Minyan

In E. L. Doctorow's City of God, the Minyan — the traditional Jewish prayer quorum of ten adult members required for certain communal prayers — surfaces only briefly, yet it carries a quiet weight in the novel's anatomy of a small, unconventional congregation. The Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism, founded and led by Rabbi Joshua Gruen and his wife, Rabbi Sarah Blumenthal, is a converted parlor on the Upper West Side, a space of bridge chairs, a platform table for reading the Torah, and an Ark at one end. It is within this intimate, unadorned setting that the minyan appears, not as a scene of prayer but as a subject of congregational debate, a detail that reveals the fault lines between tradition and the congregation's experimental ethos.

The Congregation and Its Character

The synagogue's physical modesty mirrors its theological ambition. The converted parlor, with its few rows of bridge chairs and shelves of prayer books, houses a community that prides itself on intellectual discussion and a willingness to question. This is a small congregation, as one elderly member notes approvingly, "nothing fancy, nobody putting on airs," and notably free from the pressure of building-fund appeals. The minyan, in this context, is less a ritual necessity than a point of identity. When the elderly man who has dropped into the synagogue voices his reservations, he singles out the co-ed minyan as something that "takes some getting used to," a mild concession to modernity that he is willing to tolerate even as he draws a firm line elsewhere. His discomfort is telling: the mixing of men and women in the prayer quorum is, for him, an acceptable innovation, a small adjustment in the face of a larger, more troubling question about the very foundations of belief.

The exchange unfolds during a discussion led by Sarah Blumenthal, who has been articulating a vision of tradition as something that characterizes the Jewish people rather than God — "Our longing, our obsessing. Our poetry, the epic of our people, but not—" She is interrupted by the elderly man, who rises to declare himself "mostly on your side" before pressing his objection. His intervention draws laughter and applause, and he is emboldened to hold the floor, recommending the synagogue to any newcomers even as he insists on the non-negotiable core of faith: that the Torah was given by the Creator, that the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven must be accepted. "Without this," he warns, "never mind no tradition—it's no religion. Nothing." The moment crystallizes the congregation's central tension: a community built on questioning must confront the limit beyond which questioning dissolves the very thing it seeks to sustain.

The Limits of Questioning

The elderly man's challenge lands with visible force on the novel's protagonist, Thomas Pemberton, the Episcopal priest known as Pem, who watches from his chair and slumps, holding his hands to his head. It is, the narration notes, "that moment—he knew it well—when rationalism hits the wall." Pem, himself in the throes of a crisis of faith, recognizes in the old man's stubborn piety the wall that intellectual inquiry cannot breach. The scene also casts a revealing light on Sarah Blumenthal. As the old man receives the appreciative remarks of those around him, the narrator wonders whether he sees in Sarah's eyes "a longing for her husband's resurrection," and whether she had depended on Joshua for her theology, whether she is capable of carrying his ideas forward. The minyan, in this light, is not merely a ritual detail but a symptom of a deeper question: what holds a community together when its intellectual foundations are in flux?

The co-ed minyan, for the elderly man, is a tolerable adjustment precisely because it does not touch the essential. His willingness to accept it even as he rejects the congregation's theological openness marks the boundary between reform and rupture. The detail is characteristic of the novel's method: a single, almost offhand reference to a ritual practice opens onto the larger drama of a community negotiating its identity between the demands of tradition and the impulse to question. The minyan thus stands as a small emblem of the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism's precarious position — modern enough to include women in the quorum, yet still bound to the forms that define it as a Jewish community at all.

Ritual and Community in the Novel's Wider Frame

The minyan's appearance belongs to a novel saturated with ritual and performance, from the jazz standards of the Midrash Jazz Quartet to the wedding that concludes the narrative. The novel repeatedly returns to the question of what forms — religious, musical, ceremonial — give shape to communal life and meaning. The co-ed minyan, in its modest way, participates in this inquiry. It is a form that has been adapted, its traditional gender boundaries relaxed, yet it remains a form, a structure that gathers a community into prayer. The elderly man's grudging acceptance of it, set against his fierce defense of the Torah's divine origin, suggests that even the most questioning community retains some rituals as non-negotiable anchors, while other practices can be bent without breaking.

The novel's own structure, with its interleaved sections of sermon, jazz, and narrative, mirrors this negotiation between inherited forms and new expressions. The minyan, like the standards played by the quartet, is a traditional form subjected to variation — not abandoned, but reworked. The congregation's willingness to count women in the quorum is a quiet revision of Jewish law, a small act of adaptation that the novel presents without fanfare, as simply one feature of this particular community. It is, in the end, a detail that illuminates the novel's central preoccupation: how communities hold together when the certainties that once bound them are called into question, and what forms — however altered — remain essential to their survival.