TRADITIONAL JEWS encounter the Siddur, the Jewish prayer-book, more often than any other text, even the Bible. They repeat parts of it three or even four times a day—morning, afternoon, and evening—besides reciting blessings before and after meals and on other occasions. In contrast, the text of the Torah is read in a formal fashion only in synagogue or other communal prayer settings, when it is chanted from a scroll that has been ceremonially removed from the Ark in which it is kept. Although daily prayers can be recited almost anywhere and, in the case of blessings on special occasions, at any time, there are only four ritual readings from a Torah scroll in the course of the week: on sabbath morning, as part of the annual cyclic reading of the Pentateuch, and on sabbath afternoons and Monday and Thursday mornings, when smaller sections of the next week's portion are read. Such readings are performed only in the context of a service attended by a quorum of ten adult men.

Outside the ritual round of formal readings the Bible is indeed studied intensively by individuals and groups, usually with the help of a library of commentaries and sometimes in study programmes that extend over several years. Some of these commentaries form genres in their own right, such as the talmudic, halakhic, and midrashic literatures and the glosses that have developed around them, all of which are based more or less directly on the scriptural text. Young Orthodox men might spend a number of years in full-time study of such material, continuing to study two or more evenings a week throughout their lives, making this probably the dominant religious activity among Orthodox men, and certainly the one with the highest status. Meditation and worship, in contrast, are never full-time activities but are limited to ritually prescribed occasions. In addition, they confer no special social status, but are performed by all on a regular basis, with varying degrees of attention.

The intensity of contact with the prayer-book, in terms of the number of separate encounters with it in the course of each day, thus makes this the text to which traditional Jews turn most frequently, even if it does not receive the same degree of attention as the texts included in the traditional study curriculum.