Labels for Less

      Sometimes I find Brooklyn a bit too much to stomach. I encountered a naive Brooklyn native this chag who had a disturbing way of defining liberal shuls. She defined a certain shul as being liberal due to the liberal  dress of folk who attend and  not by the height of the mechitzah or the hashkafah of the rav. I found it odd because I have attended yeshivish , modern orthodox and chabad shuls and unless there is an unusually low mechitzah or the hashkafah of the rabbi of the shul is liberal I would say they are all equal. I suppose I am in the minority but I have been to all and I don't find them all that different. Just because the people may dress differently does not immediately define how liberal the davening is . It may define the hashkofah of the congregants, but to me this does not define the actual strictness of the davening. I also think that the hashkafah of chabad and yeshivish are pretty similar if you take away the rebbe /mashiach issue. Maybe its just me though. I did not grow up in NYC and view Judaism a bit differently. Where I grew up anyone shomer shabbos would daven in the same shul together. Here everyone likes to label everything. Labels only mean something if there is an actual standard that everyone goes by, if there is no standard then what does any label mean?