I thank you, living and enduring universe, That I am aware of my breath. How great are your wonders!
Blessed Are You, Wondrous Universe: A Siddur for Seekers combines religion’s stance of wonder and gratitude with humanism’s commitment to facts and scientific method. It embraces a commitment to individual and collective responsibility for our lives drawing from both worlds.
In a traditional siddur, God is the ultimate actor whose intervention we seek, whether through blessing, redeeming, healing, or forgiving us. In this siddur, we praise the universe, the earth, and Jewish tradition. With respect to moral choices, we address ourselves: Humans are the agents who need to hear our own prayer.
Available in two editions: Comprehensive with complete Hebrew and English text and Compact with abridged and transliterated Hebrew. Both editions feature sheet music for original musical music commissioned for a selection of the prayers in this volume.
“Herb Levine has fashioned a sparkling collection of prayers for a thinking, feeling modern person who wants to express gratitude for the wonder of existence.”
—Daniel Matt, translator of the Zohar, author of God and the Big Bang, The Essential Kabbalah, and Becoming Elijah
“A wonderful resource — inspirational, comforting, uplifting and insightful.”
—Rabbi Adam Chalom, co-author, Contemporary Humanistic Judaism: Beliefs, Values, Practices
“An exercise in holy audacity.”
—Dr. Shaul Magid, author, The Necessity of Exile
“The words are humanistic, but the result is transcendent… a gorgeous work of art that calls to the heart and gives it permission to connect to all that is without abandoning our humanistic beliefs. With these blessings and readings, we may say what we believe and believe what we say, but also send our gratitude forth into the cosmos with a simple ‘you.’ ”
—Humanistic Judaism Magazine
Advance Praise
“Herb Levine has fashioned a sparkling collection of prayers for a thinking, feeling modern person who wants to express gratitude for the wonder of existence. His powerful prayers are revolutionary, because they are both spiritually uplifting and scientifically accurate. If you’re troubled by traditional Jewish prayers and think they’re rather outdated, here is an alternative.”
—Daniel Matt, translator of the Zohar, author, God and the Big Bang, The Essential Kabbalah, and Becoming Elijah
“Herbert Levine’s liturgical innovations have the potential to heal the rift between secular and religious approaches to Judaism.”
—Rabbi Everett Gendler, author, Judaism and Universalism and A Passionate Pacifist
“It is very exciting to me that Herbert Levine’s Siddur for Seekers is channeling the spirit of Mordecai Kaplan. Anyone wanting to continue Kaplan’s project of helping Judaism to evolve should be consulting this work.”
—Professor Emeritus Mel Scult, Brooklyn College, author, The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan
“A wonderful resource — inspirational, comforting, uplifting and insightful.”
—Rabbi Adam Chalom, co-author, Contemporary Humanistic Judaism: Beliefs, Values, Practices
“An exercise in holy audacity.”
—Dr. Shaul Magid, author, The Necessity of Exile
Dr. Shaul Maggid: Placing this Book in the History of Jewish Prayer Poetry
In the year 2000 singer songwriter Greg Brown released an album, Covenant, with a song entitled, “Living in a Prayer.” It is a soulful song about seeking comfort and solace amidst chaos and confusion. It expresses hope without nostalgia, the longing of connection without romance, belief without faith. The song ends with the following lines:
You should be here
I should be there
Long as I’m in your heart
I’m living in a prayer.
Many of us are taught how to pray, some of us are taught how to daven, some of us even were taught what the siddur means. But how many of us are taught how to “live in a prayer”? The sages bequeathed us a siddur, a prayerbook that served as a map, both for themselves and for their progeny. Maps help you get from “here” to “there.” But they cannot take you there, as Robert Hunter captures in the concluding lyrics of his song “Ripple”: “If I knew the way, I would take you home.” But the siddur cannot take you home; at best it can show you the way. The reason is that home is not a place but an aspiration. Home is not where you are, but who you are where you want to be. A siddur can teach you to pray, but it can’t teach you how to “live in a prayer.”
The Jewish tradition allocates times for prayer, a text from which to pray, and a structure of what constitutes prayer. What it doesn’t teach us is how to “live in a prayer.” In some way this is the project of Blessed Are You, Wondrous Universe. It does so by offering its reader a series of experiments in prayer, liberating prayer from the traditional siddur, enabling prayer to speak itself, as it were, into the world, through the human heart, up to the heavens and out to the universe. Its object is multitudinous; it is life itself; its subject is the human heart.
