Torah Portion:	Pekudei
Synagogue:	Kollel Menachem at Yeshiva (Chabad)
Walking time from home:	10 mins
Reason for going:	I woke up late
Kiddush:	N/a

This week, though I had thought about which shule I might want to go to, I hadn’t yet decided by Friday. I set an early alarm for Saturday morning to maximise my options, but slept through it. By the time I woke up after 9:30am, there was only really one type of shule I could go to: a Chabad one.

With not a lot of time till the start of shule, I wanted to find one that was close, but also one I hadn’t been to before. I ended up at the Kollel at Yeshiva. As I had discovered on a previous visit, the Yeshiva campus has up to half a dozen services on a Shabbat morning, but some of them are very niche, like for high school students and the like. The Kollel Menachem Lubavitch, as it is officially known, is theoretically for those men who spend the majority of their days learning Torah, but on Shabbat it is also open to others. As it turned out, as soon as I walked in I recognised someone I hadn’t seen for years who goes there occasionally, and we ended up being the only two not garbed in black, but no one seemed to mind. In fact, despite an air of seriousness to the place because it is for learned men, there was equally a sense of casualness. When I arrived pretty much on the dot of 10am, it was clear that the service was not yet ready to begin. My friend said that they notoriously start late – whenever they are ready – and in this case the service began about ten minutes later with no formality. Someone just walked up to the podium and started the prayers.

In terms of location, the Kollel by rights should not exist. It is in an awkward-looking room that at one end is the extension of what is called the lunchroom (the main dining hall), and at the other end is next door to the main shule. As such it has two doors at either end, and throughout the entirety of the service was used as a thoroughfare, with people (men) walking through to get elsewhere, even during the Torah reading or the speech. Despite its positioning, the Kollel has been around for decades and the entire room is lined with bookshelves and books. Only one shelf holds English books as far as I could tell, but being in a room with so many books has an uplifting feeling, especially when it comes to being there for a service. When I walked in there was barely a minyan, but because of the thoroughfare nature of the room, the numbers were never constant. During the Torah reading there were close to 30 men in the room, but soon after, the numbers dropped again. Regulars seem to know when to come in for the bits of the service they want to hear or participate in.

Most of the service proceeded as normal, with one leader and everyone else following, but because of the nature of the room, there was constant noise, chatter and movement. It wasn’t a distraction for the most part; it was just there. It was strange to me that there were no women at all and no kids either, but that is the set up of this place. There also wasn’t a sermon per se. After all, the majority of the regulars are learned men who know about the portion of the week and know a lot more than that. However, there was a speech just before the Torah reading, as there often is, but on this occasion it was about an obscure set of letters that were recently discovered, that previous Chabad rebbes exchanged. One letter did mention the portion of this week and the end of the book of Exodus, which is maybe why this was the subject of the talk, but to me it felt more academic and less relevant than an average sermon, though some of the regulars lapped it up.

The Kollel doesn’t have it’s own kiddush. Whilst a number of congregants joined the chaotic and very noisy kiddush of the main shule in the lunchroom next door, which started about ten minutes before our service finished, I stopped for a moment, watched one of the speakers trying to unsuccessfully talk over the noise of an ungrateful audience, and decided I didn’t want to stay. I had a lunch to get to anyway, but it was an eye-opening experience to be part of such an interestingly-placed shule.