I believe it was Dr. Louis Finkelstein who said that the easiest way to trace the rise of new movements within Judaism is to see how they vary the texts in the siddur. The siddur is “the people’s book.” There are many, many Jews who have never seen a page of Talmud, or Midrash, or Responsa literature. There are some Jews who have hardly cracked open a Bible. But there are almost no Jews who have not opened a siddur.
So when you want to change something in Judaism, that’s where the change will show up.
And show up it did when modernity met the 7th blessing, which talks about the redemption of our people. “See our affliction, and fight our fight. Redeem us quickly…Blessed are You, Lord, Who redeems Israel.” Note the present tense— “redeems”, not “redeemed”—which implies that redemption is an ongoing process.
During the 1800’s when Jews were first experiencing the great freedom of America, there were those who either modified this blessing—“Behold the oppression of our brethren and redeem them speedily”—note the “redeem them”—or omitted it altogether. But all sorts of events in America and around the world (like anti-Semitism, the KKK marching in Washington, the Holocaust and the inability of American Jews to do much about it, etc.) have for the most part disabused people of the notion that we in America are exempt from the travails of exile.
On the other hand, in the Conservative siddur in Israel (Haavodah Shebalev), it reads, “redeem us with geulah shelemah, ‘complete redemption,’ since with the reestablishment of the Jewish state, redemption has begun. Israel is “reshit tzmichat geulateinu, the beginning of the flowering of our redemption.”
A final note: the rest of the blessings in the middle of the weekday Amidah are a full-scale outline of the necessary elements of national redemption—returning to the land, establishing courts, rebuilding Jerusalem, etc. Anyone who tells you that the redemption mentioned in the Amidah refers only to a spiritual state, rather than a physical one, is no longer talking about Judaism.