“Twenty years ago this week, I celebrated my bat mitzvah in Denver,” Talya Zax wrote recently in The Forward. Afterward, my voice teacher gave me some puzzling feedback on the ceremony. I sang much better in Hebrew than I ever had in English, she said.

Since my turn as a teenage Torah-chanter, others have occasionally complimented my voice — but only when I sing in Hebrew. I’ve been approached after performing an aliyah during High Holiday services, but my efforts at karaoke tend to leave a room cold. (Then again, my toddler nephew seems to like my way with “Old MacDonald Had A Farm.”)

            “The human singing mechanism organizes itself for expression,” said Nicholas Perna, director of vocal pedagogy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Singers will give their best performances with material that means something to them, not just because the audience can feel their emotion, but because the emotion actually physically changes the way in which the voice produces notes. So, my Hebrew voice reflects meaningfulness.

My most treasured memories of Jewish practice are all about singing. I learned the melodies I sang at my bat mitzvah not from a rabbi or cantor — the small, lay-led shul in which I grew up had neither — but rather from listening to the whole congregation singing around me. I can still hear some of their voices, all these years later, when I think about certain prayers. A mystical tenor guiding Kol Nidre; a single soprano lilting high above “Eitz Chaim”; my father’s firm baritone mixing with my own mezzosoprano.

The understanding that depth of feeling governs vocal quality dates back millennia, Perna told me. “The earliest form of music was probably this sort of tribal and/or religious organized voicing,” he said. “Think of King David’s instruction in the Psalms: ‘Give a joyful shout to the Lord.’ Is that scripture, or is that singing instruction?”

Also, I have never considered singing in Hebrew to be a performance. It’s prayer, an experience of communal closeness. Which might explain why “Old MacDonald” is such a hit with my nephew. When you sing with love — for a community, a child, or a whole faith tradition — you sing with beauty.

Excerpted from an article by Talya Vax, opinion editor of The Forward