Thursday, March 17, 2005

Davening mincha at work

To continue my previous post we see that our priorities nowadays are messed up. Most of us would never miss mincha with a minyan at work, yet, we are not so careful with our employers time.

Lets take a concrete example. Imagine you are deep in thought working on something, if you stop you will break your train of thought and lose your place. Suddenly it is time to go to daven micha with your minyan. Should you stop and go? It is not so simple. If you stop you are affecting the quality of your work. We see that chazal did not allow workers to daven with a minyan because it stole time from the employer. Nowadays, we assume that the employer is implicitly מוחל since we all have breaks, and lunch (and for example at my office a ping pong table), however if it affects your work this assumption is probably not valid. If you wouldn't get up to play ping pong because you are deep in thought then it is problematic to get up and daven as well.

Note, nothing said here is הלכה למעשה, everyone should ask their Rav what to do in specific circumstances. I am just trying to get people to realize that this is an issue and think about it.

1 comment:

Karl said...

If you have a fixed minyan that you go to, then you will know from the outset at what time you should stop work. Obviously you would not stop work everyday at the same exact minute and second, you'd come to a convinient stop. So too at mincha time. Its all a matter of priorities though. If you knew you had a doctors appointment, you'd stop work at a convinient place and then go. Mincha should be a focus, rather than just a quick break from work.
Its something I'm trying to work on as well.