Most boards and organizations to which I have belonged over the years have rules about a quorum necessary to conduct business. A certain number or percentage of the membership is required before a motion can be passed or any other important affairs can be conducted. It is not surprising that synagogue boards have similar rules, but it may surprise some to note that synagogue services also have a requirement for a quorum. Traditionally ten adult men (above the age of bar mitzvah, i.e. 13) were required for a "minyan," a prayer quorum, for certain prayers to be said and for the Torah to be read publicly. In recent years, more liberal congregations, including ours, have included adult women (above bat mitzvah age, i.e. 12) in the ten needed.
This does not mean that one cannot pray without a minyan. Individuals can certainly pray on their own, though when they do so they should omit the communal prayers that require a quorum. In our synagogue, if there are fewer than ten, we still pray together omitting those elements until the tenth person arrives. The ancient rabbis teach in the Talmud, the great compendium of Jewish law and lore, that the recitation of any prayer of sanctification requires a minyan. These include the Kedushah prayer which calls on us to sanctify God’s name in the world, just as He is sanctified on high by the angelic chorus which sings: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts." It also includes the Kaddish prayer, an Aramaic text which asks the congregation to offer praise to God. Both of these prayers require congregational responses to the prayer leader. In the absence of a congregation, i.e. a minyan, we don’t say them. The Kaddish prayer appears numerous times in the service, sometimes recited by the leader alone to mark the end of a section of the worship service and other times the leader is joined by any mourners present who traditionally say this prayer during the year of mourning for a parent or other relatives and on the anniversary of the death of a loved one. This tradition of the Kaddish as a mourner's prayer adds an additional urgency to the effort to gather a minyan regularly so the mourners can fulfill their obligations.
Aside from these omissions, when there is no minyan, the Amidah, the main prayer of the service, which is generally recited silently first, then repeated aloud for the benefit of those in the congregation who cannot read it themselves, is said silently only. There is no call to prayer (Barchu), when there is no minyan to call together. When we have no quorum, we do not take out the sacred scrolls of the Torah and read from them, though one may always study scripture privately from the printed Bibles. There are a few other minor adjustments we must make in our worship when there is not an official congregation present.
Where does this tradition of the minyan of ten come from? Is not God present no matter how many or how few turn up for services? It is true that the Talmud finds prooftexts for God’s presence not only with the ten who gather for prayer, but also with the three sages who sit as a tribunal to judge a case, and with two students who study the sacred texts together, and even with one single individual who mentions God’s name. However for these "matters of holiness" that I’ve enumerated above, the Talmud requires that we bring ten adults together as a quorum.
Some have suggested that we might derive the number ten from the story of Abraham’s negotiations to save the city of Sodom from destruction. When God reveals His plans to the patriarch to annihilate the inhabitants of that wicked city, Abraham objects to the killing of the righteous together with the wicked. "Suppose there are fifty righteous men in the city, would you still destroy it?" he asks the Lord. God says that He would not destroy the city if there were fifty righteous men. Abraham then proceeds to negotiate and God concedes on each point that He would not destroy the city if He could find 45 or 30 or 20 or even 10 righteous men in Sodom. The discussion ends at ten and we can only assume that this is an indication that, in a city where there are at least ten righteous people, there is still hope for it to be saved. So we too search for ten righteous each morning for our daily prayers in the hopes that we may save the soul of our city too.
The Talmud itself uses a more technical argument to reach the number ten. Since God says in Leviticus, "I will be sanctified in the midst of the children of Israel," we look for another place in Scripture where the same expression (in the midst) occurs to find out just how many people are required. In Numbers, in the story of the spy mission, the Israelites are ordered to "separate from the midst of this evil congregation" referring to those spies who have come back from Canaan with their negative report. Since there were ten members in that "evil congregation," we learn that any congregation, wicked or righteous, requires ten people to conduct any matter involving the sanctification of God’s name. This derivation, though not as pretty as the story of the righteous ten who might save a city, is reassuring for us who may not consider ourselves on the level of the righteous. We learn that even a congregation of sinners can invoke God’s name and proclaim His holiness. There is hope for all of us.
Even in earlier generations when we imagine our ancestors praying regularly with great fervor, small congregations did not always get the requisite ten for a minyan. The Talmud says that when God arrives in the synagogue and does not find ten, He get angry and quotes Isaiah (50:2), "Why, when I came, was no one there, why, when I called, would none respond?" Rav Huna, a third century teacher, suggests that one might try counting the ark with its Torah scrolls in place of a tenth person, if you have nine already. When his contemporary, Rav Nachman, objects to this and points out the obvious, that the ark is not a person, Rav Huna backs down and suggests that we could perhaps count nine who appear to be ten either because they are spread out in the synagogue or clumped together. These suggestions are all rejected, though some synagogues have been known to count a Torah scroll on occasion as the tenth "man." There is also a tradition that a boy who has not yet reached Bar Mitzvah, but knows to whom we offer our prayers, may be counted in a pinch. Usually, the synagogue officers hand him a Bible to hold and he becomes an honorary "adult" temporarily. The justification for this leniency is that if we wait long enough, he will eventually take his place among the minyan of adults and so we may count him now provisionally. Since we’ve begun counting women as well, I have allowed a young girl to serve in the same capacity when needed. The rabbis who permit this do so only for the tenth person, while all the others must be adults already.
One hopes, however, to resort to such strategems only on rare occasions. The idea of requiring a quorum for certain communal prayers and for the reading of the Torah places an obligation upon every member of the community to shoulder the responsibility for maintaining the daily minyan. Though our doors are always open to guests and we encourage non-Jewish visitors to stop by, we really need ten adult Jews to make the minyan and it is them in particular that we invite to join us daily at 7:00 a.m. on weekdays, 9:30 a.m. on weekends and major holidays and Friday nights at 6:00 p.m. to make a minyan at Temple Israel at 66 Salmon Street, in Manchester. Saint or sinner, all are welcome, just maybe if we have the right numbers we might save the city with our prayers or, at least, begin with ourselves.