With clenched fists, we beat our chests in confession on Yom Kippur—but what are we still holding in our hands? The prophets decry those who defraud the poor, hoard ill-gotten gains, and then lift their hands in prayer. Ne’ilah, the closing prayer of Yom Kippur, echoes their warning: repentance is not complete until we return what we have wrongfully held to its rightful owner. Yom Kippur may end before restitution is complete, but repentance does not.
Moses, sentenced to die before entering the Promised Land, fasts, prays, and appeals to God to overturn the decree. But God orders the heavenly courts to close their gates so they would not hear Moses’s prayer. This midrash helps illustrate a conception of prayer as a legal appeal—found in the Bible and Hittite texts and reflected throughout much of the High Holiday liturgy: prayer can challenge a divine decree in the heavenly courtroom.
The promised land is described in Deuteronomy (12:9) by the hendiadys מְנוּחָה, menuchah, and נַחֲלָה, nachalah—a resting-place and heritage-land—and both terms are used several times in the Bible to refer to the land of Israel. Millennia later, these terms are given an afterlife in Jewish liturgy in reference to Shabbat; sacred space is anchored in time.
The discoveries from the caves of Qumran yielded hundreds of psalms and prayers. Some of these derived from the sectarian community known as the Yaḥad, who lived there. Others came from diverse Jewish communities, and were preserved and presumably used by the Yaḥad as part of their twice-daily “offering of the lips” as an alternative to the “defiled” sacrifices being offered in the Temple. These documents offer invaluable evidence concerning the origin of fixed communal prayer in Judaism.
After Miriam is stricken with a skin affliction for speaking badly of Moses, Aaron begs Moses to forgive her, and Moses prays to God for her healing with five words: אֵל נָא רְפָא נָא לָהּ “O God, pray, heal her.” But the original prayer was likely different.
For Ahad Haʿam and Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Shabbat was not about belief but about belonging. Through their Cultural Zionist vision, Shabbat emerges as the aesthetic, temporal, and cultural heart of Jewish identity—welcomed each week as a queen in a song meant to update the more traditional Shalom Aleichem.
The precise origins of the practice of reading from the prophets in the synagogue are unknown, but early evidence can be seen in the story of Jesus visiting the synagogue in his hometown on Shabbat and reading from Isaiah (Luke 4:16–19). Yet the process of making prophetic scripture relevant to a contemporary audience began even earlier, as we see in the second-century B.C.E. book of Baruch.
The elements of a thanksgiving prayer—praise, description of the crisis, calling on the audience, an acknowledgment of God’s answer, and a concluding thanks—are found in Psalm 30, recited daily in the morning service. The adaptability of this and other biblical psalms helps explain why these Iron-Age prayers are still recited around the world today.
What is the ideal relationship between Jews and the rest of humanity? A study of Ultra-Orthodox, Modern Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform High Holiday prayer books shows how each read the three uvechen “and so” additions to the amidah depending on their ideological worldviews. Perhaps there is wisdom in the prayer’s ambiguity.
Noah, Melchizedek, Abraham’s servant, Laban, and Jethro all bless YHWH, but, as Rabbi Pappias notes in the Mekhilta, the Israelites don’t. Only later in the Bible do we find David and Solomon blessing YHWH, but so do Hiram King of Tyre and the Queen of Sheba.
In an existential crisis, the author of Psalm 77 is so incapacitated by his troubles that he struggles to speak. He attempts to bring to mind past memories of God’s kindness, but God has changed and is no longer manifest in his life. In an unexpected turn, the psalmist focuses on Israel’s memory of the Sea crossing at the Exodus. How does this meditation help him move from despair to hope?
While silent about the miracle of oil, Al HaNissim calls attention to the lighting of the lampstand in the Temple, even making use of the Talmud’s wording, thus leaving the matter open to interpretation.
Using imagery of tents, gardens, and flowing water—themes associated with love and sexuality in the Bible and the ancient Near East—Balaam blesses Israelite women with fertility. The Priestly authors, however, invert this blessing to present Balaam as the instigator of the Baal Peor incident.
