That changed, Bejarano said, in about the sixth century when Irish monks began hearing confessions one on one. That practice spread, eliminating the shame of a public confession and instituting the seal of the confessional, "so the priest could not reveal what was confessed. Confession, according to church commandments, must be done at least once a year, Bejarano said. Most people call those the little sins. They take away the life of grace God has given to our soul.
After confession, a priest will give a penance that fits the sin, such as a prayer to say, or perhaps giving back something that has been stolen or apologizing to a spouse or children for angry words. It is expressing my willingness to restore the wrongdoing I have done.
He said confession "is reconciliation with God and one another. God wants a contrite heart, a heart that is sorrowful, one that says, even though I have failed you, I am back here with you because your love is greater than all my failures and sin.
Or, if my life was an evil life and I never repented, that means eternal death, hell. God is ultimately the only judge for that. We cannot say who goes to heaven or hell. We believe God hears our prayers on behalf of those who have died with a mortal sin, those in purgatory. As in the Catholic Church, confession is a sacrament heard by a priest.
But it is encouraged rather than mandatory, and it can be heard by a priest from a different parish. We set our lives to journey to Christ.
When we stray from that focus, we miss the mark; we sin. So confession, in the Orthodox practice, is the ultimate expression of love. It's not seen as a means to punish people, to demean or humiliate anyone. It's recognizing that Christ entrusted this care to his apostles, and through his apostles to his priests, and that forgiveness of sin is important. Separation from God is separation from God.
There are two characteristics to confession. One is private, which a person should make every day in his or her prayer life. We all make mistakes every day, and obviously a priest can't hear 1, confessions a day.
God has entrusted this care to us priests , not to make us a judge, but as the vehicle of the Holy Spirit to the people. When a person makes an appointment for confession, it takes place in the church. There's an icon of Jesus Christ before the altar that reminds the person the confession he is making is to Jesus Christ himself and not to the priest. There is a service that is done, prayers offered on behalf of the individual.
If the priest feels it's necessary to give a penance, he does so, reminding the person it's an act of love. The most extreme is a penance when a person could not receive Holy Communion for a period of time.
There's nothing more precious than receiving the body and blood of Christ. To have a separation now rather than in eternity, that's an act of love. Although confession "is an integral part of our church," Magoulias said, "I'm not going to say it's mandatory because one thing we protect and support is free will. It's not confession if it's forced on them. It's an act of humility for an individual who wants to be reconciled with God. And unlike the Catholic faith, "there are no last rites in the Orthodox Church," he said.
It's a good thing, but not necessary. He believes the sacrament of confession is neglected "mostly because people don't understand it. And they don't understand it because they don't understand sin, especially in the American culture. We'd like to take that word, 'sin,' out of the dictionary. Christ didn't say that.
He said to the apostles: 'If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven by your father in heaven. The benefits of confession are numerous, he said. Not just religiously, but physically, emotionally. Confession releases the burden the person may be holding in himself. It could improve relations with other people. It makes a person humble. The things I confess aren't going to be there. I'm going to be held accountable for those things I didn't confess.
The form involves an exhortation to repentance by the priest, a period of silent prayer during which believers may inwardly confess their sins, a form of general confession said together by all present, and the pronouncement of absolution by the priest, often accompanied by the sign of the cross.
Private or auricular confession is also practiced by Anglicans and is especially common among Anglo-Catholics. The venue for confessions is either in the traditional confessional , which is the common practice among Anglo-Catholics, or in a private meeting with the priest.
This practice permits a period of counseling and suggestions of acts of penance. Following the confession of sins and the assignment of penance, the priest makes the pronouncement of absolution. The seal of the confessional, as with Roman Catholicism, is absolute and any confessor who divulges information revealed in confession is subject to deposition and removal from office.
Historically, the practice of auricular confession was originally a highly controversial one within Anglicanism when priests of the Oxford Movement in the nineteenth century began to hear confessions, but they responded to criticisms by pointing to the fact that such is explicitly sanctioned in The Order for the Visitation of the Sick in the Book of Common Prayer , which contains the following direction:.
Here shall the sick person be moved to make a special Confession of his sins, if he feel his conscience troubled with any weighty matter. After which Confession, the Priest shall absolve him if he humbly and heartily desire it. Auricular confession within mainstream Anglicanism became accepted in the second half of the 20th century; the Book of Common Prayer for the Episcopal Church in the USA provides two forms for it in the section "The Reconciliation of a Penitent.
