“Don’t you think the people here will resent a group of noisy teenagers in the shul every night?"
Back when he lived in Boro Park, Leib Panger had been a regular mispallel at Shomrei Shabbos, enjoying the sense of randomness surrounding the exactitude. Knowing that there would be a minyan when he wanted it, he could pretend to be relaxed, never really sure who would daven with him and if he would end up upstairs or downstairs.
Leib loved forming minyanim — motioning, nodding and waving ten men together. He could happily spend the entirety of a Chol Hamoed trip to Liberty Science Center planning a Minchah outside the planetarium. Once the chazzan was well into chazaras hashatz, the Panger children knew that their father would be beaming with pride at his accomplishment.
While dropping off his son at the airport for a flight to Eretz Yisrael, Leib had arranged a particularly random assortment of people for Minchah and someone had snapped a picture. Leib made the picture the screensaver on his phone.
In Alameda Gardens, he worked hard to give the shul that spontaneous element, but the crowd wasn’t into it. They liked the eight o’clock Maariv, the same people standing in the same places every single night, and they looked on with polite disinterest at his efforts to have a nine-thirty Maariv in the back room of the shul.
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