← Towards a Spiritual Humanistic Judaism · Part III — Formation, prayer and pastoral life
This raises the question of prayer
If prayer is not necessarily a request directed towards a supernatural being, why pray?
The Hebrew word lehitpalel, traditionally used for prayer, is a reflexive form which invites an understanding of prayer as self-examination, reorientation and openness to change. Prayer is therefore not only a conversation with God. It is also a practice through which we become more attentive to our lives, our relationships and our responsibilities.
Jewish prayer can be petition, but it can also be gratitude, meditation, confession, praise, lament, memory, moral imagination and renewed intention. A blessing does not merely ask for something to happen. It names what is precious. It teaches us to recognise the sources of life, beauty, nourishment, courage and connection that are already present.
When we pray, we do not necessarily try to persuade the universe to obey us. We place ourselves within a larger pattern of meaning. We remember who we want to become. We acknowledge the ways in which we have failed. We gather our scattered attention. We allow inherited words, melodies and gestures to lead us back towards honesty, compassion and responsibility.
Prayer can bring us into relationship with God, with the sacredness of life, with the people around us, with the generations who came before us, or with the better possibilities within ourselves. These need not be mutually exclusive.
We are independent, but we are also interdependent. Jewish prayer gives form to that truth. It reminds us that our lives are not isolated projects. We are shaped by other people, by the natural world, by history and by the communities to which we belong. Prayer can therefore become a practice of moral and spiritual reorientation.
Can Jewish prayer continue the chain of our ancestral heritage?
Traditional Jewish prayer presents a genuine challenge. Much of the siddur uses images of God as king, father, ruler, judge and supernatural interventionist. If we are praying consciously rather than merely repeating words, we may need to ask what those images mean to us now.
But the choice is not simply between reciting inherited language uncritically and abandoning the tradition altogether. Jewish prayer has always used metaphor, interpretation and layered meaning. We can carry the words forward while allowing them to speak differently.
A king may become an image of ultimate responsibility rather than domination. A judge may evoke moral accountability and the consequences of our actions. A redeemer may represent liberation from oppression. A source of blessing may name the conditions that sustain life. The language of divine presence may draw our attention to nature, human compassion, communal solidarity and the possibilities of repair.
The traditional names of God can also be approached through translation and interpretation. Instead of translating the Tetragrammaton or Adonai only as “Lord,” we might encounter names such as “The Eternal,” “The Source of Life,” “The Abundant One,” “The Faithful Presence,” “The Beloved,” or “The Light that makes for life.”
Such language does not establish one compulsory theology. It opens the prayer to reflection. It allows us to remain connected to the devotion of our ancestors while speaking honestly from our own spiritual understanding.
Spiritual Humanistic Judaism therefore does not ask every Jew to agree about what God is. It asks what our practices make possible. Do they deepen our capacity for awe? Do they help us practise gratitude and generosity? Do they strengthen our courage? Do they lead us towards justice, compassion and responsibility? Do they help us build a kehillá in which people can live with greater dignity and freedom?
Some of us will call the reality or value that draws us towards these things God. Some will call it holiness, godliness, the yetzer ha-tov, conscience, Nature, love or the light within humanity. Some will use several of these languages, depending on the moment.
The words may differ. The spiritual work remains recognisably Jewish: to sanctify time, to cultivate the self, to repair relationships, to resist injustice, to celebrate life, and to help bring into the world more wisdom, compassion and peace.
Tefilotenu is a Shabbat siddur in Hebrew with facing transliteration and English, composed between 2020 and 2026, published in 2026 and in use in a small international congregation. This chapter treats it as the concentrated test case for everything above: whether one naturalistic Spiritual Humanistic Jewish reconstruction can be said aloud without a footnote and whether saying it can help form the people who enact it.
