Presenting new insights into the history and interaction between Jewish and Christian liturgy and worship, the various contributions offer a deeper understanding of the identity of Judaism and Christianity. It addresses issues such as: – Is the Eucharistic Prayer a ‘Berakha’ and what information is available for the reconstruction of the history of the Jewish ‘Grace after Meals’? – How does Jewish liturgy rework the Bible, and are Christians and Jews using similar methods when they create liturgical poetry on the basis of a biblical text? – Which texts of the Cairo Genizah are of direct importance for the history of Christian liturgies, and are Christian creeds in fact Prayers or Hymns? – What does it mean that both Jews and Christians recite Isaiah's "Holy, Holy, Holy" at important points in their respective liturgies? Questions like these brought together scholars and specialists from different disciplines to share their recent insights at a conference in Aachen, Germany, and to offer the reader a fascinating discourse on a broad range of aspects of Jewish and Christian liturgies.

The Making of Jewish and Christian Worship, volume 1 of Two Liturgical Traditions, surveyed the origins and growth of Christian and Jewish liturgy from the first century of the common era until our time. Volume 2, The Changing Face of Jewish and Christian Worship in North America, follows up with an examination of the recent revolution in Jewish and Christian liturgies. The book reflects the particular role of North America in the worldwide experiment in liturgical renewal. The introductory essay inquires, What is a liturgical tradition? Part 1 (Liturgical Traditions and Theologies of "the Other'') is a self-conscious reflection on how Jewish and Christian attitudes toward each other have been expressed in the forms of each tradition's worship. All six of the authors in Part 2 (American Reform or Second Reformation?) have been intimately involved with current liturgical editing and write firsthand accounts of what they think they and their colleagues have accomplished in the new Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish liturgical books. Part 3 (Critiquing Liturgical Reforms) addresses the question of theology, feminist theory, and poetics against which the liturgical works themselves must be judged. The conclusion of this volume looks forward: Where are our traditions heading? A reconsideration of liturgical traditions in general against the backdrop of case studies and critiques, this book reevaluates the challenge posed to Jews and Christians alike as they aspire to reshape, yet retain, the liturgical traditions they have inherited. Contributors include: Lawrence A. Hoffman, Paul F. Bradshaw, Samuel E. Karff, John Gurrieri, Kathleen Hughes, Eugene Brand, Charles P. Price, Hoyt L. Hickman, Jules Harlow, Stanley Dreyfus, David N. Power, Michael A. Signer, Janet Walton, and Mark Searle.

Readers of this book will emerge with a new awareness of what we as Jews are doing when we pray, why we are doing it, how we are supposed to be affected by prayer, how the prayers came to be as they are today, and how they differ among the major movements of American Judaism. The traditional Jewish liturgy, if properly understood, is a deep and powerful technique for spiritual transformation. However, spiritual depth of prayer has been progressively reduced over the past 2000 years as the underlying currents of the Siddur, the Jewish prayerbook, have been lost to the majority of worshippers. This book explains the Jewish liturgy prayer by prayer, according to what, in the context of ancient and medieval Judaism, was its raison d'‚tre: a structure for transforming one's mind and way of life. The author writes: "The crisis Judaism now faces, while genuine, is due not to a lack of depth in the traditional Jewish prayer service, but to a profound and almost universal lack of understanding of that prayer service that pervades all segments of the Jewish community. Jewish prayer services in many contemporary synagogues lack spiritual fervor because the linkage between word and ritual, on the one hand, and mental transformation on the other, that would generate such fervor is not generally known to Jewish adults and is not taught to Jewish children. Unfortunately, the prayer service regularly degenerates into a race through words and gestures divorced from the sequence of mental states and visualizations through which these words and gestures were intended to lead us." This book was written to reunite the activity and language of prayer with its original transformative goal, by educating worshippers about what is at the heart of the siddur. Several chapters provide an overview of the Jewish prayer service and its spiritual flow. These chapters explain the visualizations, allusions, and meditative techniques that form the heart of the service and the altered states of consciousness through which the service ca