MINYAN AND THE MORE THAN HUMAN WORLD

There’s an important concept in the Jewish religious imagination that certain prayers can only be said in community. Prayers that can only be said in community include the Borchu (the call to prayer), the mourners Kaddish, reading from the Torah in public.  Certain blessings, such as Birkat Hamazon, the grace after meals, also have textual additions if there is a minyan of ten Jews (however defined) or three adults.

The core idea behind the demand for a minyan is that prayer is different in a community than done individually. And I agree.  Humans are not fully human unless we are bound up in community.  But what is a community?

The discussion of who counts towards a community in Judaism has exclusively focused on human beings. Thus there has been a long standing discussion of whether women should count, dating back to 1811 when women started to count in Reform Judaism.  There’s also a discussion about converts counting in the Talmud and how people under 13 don’t count because they are minors. 

But when I sit outside, surrounded by trees and birds and squirrels and bulbs breaking through the ground in late winter and onion grass, am I not in a community? How narrow is the view that only humans count in a community? Just as individual humans would not be fully human without community, so humans without a deep connection to the more than human world are not fully human either.