IN Israel, a nation marked by divides everywhere, a slender peace is being brokered between the religious and secular in an unexpected arena, contemporary dance. In forums as diverse as this city’s leading alternative arts space, a conservative women’s college in the West Bank, a popular Israeli television series, yeshiva-schooled men and pious young Jewish women are separately using movement to bridge this chasm.

Perhaps the epitome of this effort is Ka’et, a group of five Orthodox men working under the direction of a Tel Aviv choreographer, Ronen Izhaki. Together they create spare yet emotionally rich work that takes gestures from daily prayer movements along with chants and synagogue attire, and gently shifts and reframes these elements as postmodern dance. It’s a savvy move, reflecting both the explosive body of Ohad Naharin’s choreography and its social opposite, the trancelike swaying of devout Jews in deep prayer. “We are using the stage to awaken a new discussion between our lives and our bodies,” said Amitai Stern, 25, the youngest member of the group.

The men of Ka’et (a Hebrew acronym that means “timely”) are not professional dancers. In their 20s and 30s, some have families; all have day jobs — one is a rabbi at a yeshiva, another works with runaways from ultra-Orthodox homes. But when they made their debut in the fall at the Lab, an important alternative space in Jerusalem, and afterward in sold-out concerts elsewhere, their lack of performing experience didn’t matter. They presented an astonishingly intense dance, “Highway No. 1,” with movement, costumes and sound score taken from Jewish religious practice.

Starting with Emmanuel Witzthum’s techno music overlaid with chanted Kabbalah passages, the dance revealed prayer as not just its medium but also its subject. The men, barefoot and wearing worn slacks and shirts, sway softly, palms forward, eyes rolled back, lips moving noiselessly. Suddenly one begins accelerating his movements. With growing agitation he tries to climb over the others clustered around him — like a sleepwalker driven by a disturbing dream. The ensemble responds reflexively, folding his swimming arms down to his sides and pressing him back into a posture of quiet prayer without breaking the steady rocking motions of their own davening.

When a group of religious men from Mr. Izhaki’s dance school saw a performance, several chuckled out loud at this passage. “It reminds me exactly of when I am praying and an errant thought keeps trying to interrupt me,” one of them, Yuval Azulay, said. “You try to put it aside and get back to the focus of the prayer, but it keeps coming back.”

“Highway No. 1” takes its title from the road connecting Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, which epitomize the secular and religious in Israel. “If you work in Jerusalem with religious people, you are right wing,” Mr. Izhaki, 38, said. “And if you live in Tel Aviv and are a dancer, you are left wing and a vegetarian. But I didn’t take the package with either of those.”

What Mr. Izhaki did instead was scramble these categories. He began working with religious men as an outgrowth of an experiment in 2000 initiated by the head of a yeshiva in Akko, Israel. The idea was that introducing dance could help with the devotional quality of students’ spiritual work. That first foray lasted only a few months, but, Mr. Izhaki said, “I discovered a different movement language.”

Nothing much came of the experiment until 2007, when Eyal Ogen, a former yeshiva student, approached him about teaching a group of his fellow former students. Mr. Izhaki agreed, and it proved to be the start of a small school. Early on, the men asked Mr. Izhaki about performing, but he told them to wait, working instead on eliciting a unique movement vocabulary from them in classes and workshops. In rehearsal they come across as ethnographers researching their own religious lives and displaying the movement artifacts they’ve found.

As word spread, professional Israeli dancers have asked to work with Ka’et, but all of them must be male, since Orthodox men are prohibited from seeing women dance or even demonstrate dancing. Likewise Noga, a company of religious women at a college in the West Bank, may perform only for female audiences. That troupe, begun in 2009, also specializes in contemporary work based on religious themes, but it is more traditional, and its impact has been more limited than Ka’et’s.

The men’s ability to draw religious and secular Israelis into the same theater for a dance performance is highly unusual. Alon Ben-Yaacov, a tour guide and the one member of Ka’et who wears long payos, the side curls of Orthodox Jews, said it took three years for his family members to understand that he wanted to dance, but now, he said, they are supportive.

The Israeli media are joining this religious-secular dance wave. In what all involved say is a coincidence, an Israeli television series, “Another Life,” that also had its debut in the fall, features a conflicted yeshiva student (played by the popular Israeli actor Oz Zehavi) who slips away from Talmud study to take a class secretly at a Tel Aviv dance studio. A researcher for that series, Yochai Hadad, has made a documentary about Ka’et that will be broadcast next month on Israeli TV.

Reactions to the troupe have been split. Some dance writers and bloggers have wondered where the technique is, while sold-out audiences have cheered. Hananya Schwartz, the young rabbi in Ka’et, was anxious about his own rabbi’s seeing him dance onstage. His anxiety wasn’t entirely misplaced: after the performance, his rabbi quoted a passage from the Talmud that Mr. Schwartz said could be summed up as “interesting but you are wasting your time.”

He and the other members of Ka’et aren’t deterred, however. Mr. Izhaki is in talks with producers about a tour in Switzerland next summer, and all of the men said they were looking for a way to teach movement in yeshivas and religious centers.

Several of the dancers noted that in the performance they actually do find themselves praying — so intently that when Mr. Izhaki stops them with a correction, they are annoyed at the interruption. Mr. Izhaki sees a connection and says admiringly, “They brought to their bodies the focus they use in studying a Talmud page.”