Month: October 2021

Davening and the Metaverse

You may have heard that Facebook changed its name to Meta. An article in the WSJ on Wednesday quoted Mark Zuckerberg as saying that Facebook, now Meta, will spend $10 billion dollars this year in pursuit of the metaverse. The metaverse represents a digital reality where people playing through avatars would be able to attend concerts with friends or try on clothes in stores, just as they would offline, out in the real world. Evan Spiegel, the Snapchat CEO, responded with some Mussar and said his company is more interested in augmented reality because it is grounded in the real world that we share.

I happened to try on a Facebook virtual reality headset the other day and it’s really cool. Many financial analysts think the metaverse will be really big, as people are constantly in search of new forms of entertainment and distraction. The Mesillas Yesharim agrees with this last point and teaches that distraction is the first major obstacle on our path of spiritual growth. The other are laziness, our desire for physical pleasure and self-centeredness.

Distraction really comes into the picture during davening. We have the opportunity to petition the Master of the Universe and instead we get distracted with our own personal metaverse. That’s how Hashem created us, but He wants us to try to focus on His reality and fill our lives with learning, mitzvos, praying and chesed.

We can begin our escape from the metaverse the next time we are about to begin Shemoneh Esrai. The Mesillas Yesharim suggests that we stop and think that we are about to petition the Master of the Universe. We will get distracted, but this initial focus should get us through the first Baruch Ata Hashem. Once we begin our escape who knows where it will lead. See you on the other side.

Slower Davening and Tircha De-Tzibura

After discussing some Shul situations with my Rav, I was marinating an article on Tircha De-Tzibura. I Googled the term to get the best transliteration, and lo and behold an excellent article was recently published named The Halachic Principles of Tircha De-Tzibura. Please go read it, I’ll wait till you come back.

Conceptually, Tircha De-Tzibura is any unnecessary delay in the service. The question than becomes what is an unnecessary delay. Let’s say that in a given Shul, Mincha usually takes a total time of between 10 and 13 minutes, and the person who wants to daven from the Amud will take 15 minutes. Should he forgo the Amud to prevent Tircha De-Tzibura. My Rav says that in this case you should not daven as you can see from the halacha that even small time delays are considered significant in this context. So the Nu, Nu choir does have a halachic leg to stand on.

One problem is that the time usually taken in a given Shul for Shacharis, Mincha and Maariv is not always so clearly defined and/or publicized. The best thing to do in those situations is to ask the Gabbai for his understanding of the time parameters, and if you can’t abide by them, then you should’t take the Amud.

Another situation. What if you’re in a Shul where Mincha takes between 10 and 13 minutes and your capable of davening fast. Do you have an obligation to minimize the time or are you ok as long as you’re under 13 minutes? In this situation my Rav felt that there was no halachic obligation to minimize your time.

From one perspective davening is often a game of minutes, and if you want to avoid the delay of game flags you need to know how long the 30 second clock is set for and how long it takes you to daven from the Amud. If in doubt, it might be best to sit it out.