Time & Perspective Quote by Peter Malkin

A quiet indictment hides inside Malkin's deadpan comparison: faith communities are supposed to be refuges, yet they can function like small-town switchboards, routing your life into approved categories. The joke lands because it’s not really about theology. It’s about social surveillance. In his telling, the synagogue is intimate to the point of intrusion; the church is vast enough to erase you. One space polices belonging, the other dissolves it.

The line about being asked if you’re alone or married isn’t casual. Those are questions that translate quickly into status, respectability, even moral legibility. Malkin sketches a community where people notice you, then immediately sort you. There’s warmth in that attention, but also the sting of conditional acceptance: you’re welcome, but also being assessed. By contrast, “in a hundred years no one would ask” is funny because it exaggerates the anonymity of the church into something almost geological. Time passes, institutions persist, and your personal life barely registers.

As a public servant, Malkin’s ear is tuned to how institutions treat individuals: who gets recognized, who gets processed, who gets ignored. The subtext is a familiar tradeoff in communal life. Tight-knit spaces can cradle you or corner you; impersonal ones can free you or abandon you. His aphorism doesn’t pick a winner so much as expose the cost of each kind of belonging.