do occur, often facilitated by mainstream institutions or by funders, mostly are framed as “us-vs.-them,” rather than as “we,” and there is relatively little visioning of how Jewish Emergent might shape klal Yisrael.
The question very few people seem to be asking (admittedly, emergent types just do rather than spend time asking questions) is whether these developments ultimately will result in reform or revolution in existing ecclesial institutions like churches and synagogues (as Wayne suggests above), or whether we ought to be looking at new ways of mapping the organized religious world. Some independent minyanim — Minyan Koleinu, Altshul, PicoEgal — already are finding physical homes in synagogues; whether that means they eventually will assimilate into one another remains to be seen. Some “synagogue-like” rabbi-led communities may move in non-synagogue directions. Speaking personally, I’ve been a member of IKAR all but since its founding: when we “grow up,” I don’t know that we’ll be a synagogue, or even that we want to. And the alternative communities are pushing the organizational envelope furthest of all.
Perhaps Emergent Village and Sojourners have more in common with each other than they do with churches, seminaries, and denominations. Among Jewish emergents, perhaps the independent minyan Kehilat Hadar has more in common with the yeshiva at Mechon Hadar than with the synagogue Anshe Chesed; perhaps the rabbi-led emergent community IKAR has more in common with the social justice group Progressive Jewish Alliance than with Temple Beth Am; perhaps the alternative community Kavod House has more in common with Boston’s Jewish Community Relations Council than with Chabad House (denominational differences notwithstanding). And what that might mean for klal Yisrael — beyond the constraints of our existing institutions — is an exciting conversation just waiting to happen.
Steven, Elie, Michelle, and I cite many of the articles in our report on emergent communities — though again, it’s important to recognize that the Zeek articles and symposia focus exclusively on independent minyanim like Darkhei Noam, Hadar, Kol Zimrah, Mission Minyan, etc., not rabbi-led emergent communities such as Kavana, IKAR, Kol Tzedek, etc., nor alternatives like Kavod House, Riverway, etc.
[As of 12/13, please check here for link updates.]
Over the past few years, we have seen an important new phenomenon in Jewish life: the creation of dozens of independent minyanim, spiritual communities, alternative worship services, and emergent congregations. This rich array adds diverse opportunities for worship, learning, social justice work, community-building and spiritual expression.
We knew very little about the thousands of people associated with these new endeavors. Who are they? What are their concerns? How do they feel about the communities they’re creating, joining, and building? Why do they participate?
To answer these questions, the S3K Synagogue Studies Institute, in collaboration with Mechon Hadar, conducted a survey designed by the prominent sociologist Steven M. Cohen in partnership with Rabbi Elie Kaunfer and Shawn Landres. Our goal was to find out more about the participants, members, partners, and “acquaintances” of these new spiritual communities. The results of this work is the first ever portrait of the interests, values, and concerns of a critical innovative turn in American Judaism.
Please go here to download the report and related files.
To take part in Mechon Hadar’s hosted discussion of the report and/or to suggest issues and questions for further analysis, please go here.
For links to coverage of the survey results, as well as additional blogposts related to both the results and the November 28 New York Times story by Neela Banerjee, please click here.
Responding to last week’s New York Times story, some commentators have been noting the parallels with the Emerging Church in the Christian world. See my article with emerging church expert Ryan Bolger, which appeared this summer in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (free abstract, institutional subscription required for full text; a shorter version also appeared in Sh’ma, but it’s not online). See also this Synablog roundup, this Theoblogy reflection, and these BolgBlog roundups (1, 2, 3, 4) from the January 2006 gathering of Jewish & Christian emergent leaders hosted by S3K and Emergent Village.
(For more from Synablog about Jewish Emergent, dating back to December 30th, 2005, click here.)
Over the past few years, we have seen an important new phenomenon in Jewish life: the creation of dozens of independent minyanim, spiritual communities, alternative worship services, and emergent congregations. This rich array adds diverse opportunities for worship, learning, social justice work, community-building and spiritual expression. These new communities have welcomed friends and family members of all ages and backgrounds, from all walks of life, including Jews and non-Jews (and not-yet-Jews).
We know very little about the thousands of people associated with these new endeavors. Who are they? What are their concerns? How do they feel about the communities they’re creating, joining, and building? Why do they participate?
To answer these questions, the S3K Synagogue Studies Institute, in collaboration with Mechon Hadar, has launched a survey designed by the prominent sociologist Steven M. Cohen in partnership with Rabbi Elie Kaunfer and myself (Shawn Landres). Our goal is to find out more about the participants, members, partners, and “acquaintances” of these new spiritual communities. The results of this work will be a portrait of the interests, values, and concerns of a critical innovative turn in American Judaism.
If you are connected with such a community, we hope you will join with us in making this research endeavor a success by participating in the survey. Please click here (http://www.communitysurvey.info) to complete the survey. We think you"ll find the survey engaging and enjoyable to complete. It"s not too long – it should take no longer than 15 minutes. Your answers are confidential.
When completed, we’ll have a portrait of this vital segment of American Jews. If you have any questions, please write to us at Synagogue 3000.
…what we are seeing is not the loss of Jewish practice in North America. We are seeing young people who want to build something new that follows a different vision of what an institution can be and that will cater in a different way to the needs of American Jews for meaningful Jewish engagement.
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