Liturgy Rewritten to Keep the Form and Change the Claim

Humanistic Judaism keeps the festivals, the life cycle rites and the Hebrew language of Jewish liturgy but rewrites the wording of the prayers themselves, so that nothing recited in its services asserts belief in a supernatural God the congregation does not hold. Judaism Beyond God explains the practice as following directly from the movement's location of Jewish identity in history and peoplehood rather than in theology: where the traditional blessing formula, blessed art thou, O Lord our God, addresses a personal deity, Humanistic services substitute language affirming human capability, communal responsibility and continuity with Jewish history, retaining the same festival structure and, for the most part, the same Hebrew words for holidays and life cycle events while changing what those words are understood to claim. The Passover Haggadah, the text read at the seder, is a frequently cited example, rewritten within the movement to center human beings' own historical struggle for freedom rather than divine intervention as the event being commemorated, keeping the meal, the retelling and the symbolic foods of the traditional seder while relocating the agency at the story's center from God to the people who acted.