Substituting Words for Sacrifices

My People's Prayer Book: Shabbat Morning, Daniel Landes, "Halakhah" pages 143-144
The Musaf Amidah is both the verbal evocation of the sacrifice and its virtual reenactment. The verse applied to it is un'shalmah farim s'fateinu, "[Instead of bulls] we will pay the offering of our lips" (Hosea 14:3). This means that the kavvanah (our "inner intent") should be that the words of the Musaf Amidah be indeed a sacrifice.
The sacrificial system is commonly derided. I have heard the scorn heaped on this so-called brutal and wasteful cultic rite-- often at banqueting halls or fine restaurants where mounds of flesh are consumed by ravenous crowds and even greater mounds are discarded afterwards. How different was the sacrifice, a KoRBaN in Hebrew (from Hebrew k.r.v/b), meaning "to draw us near," and intended to bring us closer (l'KaReV) to God. The korban is an expression of life's finitude, an encounter with mortality, a forced admission of how fleeting life really is. The priests of old would lay hands upon the sacrifice, then (in some cases) say a vidui ("a confession,...) and then sprinkle or dash the blood on the altar, as if to say, "There but for the grace of God go I."
But even as sacrifice allows us to encounter human finitude, it also draws us near to infinity. The korban allows for transformation: the offering and the lifting up of the merely material into the spiritual. From the most base and mundane parts of existence, one brings a gift that finds its way to God.
It also connects us to another form of life. Judaism clearly embraces a hierarchy of life-- it places animal existence below the human plane. But it demands a reverence for that life, as expressed by the way the laws of ritual slaughter (sh'chitah,...) First, sh'chitah requires a blessing; second, it demands skill in using a specially sharpened blade that limits suffering because the animal dies instantly, without so much as an unnecessary nick in the neck.
Finally, pedagogically speaking, sacrifice enhances the sacrificer's dedication to others. Sacrifice is counter-egocenteric-- one offers up and gives. Eventually one is supposed to be able to give willingly in a wider and deeper sense. Sacrifice becomes a template for how life is to be lived.
Of course sacrifices are worse than useless if they are considered a magic-like way of "bribing" God. The prophets properly railed against such dishonesty and conceit. Understanding that tendency, the Rabbis responded to the demise of the sacrificial system by deepening Torah study, expanding the realm of the ethical, describing the home and table as the new altar, and seeing human interirority as a place of sacrifice. They reinterpreted the verse zove'ach todah y'khabdan'ni, "One who offers up the thanksgiving sacrifice honors Me [God]" (Ps. 50:23), to mean, "If you sacrifice your inner [evil] desire and confess upon the sacrifice, you honor Me" (San. 43b). They saw the sacrificial model as the ethical basis for communal life, intellectual honest, and complete and full personal morality. Toward that end, they retained verbal evocation of sacrifice in the glorious and joyous Musaf Amidah. Such is the way of Halakha: the preservation of a core facticity of observance, which, upon expansion and deepening, provides blessings.

My People's Prayer Book: Shabbat Morning, Elliot Dorff, "Theology" pages 134, 138
"May you find it favorable" The traditional liturgy requests the restoration of our homeland and Temple so that we can again fulfill the Torah's command to offer the musaf sacrifice. The Talmud, however, is ambivalent about the idea of restoring sacrifices. "Prayer," says Rabbi Eleazar (Ber. 32b), "is more efficacious than animal offerings, as it says, 'What need have I [God] of all your sacrifices?' [Isa. 1:11]; and then, 'When you lift up your hands [in prayer] ...' [Isa. 1:15]." Isaiah's primary point is taht God accepts neither sacrifices nor prayer if people act immorally, but the fact that "prayer" is mentioned after "sacrifice" is taken to indicate that God regards prayer as more efficacious....
Maimonides goes even further: he maintains (Guide for the Perplexed, part 3, chap. 32) that God never wanted sacrifice to begin with; God went along with the practice only to let the Israelites worship the way other people in the ancient world did.
This notion of evolution informs the Conservative Movement's practice regarding the retention of Musaf. Rabbi Robert Gordis, who chaired its original Prayer Book Commission in 1945, explains that the prayer for the restoration of sacrifice exemplifies "passages in the traditional Prayer Book that no longer seem to express the convictions and hopes of our day.... [Still] the sacrificial system represents a legitimate stage in the evolution of Judaism and religious generally... [so] neither the deletion of the Musaf nor its retention unchanged would satisfy the basic principles of a Jewish Prayer Book for the modern age" (Sabbath and Festival Prayer Book, pp. vi, ix-x). Complicating matters is the fact that Conservative Judaism has advocated Zionism ever since Solomon Schechter published an essay in its defense in 1906, just eight years after the First Zionist Congress. As a result, ever since its first prayer book (in 1945), Conservative liturgy has maintained this sentence asking God to restore our homeland, but transformed the request to restore the Temple into a historical recollection: "For there our ancestors offered the required sacrifices...." Mention of sacrifice becomes a reminder of our ancestors' devotion to God, and a stimulus for our own devotion, expressed through prayer.