Adam and Daniel Kaplan grew up inhabiting Hebrew as an atmosphere, speaking the Hebrew language throughout their daily lives. The ancient language was part of reciting sacred prayers and blessings but also invoked as a living, modern language part of everyday living.
As opposed to strictly an academic subject and language woven through Shabbat candles and holiday tables long before they understood it formally, Hebrew is the language that Daniel and Adam heard daily growing up. It is the cherished language that they converse in fluently to this day. Hebrew is inextricably woven into the very fabric of the Kaplan brothers.
What they came to recognize, and what scholars of Jewish liturgy have long affirmed, is that Hebrew is the vessel of Jewish worship and, even more than that, the grammar of Jewish time itself.
From birth to death, and through every Shabbat in between, Hebrew blessings, or brachot, consecrate ordinary acts, transforming the lighting of candles, the drinking of wine, and the standing beneath a wedding canopy into declarations of the sacred.
Shabbat and the Weekly Renewal of Sacred Language
Of all the rhythms in Jewish religious life, none is more linguistically rich than Shabbat. Two Hebrew ceremonies bracket the Sabbath week after week, essentially unchanged across generations. They include Kabbalat Shabbat on Friday evening and Havdalah on Saturday night.
Kabbalat Shabbat draws on Psalms and the mystical poetry of sixteenth-century Safed, including Lecha Dodi, sung by congregations worldwide, each with its own melody, representing how sacred Hebrew becomes alive in the mouths of ordinary worshippers.
Adam and Daniel Kaplan have described the Friday evening service as a weekly homecoming with the language.
“Shabbat is where Hebrew stops being something you study and becomes something you breathe,” Adam Kaplan says. “The repetition across years builds a relationship with the words that no classroom exercise can replicate.”
Havdalah compresses profound theological meaning into wine, fragrant spices, and a braided candle. Hebrew brachot over each element layer sensory experience with linguistic significance, and the closing blessing, marking separation between sacred and ordinary, light and darkness, uses Hebrew parallelism to hold enormous weight in just a few lines.
Birth, Naming, and the First Words Spoken Over a Life
Long before a Jewish child can understand language, Hebrew is spoken over and around them. At a baby naming ceremony, a simchat bat for girls or a brit milah for boys, Hebrew prayers frame the entrance of a new life into the covenant community.
The Hebrew name given at these ceremonies carries weight and connects the child to ancestors whose names they bear, to the biblical figures whose characters those names evoke, and to a community that will call them by that name in every sacred context for the rest of their lives.
The Priestly Blessing, or Birkat Kohanim, is typically recited at these ceremonies, its three verses tracing a shape from protection to grace to peace. Composed in Numbers 6:24-26, these lines are among the oldest continuously recited words in human history.
Bar and Bat Mitzvah: When a Young Voice Takes Responsibility
The bar or bat mitzvah marks the moment a young person assumes full religious responsibility. Its centerpiece is the public chanting of Torah using cantillation marks that have governed melodic reading for over a millennium.
Adam and Daniel Kaplan each describe their own preparations as the inflection point when Hebrew moved from ambient sound to embodied skill. It would be months of disciplined work that rewarded with a belonging few other rites produce.
“Preparing for your bar mitzvah is the first time Hebrew truly belongs to you,” Daniel Kaplan explains. “After that, you become part of the transmission yourself, someone who can stand at the bimah and carry the text forward.”
Marriage, Covenant, and the Seven Blessings
A Jewish wedding is, at its liturgical heart, a series of Hebrew blessings. The Sheva Brachot, translated as the Seven Blessings, are chanted under the chuppah, moving from praise of the divine to affirmations of joy and covenant.
Marriage in Jewish law is sealed in Hebrew. Rings are presented with the declaration, Harei at mekudeshet li. “Behold, you are consecrated to me.” Just seven words.
“At a wedding, you understand why the language matters. The Hebrew doesn’t translate the moment. Instead, it elevates it and places this particular love within something much larger and much older,” says Daniel Kaplan.
Death, Mourning, and the Language of Consolation
At the other end of human life, Hebrew accompanies mourning with a liturgical architecture that, for centuries, has sustained grieving communities. The Kaddish prayer, perhaps the most widely recognized Hebrew text outside of Israel, contains no direct reference to death, yet is recited at every service for eleven months following the loss of a parent.
Kaddish asks the mourner to praise what they may most want to question. The El Maleh Rachamim commends the soul to divine care, while shiva minyanim gather community members to recite Hebrew collectively, turning private loss into shared testimony.
A Language That Lives Between the Milestones
What distinguishes Hebrew in Jewish life from a ceremonial language used only on formal occasions is its persistence between those occasions. Grace after meals, Birkat Hamazon, is recited in Hebrew after everyday dinners.
Morning blessings mark waking, washing, and dressing, while the Bedtime Shema tucks each night into a liturgical frame. Hebrew, in other words saturates ordinary time as well as holidays and milestones, making the sacred and the daily impossible to fully separate.
The Kaplan brothers point to this continuity as one of Hebrew’s most distinctive qualities within Jewish religious life, that it refuses to remain compartmentalized.
“Our years of engagement with Jewish liturgy, from weekly Shabbat services to life-cycle ceremonies across multiple generations, have reinforced a conviction that the language itself is part of what makes Jewish tradition coherent across time,” says Adam Kaplan.
Sacred Language as Living Inheritance
The role of Hebrew in Jewish weekly and life-cycle ceremonies is structural. From the first blessing spoken over a newborn to the Kaddish recited at a grave, Hebrew is the connective tissue of Jewish religious experience, linking individual lives to communal memory and ancient covenant.
Each ceremony draws on the same reservoir of language, reminding participants that they are not isolated observers of their own lives but inheritors of something vast and still living. For those who engage with Hebrew as practitioners as well as learners, people like Adam and Daniel Kaplan, who have spent decades inhabiting the liturgy.
The language accumulates meaning with each repetition. A blessing recited at eighty carries the weight of every time it was recited before. A wedding prayer echoes with all the weddings at which it was once heard. Hebrew in ceremony is never just what the words mean today but the sum of every time those words were spoken.