It is often not understood that in the more than 2000-year history of Jewish texts, the text that Jews through the ages were most familiar with was not the Torah, not the Talmud, not the Shulchan Aruch. It was the siddur. From sage to farmer, from merchant to peasant, Jews knew the siddur, they owned siddurim, often passing them down through generations. The siddur was not a Jewish text; it was a Jewish map. It was often a physical object to be venerated, a palace of Jewish creativity, often freed from the confines of the legalities and social norms of the day.
Reciting prayers often became writing prayers. The tradition of piyyutim (liturgical poems) flourished in the Middle Ages in Europe and the Arab world. Jews, and not only sages, and not only men, composed prayers of thanks for everything from local miracles to regional consolation, from natural disasters to human depravity. Prayers accompanied fasts for rain, thanks for harvests, for weddings, funerals, and births. While halakha confined Jewish behavior to certain norms, the siddur never constricted the creative activity of constructing prayer. This is the foundation of this present book, to free prayer from liturgy, to liberate the human heart from communal conformity, to offer suggestions of how to “live in a prayer.”
Herbert Levine serves here as a navigator, a kind of Columbus of Jewish prayer, with a compass and series of maps spread across the table. He reconsiders prayer as a reaction to a series of actions in the daily lives we live: to react or to re-act, a gesture of response and repetition. Prayer as “re-action” enables one to step back from a moment in time and capture it through reflection and though language. Sometimes there are markers of Jewish life, sometimes simply moments in one’s life in this world. Levine teaches us how to verbally re-act and live in a moment, sometimes tragic, sometimes celebratory, a breath of life. The prayer does not then dissipate into the ether of time, but becomes an edifice of commemoration. If you let them, these prayers may help you “live in the prayer” itself. And that is where wonder is found, not in the moment of surprise, but in the moment of repeating surprise.
Famously, Rabbi Nathan Sternhertz of Nemerov, the disciple of Rebbe Nahman of Breslov, wrote a book of Likkutei Tefillot. This was an audacious project that had never really been tried before. Nathan took each homily of his teacher in Likkutei Moharan and created a prayer from its message as he understood it. It was one of the great prayer projects of Jewish modernity, about which he opined eloquently. To fully understand something, he surmised, one had to become an active agent. There are numerous ways to do this, commentary being the most common in Judaism. Nathan had another idea. What if I distilled the “experience” of the homily by constructing a prayer to express its message? Maybe then I could understand it better. Maybe then I could “live in the homily” itself. That is Hasidism!
Blessed Are You, Wondrous Universe is an exercise in holy audacity. It suggests that living in the moment, acting in the moment, sometimes requires a re-reaction to instantiate that moment, so that it can be integrated into one’s life. Not a marker but a key, not a memento but a code to unlock experience, not to pray, or daven. But to “live in a prayer.”
It makes perfect sense that this new roadmap is dedicated to Mordecai Kaplan, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, and Everett Gendler. Each in their own way tilled the soil for this project. Levine lives in their wake, and on their wave, and maybe even “in” their prayer-world. Kaplan gave it structure, Schachter-Shalomi gave it spirit, and Gendler gave it meaning in the here and now.
Don’t re-cycle your siddur, you still need it to pray. But if you want to “live in a prayer,” pick up a copy of Blessed Are You, Wondrous Universe…and enjoy the ride.
Musical Settings
We commissioned original music for our original prayers. Both editions of the book contain sheet music. Three composers — Shefa Gold, Eileen Kozloff, and Zach Mayer — provided the tunes: 13 original melodies for 9 of the Siddur for Seekers’ original prayers.
(You can download the audio files from this page.)
A Conversation with a Humanist rabbi about this Siddur
Herb Levine discusses his liturgical work with Rabbi Adam Chalom, Dean of the International Institute for Secular Humanistic.
Can One Pray Without Praying to a God? (3 minute podcast excerpt)
A Conversation with a Reform Rabbi about this Siddur
“Can you use this Siddur to reach an Eternal Thou?” asks Reform Rabbi Michael Zedek. Listen to a wide-ranging discussion between Rabbi Zedek, author Herbert Levine, and L’Chaim Jewish Radio host Jim Shainker on what it means to be a seeker within the Jewish tradition.
A New Approach to Jewish Prayer: Insights from Dr. Herbert Levine – Seekers of Meaning 10/31/2025
In this episode of Seekers of Meaning, Rabbi Richard Address interviews Dr. Herbert Levine about his prayer book, Blessed Are You, Wondrous Universe, which merges Judaism, science, and spirituality. They explore the role of seekers, community, and music in spiritual practices, promoting a non-theistic approach to enhance meaningful Jewish experiences.