At its narrower level, “the siddur without footnotes” is a standard of liturgical semantics: the words printed in the service should mean, in ordinary public language, what the congregation intends by saying them, and no worshipper should need to learn that God privately means natural process while the sentence continues to address a divine person. At its wider level the phrase names the whole programme, of which this book is not a miniature but an instance.
This is where the Mussar argument becomes liturgical. If holy predicates are to become middot, they must move from admired nouns to recurrent acts, and a siddur supplies a public schedule of attention. Week after week it names gratitude, humility, compassion, justice, rest, memory, hope and love; melody and choreography attach those qualities to the body; the calendar returns the practitioner to them; the plural voice makes their cultivation communal; and the weekday test asks what the rehearsal produced. Tefilotenu does not replace the journal, drill, study-partner or ḥeshbon ha-nefesh of Mussar. It gives those disciplines a shared Jewish grammar and an affective home, and is therefore neither a theological manifesto set to music nor an ethical code disguised as prayer, but a formative practice within an evolving religious civilisation.
The problem it addresses is not the one Kaplan addressed. His Sabbath Prayer Book of 1945 retained the Hebrew, the traditional order, and the formula on which nearly every unit of Jewish liturgy is built — Baruch atah Adonai.25 That follows from his theology: if God is the power that makes for salvation, the noun has a referent and a referent can be addressed. He changed what the noun points to. He did not conclude that the sentence should stop pointing. The result is a liturgy in which the metaphysics were rebuilt and the grammar left standing: the congregation still says you, and with it come an addressee, a direction in which praise travels, and a hearer.
Shuster makes the same observation about Kaplan’s successors, noting that the Reconstructionist siddur adjusts the formula — melech ḥai olamim for melech ha-olam — to render God as a natural force, and that even this remains a petition to a Supreme Being. The adjective has been naturalised; the vocative has not.
Weiner’s alternative must be met before the textual case is made. Benjamin Weiner begins from the same instability and declines the proposed grammatical repair. Traditional davenning, on his account, is a classical spiritual technology whose language, melody and choreography can carry a person after its original theology has ceased to convince. In nusḥ, the words become less a conversation with an addressee than an ambience: fragments of gratitude, trembling and longing suspended in music. The God to whom the sentences are addressed recedes from the experience, while their affective burden remains.
This is a serious account of prayer and a necessary criticism of bloodless religious humanism. The human being at prayer is not a disembodied interpreter: music carries grief before thought has organised it, repeated Hebrew creates belonging without translation, and a room breathing together produces knowledge unavailable to prose. Semantic honesty must not become the rule of a rational faculty embarrassed by the body, and Tefilotenu depends upon inherited melodies for exactly that reason.
But music suspends semantic conflict without resolving it. A worshipper transported by nusḥ may cease attending to the divine agent encoded in the sentence; the agent remains audible to anyone who understands the words and visible to anyone reading the translation. The resolution also assumes an inheritance which cannot be assumed — the forms and rhythms of davenning were inscribed upon Weiner in childhood — and Jews by choice, Jews raised without Hebrew, and those for whom compulsory prayer was itself alienating do not possess the same route from propositional address to musical ambience.
The limitation is therefore normative rather than experiential. It does not follow from the fact that traditional tefilla works this way for many people that a transparently naturalistic community should adopt as its public speech words whose ordinary meaning it relies on worshippers learning not to hear. Weiner’s experience nevertheless supports the argument of this thesis, since in his davenning the divine Subject disappears while gratitude and trembling remain. The disagreement concerns where the disappearance should occur: for Weiner, in the consciousness of the musically transported worshipper; in Tefilotenu, in the text the community says aloud. This is a claim about the honesty of this community’s naturalistic liturgy, not a definition of what every Spiritual Humanistic Jewish community must say.
The move made in Tefilotenu can be stated in one sentence.* Kaplan changed the referent of the noun and kept the direction of the sentence. This liturgy keeps the form of address and changes its direction. The vocative is not abolished — which is what distinguishes the result from a secular substitute — but redirected: toward the community present, the teachers and ancestors who transmitted, and the dead who are remembered.
