Imun – Synagogue Skills for Aspiring Service Leaders

by Joanne Palmer

JULY 2007 – Perhaps you’re a constant presence at your small synagogue; you have not chosen to involve yourself too closely in its operations but you yearn to help lead services.

Or maybe you belong to a congregation too small to be able to hire a rabbi; services have been led by the generation above yours but you and they are realizing that their successors must be groomed.

Or your synagogue is large, and your synagogue skills are satisfactory, but still you feel compelled to learn more about the liturgy. You would like a chance to go beneath the surface of the words to learn where they came from and what they mean. And you would love to join the corps of Torah-readers.

For the last 16 years, all these people, and many more beside them, have been coming to United Synagogue’s Imun program. They spend eight days learning or brushing up on synagogue skills, such as layning Torah, chanting haftarah, delivering d’vrai Torah, leading a shiva minyan, and running a service.

The program is run at least once a year but occasionally more. Each group is fairly small, because the intimacy of a small group, and the trust that goes along with it, matters greatly. Except for the special postgraduate Israel trips, Imun is held at Camp Ramah (most often at Camp Ramah in the Berkshires, but also at Camp Ramah in California and Ramah Darom in Georgia). “It’s because we benefit from the high energy of a summer camp, especially on Shabbat,” said its director, Rabbi Paul Drazen.

Imun is aimed primarily at people who are interested in becoming more involved in running their synagogues’ services. Most of them come from synagogues that for various reasons need more lay involvement than they have. For many of the participants, Imun, with its 12-hour days of study and practice, fills a need that runs very deep. For others, it is a more practical way to help the congregations they love. “In the beginning Imun was to train leaders for congregations that did not have professional clergy; it was specifically for smaller congregations,” Rabbi Drazen said. “While that is still a focus, now we have people who come from larger congregations. They have learned to become paraclergy, and they can run the minyan when the rabbi and the cantor cannot be there.

“This year we had 16 Imunies,” he continued. “We had a retired microbiologist, a middle-school teacher, an orthodontist and a dentist, and a paramedic; other years we’ve had lawyers, doctors, and university teachers. We had a congregation of 900 members represented, and another one that has 25. This year we had two people in their 20s; the largest group was in their late 50s and early 60s. In other years we have had participants whose ages ranged from their early 20s to their 70s.

“What unites them in an intense desire to learn these basic pieces of tradition, either for personal reasons or to help their congregations.

“Some are Jews by choice, and it is inspiring to many of the Jews by birth to come and see these people, who have taken on so willingly something that the rest of us just sort of have. It’s inspiring to watch them learn.”

Most of program focuses on the liturgy; student learn both how to lead prayers and, to a somewhat lesser extent, what the words mean. Each year, though, someone else comes to teach about something else. This year, Rabbi Elyse Winnick of Koach taught, as did Rabbi Daniel Wigodsky, who is not only a Conservative rabbi but a sofer, a scribe, as well. “He showed a Torah scroll, pointed out which things have to be corrected right away. Explained how he works with parchment, where it comes from, and how it’s sewn together.”

Imun begins on Sunday and works toward its climax on Shabbat, when students run a service for themselves. There they get to use what they just have learned. The two days after Shabbat ends largely are for debriefing and then reentering the outside world. During the week, participants have some time off to practice what they have learned and to swim, but each day begins with Shacharit at 7 and “runs full tilt until 8 or 9 at night”, according the Rabbi Drazen.

On Friday night, participants join Ramah campers for Kabbalat Shabbat.

“We take advantage of the camp’s setting, the beauty of the sunrise and sunset and joining with the campers for Shabbat,” Rabbi Drazen said. “For many of the people there, from small congregations, this could be the first time they’ve been in a room with 700 Jewish people at the same time. The intensity of being in a room with that many Jewish kids, and the power of that experience, is in itself a great reason for being at camp.”

After the program is over participants return to their families, their lives, and their synagogues, but they often stay in touch with each other. A not-insignificant number of Imunies have gone on to rabbinical or cantorial school. That is wonderful, but it is not even the point of Imun. The point, instead, is to provide synagogues with leaders whose grasp of ritual is good enough to allow them to lead the community in prayer, and whose understanding of the liturgy and ritual is deep enough to allow them to do it with kavannah – intention – with understanding, and with skill.

To learn more about Imun, including information on next year’s program, call Rabbi Paul Drazen at 646 519-9310 or email him at drazen@uscj.org.

• See the schedule for 2007 and get some idea of what other programs will look like
• Read a participant’s notes on the program