The stagnation of Jewish tradition is hardly a new story. In a sense, it's a modern Jewish trope. In the 19th century, both the Reform and Conservative movements emerged as responses to this perceived atrophy. Leading Orthodox rabbis, some of whom agreed with the reformers' critique, devised their own attempts to revive the tradition—if, naturally, along more traditionalist lines. Unfortunately, none succeeded in arresting the decline.

Often forgotten today is that the Zionist movement, too, was in part a response to this same condition. To cultural Zionists like Ahad Ha'am and Hayim Nahman Bialik, and religious Zionists like Abraham Isaac Kook, the return to Zion held out the hope of a renewal of specifically Jewish forms of creativity. Replanted in the land of their forefathers and speaking their ancestral tongue, the Jewish people would get their groove back.

Have these hopes been fulfilled? The jury is still out. But one interesting recent development in Israel—a country founded mainly by European Jews and, like most Western Jewish communities, historically dominated by Ashkenazi forms of Judaism—has been a turn toward Sephardi tradition for fresh inspiration. In 2009, an Israeli publishing house devoted to classic Jewish texts issued a compilation of the works of 19th- and early-20th-century Sephardi scholars long ignored outside their own communities. But it's not just for intellectual energy that Israelis have taken to mining Sephardi sources. It's also for artistic energy. Hence today's vogue for Sephardi piyyut.

The term piyyut itself, meaning Jewish liturgical verse, is of ancient vintage and encompasses much more than Sephardi contributions alone. The form flourished in medieval times, and examples of it are incorporated into every Jewish prayer book. Lately, thanks to the labors of both scholars and musicians, the performing and singing sides of piyyut have enjoyed a remarkable revival. Recitals of these songs of devotion, which one musician calls "ancient Jewish blues," typically draw large and enthusiastic audiences from across Israeli society: Sephardim and Ashkenazim, men and women, young and old, religious and secular.

But Sephardi piyyut, which has never ceased to be composed, shines with special radiance. One of the principal forces behind its revival is Meir Buzaglo, a teacher of philosophy at Hebrew University and the son of a great Moroccan master of the form. Approaching Jewish tradition from the perspective of family and community, Buzaglo enters a striking claim for piyyut as a principal building block of Jewish identity for our times: "Piyyut has it all: the Hebrew language and its treasures, Jewish existence and Jewish experience, the longing for redemption, the connection to the land of Israel, the link to the Arab world and its culture, breaking the dichotomy between Judaism and Hebrew culture, and more."

Note especially the reference to the Arab world and its culture. These days, the words "Jewish" and "Arab" tend to occur only as opposites; but, until recently, and wherever political circumstances permitted, Jews participated actively in the fashioning of Arab culture; to this day, many Israeli Jews and their descendants remain, to a degree, culturally Arab. In this sense the revival of specifically Sephardi piyyut—often informed by Arab musical forms and occasionally sung in Arabic—is itself a kind of return: an effort, extending beyond the intrinsic beauties of the poetry and the music, to reconnect with and reclaim a neglected dimension of modern Jewish experience.

Implicitly central to this effort is the promise held out by cultural Zionism.  In one of his classic essays, "External Freedom and Internal Slavery" (1891), Ahad Ha-am wrote that, in exchange for being granted political rights, Western Jews were being asked to pay a cultural price in the coin of inner servitude to Western cultural conventions. (An American Jewish writer would later dub this "The Brutal Bargain.") One might argue that what was true for individual Western Jews in the 19th century is true today for Israeli society as a whole, where Western norms and influence are pervasive.

Politically, the state of Israel belongs to the West, which is certainly as it should be.  Historically, however, the Jewish tradition has absorbed much of the best that has been thought and said in both East and West—while stubbornly retaining its own vital integrity. Piyyut reminds us that, spiritually speaking, the Jewish people is not so much part of the West as the West is part of the Jewish people, in the same way that the East is part of the Jewish people. If embracing the Eastern dimension of Jewish identity marks another step toward regaining the singularity of the Jewish tradition—a small declaration of spiritual and cultural independence—that's a step in the right direction.

Watch Rabbi Haim Louk sing in Arabic and Hebrew.