Shema Yisrael, or the Shema, is the central affirmation of Judaism. The prayer expresses belief in the singularity of God, that is, in God's oneness and incomparability. Though this opening verse is ...

After 50 years leading various congregations in prayer as a Hazzan, an ordained Cantor, I am at a crossroads. Does God hear my prayers? Must I recite every prayer line-by-line, even though, admittedly ...

There is a beautiful but sad story about Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman and Rabbi Yitzhak Halevi Herzog. After the Holocaust, they searched Europe for Jewish children hidden in orphanages and convents, ...

I have produced a recognizable body of scholarship on ancient Jewish and Christian prayers and hymns. During the formative period of biblical scholarship in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth ...