THE APERTURE by Uri Cohen

Courtesy of Ben Dreyfus’ “Comment”:

Kol Zimrah (before it had a name) began with an email, announcing “A heavily musical Shabbat service. The service will include the full kabbalat shabbat and maariv liturgy, and will be accompanied by acoustic guitar. It will include melodies from Debbie Friedman to Shlomo Carlebach to ‘Traditional’ to never-before-sung, and the harmonies will be spectacular. Bring your favorite siddur, and your voice.” People forwarded this email to their friends and their lists, and their friends forwarded it to their friends, and 67 people showed up to that first service, and the rest was history. The first service was in the playroom at the aforementioned Key West. (The use of the playroom was unauthorized, and the doorman told our Key West liaison “Don’t do this again.”)

After soliciting suggestions for names, we named Kol Zimrah quickly, so that it could develop a community identity. (We were afraid that if the minyan didn’t have a name, then people would refer to it as “BZ’s minyan”, or by the names of one of the other leaders, in the same way that Kehilat Kedem in Jerusalem was known colloquially as “Philip’s minyan” for a long time before it had a name. We didn’t want Kol Zimrah to be seen as an oligarchy.)

Even though KZ is not that much younger than the other minyanim mentioned, it represents a new generation in some ways, because by the time we started, there was already an active independent minyan scene in place, and we saw Kol Zimrah as self-consciously fitting into the independent minyan ecosystem. So we started off meeting one Friday night a month (which is approximately true to this day), with the understanding that we could hop around to other ongoing minyanim (or ad hoc apartment davening) the other 3 Friday nights, or on Shabbat morning.

When we first envisioned Kol Zimrah, I anticipated that it would appeal only to a very narrow slice of the Jewish community, since some people would not go for a service with instruments on Shabbat, and others would not go for a service all in Hebrew. Instead, KZ has attracted an incredibly diverse community, with a wide range of backgrounds and practices. We have had the opportunity to explore pluralism within our community. For example, our services adhere to the macroscopic structure of the traditional liturgy, but the leader can incorporate whatever microscopic variations s/he wants, from any siddur, with the understanding that each participant is also free to relate to the service in different ways.

For the first year, Kol Zimrah was highly mobile, operating on a $0 budget and meeting wherever we could find space. After that first service in the Key West playroom, we met a few times in various spaces at JTS, a few times in a large (but not large enough) apartment still in the Key West, and in the basement of another apartment building. Eventually we largely stabilized, meeting in Riverside Park in the summer, at the SAJ (with whom we have built a positive relationship) during the year, and at the Jewish Home & Hospital on occasion.

In late 2003, Kol Zimrah incorporated as a religious corporation, and had an “IPO“, asking for voluntary contributions from people in the KZ community. This made it possible to pay for space, and we now have a potluck Shabbat dinner after services each month (using the two-table system). To this day, Kol Zimrah is run entirely by volunteers, and funded entirely by contributions from the KZ community (with no membership dues, and no membership).