Several years ago, a friend of mine invited me one day to come with her and attend an evening class at a Jewish Studies center in Tel-Aviv about Jewish traditional songs. At first this didn't sound especially attractive to me, I even suspected it to be terribly dull and boring.
Then she told me that this wasn't one of those workshops where religious people lure non-religious people into making a "khazara be-tshuva", a "return to faith". Quite on the contrary, this workshop had been kicked off by a student from Jerusalem: as a student in musicology, he had chosen to study the various traditions of Jewish "Piyyut" - liturgical songs - among the various and numerous Jewish communities; while doing so, he came to realize that while Piyyut is indeed a very complex music, fully mastered by only relatively few people - all religious people going to temple - and that this tradition was in danger to fade away and disappear.
During his field research, he had had this idea that Piyyut has an enchanting power of its own, even for those who are not religious.