Liberal-thinking Jews like me need a new way to think about Hanukkah
We may not yet realize it, but we need a new story of Hanukkah, lest we lose the next Jewish generation to disillusionment with Jewish power and might.
What do I make of Hanukkah, our most overtly political and militaristic holiday, in the context of my beliefs? How do I as a liberal thinker approach a holiday that has become a celebration of supernatural miracles and divine intervention?
I stand in a long line of Jews wrestling with these issues. The Talmud famously asks “What is Hanukkah?” as if the rabbis having the conversation had never heard of it. They go on to tell the story of the miracle made by God: how one day’s supply of oil lasted for eight days, enabling them to rededicate the Temple that had been polluted by Israel’s Greek-Syrian oppressors. That is the story we have been telling our children ever since.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the great Yiddish and Hebrew writer, Mendele the Book Seller (in Hebrew, Mendele Mocher Seforim) wrote a story asking the same question: “What is Hanukkah?” The story presents a little boy in Russia who angers his father by asking for Hanukkah to last a whole year, so that he could have a permanent vacation from the cheder and its rigors. His father slaps him, knocking the kippah off his head, and sends him looking for other sources of knowledge. He eventually finds volumes written by enlightened Jews who present Hanukkah in a wholly new guise: as both an anti-imperial war and as a civil war of Jewish loyalists against modernizing Jewish Hellenists.
This second story, which we have been telling for the past century, has been reinforced by the Zionist approach to the holiday, which is evident in the secular song, “Mi Yimalel.” “Who can retell the things that befell us/ Who can count them?/ In every age, a hero or sage came to our aid.” The sage was a concession in the English translation of the song; the Hebrew version features only the gibbor, the hero, celebrated for his valor. It is no surprise that in Israel Hanukkah became the nationalist holiday par excellence.
In our time, neither the religious story of childhood’s miracles, nor the account of Maccabean military might, rings true. This year especially it will be hard for many American Jews to celebrate Hanukkah as a holiday glorifying a Jewish military victory. So many of us have come to see that militarism will not guarantee peace for the people of Israel, but rather only contribute to a cycle of endless war. The spiritual visionaries of early Zionism — Ahad Ha-am, Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, Henrietta Szold —foresaw that a nation state using power for self-preservation would be in an eternal war with the Arab people and would inevitably deform the values of Judaism that they held dear. We needed a nation state to save the Jews of the world after the Holocaust and our expulsion from Arab lands. We still need a place of refuge from antisemitism, not a state that generates more antisemitism through its actions. Now we need our nation state to share the land with the other people that holds it dear.
In a world where Jewish identity is often defined by culture rather than faith, interpreting Hanukkah as a truly spiritual story is also no easy task. Long ago, the rabbis picked for the Haftarah of Hanukkah a lesson from Zechariah. In Debbie Friedman’s popular version, it goes like this: “Not by might and not by power, but by spirit alone shall we all live in peace.” American Jews crave spirituality, though few of us believe in a God who makes miracles. We speak of the Hanukkah miracle to our children, all the while knowing that it is but a children’s story. Most university-educated Jews would have been counted among the Hellenizers; we would not have survived the Maccabee’s zealous hatred of all that was modern.
So, for the mostly non-observant, celebrating Hanukkah as a victory over assimilationists is highly ironic, especially when we stage it for our children in the materialist, commercial idiom of the dominant culture.
So we Jews need a new story of Hanukkah. Many have begun to focus on the lights themselves, making Hanukkah a holiday of searching for sources of inner light in the midst of a dark time — an annual dark time of year in yet another dark time in the history of the world, a world that is always broken and always needing repair, tikkun olam.
That sort of spirituality is what I am trying to get at in this contemporary Hanukkah prayer, “Meditation before the Hanukkah Candles”:
At a great distance from wondrous miracles,
I sit and watch the tiny candles
Burning in my deep diaspora,
Competing with their small light
Against the giant blaze of Christmas,
And feel grateful for a festival of small lights,
Because only from small actions—
Giving a soft answer,
Turning away anger,
Increasing peace at home—
Is the world sustained.
Blessed is our tradition
Dedicating small candles
To great deeds.
There is an irony, of course, in comparing the small ethical and moral actions in one’s life to the great deeds of the Hanukkah story, but that is precisely the point. It is time for a new Hanukkah, kind and compassionate, turning narrow nationalism into a universalist pursuit of the world to come promised by our prophets. With kindness, the world to come can come now.
