As with "On Faith" panelist Julia Neuberger, I too was with my grandfather when he died, standing by his bedside as he stopped breathing. It was one of the most important moments in my life. In the weeks and months before his death, he was full of stories especially about his childhood-he talked about the car he learned to drive in, about a snake he once found in a meadow, about an apple he and his friends once kicked all the way home from school. When he died in August 2001, he died so peacefully that those of us standing there could not discern any "before" or "after." His forehead grew cool; my grandmother, disoriented, cried, "Where is my family?"

Whether we say we believe or not, most of us have these moments of profound awareness of our connectedness to the world, the inevitability of birth and death, and the desire to give oneself over totally to impulses of thanks and humility.

Lately, though, I have been experiencing this feeling in what is for me the unlikeliest of places: synagogue. Although I was raised with a strong Jewish identity - my grandparents fled Belgium with my mother in 1940 and that story was very much part of my growing up - I never learned much about the religion beyond standard blessings over wine, candles and bread. We didn't belong to a temple, I do not read Hebrew, I did not have a bat mitzvah.

When I was pregnant with my daughter in the fall of 2003 I went with my husband to High Holy Days services out of a sense of duty and with a vague intention of honoring my grandfather's memory and asking for the safe passage of the child we were about to have. I was not expecting the soul-shaking feeling I had when I heard the words of the Sh'ma--familiar even to me as the ancient Jewish prayer asserting monotheism over all other religious choices, the most important prayer in Judaism: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is One."

The words are basic, but try to imagine what they meant thousands of years ago, when polytheism was the norm, when choosing to worship One God meant striking out in a completely new direction, a radical reconceptualization of the idea of god-not just local gods, gods of weather and of crops and of sky, but one god, the lord of everything.

Observant Orthodox and Conservative Jews still say the Sh'ma twice a day, in accordance with Jewish law. While in the temple, I could see in my mind's eye the seemingly endless generations of Jews, of my own ancestors who said these words aloud, whether twice a day or twice a year: Jews in Poland, in Belgium, in the Netherlands, in Israel, in North Africa, in American cities and suburbs, in the Ukraine, in Austria. Jews whose prayers had to be secret, Jews who were murdered for their belief in their prayers, Jews who had all but stopped praying, Jews whose daily prayers were like breathing.

This past Friday night, I went for the first time to Shabbat services at my local temple-we've been members for a year, but I've never been a "joiner" and am a reluctant participant in organized Judaism. I went again to honor the dead, this time my grandmother who died three weeks after our daughter was born. And when the rabbi read her name aloud, in a long list of people who had died recently or long ago during this winter season, my breath caught again at the connectedness of my people.

I do not know Hebrew but I know that these ancient prayers said over and over in times of yearning, or mourning, or simply out of habit, contain revelatory power, the power of history and ancestry and the invocation of a brave group of people who, thousands of years ago, decided that the Lord is One.