By: Benjamin Maron

Many of our communities start off meeting in a living room or other non-synagogue space. While this provides a level of intimacy and comfort for community members, patient it also often means that we are scrambling for resources. A common phenomenon is the “BYOS” (bring your own siddur (prayer book)) service, price where participants are encouraged to show up for services with their own prayerbooks, sildenafil and havurah or minyan organizers who have extras bring those too.

The resulting hodgepodge selection of siddurim (prayer books) means that people will participate in services with a familiar siddur, but this can provide some unwanted confusion in calling out pages. “We’ll start with Yedid Nefesh on page… uh….” One solution is to make a grid for siddurim (prayer books), listing prayers or other liturgical markers down one side, the various siddurim across the top, and filling in all of the page numbers in the grid. It can be a lot of work to compile these. Luckily, much of the work has already been done for you.

For Friday night services, Kol Zimrah has prepared this grid [doc] showing ten different siddurim.

For Saturday morning services, Minyan Tikvah and Segulah have similar grids to hand out. You can find the former here [xls] and the latter here [xls].

Tremont Street Shul has their grids for both Friday nights and Saturday mornings on their website.

Feel free to use these as examples for your own minyan or havurah. You can add any additional siddurim to them, or remove any that are not used in your community.

Benjamin Maron attended his first NHC Summer Institute as an Everett Fellow in 2006. He is on the NHC Board of Directors. He is chairing the 2010 Chesapeake Retreat.

By: Benjamin Maron

When starting a new havurah or minyan, salve or getting involved in Havurah Judaism for the first time, link many of us are asked by our peers – both synagogue members and unaffiliated Jews alike – how these communities can function without a professional leader, usually a rabbi, in charge.

There are several ways to explain this model, the most common being that with enough knowledge, resources, and support, any of us can lead a community in prayer, any of us can offer a thought-provoking d’var Torah (word of Torah) or text study, any of us can contribute to life-cycle events. In a paper [PDF] presented to a conference of rabbis, Mitch Chefitz framed the history of rabbis’ roles in Jewish communities as learners and teachers of the tradition through study of Talmud and later the Shulchan Aruch, the rise of mysticism, the broadening of religious authority, and the transition of communities led largely by rabbis to other forms of leadership. The paper also addresses the significant changes in religious and spiritual authority from changes such as the proliferation of siddurim (prayer books), the formations of “communities that are sustained by niggunim [songs without words],” JDate, and “Jewish leaders … being tacitly ordained from below rather than from above.” How does this apply to us in the Havurah world? What can we learn about how our members are resources for community leadership? What is, and what should be, our model of religious and spiritual authority? Where might we need leadership, knowledge, or resources not available within our communities, and where might we find people or information to guide us?

Read the paper “Religious and Spiritual Authority in the New Jewish Paradigm” [PDF] in full… and feel free to share thoughts, and any answers to the concluding questions, in the comments.

Benjamin Maron attended his first NHC Summer Institute as an Everett Fellow in 2006. He is on the NHC Board of Directors. He is chairing the 2010 Chesapeake Retreat.

By: Benjamin Maron

A collection of resources for helping you and your community further supplement and explore prayers and Torah, physician plan services, misbirth and more:

• Gather The People is a downloadable resources for preparing divrei Torah (words of Torah) and more.
• Mechon Mamre lets you print sections from the Torah side-by-side in Hebrew and English, medical and in several other formats.
• ScrollScraper lets you print a tikkun page (page for preparing to chant/learn Torah) for your Torah Reading.
• Siddur Chaveirim Kol Yisrael, by the Progressive Chavurah/Siddur Committee, is a Friday night and Festival Evening siddur. It features transliteration, traditional text, gender neutral translations, and a multiplicity of voices in the commentary.
• Siddur Eit Ratzon, by Joe Rosenstein, follows the same format as Siddur Chaveirim Kol Yisrael and has many kavvanot and meditations, as well as guideposts for learning and experiencing Jewish prayer services.
• L’chu N’ran’nah is an egalitarian bencher used at the weddings and in the homes of many NHC members.
• Az Yashir Moshe is a printable bencher in PDF format.
• Green & Just Celebrations is a booklet published by Jews United for Justice, containing specific suggestions for how families can make purchasing choices for weddings, bar/bat mitzvahs, etc., in ways that are mindful of workers’ rights and environmental impact.
• HebCal is a perpetual Hebrew calendar that can be localized to your ZIP code.
• Shabbat People, is a web application for signing up participants for services.

Benjamin Maron attended his first NHC Summer Institute as an Everett Fellow in 2006. He is on the NHC Board of Directors. He is chairing the 2010 Chesapeake Retreat.

By: Benjamin Maron

Many havurot and minyanim have their policies or guidelines available on their websites, viagra dosage as handouts available at services, patient or as documents that are sent to new members of their email lists.

