It’s a literary style that created a certain kind of mind — made by the people, it remade the people in turn, organized their thinking around endless probing.

2. Yiddish

The cadence comes from the dialect of the shtetl and the Pale of Settlement, where Jews developed an especially expressive language to describe especially terrible circumstances. In New York, Yiddish-isms mixed with neighborhood lingo, creating a patois. Some of those phrases made it into the American lexicon, where they live forever.

The people are gone, but their words remain: klutz, kvel, mensch. And it was not just the words but the structure of the sentences, which were inverted, tuned for pontificating. Scholars call it the “Yoda effect” — the wizened Muppet was an old rebbe, teaching the ancient wisdom.

“In most varieties of American English, a predicate can’t be placed in front of the subject,” Dan Nosowitz wrote on the website Atlas Obscura. “Think of a simple phrase like ‘I want pizza.’ But in Yiddish, that order is sometimes swapped: ‘Pizza I want.’”

Scholars call it the “Yoda effect” — the wizened Muppet was an old rebbe, teaching the ancient wisdom.

Or consider my Grandma Esther, born in Poland, moved to New York, then to what she called “the true promised land of the Jews,” North Miami Beach, where she lived in a condo complex named the Three Seasons — because there is no winter in the land of milk and honey. You could never tell if she was trying to be funny, or if it was just the Yoda effect. When her second husband, Izzy, died a year into the marriage, she told it this way: “Izzy was doing a dish. I was in the bathroom. A crash I heard. I thought Izzy dropped a dish, but, when I came out, I saw that what Izzy had dropped was dead.”

3. Influence

The voice originated from the Talmud and Yiddish, but spread via imitation — many rabbis imitating some long ago Rabbi Chuck Yeager. That’s why it thrives among even the most assimilated clergy members. For many people who’ve forgotten the rituals, the voice, along with bagels and lox, Streisand and Koufax, is what remains of the old ways, a comforting item in the storehouse of cultural Judaism. Why do even Reform rabbis talk like that? Because it makes them seem Jewish and because it’s what their congregants want.

When I asked an old friend who was ordained as a Reform rabbi — he did not talk like that in school — if he knew about the voice, he emailed me, saying, “My rabbi spoke in the same way, and I’ve adapted the approach.” He doesn’t use it all the time, he said, but it has its uses. “I definitely do when I know I’m going to have a big audience, such as on the High Holy Days. That voice is sort of the rabbi’s version of a mic drop.”