Less Than Ten Rabbis Can'T Daven Together Poem by gershon hepner

LESS THAN TEN RABBIS CAN'T DAVEN TOGETHER

Less than ten rabbis can't daven together,
but ten humble shoemakers can make a minyan.
All Jews seem to think it's a good thing to bother
Hashem. They're like shoemakers causing a bunion
when making shoes fitting their wearers so tightly
their feet become injured. That's why rabbis pray
in the morning and afternoon, and, of course, nightly:
they're asking relief for their feet made of clay.

Simon Yisrael Feuerman ("A Motley Minyan, Simon Yisrael Feuerman, Tablet,5/8/12) , a psychotherapist in New Jersey, is director of The New Center for Advanced Psychotherapy Studies, writes:

They're frustrating, and sometimes broken, but the men in my shul make services divine
The people we see at shul get into our bloodstream. But still, try as one might, you cannot learn what is on a man's mind or know too much about him just by davening next to him. But a glimpse you can get: Here is a man geshikt (put together) , here a man tzu'brochen (a little broken) , here is a man at odds with himself.
A week before Passover, I saw a man bent over a book of Tehillim—the Psalms, often read on behalf of a sick person. I asked for whom he was saying Tehillim—for his mother, his father, a member of his family? "For my wife, " he said with reticence, his voice getting progressively less audible. "I have a rough ‘shalom bayis, ' " a lack of peace at home, he continued. "She is an erupting volcano before the holidays. I pray that it won't be too bad this year."…
After all, what is the Yiddish saying? Nine rabbis cannot daven together, but 10 illiterate shoemakers—a minyan they make. (Nayn rabbonim kennen kayn minyan machen, auber tzehn shuster'n …) Perhaps in shul we come to terms with the broken-ness in all of us: the part of us that is out of touch, out of step.
For better or worse (and I think for better) the shul is my home. In these sacred precincts where odd bits of humanity and sacredness commingle—bits of light and loss, hubris and humility, the hobo and the prince, the schlep and the schlepped—I watch myself and my contemporaries grow old as we say amens and chant verses and see people and things that alternately torture and touch us.

5/9/12 #10143