Looking through them, one can get a feel for the variety of models that our communities use for governance, membership, services, and more. Feel free to peruse the following examples, discuss them in the comments below, and make use of them as guidelines for your own community.

• Havurah Norms [doc] outlines one anonymous havurah’s mission statement, history, and policies.
• Kol Zimrah’s FAQ and guidelines for service leaders [doc].
• Tikkun Leil Shabbat’s Footnotes for the Perplexed: glossary, guidelines, and frequently asked questions.
• Ben Dreyfus wrote guidelines for giving a d’var Torah (word of Torah) at Hadar [doc].
• Q’s and A’s about Fabrangen: what to expect as a new member and how to get involved.
• Gather The People‘s community organizing resources include different models of governance, planning, developing, etc.
• From Two Heads of Lettuce, a guide to making your community’s potluck work, including an introduction to the two-table system (accommodating different kashrut (dietary law) standards).
• And a guide to pluralistic meat potlucks on the Mah Rabu blog.
• Guidelines from Hadar on being inclusive in davening (prayer) without sacrificing quality.
• Suggested guidelines for hiring people in lay-led minyans.
• A collection of links and resources for getting started or improving your independent community – what has been coined “the 21st-century Jewish Catalog (alpha version).”

Benjamin Maron attended his first NHC Summer Institute as an Everett Fellow in 2006. He is on the NHC Board of Directors. He is chairing the 2010 Chesapeake Retreat.

By: Adina Rosenbaum
This article was inspired by a workshop offered at the 2009 NHC Summer Institute on havurah governance.

For a community to function, approved there has to be some group of people empowered to make decisions. Different communities use different governance structures, illness varying in the number of people involved in leadership, sale the authority they have, the amount they interact with the larger community, and the way they reach decisions among themselves. Below is one possible model for havurah or minyan governance, based on the governance structure of Tikkun Leil Shabbat (TLS), a havurah in Washington, DC that meets every third Friday night.

TLS has a coordinating committee of 13-15 members. Although having a smaller committee may be more efficient, having a 13-15 member team distributes the work so that members of the committee do not burn out, and allows participation of people with different skills and from different parts of the community in the group. At the same time, it keeps the committee small enough for its members to know each other well, for meetings to be manageable, and for everyone to be able to fit in an apartment living room (very important for urban communities). The committee members are responsible both for engaging in long-term planning and envisioning and for taking on tasks each time the havurah meets, such as setting up, cleaning up, greeting people, or leading singing. (TLS has a Google spreadsheet with the roles that need to be filled each time it meets that both members of the coordinating committee and others in the community use to sign up for those roles.)

Every year or so, the coordinating committee’s members choose to rotate off or stay on the committee, and any openings are filled through a short application process. Except for a few people who are in charge of specific logistical tasks, such as making sure the spreadsheet gets filled out or sending out e-mails about upcoming gatherings, all members of the committee are equal. The committee meets every few months, with committee members taking turns facilitating the meetings, and makes decisions at meetings based on consensus. Consensus-based decision-making generally results in issues being discussed at length, which can be time-consuming, but it helps ensure that all members of the committee’s voices are heard and that all members leave the meeting with some sense of ownership over the group’s decisions.

In addition, the committee has a bunch of standing subcommittees (including a holiday committee, a finance committee, and a davening committee) and creates other temporary subcommittees as needed. Temporary subcommittees have been created, for example, to think through TLS’s co-sponsorship policy, to create a historical archive of meeting minutes and policy decisions, and to do an initial read-through of applications. Figuring out what to delegate to subcommittees requires balancing the desire for the committee as a whole to maintain control over the direction and functioning of the havurah/minyan, with the recognition that some discussions are hard to have in large groups and that it is not a good use of everyone’s time for everyone to have to discuss every issue. The subcommittees are authorized to make some decisions, mostly related to the minyan/havurah’s day-to-day functioning, on their own. The Davening Committee, for example, can find people to lead services without having to check in with the full committee. Often, though, the subcommittee is authorized just to come up with a suggestion that must be brought back to the full committee before it can be implemented.

Because decisions can’t always wait until the next full committee meeting, the TLS coordinating committee has a system for making decisions that must be made quickly over email. When someone comes across an issue that needs immediate attention, that person decides the importance of the issue (with some input from others on the committee). If the issue is of minimal importance, the person whose attention it came to makes a decision on it, then emails the full committee to explain what happened, the choices that were made, and the values that informed those choices. If the issue is of great importance, the person to whose attention it came sends an email to the whole committee explaining the issue, setting out a question that needs answering, and providing a time-frame within which responses must be provided. After the stated time-frame, the person will make a decision based on the responses and send an email to the committee explaining the decision and stating that the decision will be implemented unless there is overwhelming opposition. This decision-making procedure allows decisions to be made quickly, without in-person meetings, but still provides multiple opportunities for members of the committee to weigh in and have their voices heard.

Adina Rosenbaum attended her first NHC Summer Institute as an Everett Fellow in 2007.