It is so powerful.

People find themselves crying without even knowing why.

Hello, I'm Neil McGregor,

and in this series of podcasts,

I'm looking at objects to see how shared beliefs help shape societies

and how individuals take their place in a larger community.

In this episode, we come together to celebrate and to sing.

This is the BBC.

In the last few programmes, we've been looking at how individuals take their place in a society,

a society that's usually also been a community of faith.

In this programme, we're looking at how those individuals are bound and energized into a group

that can work together. We're looking at community worship.

For most people, for most of history, that's meant coming together just a few times a year

for festivals, linked with changing seasons or great religious celebrations.

And then, really quite recently, the rise of Christianity and Islam as truly global religions changed all that.

They brought to much of the world a Jewish structure of a weekly cycle of worship,

marked every seven days by communal gathering. It's a pattern designed to replicate the behavior of God,

as told in the book of Genesis, creating the world in six days and then resting on the seventh.

This is why every Friday just afternoon,

Muslims come together for congregational prayer.

Friday evening, moving into Saturday, is a Jewish Shabbat or Sabbath,

when many Jews will go to synagogue.

...