“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.

But now, as Leib Panger sat across from Reuven Stagler, he explained the real opportunity for change and why they had to seize the moment.

Last week, Heshy Brucker had started to learn with a group of boys at the front right table, and Leib Panger saw the seeds of his minyan sprouting before his eyes.

“Listen,” he told Reuven, “when I asked him, he told me that he hadn’t yet gotten formal permission from you to have his chaburah in our shul, so he can’t commit. What’s the story?”

Reuven was quiet, making calculations.

When Heshy had asked him about the program — “just a few boys he had met at the Shabbos minyan coming to learn at night” — Reuven had been skeptical. The Alameda Gardens shul ran a certain way. The people wanted the chairs put back, they appreciated the moderate noise level, no one ate pretzels inside the shul and left a trail of crumbs on the freshly vacuumed carpet.

There was no practical gain in allowing these elements into the shul.

But now he heard something else.