Ah, no, Don. The formalities are all part of it. My late father had no belief, didn't keep the dietary laws or the Sabbath, cut his hair & shaved, didn't really think there was a deity, but wouldn't have anything to do with Liberal or Reform Synagogues or any such; but only, as he put it, the real one ~~ not that he was a member or ever went, but if he had that was where he would have gone. "I am a non-practising, non-believing Orthodox Jew," he would say.

See where I am coming from?

~M~