The popular notion is that English prayer is a shattering heresy. Our common law [in Benedictions] allowed it two thousand years ago….
The Hebrew Bible speaks with power in all the tongues of earth, but it sounds to nobody else as it does to Jews. The Second Table of the Ten Commandments reads in Hebrew something like this: “Don’t kill; don’t be vile; don’t steal; don’t tell lies about others; don’t envy any man his wife or house or animals, or anything he has.” This sounds shockingly wrong in English. For the English genius, religious is solemn and stately, Canterbury Cathedral, not a shul. The grand slow march of “Thou Shall Nots” is exactly right. [But] religion for the Jews is intimate and colloquial, or it is nothing…. People complain sometimes that praying in English makes them feel as though they were in a church. It is a just reaction. They experience the English genius, not the Hebrew.
—Herman Wouk, This is My God