What I'm doing next
A personal note, a professional note, and a request.
What is Jewish futurism in a time of stagnation and decay?
I thought I knew. Now I know something a little different.
Addressing this question in post a few days after October 7, I wrote the following:
[E]ven though it’s not going to be top of mind for most…I am going to keep talking about the future of Israel, and about AI, and about rocket ships, and virtual reality glasses, and psychoactive substances, and wordless prayerbooks, and all the fantastical things on the verge of reality…I’m going to do these things because my distance from the violence affords me to, at least for the moment, and because the people putting their lives on the line for my family and my people allow me to, and because I believe even bloodshed must not interrupt our vision for the long Jewish future.
At least for the moment, emphasis mine. I performed an internal check and found that the tragedy, however painful, had not shaken me enough to justify a change of course. And so I continued.
But now? Now I’m worried.
The next four years are going to be very hard. People—my friends, my family—may lose hard-won liberties. Threats of anti-Jewish violence, which still feel distant even though they are not, may finally come to call. The planet will assuredly continue to warm. People will get hurt. We will suffer the constant thrum of misery that comes with the sense of societal decay. We will valiantly push against the tide, but we will frequently fail.
This has all shaken me badly. Despite having written a manifesto about living in exactly such times, I’ve found myself questioning the value of my own vision, this idea called Jewish futurism, in the face of such destruction. My head and my heart, it turned out, were standing on opposite sides of a great divide. I became split, and—filled with grief—I broke all the way open.
Adrift, I stopped writing. I’ve barely written a public thing since the election. I’ve cried a lot. I’ve sought out the guidance of friends. I’ve spent a lot of time listening—to my community, to my family, to my own heart. I’ve practiced mindfulness and learned to observe the weather patterns and climate of my soul. I was already religious, but I’ve become, perhaps, spiritual.
This is an ongoing process and I don’t pretend to know where it will lead. But I am telling you these sensitive things because they will affect the way that I present my ideas going forward. I think they’ll make me a better writer, a more empathetic communicator—but of course, you’ll be the judge of that, and I hope you’ll tell me one way or the other.
So the way I write may change. As for the content—let me tell you a little about what I plan on doing next.
How I plan to fight
The years of the Biden presidency were not calm by any measure, but the veneer of normal governance allowed many of us to relax a little from the Trump years. For days or months, we could forget that the future was teetering on a knife’s edge, and in those momentary lapses we could simply be our mundane, mediocre selves. But this is about to become a lot harder again. Reactive behavior will return with a vengeance. Proactive thought will struggle.
This has personal implications, but it also has professional ones. My ability to invest time in this work relies on people having the attention to think about the long-term future. The more people feel they are in danger, the less they can focus on such things—which means it’s harder to get people to listen, harder to make the case for the importance of this work, harder to get funding, harder to find collaborators.
You might think this means that my writing will pivot. Some of my friends have certainly spent more time writing about politics than they probably wanted to, and I’m glad they’re rising to the occasion. But just as COVID didn’t make everyone into an epidemiologist, the present moment is not going to make me a politics writer. It’s simply not in my blood and it never has been. I’d rather put forward an original new idea than fight over an old one, every single day of the week. I don’t want to write the best version of the argument you already agree with; I want to make visible what is invisible, to give you your first map to a brand new frontier and invite you to explore. I want to tell you things in new ways, in new formats. For better or worse, my work is to make a better world by giving people the vision to imagine what it might look like, even if it’s not going to look like that in our lifetimes.
Isn’t that, at the end of the day, the foundation of hope?
Practically, this means that you’ll see the usual content about technology and cutting-edge art and psychoactives, all of which are among the eight frontiers of Jewish thought that I have identified. You might see some original fiction, too.
I’m not going to pretend that the present world is irrelevant. But I’m going to trust you to see my work as an essential counter to an environment where it seems like the future has been obscured by a cloud of smoke. We cannot keep seeing ourselves as living at the end of a story. We need to know which way we’re heading, even if the destination is far away. That’s what I want to do here.
Before, I believed that my future-gazing emerged from the privilege of relative safety. Now, I understand it to be an act of defiance.
Of course, there is a limit to this. As much as I’d like to say otherwise, I do care about whether my ideas find purchase; there is only so much shouting into the void I can take.
That brings me to my next point.
For the first time, I’m asking for your support
As part of this recommitment, I am doing something scary: I’m going to ask you to donate to this site.
I’m not going to offer bonus content, at least not initially. Instead, donations allow me justify the time I spend developing ideas here. Right now, Jello Menorah is the only place where I don’t get paid when I publish an article, which disincentives writing here. I’d like to change that, because I think that this space offers something unique.
This is a little terrifying for me because I’ve never directly charged readers for my writing before, and (self-deprecator that I am) I’m secretly worried that the marketplace value of my ideas hovers around zero. Rationally, I know this isn’t true—people have offered to pay for Jello Menorah even without me asking, and people pay me to speak on these topics—but it’s still a leap. It’s so personal.
So—if you think this platform is worth something, turn your subscription into a donation. It really does make a difference. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, you can do that by clicking the button below.
Second, I plan to return to a regular publication schedule. Its frequency, to be a frank, is a little dependent on the support I receive, but I plan on posting at least biweekly, beginning in February.
And lastly: thank you, all, for your enthusiasm. It means more than you know.
See you soon.