The method is not confined to the siddur. Applied to a rabbinic text it produces the same result. Rabbi Tarfon’s sentence at Avot 2:16 reads lo alecha hamelachah ligmor — it is not upon you to complete the work — a second-person address with a speaker standing outside the labour and instructing someone else in it. Read lo aleinu: it is not upon us. One pronoun dissolves the addresser into the workers, makes repair collective rather than the private project of an individual, and leaves the obligation exactly where it was, since neither are we free to abandon it. The change also states what a mitzvah is. It is not a wager placed on the likelihood of success; it binds before the odds are calculated and continues to bind after they turn. And it sets the scale of the work honestly: the melachah is larger than any worker, community or lifetime, so a person is answerable for their part without being asked to carry the whole.
The evidence is textual.26
The Barchu. The traditional call to public worship is Barechu et Adonai ha-mevorach, answered Baruch Adonai ha-mevorach le-olam va’ed. Tefilotenu reads Barechu et ha-kahal ha-mevarech — bless the community which blesses — answered Baruch ha-kahal ha-mevarech, le-olam va’ed. Two consonants change and the axis of the service rotates. The participle ha-mevarech, which in the original describes God as the source of blessing, now describes the assembly as a body that performs it. The choreography is retained and its meaning inverted: the rubric directs the facilitator to bow at barechu and the congregation at baruch, glossed as a symbol of the sacredness of community. The gesture of reverence survives; it is performed toward the room.
Ma’ariv Aravim. Baruch koaḥ ha-olam ha-maḥalif et ha-zmanim — blessed is the force in the world which changes the times and arranges the stars in their courses. Here the referent is close to Kaplan’s own: the power that makes for salvation and the force that brings on the evening are cousins, and both are naturalistic. The disagreement at this line is therefore grammatical rather than metaphysical. Atah is dropped; no noun names an agent; what remains is a predicate construction, true when said. The siddur’s own English renders baruch here not as blessed but as awesome, which is a theological decision as well as a translator’s: what the blessing names is the turning of the times and the ordering of the stars, which is Santayana’s formula — the sources of our being — set in Hebrew and said at dusk. It requires no hearer.
Ahavat Olam and the Shema. The traditional blessing declares God’s everlasting love for Israel. Tefilotenu reads Be-ahava raba nohav et amenu — with abundant love we will love our people — retaining be-ahava raba word for word and changing the verb’s subject and tense: divine love for us becomes our love of our people, promised rather than reported. The preceding meditation asks the reader to imagine loved ones receiving unconditional love, to notice how that love has passed from person to person across generations, and then to extend it outward until ”these people, your chosen family, are our people.” The Shema’s own declaration follows: Shema Yisra’el, kulanu eḥad ve-yi’udenu eḥad — hear O Israel, we are all one and our purpose is one.
The Amida. The rubric states the intention outright: to transform the moment from petition into commitment, from asking for divine intervention to accepting human responsibility. The Avot becomes Nevarech et ha-ḥayim bene’emanutenu — let us bless life with our faithfulness — first person plural, cohortative, naming the ḥasadim of six matriarchs before the patriarchs. The Gevurot is the most instructive passage in the siddur. Kaplan removed the resurrection of the dead; Tefilotenu revalues it. The verbs of the traditional benediction survive — supporting the falling, healing the sick, freeing the bound — with their subject changed from God to us; and meḥayeh metim becomes the raising up of those who feel dead, with the clause about those who sleep in the dust relocated from a promise about the dead to an obligation of the living. This is Kaplan’s own method applied where his own prayer book reached for deletion.