There is no requirement for private confession, but a common understanding that it may be desirable depending on individual circumstances. An Anglican aphorism regarding the practice is "All may; none must; some should". Protestant churches believe that no intermediary is necessary between the Christian and God in order to be absolved from sins. Protestants, however, confess their sins in private prayer before God, believing this suffices to gain God's pardon.
However confession to another is often encouraged when a wrong has been done to a person as well as to God. Confession is then made to the person wronged, and is part of the reconciliation process. In cases where sin has resulted in the exclusion of a person from church membership due to unrepentance, public confession is often a pre-requisite to readmission. The sinner confesses to the church his or her repentance and is received back into fellowship. In neither case is there any required format to the confessions, except for the steps taken in Matthew Lutheran churches practice "confession and absolution" with the emphasis on the absolution, which is God's word of forgiveness.
Confession and absolution may be either private to the pastor, called the "confessor" with the person confessing known as the "penitent," or corporate with the assembled congregation making a general confession to the pastor in the Divine Service. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries private confession and absolution largely fell into disuse; and, even at the present time, it is generally only used when specifically requested by the penitent or suggested by the confessor.
In his catechisms, Martin Luther praised private confession before a pastor or a fellow Christian "for the sake of absolution ," the forgiveness of sins bestowed in an audible, concrete way see John The Lutheran reformers held that a complete enumeration of sins is impossible Augsburg Confession XI with reference to Psalm and that one's confidence of forgiveness is not to be based on the sincerity of one's contrition nor on one's doing works of satisfaction imposed by the confessor.
The medieval church held confession to be composed of three parts: contritio cordis "contrition of the heart" , confessio oris "confession of the mouth" , and satisfactio operis "satisfaction of deeds". The Lutheran reformers abolished the "satisfaction of deeds," holding that confession and absolution consist of only two parts Large Catechism VI, 15 : the confession of the penitent and the absolution spoken by the confessor.
Faith or trust in Jesus' complete active and passive satisfaction is what receives the forgiveness and salvation won by him and imparted to the penitent by the word of absolution. The Lutheran Church of Sweden emphasizes the teaching of the Book of Concord that "confession and absolution" is a sacrament Apology of the Augsburg Confession XIII, 4 : sacramental confession to a Lutheran priest is contained in the Swedish massbook.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that "Confession is a necessary requirement for complete forgiveness. Confession may also be required to an authorized Priesthood leader: "Those transgressions requiring confession to a bishop are adultery, fornication, other sexual transgressions and deviancies, and sins of a comparable seriousness.
However, the confession must be held in strict confidence unless the sinner grants permission to disclose it to the disciplinary council. In Buddhism , confessing one's faults to a superior is an important part of Buddhist practice.
In the various sutras, followers of the Buddha confessed their wrongdoing to Buddha [1]. In Islam , confession, or declaration to be more precise, of faith is one of the five pillars of Islam see Shahadah.
The act of seeking forgiveness from God is called Istighfar. Like Judaism, confession of sins is made to God and not man except in asking for forgiveness of the victim of the sin. In Judaism , confession is an important part of attaining forgiveness for both sins against God and another man. However, confession of sins is made to God and not man except in asking for forgiveness of the victim of the sin. In addition, confession in Judaism is done communally in plural.
Unlike the Christian " I have sinned," Jews confess that " We have sinned. Psychology Wiki Explore. Animal defensive behavior Kinesis Animal escape behavior Cooperative breeding Sexual cannibalism Cannibalism zoology Animal aggressive behavior. Recent Blogs Community portal forum. Register Don't have an account? Confession religion. Edit source History Talk 0. Please help to improve this page yourself if you can.. The Sacrament of Penance. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
Categories Pages with broken file links Religious practices Add category. This occurred in Russia under Peter I — Peter abolished the institutional independence of the church and integrated it into the state administration. In , it was abolished completely and replaced by a committee known as the "Most Holy Governing Synod", which mimicked the colleges he had created as part of his government reforms — and church authorities in Protestant states — and which consisted of 12 members who had the status of state officials and who swore allegiance to the tsar.
Thus, the Orthodox Church had a similar structure to that of Anglicanism, Gallicanism, and the Iberian churches in the early modern period and in the 19th century. As the Iberian Peninsula was gradually brought back under Christian rule during the course of the Reconquista, the position of Jews there deteriorated considerably by comparison with the Moorish period.
