For Heaven's Sake, Quit Fighting

This past Thursday, I got up later than usual, and as my only option for prayer in a minyan, I went to the Shtiebl in a nearby Bnei Brak neighborhood.  A Shtiebl is a kind of prayer house that's not necessarily a proper synagogue associated with a particular community, but rather just a structure men come together to pray in.  Such places are often referred to in the plural, Shtieblach, Yiddish for rooms, indicating that there are a number of prayer rooms all in one place.  This a phenomenon that is ubiquitous to areas that have a very high density of religious families, such that the overflow from the more established synagogues (by overflow I mean people who get up late, since it's rare to find a synagogue that holds weekday prayers later than 7:30 am, or those who can't find their place in a proper synagogue) is great enough to support such a place.  

I arrived just before 9 o'clock.  At such a late hour of the morning, I know what kind of a minyan I'll find, and I cringe at the thought, but the alternative is praying by myself in a house full of children on summer vacation, which is bound to be a far more painful experience.  You see, the latecomers are mostly of two persuasions: those who are in no hurry, such as the retired, unemployed, or teenaged, and those in a great hurry, because they got up late and need to start their work day.  There are a very few, like myself, who got up late but are in no great hurry, because they know there's no sense in rushing your prayers - then they will just be a bunch of mumbling and page-turning, all the while glancing at the clock.  No connection to God here!  Another thing to keep in mind is that the nature of the place is such that the organization of the individual minyanim is very loose. In the case of this particular shtiebl, there is a single aged gabbai who drifts from one crowd to the next, making sure the honors of blessing the Torah are properly auctioned off (sometimes for a little as 10 ILS, but it all adds up), and not much more. Each minyan starts when someone goes up to the lectern and starts belting out the start of the prayers. And so it's not uncommon to have one of the aforementioned types of latecomers leading the service, and some of the other kind in the crowd, grinding their teeth with anxiety and frustration. 

The shtiebl at 7:30 in the morning. In an hour both the
covered area and the outside will be packed. 

This morning was no exception. The man who was leading our prayers was a tall, middle-aged individual who didn't seem to be in any sort of a hurry.  He carefully said the introductory Psalms, chanted the three paragraphs of the Shema dutifully, and everything was humming along smoothly, if not as quickly as possible. And then we arrived at the silent prayer. Once ten participants have finished their silent prayer, the leader begins the repetition of the prayer, said aloud, with the congregation answering each blessing with a resounding "amen". The halachic sources make it clear that starting the repetition with less than 9 members of the congregation answering with an "amen" is bad for  the spiritual health of the prayer leader. 

So our hazzan, in the vernacular, starts looking around and motioning to those who appear to be finished, in order to confirm their status (all communication at this moment must be done in utter silence so as not to disturb the majority of the congregation, who are still deep in prayer).  But some of them aren't looking at him,  or don't respond to his gestures, and he's having a lot of trouble taking a reliable tally.  He keeps trying, and a minute, two minutes pass. It's clear that well over ten of us have finished the prayer and are waiting for him to start the repetition.  A couple of men try to motion to our hazzan that it's safe to move on, but he ignores them.  He wants to be sure of the count.  A twenty-something clean-cut man, standing at the back of the room, whose face says he's running late to his office job, clears his throat.  A moment later, a soft but clearly audible "Go ahead" is heard from his direction.  These also go ignored, the goal of nine definitely and undoubtedly available men still unreached.  Another moment of silence, and our impatient young man in the back turns into an angry heckler.  "What are you waiting for?  Can't you see that you've get nine answerers already?"  The hazzan calmly replied, "I don't know if I have nine yet.  Let me count.  I know what I'm doing," and continued to make his tally.  The heckler was nonplussed, "Oh, come on already!  Your holding all of us up!"  This time his plight was echoed, in a calmer fashion, by other members of the crowd.  "He's right, you should start already."  "There's no need to wait any longer, you're needlessly delaying the prayer."  In a moment, the repetition was underway, in the same even, unhurried tone as the rest of the prayers had been.

At that moment, I looked around the room, and was not surprised to discover that, like me, many of the other men present found the situation quite uncomfortable.  The problematic part was that they were both right.  On the one hand, no one wanted to be leading the repetition without being sure there were nine attentive members of the congregation answering their every blessing, nor did they want to pressure anyone else into doing so.  On the other hand, this hazzan did seem to be ridiculously thorough about counting his answerers, even after at half the people in the room, who numbered more than 40 persons, had finished the silent prayer.  On the third hand, the young heckler's remarks had felt too harsh and too vicious (I did not translate here the full flavorfulness of his words).  I felt like some kind of making up and apologizing needed to happen before we could all go on praying together.  But it's probably better that nobody demanded such a thing, since it would certainly have made the impatient heckler even more angry.

Within a few short minutes we were ready for the Torah reading service, and the venerable gabbai took his place by the lectern and began auctioning off the honors of opening the Ark and blessing on the holy scroll in his gravelly voice.  By this time, the tension from earlier had dissipated from the air, but the incident was not forgotten.  Nobody seemed interesting in paying a few coins for the sacred task of taking the Torah scroll from the Ark and pronouncing the blessings.  Nobody, that is, except for our hazzan who never lost his cool.  And now, with a little smug smile that may have only been a figment of my imagination, he offered 10 shekels, and the honors belonged to him.  What happened next, I already saw coming.  When the gabbai announced the opening of the Ark, the calm hazzan, instead of going up and doing it himself, motioned to his antagonist to do the task.  The young man hesitated for a fraction of a second, but knowing that he can't refuse to honor the Torah no matter what he thinks of the guy who put up the money, he went through with it.  His face, however, betrayed his bewilderment.  After that a Cohen and then a Levite were called up to say the blessing over the Torah reading, and lastly, the hazzan said the blessing, with a sweet smile on his face.