שלא עשני גוי

JMoshe Spero has attempted to give these blessings psychological meaning. He asserts that the blessings referring to non-Jew and slave represent two socio-psychological aspects of the human personality. The non-Jew represents a person who has no obligations at all, while the slave represents a person who is totally obligated, with no freedom of choice at all. These two blessings, taken together, express the idea that we wish to be people who have accepted obligations out of free will.

Rabbi Joseph Tabory
It was the Reform movement and its adherents who attempted to change the liturgy of these three blessings. We will just point out that A. Geiger, in the siddur that he published in 1854, substituted for these three blessings “Who has created me to worship him”. In the modern American Conservative movement we find that the blessing about women has been replaced by “Who has created me in His image”. This prayer book also uses positive forms for the other two blessings: “Who hast made me an Israelite”, rather than the negative “Who hast not made me a gentile”; “Who hast made me free” rather than “Who hast not made me a slave”. Although the expression of gratitude for having been created an Israelite would seem to obviate the other two blessings, the desire to retain the trifold structure was more important. In order to retain a logical structure, the order of the blessings was reversed: first thanking God for being created in His image; then thanking Him for being created a free man; and finally thanking Him for having been created an Israelite. However, Orthodox Judaism found only one proponent for a change in the liturgy, Abraham Berliner (1833–1915). The main thrust of his argument was connected with the blessing of not being a gentile. Berliner discussed the variant version of “Who hast not made me a gentile”, – “Who has made me an Israelite (or a Jew)”, which is found in many manuscripts of the siddur and in printed editions of the Talmud. Berliner was a philologist, and he well knew that the positive form of this blessing was instituted as a result of Christian censorship. However, he thought that it was a good idea anyway and he also thought, apparently, that since this change had been in existence for hundreds of years, it had some claim to being traditional. He invoked also the authority of the Vilna Gaon, who seems to have thought that the texts with this version were valid textual traditions. Berliner stated that if his suggestion was adopted, there would be a welcome by-product in that the blessings “Who has not made me a woman” and “Who hast not made me a slave” would automatically be eliminated from the siddur as there would no longer be any point to them. Thus, he said, we would no longer be required to justify these blessings in any way.