In , the Sephardic Jews Sepharad being the Hebrew name for the Iberian Peninsula 48 lost their right to operate their own judicial system in the Christian part of Spain. As they had maintained a close relationship with Christian society, large numbers of Jews subsequently converted to Christianity conversos. The Jewish communities in England and France had ceased to exist due to the waves of expulsion in the 15th and early 16th centuries, as in Spain and Portugal. In Poland-Lithuania, where the majority of European Jews had been resident since the 15th century, 56 the Statute of Kalisz, which guaranteed internal self-administration to the Jews, established the parameters of Jewish life until the 18th century.
The Jewish communities also created governing structures above the communal level. Thus, organisational forms emerged which came close to a kind of Jewish statehood, which was viewed as the ideal. Regional provinces galil came into being as a result of multiple congregations joining together and smaller congregations subordinating themselves to larger communities.
These provinces in turn joined together into a medina state at the national level. The synodal assemblies at these levels were referred to as Vaad ha-Galil and Vaad ha-Medina. They were headed up by elders parnassim , who were elected by the congregations or their representatives and by a rabbi for Jewish law halacha. However, due to the central importance of the individual congregations in Jewish life, it was almost impossible to enforce legal judgements against individual congregations.
The "Territorialisierung der deutschen Juden" "territorialisation of the German Jews" 61 who had remained in the Holy Roman Empire came about as the imperial protection extended to the Jews was gradually replaced by the laws of individual lords and rulers pertaining to the Jews. By the midth century, almost all Jews in the Holy Roman Empire were under the jurisdiction of the territorial rulers and the imperial knights, the few "imperial Jews" remaining lived in a few imperial cities and in the hereditary Habsburg lands.
Thus they remained a fairly constant 1 per cent of the total population. Islam has been present in Europe for a very long time. Moorish Spain 67 came into being as a result of rapid campaigns of conquest which began in and disappeared with the expulsion of the last Muslims, who had been forcibly converted, in The Islamicisation of this part of Europe only began to be reversed with the beginning of the Reconquista in the 11th century, which saw the territory in the extreme north of the peninsula which had remained under Christian rule — and which portrayed itself as the heir of the Visigothic kingdom and thus laid claim to the whole of Spain — gradually extending its rule southward in a war of attrition.
Broadly speaking, Al-Andalus was organized as a caliphate 69 until it finally broke up into smaller kingdoms as a result of the defeat of the Muslim army by a crusading army at Las Navas de Tolosa in With the conquest of Granada, the history of the Moriscos began.
These were Muslims throughout the kingdom of Spain who nominally converted to Christianity after the suppression of Islam in Castile in and in Aragon in These Christians — whether nominal or genuine — were now subject to the Inquisition.
The policy of extirpating Islam began with the provincial synod of Granada in All forms of Muslim culture language, clothes, ritual bathing and baths, dances, etc. The rebellion which occurred between and in response to these measures resulted in the resettlement of 70, families from Granada to long-standing Catholic regions of Castile. Consequently, deportations occurred in —, 73 which saw Moriscos who unlike the majority had genuinely converted to Christianity being expelled with the rest.
In total, , people were expelled out of a total Spanish population of 8. Even under the Berber dynasties from the second half of the 11th century, which generally pursued a policy of confrontation, Christians known as Mozarabs because they had adopted Arab culture and Jews were not interfered with in terms of their religion, though they did adopt the Arabic language.
Thus the Arabs played an essential role in the return of classical philosophy to Europe. The second Islamic region of Europe was situated in the eastern European plains , where khanates had split off from the Golden Horde. It was finally annexed by the Russian Empire after The third Muslim-ruled region in Europe was in the Balkans. Constantinople fell in Serbia was conquered in , the Peloponnese in , and Bosnia in Most of Hungary was conquered between and ; Rhodes was conquered in ; Cyprus came under Ottoman rule in , 78 and Crete was conquered in Islamicisation proceeded particularly quickly in those regions where Christian groups like the Bogomils, who were viewed by Catholic and Orthodox Christians as heretics, predominated.
These voluntarily converted to Islam in large numbers. Tax records for the border region of Bosnia-Herzegovina give information on confessional affiliation. In Herzegovina , the Muslim proportion of the population reached The distribution of the Muslim population was particularly uneven in the Bosnian cities. In some of them, Christians remained in a clear majority, while in Sarajevo the Muslim inhabitants accounted for more than 96 per cent of the population by At the top of the hierarchy of the Islamic world was the caliph, who was originally both the religious and temporal leader of the Islamic people.
