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Nov 12, 2017

Fine for Missing Minyan

This is interesting, though I have no idea what makes it newsworthy.

According to The Forward, a male student of Yeshiva University is being fined $150 for violating the rules of a coed shabbaton.

One might think, upon hearing just that, that he must have violated a pretty serious rule. Maybe something keeping the boundaries between the men and the women or something else serious in that way. It turns out the rule he violated was sleeping through minyan. The rules stipulate that all participants must partake in all scheduled programs of the shabbaton and every participant had to sign his/her commitment to do so. Participation was highly subsidized and the fines were set to reimburse monies from the wasted subsidies.

Back when I was in Yeshiva High School, Telshe Yeshiva more specifically, boys also got fined for missing minyan. The fines back then were more to the tune of just a few dollars, increasing with the frequency of the missing of the minyan, but the idea of a fine is nothing new.  I guess with adults you expect people to be treated more like adults than like 14 or 15 year olds, but so be it. One significant difference is that we did not have coed shabbatonim, though that is not really relevant to this story..




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4 comments:

  1. The forward and even the linked commentator article do not say a student was fined for missing minyan. The forward just says that this is the policy, the commentator says a male student was fined for x, and this is dealt with on an individual basis. X is not participating in the programming, which equals minyan, meals, Torah programs. We don't know that the x was that the student did. In order to blast it, they created a theoretical where x was just missing minyan.

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  2. Why is this so hard to understand? Isn't it basic Choshen Mishpat?

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  3. it is really not a story. I dont know why this hit the news. must have been a slow day at the forward

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  4. They're leaving out a major detail: Every Shabbat (and one some other days, like Purim) at least a minyan of male students heads down to the women's campus so there will be a minyan there. (They're housed in a hotel some distance from the campus itself.) I used to participate myself every now and then when I was a student in YU. The school subsidizes all this- the male students don't pay for the hotel, meals, etc. (I recall that the hotel was owned by an alum who gave the school a discount, but still.)

    The point is, one of the only reasons they're *there* is to make the minyan. (Sometimes it's a larger Shabbaton with other programming, but often not.) Otherwise YU is paying their way for nothing. Hence the fine.

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