[Avodah] Movement in a minyan

[Chana Luntz]

On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 08:35:29PM +0200, Ben Waxman wrote:
>> My most common experience is when I go to a Sefardi shul and they sit 
>> for many of the kaddishim...

>>                            I asked a relative (a rav) of Rav Moshe's 
>> and he told me that in his opinion, Rav Moshe's psak doesn't apply 
>> because you can always say that you are in a part of the tefilla that 
>> requires standing. I never found that such a satisfying answer, a kind 
>> of a minor lie.

And RMB replied:
>I would think of it slightly differently. Because it is normal for people
to be in other places in davening and thus standing when the majority are
sitting, it lacks the in-your-face perishah >min hatzibur to stand for other
reasons.

Yes, I would assume it is the same logic as found in Pesachim 55a in the
name of Rabban Shimon Ben Gamliel and the question of not working on Tisha
B'Av - ie any person may take on himself to be like a Talmid Chacham and not
work on Tisha B'Av even if the general practice is for ordinary people to
work, and we are not worried about questions of Yehura, because people will
just assume that he doesn't have any work to do - saying go out and see how
many batlanim there are in the marketplace.  Similarly here, people will
just assume that a person is in another part of the davening, and not that
they are davka standing for kaddish - so it is not obvious that the minhag
hamakom is being violated.  

>Lulav shaking is a rather benign case -- you're yotzei either way, and you
could simply shake in the way your ancestors did right after the berakhah,
preferably not in shul.

>Tefillin on ch"m is far more messy than your example: one side thinks that
wearing tefillin is taking a sickle to the forces that maintain creaiton,
while the other side thinks that not >wearing tefillin is violating "midevar
sheqer *tirchaq*" (while not actual sheqer, mechzei keshiqra).
>It's not just "you can be yotzei once doing it another way".

But in both these cases it is obvious to any casual observer if one is
deviating from the minhag hamakom or not - which is why the logic of Rabban
Shimon ben Gamliel does not work for these, unlike in the standing for
kaddish case, where it does, so it is not obvious that you are deviating
from the tzibbur.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

Shavuah Tov

Chana