In Jewish life, the word “Orthodox” doesn’t usually call to mind openness, flexibility, and nonconformity.  Yet for nearly four decades, the Capitol Hill Minyan – a satellite of Seward Park’s Bikur Cholim-Machzikay Hadath Congregation – has quietly been shifting the meaning of Jewish Orthodox community.

It starts with the congregation’s rabbi, Ben Aaronson, who is 26 but has been involved with the Minyan since the age of 2. His father, Barry, began attending in the late 1970s, when the majority of the membership was at or beyond retirement age. Today, about half of the Minyan’s members are in their mid-twenties or early thirties, Aaronson said. He described his job as a “facilitator-of-knowledge position” and “more of an informal presence,” and he focused on his dedication to the shul’s development rather than emphasizing his yeshiva studies in New York.

When Aaronson gives a Dvar Torah, he’s unusually succinct. This approach fits the Minyan’s overall aim: To be a smaller, nimbler alternative to the shul experience offered by BCMH. The Seward Park congregation has roughly 300 member families and may attract 200 individuals to a service. Its Capitol Hill offshoot has fewer than 150 active members and might draw between 30 to 40 people on a Saturday morning, or an even smaller number during the summer. One Minyan regular told me: “Being a member of a smaller shul makes me feel less insignificant. I feel appreciated over there.”

But size isn’t everything. Several of the past and present Minyan members I spoke to also emphasized the group’s warmth. Eric Hecht joined in 2002, fresh out of college, at the age of 21. He called the Minyan “the most welcoming Jewish community I’ve ever been involved in.” It was with mixed feelings that Hecht moved to New York three months ago. “It was an incredibly difficult decision to leave,” he said. “The Minyan was one of the strongest things keeping me here.”

Soon after he began attending services, Hecht and his father received a Shabbat dinner invitation from Barry Aaronson – a gesture he often extends to newcomers. Grateful for the warm welcome, Hecht increased his involvement. His leadership roles at the Minyan have ranged from Hospitality Chair to head of the planning board, and at the age of 29, he sees the Minyan as a highlight of his Seattle experience.

Hecht noted that while the shul’s preponderance of young people has been important to him over the years, “without the older crowd, we don’t have a minyan.” To an extent, he said, the wide age range has led to a naturally “polar” social structure, where the under-40 set hangs out together and the elder crowd does the same. Yet former member Bob Goldfarb, who attended services from 2003 to 2006 and now lives in Jerusalem, described “a nice chemistry across the generations.” He recalled “people on the older side of the divide who made it a point to invite younger people for Shabbat meals.” The famed Aaronson family dinners, for example, often include several generations.

Goldfarb, who is in his fifties, sees the Minyan as a proudly do-it-yourself enterprise, where any member can affect the flow of a service, or the direction of the shul as a whole. “One thing that’s appealing for anybody who has an active view of participation is that, to the extent that people want to, they can get actively involved,” he said. “The attitude has always been, ‘Give people a chance to do their thing.’”

Not too many years ago, Goldfarb noted, the shul was essentially lay-led: “When Ben [Aaronson] was in yeshiva, every week there needed to be somebody to give a talk. People who had something to say were invited to say it.” He often gave the Dvar Torah himself. “Practically every week I did something or other,” he said. Young adults, in particular, seem to find the shul’s grassroots approach appealing.

Another thing about the Minyan that attracts Gen Y is its unconventional take on traditionalism. Like most of the congregants I spoke to, David Kogut considers himself Modern Orthodox – emphasis on “modern.” He was raised Orthodox, yet he appreciates the Minyan’s more laid-back approach to traditional Judaism. Young people, he said, “don’t want everyone watching them” when it comes to observance.

Kogut, 28, relocated to Seattle from Montreal a year ago to work at Seattle Hebrew Academy. He and his wife, who is 25, found the Minyan online the day they moved. Their experiences at the shul eventually convinced them to relocate to the neighborhood, and Kogut currently serves as the community’s gabbai.

As Kogut pointed out, the term “Orthodox” is actually quite broad. “A lot of young people want to do things their own way,” he said, and though the sight of a mechitza might not evoke progressive practice, a lot of the membership’s open-mindedness is in the nuances. Women can leave their hair uncovered, and some members take elevators on Shabbat. Some even drive to shul. The unspoken agreement, according to Goldfarb: They don’t kvetch about the traffic, and, in exchange, no one judges them for using their cars.

All in all, an atmosphere of non-judgment prevails. “You’re Jewish, you’re part of the minyan,” Eric Hecht told me. I found that to be true when I was called up for an aliyah and needed some coaching to make it through the blessings. This member reminded me to put on a tallis, that one guided me to the transliteration, and the rabbi himself assured me, as I stepped down from the bimah, that I wasn’t as rusty as I’d feared. At a time when intermarriage and secularism are met with condemnation from some of American Judaism’s more conservative corners, it’s refreshing to be accepted as you are in such an outwardly traditional setting.

The Minyan also avoids another serious mistake: making religious events the be-all and end-all of a synagogue community. The shul hosts weekly Torah discussions, but informal get-togethers – such as wine tastings, barbecues, and pub nights – are popular as well. “Sabbath morning services aren’t supposed to be the biggest feature of the community,” Aaronson told me. “I have no interest in trying to commandeer everyone’s social lives into our synagogue.”

This became apparent to me during a Shabbat lunch at the home of Keith Krivitzky, who is 38 and has been attending the Minyan for about two years. As Krivitzky’s other guests and I strolled from shul to his nearby condo, I learned that the young man walking beside me was a dentist visiting from London for a week. I wouldn’t have known it; he fit into the group dynamic like a longtime member.

The big Shabbat-table topic of the day wasn’t the parsha; it was Vegas. A batch of hair-raising tales came out, of big wins and bigger losses, and I realized the Jewishness of this gathering wasn’t in the content but in the storytelling. The exuberance of the voices, the enjoyment of each detail on the part of both teller and audience – this, perhaps as much as Torah study, is what cements Jewish community.

When I spoke to Krivitzky later, he confirmed that the eclectic crowd I’d lunched with – an older couple, young parents, a married woman, unmarried me, the English dentist, and an Israeli man – reflects the Minyan well. He finds its diversity “remarkably healthy” and pointed out that even the dress code isn’t nearly as strict as the Orthodox norm. He also observed that services, kiddush, and schmoozing all take place in a single room – an unglamorous basement space in the Council House retirement home – so that “everybody is accessible to each other.”

“At the Capitol Hill Minyan, there are people who went to yeshiva, and there are people who went to Reform temples,” Goldfarb told me. What, then, keeps the community together? “It’s a similarity that isn’t obvious in the demographic data that we’re used to using.” He mentioned that independent minyanim “somewhere between Conservative and Orthodox” are on the rise in the U.S., “which runs counter to predictions of the triumph of secularism.”

Which just goes to show that modern Judaism can be as much about what makes us different as what unifies us. Here is a motley group of traditionalists who take prayer and practice seriously but don’t exude piousness. They’re open to each other – and to guests – as much as to the Torah.