In the Ottoman Empire, the temporal ruler the sultan held the caliphate which continued to exist until along with the sultanate which was abolished in Turkey in The theology developed by St. Paul in the New Testament and the related anthropology, on which the subsequent doctrine of original sin was based, was central to the Christian concept of humanity.
Augustine's — teachings on sin had far-reaching consequences. Thus, he can no longer be without sin of his own accord non posse non peccare. This original sin is taken from humans through Christ's sacrifice.
Through baptism, humans are accepted into the covenant with God, which gives them the chance of not being defeated in the constant battle against evil and of not incurring God's punishment.
Eternal life is attained by those whom God has chosen praedestinatio. Only Calvinism has retained the doctrine of predestination in its more strict form of double predestination praedestinatio gemina , i. This became a very important aspect of doctrine in some strands of Calvinism. Drawing on traditions in Greek philosophy and certain tendencies in the New Testament, St. Augustine described the spirit as being in a battle with the flesh, which stood for the sum of all ungodly desires the concupiscentia.
A body-soul dualism emerges, which has fundamentally defined western Christianity. According to the Catholic view as codified in the Council of Trent — , each Christian has a free will and participates in his own justification.
Central to the forgiveness of sins is the sacrament of penance, during which the priest pronounces the forgiveness of sins absolution on God's behalf and prescribes the penance required to expiate the guilt. As with the Reformed churches, the Lutheran understanding of God is initially clearly predestinarian, that is, it states that God justifies man and dispenses salvation.
The works of man are never sufficient, as man is not capable of doing good of his own accord. It is the mercy of God that grants man, who is himself unworthy, salvation. In this explanation, God is analogous to a temporal prince and his law is analogous to a court judgement. However, this mercy is not "without consequences" like a simple testament, but rather it bestows faith.
This faith manifests itself in good works, which should be understood as a consequence, rather than a prerequisite, of mercy: sola fide, sed fides nusquam sola through faith alone, though faith never remains alone.
Even though good works are irrelevant for salvation, Lutheranism developed a doctrine regarding the Christian life which emphasises the tertius usus legis see Philipp Melanchthon — and the pedagogical element of God's commandments. True belief is oriented towards the didactic standards of the commandments in terms of the works it motivates, and the commandments thus become ethical values. A society which ignores the direction provided by the commandments must expect the punishment of God.
In this way, a world-ordering impulse became part of Lutheranism as well. The almighty and just God is at the centre of the theology of John Calvin — Calvin is primarily concerned with the honour of God, and secondly with the certainty of salvation of the individual. The glorification of God occurs in this world in the fight against evil Satan. According to Max Weber's — thesis, the capacity to contribute actively and freely to this glorification is for a Calvinist Christian a dependable indication of his being among the elect, i.
Discipline in the sense of constant self-control, of spiritual guidance, and also of a rigid monitoring by the congregation is therefore identified by some as an essential difference of Reformed churches from other confessions of western Christianity. Protestant Europe, and particularly Reformed Europe, placed far more focus on living in accordance with internal ethical standards than Catholicism with the possible exception of Jansenism , 95 Anglicanism, and the Orthodox Church.
Reformed Protestants also endeavoured to Christianise the world: "regnum Christi est etiam externum". The Orthodox religion does not have the same concept — which emerged in western medieval theology — of man's guilt before God, which can only be expiated through mercy Protestantism , or through God's mercy and the "treasury of grace" of the church Catholicism.
The Orthodox Church is much more spiritualist in its anthropology. Even after the fall from grace, in spite of his sinfulness man retains a core of the divinity in whose image and likeness he was created.
The Orthodox Church acknowledges man's free will and therefore his capacity for good. This is not interpreted as a virtue — since the punishment-reward system is not so dominant in the Orthodox religion as in the West — but as a process of gradual "divinisation". Although it identifies a human tendency towards evil evil drive, jezer ha-ra , the concept of the hereditary transmission of sin "original sin" is alien to Judaism.
There are only the current sins of deed. Man is free to choose good or evil. The entire people of Israel is chosen and became God's people through the Sinai Covenant, a Covenant which holds until the end of the world. Judaism also contains the concept of a Final Judgement. This is connected to a kind of sense of mission which views salvation as part of one's own responsibility, a sense of mission which views the world to come as a continuation of the current historical world, as the realisation of the "kingdom of God on earth".
