The Next Reform?

Hearing Any Questions from Wimbledon and District Synagogue, finished just in time for sunset, I began to think that a little idea floated on here might actually come to pass. Most of the audience put up their hands for withdrawal from Afghanistan. Not all of them will have been members of the congregation, of course. But a lot of them will have been. And that, like the applause at certain points and the groaning at others, sounds like most Reform Jews. The most significant British exception being Melanie Phillips, with her considerable following through her books and her Daily Mail column.

She herself will probably have no part in it, but I really am beginning to think that the day is coming when people like her devoted readers declare Judaism to have the philosophical, theological, ethical and ritual resources necessary to give structure to their neoconservative views and lifestyle, and we begin to see synagogues springing up, with no single-sex seating, no prayers for the restoration of animal sacrifice (or, perhaps, even in Hebrew at all), no dietary laws, and so on, but where no one puts up their hand to withdraw from Afghanistan, applauds the Coalition's economic critics from the Left, or groans at Philip Hammond's defence of spending cuts.