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news on our virtual, asynchronous minyan

Posted on 1 December 201023 March 2011 by erin

Our minyan (of sorts) is growing!

We are working with the publisher to secure rights to share the daily Kaddishim publicly by podcast (and links directly embedded in related posts, too, of course), but in the meantime, we are sharing the recordings privately on request by sharing a Dropbox link. (Details here.)

Let’s pause for a gloss, from Reb Deb’s glossary:

minyan: Literally “number” or “counting.” The quorum of 10 adult Jewish men (or in contemporary egalitarian communities, 10 Jewish adults) required to hold a prayer service and recite all the prayers; in the absence of a minyan, certain prayers are omitted or recited privately rather than publically. Also required for public Torah reading.

For our purposes, the “minyan” is our community of listeners. But we’re not all Jewish. (So far we’re all adults.) We don’t gather physically but virtually, by internet. And we don’t gather at the same time, exactly—we’re asynchronous.

Here’s how it works: Every day, at some point during the 24-hour period in Pacific time, I prepare a new recording and place it in the Dropbox for Mira and any others who have asked to listen. People listen when they can. Mira tends to listen very late at night, often spilling into the next day.

I suspect that not everybody listens every single day, or to every single recording, but I am committed to recording every day, and Mira is committed to listening to every recording. For practical reasons, though, she sometimes hears several recordings in a row several days later—for instance, during her trip to a conference in New Orleans, when internet connectivity issues precluded daily listening. Judging from the comments here, though, some people are indeed joining us in a daily ritual, and that is both slightly terrifying for me (yikes! I only get to do one take each day, and some definitely go better than others!) and incredibly heartening.

please spread the word

That this project speaks to people—and a truly diverse audience it is—moves me beyond words. If it speaks to you, please share it with others who might be interested. Every post here on Beit Malkhut has a “Share This” button at bottom that you can use to share by email or on Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Blogger, MySpace, Digg, AIM Share, Stumbleupon, Messenger, and more.

some news

  • Last night our community of listeners became a group of eleven, exceeding the magic number for a minyan by one. A minyan and a spare!
  • Today our community welcomed the first member that neither Mira nor I already knew “in real life.” Wonderful!
  • She came to us through my rebbe, who mentioned our project on her blog for the Times-Union newspaper in Troy, NY.

please share your experiences

Please share your thoughts, reactions, questions, frustrations, … (recipes?) in the Comments. We especially invite you to add names and memories of those you mourn by commenting on our yahrtzeits page.

2 thoughts on “news on our virtual, asynchronous minyan”

  1. Reb Deb says:
    2 December 2010 at 06:40

    Kaddish, of course, is one of the key prayers requiring a minyan, for reasons obvious & subtle.

    Mira — I’m assuming — knows full well that her listening is encompassed all on one day, Jewishly speaking. No spilling over into anything but the next hour., though midnight is relevant in some contexts, such as the Mishnaic discussion of the best/permItted time to say the evening Sh’ma.

    Reply
    1. erin says:
      3 December 2010 at 22:58

      Aha! So does Jewish teaching conform to the rule my college roommate Barb stated? We were both exhausted and disoriented in the wake of an all-nighter, and I was trying to articulate what happened today, what was yesterday, confused whether it was still yesterday or tomorrow. She said sharply:

      “Erin! It’s not tomorrow until you’ve slept. That’s the rule. Remember that!”

      Reply

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