Parenting & Family Quote by Louis Finkelstein

Pastoral realism is doing the heavy lifting here: Finkelstein gives the rabbi permission to stop treating moral shortfall as a personal defeat. The opening clause is practical, almost managerial: do not despair if people do not do as much as they should. That phrasing concedes the stubborn gap between sermon and behavior without dramatizing it into crisis. It also reframes the rabbi's job from producing compliance to sustaining a relationship with a community that will always be unfinished.

The pivot to parenting is the quiet rhetorical coup. By likening congregants to children, Finkelstein risks sounding paternalistic, but the comparison mainly humanizes the rabbi: a parent does not abandon a child because growth is slow, uneven, or messy. The subtext is that spiritual leadership is less about winning arguments than about staying present through repetition, disappointment, and incremental change. It is an argument for patience that is not naive; it assumes failure as the normal condition of moral life.

"God is merciful" lands as both consolation and corrective. It comforts the clergy member tempted toward burnout or bitterness, and it checks the impulse to enforce righteousness through shame. In the mid-20th-century American Jewish context Finkelstein inhabited, the line also reads like a strategy for modernity: communities balancing tradition, assimilation pressures, and postwar anxieties needed religious authority that could hold standards without breaking people. Mercy, here, is not softness. It's a theology of endurance: keep teaching, keep caring, because the divine model is not despair but forbearance.