Origin 70 to 500 CE
The quorum required for communal prayer and for certain liturgical acts, the repetition of the standing prayer, the reading of the Torah, the sanctification, the mourner's Kaddish and the seven wedding blessings. Ten is the number, derived by the rabbis from a verse concerning the congregation of the scouts, and its effect is to make the most weighted parts of Jewish worship unavailable to a person praying alone. Who counts is the sharpest practical divide in contemporary Judaism: Orthodox practice counts ten adult men; Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative practice counts adults of either sex, the Conservative movement having ruled so in 1973 with individual congregations deciding for themselves; partnership congregations, which describe themselves as Orthodox, have adopted arrangements requiring ten men and ten women for certain parts of the service. Whether a quorum can be constituted over video was ruled on in opposite directions by different authorities during the coronavirus pandemic, with most Orthodox authorities refusing and most non-Orthodox permitting it.
Facts
Organisation
Category of StructureThe quorum required for Jewish communal prayer and certain liturgical acts 1 Its own record defines it as a quorum requirement rather than an institution, a shape none of the existing short categories captures. Who May BelongMen only 1Tradition: Orthodox Judaism Who May BelongWomen and men 2Tradition: Reform and Conservative Judaism Reach of Its AuthorityNo institutional authority; the standing is personal 1 A quorum, not an authority: it makes certain prayers possible and governs nobody Origins
Origin Period Status
Status TodayLiving tradition, practised today 1 Learn More
The Number Below Which the Community Is Not Present
The minyan is the quorum of ten required for communal prayer, and its logic is that certain sacred acts belong to the community rather than to the individual and cannot occur without it.
What requires ten
A minyan of ten is needed for the parts of the service that are held to require the presence of the congregation: the repetition of the standing prayer, the reading of the Torah, the responsive sanctifications, and, most keenly felt, the mourner Kaddish, which a bereaved person can recite only where ten are gathered. A person praying alone says a reduced service, omitting exactly those elements, so the difference the minyan makes is precise and visible.
Who counts
In Orthodox practice the ten are adult men, which ties the ability of a mourner to say Kaddish to the availability of a male quorum and has made the counting of women a defining division within Judaism: Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist communities count women in the minyan, and Orthodoxy does not. The requirement shapes Jewish settlement in a concrete way, since a community must be large enough to guarantee ten for daily prayer, and the effort to secure a minyan, especially for a mourner, is one of the ordinary labours of Jewish communal life.
Ten, Derived from a Complaint in the Wilderness
The requirement of ten adult participants for certain prayers is not a round convenience but a specific rabbinic derivation from scripture. The Talmud traces the number to the account in the book of Numbers of the twelve spies sent to scout Canaan, ten of whom returned with a discouraging report; that group of ten is called an evil congregation, and the rabbis reasoned from the word used there that a congregation, in the sense the law cares about, numbers at least ten.
From that reading followed a fixed list of acts that require the quorum to be present at all: the public reading of the Torah, the repetition of the standing prayer known as the Amidah, the recitation of the mourner's Kaddish, and the seven blessings recited at a wedding, among others, all of which a person praying alone may not perform in their full communal form. The requirement shaped synagogue life practically, since a small or declining community's ability to hold a full service depends on reliably finding ten. Reform Judaism, from the twentieth century, extended the count to women alongside men, while Orthodox practice has generally continued to count only men, so that the same historical derivation from a single verse now produces two different quorums in different parts of the same tradition.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Belongs to Tradition
Held Differently
Conservative practice counts adults of either sex, a change made by its law committee and adopted congregation by congregation rather than imposed.
Reconstructionist practice counts adults of either sex, on the ground that the community rather than a fixed rule determines the form of its worship.
Reform Judaism, Denominations Reform practice counts adults of either sex and does not treat the quorum as a condition without which the service cannot proceed.
Element Of
Haredi communities keep the requirement of ten adult men strictly, and the availability of a quorum shapes where families are able to live.
Modern Orthodox practice counts ten adult men, and the partnership minyan that gives women a larger role in the service does so without altering who is counted.
Orthodox practice counts ten adult men, and the parts of the service that require a quorum are omitted where ten are not present.
Sources
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