Summary
The quorum of ten required for certain Jewish ritual and liturgical acts, which A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism: Parting Ways with Judith Butler reads as the representative structure of Jewish republicanism: a doubly heterogeneous ritual unit, drawn representatively from preexisting social groups and large enough to hold a range of experiences and interpretations, so that the fundamental religious unit is not the individual believer (PDF p.64-66).
Details
- Tucker introduces it as “a group of ten adults (not necessarily adults)” required for certain ritual and liturgical acts (PDF p.64). Footnote 30 records that orthodox and haredi minyanim limit membership to adult males, but that the legal basis for the exclusion is late and contested: the Shulhan Arukh specifies ten men, while the Mishnah (Megillah 4:3) and Maimonides (Mishneh Torah, “The Laws of Prayer,” 8:4) specify only the number. Rabbi Phillip Sigel (also spelled “Sigal” in the same footnote, as printed) argued the exclusion was a minhag, a custom, rather than law; other members of the 1973 Conservative law committee justified counting women instead as a takana, a repair, “to correct an injustice or to improve the religious and ethical life of the community”; David Weiss HaLivni, on the 1979 review committee, would codify inclusion only after a generation of women understood themselves obligated to pray, a minyan’s function depending on members understanding their participation as not optional (PDF p.64-65).
- Mishnah Megilla (4:3) derives “congregation” (eida) from “to witness”, the witnesses being the twelve spies of Numbers 13, one from each tribe, who after forty days agreed on the land’s fertility but split ten to two over its inhabitants; the ten’s report led Israel to demand a return to Egypt, and the people were sentenced to forty more years of wandering, one for each day of scouting, the two dissenters Caleb and Yehoshua Ben Nun surviving (PDF p.65).
- The slide from twelve witnesses to a public of ten — the number of the spies whose position is later excoriated — is read neither as a model of homogeneity nor merely as a floor for heterogeneity, but as “a tension meant to be sustained, an acknowledgment both of the enduring allure of political purity, and of the importance of resisting that allure over and again” (PDF p.73). Because community is defined by contingency and temporariness, “citizens of the minyan have reason to treat their political opponents as people who will likely at some not-too-distant future moment, be their political allies” (PDF p.74).
- The minyan also functions as a structure of governance: its multiple perspectives serve fair valuation, and Rambam (Maimonides) suggests that the practice of praying in a minyan allowed public readers well-versed in the relevant texts to read for the benefit of the illiterate (Maimonides, “The Laws of Prayer,” 8:8–9) (PDF p.66).
- In Tucker’s closing argument the minyan supplies republicanism’s “mode and reach of representation”, as Ceremonial law supplies its practice; a parliament so organized would not require parties to identify as Zionist to join a governing coalition (PDF p.73, p.75).
Related pages
A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism: Parting Ways with Judith Butler, Jewish republicanism, Ceremonial law, Moses Mendelssohn