Imun: Fantasy Baseball Camp for Synagogue Skills
All you need is 10 Jews for a minyan. Once you have that, there’s almost nothing you can’t do.
You don’t need a rabbi or a cantor to lead the service; you don’t need a shammas or a ritual director to direct it. All you need is a shaliach tzibur, the community’s emissary. Any one there can do it.
But you do have to know how to do it. That’s where Imun comes in.
Imun is an intensive residential seminar program, a kind of boot camp for minyan leaders, a place where lay leaders can learn to read Torah and haftarah and deliver divrei Torah. United Synagogue established the program as a service to small or new congregations, which sometimes do not have enough money to pay for full-time clergy or are geographically unappealing to them. Not so long ago, those shuls could rely on the older members who learned those skills in their distant childhoods, but there are fewer of those men (they are almost always men) every year. Those congregations now often have lay leaders who are willing to lead services but never learned how to do so, or who might have rusty skills but lack the self-confidence to polish them without help.
Over the eight days Imun participants spend at Camp Ramah in the Berkshires in Wingdale, New York, they concentrate intensely on learning; they display their new skills on Shabbat, when they run services. The emotional intensity of the learning culminates on Shabbat, when the Imunies – there is room for 16 at most – are surrounded by the high-energy, high-decibel Ramah campers as they daven, sing, and dance to welcome the Sabbath queen.
Imun participants range widely in age and background, according Rabbi Paul Drazen, who heads the program. Some are in their 20s, others in their 70s; the program has included college professors, other professionals, businesspeople, and many others. “What unites them is an interest in learning synagogue skills on a very serious level,” he says. They all know how to read Hebrew, but need know no more; they need not have good singing voices. (“I can assure you that a good voice isn’t necessary,” Rabbi Drazen assures us.)
Something else that unites them is the experience of Imun itself. “Over the years it has been a life-changing experience for many people,” he said. Over the nearly two decades of the program’s existence, many of its graduates have stayed in touch with each other, and some have returned to experience Imun for a second time. United Synagogue also hosts an Imun listserv to which many graduates subscribe.
The program, which is highly scheduled but does allow some time for swims in Ramah’s lake, enrolls people “who accept the concept that learning is a continual process,” Rabbi Drazen continues. The focus is on synagogue skills, but there is some theology as well; “if you’re leading a service you want to know what you’re talking about,” he adds. There are a few tricky balances to work out; “if you come in with a certain level of confidence, you can easily leave with a feeling of incompetence, because all of the sudden the fact that you know Ashrei means you’re just at the very beginning. But people don’t leave feeling incompetent. They leave feeling aware of the challenges. When you have people who come in with very few skills but are able to get up and lead part of a service, including reading the Torah – that’s a huge accomplishment.”
Another tension is the understanding that Imun teaches one way, not the way, to lead services, to read trope, to daven. “Local custom is very important,” Rabbi Drazen stresses.
This will be Rabbi Drazen’s second summer at Imun and his fourth year with United Synagogue, where he heads the department of congregational services. For 23 years he was a pulpit rabbi, first in Minneapolis and then in Omaha. “It was a change,” he says of his move. “You lose the personal connection when you leave the pulpit. But on the other hand, you learn a lot in the pulpit, and now I have the opportunity to share some of the things I learned and did on a larger scale.”
He also admires the students’ dedication. “For me, it’s a great opportunity to watch people take the time to learn something they’ve always wanted to learn,” he says. “I want to go back and pickup the piano lessons I dropped when I was 10, but I don’t have the time. Here we have people who stopped this learning after their bar or bat mitzvah but now they’re finally making the time to go back to it. And now they’re learning it as a real skill; they’re not memorizing, as they might have when they were young, but they’re really learning it. It’s a great opportunity for them to have and for me to watch. And I love watching as their panic turns to confidence.”
There might still be some openings for Imun this summer; if not, there’s always next year. Rabbi Drazen looks for students who have the dedication to learn these new skills, the stamina to study them intensively, and the time to devote to Imun. For information about this year’s program, go to our website and click on the Synagogue Leaders tab at the top.
Imun is a not-to-be-missed chance to learn synagogue skills. As Rabbi Drazen puts it, “Imun is sort of like fantasy baseball camp for synagogue skills.”