The concept of the existence of original sin which makes man inherently incapable of loving God with a free heart and of obeying the commandments — this "scenario of doom" is alien to Islam. Thus, the full responsibility of man and his capacity to actually fulfil all of the commandments became central to Islam. According to the Koran, an original covenant between God and man and an original revelation have existed since the beginning of time.
Deep in his heart, man knows God and his absolute power; obedience and the power to submit to God's will is buried in each person and accessible to each person. Humans must fulfil the commandments both in the ritual and in the ethical spheres. The ritual commandments include the profession of faith Shahada , regular prayer, fasting, the giving of alms and the pilgrimage to Mecca, which are symbolised by the five fingers of the hand of Fatima, a popular piece of jewellery.
The ethnical commandments are the same as those in the Torah and the Old Testament: Worship God alone, honour your parents, help the poor, do not kill, do not fornicate, do not steal, give just measure, and do not be proud.
Salvation which is secured by doing good deeds and refraining from evil deeds is not sufficient for those Muslims who embark on the path of approaching God through Sufism, an Islamic mysticism which developed from the 9th century. Repentance begins with an intensive examination of the soul. The Sufis see man's enemy as residing in man's own nature, in his nafs the ego-self. In addition to the mosques, the Dervish monasteries were "Zentren sozialen Lebens" "centres of social life" in Balkan cities.
The dress of the dancing Dervishes is a reminder of man's mortality and God's mercy. The tall hats symbolise the gravestone; the black coat worn over the Alba symbolises the grave, and the white dancing gown symbolised the shroud. The palm of the right hand faces upwards to symbolise the undeserved mercy of God; the palm of the left hand faces downward because the mercy is passed down to earth, to humans, animals, plants and stones.
The altar is central in a Catholic church. It is also a holy tomb and thus is a reminder of the "treasury of grace" of good works, which the church possesses. Particularly in the baroque era, the Counter Reformation Catholic Church emphasised the glory of God and the veneration of saints, and focused on the seeing of ritual acts instead of the hearing of sermons.
The Counter Reformation aims as manifested in the Tridentine Mass clearly focused worship on the high altar and the tabernacle with the expositorium.
The relationship to God is established through the consecrated host, in which Christ is present. It is the essential element of the service, which is why not even the presence of the faithful is ecclesiologically necessary for the service. Given the particular ornateness of the church buildings in the post-Reformation period which served to depict and created a sacred space outside of everyday existence — and which created a distance between the priest, who had previously been a "normal" part of society, and the parishioners —, the way in which the congregation moved in this space is surprising.
Even during the service, the people wandered around, chatted, made contacts, and conducted business: "[E]ine allgemeine Unbefangenheit und Respektlosigkeit im heiligen Haus, die sie eher an das Treiben auf dem Markt erinnerten, fielen den protestantischen Autoren auf und deuteten darauf hin, dass hier offenbar ein merklicher konfessionskultureller Unterschied bestand. In addition to being the site of salvation and a site of social interaction, the church was also the site of effective apotropaic warding off evil remedies for the vagaries of worldly life.
Blessings, sacramentals, and sacraments, served as a means to preserve existence and protect against dangers. The rite was central, not — as in Protestantism — the inner attitude of the believer. Lutheran churches are similar to Catholic churches in many respects. The Reformation did not remove all images and statues. Martin Luther — was content as long as the images were not being worshipped. Neither did the Lutherans have any problem with retaining the old altars and continuing to use them.
However, they did no view the altar as a holy tomb or as a symbol of Christ, but as a reminder of the Last Supper , as a place where the congregation of the faithful come together.
Of central importance and as important as the altar is the pulpit, from which the word of God is read. It became the second pillar of Lutheranism's understanding of itself, as — according to Reformation thinking — God himself comes to the people in the sermon.
Lutheran church design reached its apogee in the pulpit-altar, in which the preached word and the visible word sacrament of Communion come together. In contrast to the Catholic church, which was viewed as a multifunctional space, Protestant churches were more strictly separated from profane life as sacred spaces.
As they served solely for the holding of services, they were locked at all other times. During the sermons and the Holy Communion services, the congregation sat still for long periods in their pews.
According to the Lutheran Haustafel , not only is the church a house of God, the family home is one, too. The man of the house, in his capacity as a lay priest, should therefore read the Bible aloud and provide for Christian life in the house. The Lutheran devotions for the home played a particularly important role during the era of pietism. In contrast to Lutheran churches, Reformed churches are free of images.
