Time & Perspective Quote by Louis Finkelstein

A cautious universalism hides inside this seemingly bureaucratic sentence. Finkelstein isn’t pleading for Judaism to dissolve into a generic faith; he’s warning that Judaism’s public legitimacy, safety, and moral authority can’t survive in a culture where religion as such is discredited or privatized into irrelevance. The key maneuver is “therefore become essential”: a claim dressed as inevitability. He frames the project not as preference but as survival logic.

The subtext is strategic coalition-building. “Correlated” is the tell - technocratic, almost diplomatic language that turns theology into infrastructure. It implies that Jewish flourishing depends on strengthening the broader social standing of religious life, meaning alliances with other traditions, shared civic language, and a common front against secular forces that could marginalize all faiths. In mid-20th-century America, that’s not abstract: Finkelstein led the Jewish Theological Seminary during a period of intense interfaith activity, Cold War moral rhetoric, and anxieties about totalitarianism. “Religion generally” was often invoked as democracy’s ethical ballast, contrasted with atheistic communism and, in memory, the murderous racial pseudoscience of Nazism.

There’s also an internal communal message: Jewish advancement can’t be reduced to ethnic pride, philanthropy, or institutional growth. It has to be tethered to “religion” - practice, belief, moral formation - or it becomes a hollow success story. The line works because it links particularism to a broader ecology: Judaism’s future is framed not only as a Jewish problem, but as a test case for whether modern society can make room for sacred commitments at all.