The Quran makes multiple intertextual connections with the Shema and its rabbinic commentary in its qiblah (“direction”) passages, thus highlighting a point of agreement between Jews and Muslims: Prayer is not about the physical direction you face but about loving God with all your heart.
The Kedushah prayer is based on two quotes from angels: “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of Hosts...” (Isaiah 6:3) and “Blessed be the Glory of the Lord from its place” (Ezekiel 3:12). However, Shadal, the 19th century polymath, explains that the second verse is not a quote by angels, but the result of a scribal error.
A burnt offering, must be whole (תמים), after which it is dismembered (נתוח) and offered to YHWH. In the wake of the loss of my parents, I have come to appreciate how this process mirrors the creation story and life.
Arguably, the highlight of the prayer service on Yom Kippur is the Seder Avodah, a type of piyyut (liturgical hymn) that poetically reenacts in every detail the ritual service performed by the high priest on Yom Kippur in the Jerusalem Temple. But why do these poems begin with the creation story?
The haftarah (prophetic reading) for the first day of Rosh Hashanah features Channah's two prayers. In the second prayer, she thanks God for the birth of Samuel by reciting a ready made royal hymn about defeating one's enemies, hardly relevant to her situation. Why does the Bible choose such a prayer and how might this help us better understand prayer in the context of the contemporary Rosh Hashanah?
Deuteronomy 11 repeats, reworks, and supplements the core phrases and themes of the Shema paragraph in Deuteronomy 6 in order to teach the Israelites how to deal with one of their major future challenges: the temptations that accompany wealth, comfort, and affluence.
Lernen versus learning, davenen versus prayer: an ethnographic analysis of how Orthodox Jews define themselves.
Do we really want God to remember all that we did?
Moses’ use of rhetoric to convince YHWH to undo his decree against Israel recasts a namburbu-like ritual intercession in a prophetic hue.
Karaism is often characterized by its rejection of the Talmud in favor of a super-literalist interpretation of the Torah. But Karaism is better understood as an alternate, parallel form of Judaism based on the Bible.
The development of the idea that the Torah has 613 mitzvot: From Talmudic aggada, to geonic liturgy, to medieval enumerations.
Midrash Chad Shenati (ca. 10th cent.), discovered in the Cairo Genizah, praises Isaac for praying for Rebecca to have children, criticizing Abraham for not doing the same for Sarah, who is barren for much longer. Emphasizing the sensivity of Isaac, the only monogamous patriarch, is in line with the trend towards monogamy in Israel at the time of Midrash Chad Shenati’s composition.
The term לשוח is a hapax legomenon, a term that appears only once in the Bible. What does it mean?
How a provoking and problematic Aramaic prayer continues to mesmerize so many Jews every Yom Kippur.
Yose ben Yose’s 4th century CE piyyut for the shofarot service, and its creative use of the Song of Songs.
A look at the Torah and Mishnah’s treatment of the mitzvah of bringing bikkurim (first fruits) to the Temple and its associated requirement to recite a historical confession through five prisms: phenomenological, historical, anthropological, feminist and liturgical.
A Second Temple story of how Daniel used his knowledge of Torah to save a righteous woman from wicked judges who falsely accused her of adultery.
Jeremiah 32 describes the prophet’s redemption of his uncle’s ancestral land. The scribal authors turned this transaction into an oracle. Eventually, the passage was expanded to include a prayer in which Jeremiah invokes the exodus from Egypt and the gift of the land. Taken together, the passage inspires hope for exilic Jews that God will redeem their land as well.
The Mourner’s Kaddish strengthens the connection of living Jews with their deceased relatives. The custom was developed by twelfth century Ashkenazi Jews as a way of saving their loved ones from Gehenna (hell) and making heaven available to all.
A pediatric neurologist searches for the soul through the lens of current neuroscience.
Praying for God’s shekhinah, Divine presence, in heaven to radiate on earth.
The Aleinu prayer begins, עלינו לשבח לאדון הכל, “It is for us to praise the Master of all,” which creates theological tension: If God is presented here as the Master of all, why is it only Jews who are to praise God?
Why God repeats his command to Jonah a second time
Bringing “different voices” from the margin to the center of religious life.
