My most recent travels brought me to a community without a regular minyan. This is in stark contrast to my home, where I live within five minutes of one hundred different minyanim a day. Where I live, it is often easier to pray with a minyan than to pray without one. As such, being alone in prayer for several days was something that made me pause.
There is no question about the benefits of praying with a minyan, both halachichly and sociologically. As with almost all things in life however, benefits always come with accompanying disadvantages. Outbalanced though these disadvantages may be, it is important for us to be aware of their existence. One disadvantage of any group activity is losing sight of the thing that we are actually doing. We know that we do many things in groups that we would not otherwise do by ourselves. This, because we are usually less critical about doing something if everyone else around us is also doing it. We somehow feel that the endorsement of the group releases us from the standard need for awareness of that which we are doing. On some level, this is also what happens when we pray with a minyan. The minyan helps us forget what we are doing and the critical fact that we are standing in front of G-d
While on the road, I had the opportunity of being at an observation point near the top of the Rocky Mountains. One imagines that this is an ideal place to feel one’s existential loneliness in front of G-d. Thus, I was taken aback, though unfortunately not surprised, to see someone glued to her cell phone the whole time she was there. Apparently, the thought of being alone was not so comfortable.
The communications revolution has truly made it more difficult to feel alone. Gadgets that either put us in contact with others, or give us the impression of being in contact with others are more and more portable. The clever slogan for the telephones that can be used from airplanes summarizes it well – “Now, even the sky is not the limit.” As the various communications companies are happy to remind us, there is almost no place where we must be alone. Instead, we are constantly connected to the group. One result is that we forget our ultimate existential loneliness.
Being alone was a framework that could be taken for granted in the past. A man working in the fields would generally be alone with his Maker. But even when he came home, when he was alone, he was really alone. There were no communication devices to alter that situation. And as a result of the inevitable situations of being alone, it was almost impossible to hide behind the group. The solitude one regularly encountered in the past, however, is disappearing. Partly because of the advances in technology, but also partly because of our choice to constantly use that technology. Choosing to avoid loneliness is understandable – solitude can be very depressing and debilitating. It is appropriate to be involved in the life of the group – but only if we also have some time to truly be with ourselves. If we constantly choose to avoid it, we lose a very important dimension of our existence.
Loneliness is a very real feeling – a feeling of truth: We come into the world alone and we leave it alone. We are judged largely as individuals. By truly being aware of this fact, we are more in tune with our limitations and Thoreau’s “essential facts of life.” Such an awareness allows us to retain the proper modesty of a truly religious person.
Indeed, one of the most striking paradoxes in the Torah is that it refers to Moshe, the greatest man who ever lived, as the most humble of all men. It causes us to wonder how such a great man would not be aware of his own greatness. If we reflect more carefully, however, we understand that Moshe’s modesty did not come from self-deception but self-awareness. It is his wisdom that allowed him to understand his limits as an individual mortal man. A man, no matter how great, is strikingly insignificant in front of G-d. Thus, another one of our spiritual giants, King David, writes in Tehillim, “I am a worm and not a man.” This, because all men are more akin to worms than they are to G-d.
This is certainly not a call to avoid praying in a minyan. On the contrary, halacha teaches us that the benefits of praying in a minyan clearly outweigh the disadvantages. When we go as a group to a person in power, it is easier to lose sight of our frailty – there is a sense of being part of a greater unit, which somehow gives us the gumption to do things we otherwise would not. So too, with prayer. On the whole, the concept of minyan allows us to feel more comfortable in properly making requests of G-d in our prayers, something we are meant to do.
That being said, when we do have to pray by ourselves, we can experience something we do not allow ourselves to experience often enough — the fundamental reality of being alone.
