ShulIQ
For decades, I’ve been the guy in the back who notices things.
I notice who’s looking for a seat and who doesn’t want one. I notice when the person next to me has finished Amida and is politely waiting. I notice the exact moment I’ve taken someone’s seat, usually about 2 seconds before they notice it. I notice the throat-clearing, the sniffling, the shuffling, the guy humming behind the chazzan, and the creak of my own chair, which gets louder during the quiet parts.
Some people call this oversensitive. Others call it insecure. I call it fieldwork.
I’ve been davening in shuls big and small, well established and ad hoc. Every one of them had two sets of rules: the ones in the Shulchan Aruch, and the ones nobody wrote down but everyone knows.
This site is about the second set.
I’m not a rabbi, and I’m not paskening anything. Just observations about conduct, mostly my own. Halacha tells you what to do. ShulIQ will tell you how to do it without annoying people.
Pull up a seat. Not that one. It’s probably someone’s
