Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
Monday 21 September 2026

William Ellery Channing¹

• In 1957, Congregation Chevra Tehillim in New Orleans introduced mixed seating² by a vote of 193-68.³ For the first time in its 70-year history, husbands and wives would be able to sit together. Audible gasp!
• The minority faction ran to court, seeking an injunction to overturn the decision. They pointed to the synagogue’s founding documents which described the community as “Orthodox”⁴ – and, for this faction, “Orthodox” meant segregated seating.
• The Louisiana Supreme Court threw the case out. Their main reasoning was that they just didn’t want to get involved in such a ridiculous dispute: the small number of members who couldn’t stomach mixed seating should go and join another shul instead of thwarting the wishes of the majority.⁵
• But the court went on to make a much more important point: the word “Orthodox” was, essentially, meaningless. After spending an inordinate amount of time poring over technical halachic evidence, the slightly bemused judges deduced that there were many different flavours of “Orthodox” Judaism: they labelled these “Orthodox-Conservative, Modern Orthodox, Ultra Orthodox and [my favourite] Uncompromising Orthodox”.⁶
• The rebellious faction filed letters from 75 rabbis asserting that orthodoxy necessarily meant segregated seating, while the synagogue’s management filed letters from 27 rabbis insisting that “such a practice is not contrary to Orthodox Jewish” practice.⁷
• After wading through all of this, the court wryly remarked:⁸

Isn’t there just!

• And then, the best line of the whole judgment:⁹ “[T]here are many Orthodox positions, and … always to the more stringent interpretation, the less stringent is not Orthodox.”
• Finally, the court turned its attention to the 1915 deed of trust which bound the synagogue to be “Orthodox”:¹⁰

• The Louisiana Supreme Court understood something of fundamental importance to Progressive Judaism: we cannot, must not, and will not, be held hostage by the past.
• The plaintiffs in that case were attempting to draw lines between what they recognised as ‘proper’ Judaism and what they dismissed as improper, inauthentic, imitation Judaism.
• It’s a well-known trope. After the attempted arson attack on Finchley Reform Synagogue in April,¹¹ a former Conservative Party councillor, a Jewish man called Harvey Odze, declared that FRS was “definitely not a shul” because “very few of the congregants … are Jewish”.¹²
• And, of course, there’s the line that Rabbi Elli and myself have both heard many times, albeit for different reasons: “But you don’t look like a rabbi!”
• What is it that leads to this sort of sneering? Much of it is based on myths and stereotypes. We give bar mitzvahs to dogs, we keep Palestinian flags in the ark, we serve prawns at kiddush. (As if this congregation would have fish at kiddush!)
• But there are also genuine facts which prompt the claim that we’re somehow inauthentic. Progressive Jews allow women on the bimah and conduct same-sex marriages. We don’t necessarily abide by traditional kashrut and our services are much abridged compared to those at New Church Road.
• While these are all true, the argument that they constitute ‘inauthenticity’ requires us first to identify what ‘authentic’ is. And that requires us to ask: authentic to what? No form of Judaism as currently practised anywhere in the world is grounded purely in Torah: look as hard as you like in the Tanach but you won’t find rabbis, kippot or bar mitzvahs.
• Our critics typically treat Orthodox Judaism as the gold standard against which to measure other denominations, but in fact, Orthodox Judaism is an extremely modern invention. Far from being a coveted pedigree, the term “orthodox” was originally an unwelcome label, almost an insult, levelled by mid-19th-century German Reform Jews against their more traditional brethren.¹³ The historian Professor Jenna Weissman Joselit identifies what we now know as American Orthodox Judaism as “brand-new”,¹⁴ something created by early 20th-century Jews who were “[i]nventing the culture as they went along”.¹⁵
• One of the confessional prayers recited on Yom Kippur begins: “סרנו ממצותיך, We have turned away from Your commandments.”¹⁶ The word סרנו comes from the root ס־ר־ר, which usually means ‘stubborn’, ‘rebellious’, ‘revolting’. But it has another meaning as well. It can refer to restlessness,¹⁷ which perhaps better captures our approach to the Torah. We have it, but we can never just sit with it. We’re always debating it, dissecting it. And by ‘we’ I mean all Jews, us and the other lot.
• The Louisiana Supreme Court held that there was no such thing as “Orthodox” Judaism, and they could equally have said that there is no such thing as ‘authentic’ Judaism. Judaism is flux. This fact wasn’t even controversial until quite recently: in a 5th-century Talmudic story,¹⁸ the rabbis satirised themselves by imagining Moses turning up in their study hall and finding the religion being taught there totally unrecognisable.
• In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the word ‘Judaism’ should be treated as a count noun. You can’t have ‘cat’, but a cat. You can’t have ‘book’, but a book. And you can’t have Judaism: all you can have is a Judaism. A Judaism is a slice of time and space. No two Judaisms have ever been the same and none has greater claim to authenticity than any other.
• סרנו ממצותיך. We have become restless with Your commandments. Our Judaism yesterday is not the same as our Judaism today – and may we be blessed such that our Judaism tomorrow will be different as well. כן יהי רצון, may this be God’s will.

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Shavua tov!

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Notes

1. William Ellery Channing, Complete Works (London: Christian Life Publishing Company, 1884) @p304. ↩︎
2. Katz v Singerman 127 So 2d 515 (La 1961) @p519. ↩︎
3. Ibid @p527. ↩︎
4. Ibid @p519. ↩︎
5. Ibid @p526. ↩︎
6. Ibid @p527. ↩︎
7. Ibid @p532. Emphasis added. ↩︎
8. Ibid. ↩︎
9. Ibid. ↩︎
10. Ibid @pp532-533. ↩︎
11. Chris Osuh and Raphael Boyd, “Attempted arson attack a bid to scare British Jews, says leader of London synagogue“, The Guardian (15 April 2026). ↩︎
12. Facebook (15 April 2026). ↩︎
13. See generally Jeffrey C Blutinger, “‘So-called Orthodoxy’: the history of an unwanted label”, Modern Judaism 27 (2007), 310-328. ↩︎
14. Jenna Weissman Joselit, New York’s Jewish Jews: the Orthodox community in the interwar years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) @p19. ↩︎
15. Ibid @p20. ↩︎
16. Machzor Ruach Chadashah @p256. ↩︎
17. Proverbs 7:11, NJPS translation; see also Dictionary of Classical Hebrew sv ‘סרר III’. ↩︎
18. b.Menachot 29b ↩︎