In the Reformed version and the Orthodox version of the Ten Commandments, a second commandment is added which forbids the worshiping of graven images. Thus the Reformed version differs from the traditional version retained by both Lutheranism and Catholicism : "You shall not make for yourself any image or likeness of anything that is in heaven above or on the earth below or in the water beneath the earth.
You shall not worship them or serve them. And in contrast to the Lutheran service which was based on the Latin Mass and was thus referred to as the "German Mass", the Reformed service was based on the late medieval Predigtgottesdienst sermon service without Communion or singing. Like Zwinglian churches, Calvinist churches were free of images and crosses.
The altar was replaced by the Communion table. The Communion wafer was replaced with broken bread. As in Lutheran churches, the pulpit is central in Reformed churches, and it is often connected with the Communion table.
When new churches were being built, the central role of the sermon was further emphasised by desiging the church like an auditorium. The floor plan was sometimes — as in the Noorder Kerk in Amsterdam — developed from the Greek cross.
The compulsion to have the church building oriented towards the east was dispensed with. A plaque containing the Ten Commandments, which it was the duty of the elders to uphold, could be found in practically every Reformed church. Orthodox churches are either basilicas or are centralised in layout with an onion-dome roof, which symbolises the presence of heaven on earth and thus gives expression to the idea of the divinisation of man.
They are a reflection of the next life. The iconostasis separates the nave from the sanctuary which contains the altar , but its icons depicting the saints and Christ also create a connection between the heavenly and the worldly church.
It is a primary feature of Orthodox churches. The synagogue is not only the house of God, it is also the focal point of the congregation. At various times in history, it additionaly housed the court and often the school, as well as serving as a hostel and housing charitable institutions. Particularly in the Holy Roman Empire where Jewish settlement was dispersed, this meant that multiple congregations had to join together to maintain regional synagogues.
The synagogue is always orientated towards Jerusalem. The Torah shrine is located at the wall which faces Jerusalem. Some synagogues in Moorish Spain were basilicas with side-aisles or big halls. In central and eastern Europe , one can find synagogues in the form of double-vaulted basilicas or simple halls with a flat ceiling or a domed roof. The bema also known as the alememar is always in the centre of the synagogue.
The Torah is read from the bema. In traditional synagogues, there was typically a separate area for the women. An eternal flame ner tamid and usually an artistic reconstruction of the seven-branched candle holder menorah are kept in many synagogues, as they were in the Temple of Jerusalem. A Jewish house is considered to be holy similar to a synagogue. Two containers either side of the entrance door and internal doors contain parchments with the Shema Fifth Book of Moses 6: 4—9 and the warning not to worship any other gods Fifth Book of Moses 13— These are touched with two fingers on the right hand as one enters and leaves, and the fingers are then kissed.
When they cannot attend worship at the synagogue, devout Jews perform their thrice-daily prayers at home by putting on the prayer shawl and binding the prayer boxes tefillin , which contain the verses from Deuteronomy from the house case, to their head and arm. The kippa remains on his head, as always.
The practicing Jew then prays quietly to himself, as does the congregation in the synagogue. The Sabbath is the holy time, a foretaste of the time of salvation. At home, the woman of the house lights the Sabbath candles, recites a blessing, and waves her hands over the candles in order to fill the room with their light.
The reading of the weekly text from the Torah, the reading of the haftarah , and these days a sermon are central elements of the morning service on the Sabbath. The service in the synagogue is communal prayer in Hebrew and sometimes in Aramaic. By touching the Torah scrolls, those present symbolically affirm their membership of the community of the Torah. The reading of the weekly Torah text, which is done by members of the congregation or by a permanent cantor, is introduced by the Shema.
Just as the Sabbath is welcomed like a glorious bride on Friday evening, the Sabbath is concluded on Saturday evening with the Habdalah "separation" , which separates the feast day and the working day. It is necessary to differentiate between Islamic prayer houses for daily prayer and the mosques in which the congregation gathers for Friday prayers. The prototype for all mosques is the house of Mohammed ca.
After the Prophet's death, a mosque was built on the site of the house, and, at the point facing Mecca where Mohammed used to pray, a niche was built, which was intended as a reminder of his presence mihrab. The original mosque did not have a minaret. In the Ottoman Empire, this design was developed further into the cupola mosque, which was also based on the formerly Christian cathedral Hagia Sophia. Minarets were only added to mosques at a later point, and they were based on the lighthouse Pharos in Alexandria the name minaret comes from manara tun meaning lighthouse.
The mosque is not a consecrated site.
0コメント