The Kaddish. Yitgadal ve-yitkadash shelama be-alma. Nivra shelama chir’utana — magnified and sanctified be peace in the world; peace created according to our will. The subject of sanctification is no longer the Name but shelama, and every one of the eight verbs of praise now governs it. The English of the mourner’s form makes the inversion explicit: in the world which we did not create, let us take counsel, let us choose worthy leaders, let us bring our own salvation. It is a deliberate answer to b’alma di vera chir’utei, conceding that the world was not ours to make and refusing the conclusion that its making obliges us to address anyone.
The Alenu. Alenu leshabeaḥ le-yif’at tevel — it is upon us to praise the splendour of the world — in place of praising the Lord of all; ki be-koḥenu livnot ultaken, uve-yadenu lehatsmiaḥ ge’ula, for it is in our power to build and repair and in our hands to make redemption spring forth; and, at the climax, ve-ahava timloch al kol ha-arets… yihyeh ha-adam eḥad ve-yi’udo eḥad: love shall reign over all the earth, and the human being shall be one and their purpose one. The verb of sovereignty is given to a quality, and Zechariah’s the Lord shall be one and His name one becomes a claim about humanity.
The Kiddush. Here the vocative returns in its traditional form and its object is named: Blessed are you our teachers and our ancestors, who ensured the continuity of our people, who blessed us with their traditions with love… Blessed are you my friends who distinguish the Sabbath. What the ancestors are blessed for is transmission — an act performed by people now dead toward people not yet born, which is Santayana’s formula in its most exact application. And savri ḥaverai, attention friends, survives untouched, because it was always horizontal: the one moment in the traditional Kiddush when the speaker addresses the room rather than heaven required no revision at all.
Chosenness. The Torah blessing is where the doctrine is stated most baldly in the traditional liturgy — asher baḥar banu mi-kol ha-amim, who chose us from among all the peoples — and it is the blessing an ordinary congregant is most likely to say aloud in their own voice. Tefilotenu reads ki anu baḥarnu et am Yisra’el: for we have chosen the people of Israel. The verb of election survives and its subject is inverted, so that the one called to the Torah is the one doing the choosing; mi-kol ha-amim becomes a preposition of company rather than rank — one people among all peoples; torato, His Torah, becomes toratenu, ours; and the traditional notén ha-torah, singular, becomes notné ha-torah, plural, so that one letter transfers the giving of Torah from God to the people. The same technique appears in Lecha Dodi, where am segula, a treasured people, becomes am mesugalim, a capable people: the root is preserved so the ear still hears the original, and what a people is to an owner becomes what a people is able to do.
This matters beyond the individual texts. Kaplan removed chosenness and was excommunicated substantially for the removal;27 he then supplied vocation as its replacement in prose rather than in the prayers, which by the standard governing this thesis is no replacement at all, since what a congregation absorbs is what it says. Tefilotenu reconstructs rather than deletes, and gives Kaplan’s own replacement term the final word of both of the liturgy’s great unity declarations — ve-yi’udenu eḥad for this people, ve-yi’udo eḥad for humanity.
And the Sabbath programme. In Judaism as a Civilization Kaplan set out what a reconstructed Sabbath requires: not what the Jew refrains from doing but the affirmative conduct which observance elicits; a day with a distinct atmosphere, deliberately cultivated; an hour taken from business for a service; an afternoon of discussion, study and reading circles; a late afternoon of social gathering and singing; the day closed with Havdalah — and he rated the Friday evening table above the most successful synagogue service. Eleven years later he published a synagogue book, serving the hour he ranked lowest. Tefilotenu carries the table in the same volume rather than in a separate domestic manual; prints the study circle as a rubric, with a talk, discussion in pairs and sharing with the group given the same standing as a prayer; typesets the late afternoon of singing and company alongside the blessings; and closes with Havdalah. Where Kaplan and Morris Joseph left the hard cases to the individual conscience, the liturgy installs that tribunal in the text: vih’yitem kedoshim l’Eloheichem, you shall be holy to your God, becomes ve-hayinu kedoshim lifnei da’atenu, we shall be sacred when facing our conscience.