Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur Hertzberg

Bureaucracy has few finer cloaks than pious vagueness, and Hertzberg’s line weaponizes that cloak with almost comic precision. “Nobody” instantly diffuses responsibility: no culprit, no accountable committee, just a fog of collective inertia. The phrase “in the process” performs a second trick. It implies motion without requiring results, a procedural halo that lets an institution sound busy while staying safely still. Then comes the kill shot: “any changes that we can be specific about.” Change is dangled as a possibility, but specificity is treated like an unreasonable demand, as if clarity itself were the real disruption.

As a theologian who spent a career in and around Jewish communal politics, Hertzberg understood how religious institutions protect themselves: not by outright refusing reform, but by speaking in a dialect designed to postpone it. The sentence is a snapshot of a common power move in faith-based (and nonprofit) life: concede the moral pressure for renewal while denying the public the only thing that forces renewal to happen, namely, concrete commitments. It’s pastoral language turned managerial, the voice of leaders trying to calm critics without feeding them leverage.

The subtext is less “we don’t know yet” than “we are managing the expectation that you will stop asking.” It’s also a quiet indictment of how organizations confuse prudence with paralysis. Hertzberg’s brilliance is that he makes the evasive posture audible: once you hear how the sentence is built, you can’t unhear the strategy it’s performing.