What is Jewish Futurism?

A statement of purpose

Image adapted, source

A religion of deep dreams

Pharaoh, the Bible says, has a dream: sickly cows consuming healthy cows. Joseph interpreted it. You will have good years and bad years, says Joseph, and each will feel so complete that the other becomes almost unimaginable. Resist the urge to react to the moment. Save in the good times, expend in the bad. Look beyond your present moment, and everything will be fine.

The idea of those bad years has resonance for the present moment. The Jewish people have had a lot of bad years, a lot of years bad enough to make the good years take on an air of unreality. If they were really good, we reason, then why is it so hard to bask in their glow? If the fat cows were really there, if they had actual substance, then how could the thin cows swallow them and leave not a trace?

In the story, Joseph advises that Pharaoh must push beyond that impulse, that an awareness of the vicissitudes of crop yields mandates neither panic nor despair but rather a careful plan that encompasses not just the seven years of good and seven years of bad, but creates a path out of the cycle itself and back into the many years beyond.

When we read Joseph’s story the focus is almost always on Joseph as dream interpreter, but the advice itself resonates strongly with so much else that has happened in Genesis, a book that repeatedly warns about the dangers of allowing the terrors of the moment to erase the requirements of a civilizations, which teaches that short-term thinking is itself a moral danger, and that the future cannot be sacrificed on the altar of the present.

Wasn’t it only a few weeks ago that we read about Lot’s daughters committing incest because they thought the world was ending? Wasn’t just two weeks after that when we read how Esav gave up his own birthright to Jacob in a passing moment of despair, rationalizing to himself “behold, I am about to die” — an unjustified sentiment he would have decades to turn over and over in his mind? The entire book of Genesis, which is a kind of prelude to the main attraction of Exodus and all that follows, comes back and back again to praise for the people who can hold onto the big vision, even if it is a vision that they will not live to see and seems so fantastical that it almost—almost!— escapes belief.

A plague of short-termism

What I worry about, however, is that the lessons of this book are treated as a value that has since expired, which made sense only for the Jewish people when they had their whole future ahead of them. Though this has never changed—our condition is not so dire that we have run out of future—I worry about the slow drip of the opposite sentiment, the premonition that most of our story is actually behind us, and that the future cannot possibly hold changes as radical as those of our own past. This does not mean a fear of a Jewless world, but a world in which our examination of the last three thousand years of our own history utterly dominates over efforts to plan towards the three thousand yet to come.

Unfortunately, I see troubling symptoms of that world all around us. I see it in a growing interest in retrospectives of Jewish thought, in a rabbinic preference for adjudication over legislation, in an inability to present moral frameworks for the issues thrown at us by technology and climate change and legalized drugs. I see it in something I am personally guilty of: the idea that a great Torah class is one that ends with a kind of erudite equivocation, that provides frameworks for thought but not well-considered prescriptions. I see it in the ongoing marginalization of the areas of American Jewish thought that are exploding with creative energy. I see it in a concern about American Jewish continuity that seems disconnected from the ongoing marvel that is American Jewish society, a Diaspora society the likes of which the world has never seen. More than anything else, I see it in how we take real substantive questions (How do we relate to God now? What is the purpose of prayer?) and pass them off as “simply” questions of pedagogy (How do I explain God? How do I get people to come to synagogue?), as though of course we already have all the answers and our work is simply to convey them in an appealing way.

The weakness in thinking about this long future has many follow-on effects, but two stand out to me.

The first is a crisis of leadership: Jews who are by nature leaders increasingly select to lead outside of the Jewish community because, in part, the potential to effect change within the Jewish community seems too small. More concerning, this stagnation of Jewish thought has created the conditions for a category error in which combatting antisemitism, which ought to be treated as the activity that makes Jewish values possible, is treated as a Jewish value in itself. Given the brutal reality of the threat, this error means that the actual content of Jewish life is left to compete with its own defenders; it is like confusing a farm’s fence for the farm itself. This should not be the case. Judaism, like Shabbat, relies on a thicket of “thou shalt nots” to engender the environments in which meaningful experiences can happen. But just as a thousand Shabbat prohibitions will you not tell what Shabbat is supposed to feel like, Jewish security and Jewish values must develop simultaneously and with the same vigor.

The attempt to do this is what I call Jewish futurism. Jewish futurism is the idea that our people is far closer to its beginning than its end, that our future relies on development of ideas that are by their nature radical, that long-term thinking is an exercise neither in escapism nor frivolity but the thing that we have been called to do since the days of our foremother Sarah, who set the tempo for us all by literally giving birth to Isaac at the age of ninety, exemplifying the idea that this is a religion in which the old can and does give birth to the young.

Ironically, those who love Jewish thought the most often have the hardest time acclimatizing to this reality. If you deeply love the texts and ideas and the rituals of the tradition, your first inclination will be to desire more of the same, to produce new stories for the Rabbinic Cinematic Universe and lean on familiarity to do the heavy lifting. But, as so often happens when people love something old, it is easy to forget that they are not in love with the old because it is old, but rather they love the old because of the exhilaration of experiencing it as new and bright and unprecedented. To follow in the steps of the rabbis is not to return to them, but to emulate their audacity, to say to them, as they report saying directly to God, that the Torah is now and forever in our hands, that it is ours to do with what we please. “Turn it over and over,” say the rabbis about the Torah, “for everything is in it.” But only if we continue to overturn it.

The seeds of Jewish futurism

The seeds of Jewish futurism are everywhere, if you know what to look for.

Jewish feminist thought, already several generations old, continues to innovate by re-reading and re-writing Jewish texts, slowly but surely rebalancing a tradition in which male-authored texts have a multi-millennia head start, moving from correctives to rewritten canon to entirely new formats.

Gay and trans Torah, which has moved beyond questions of acceptance into a wide spectrum of new rituals and texts, is bursting with ideas about gender and sexuality and bodies that have implications for all Jews.

This effort is on the same continuum as new attempts to integrate neurodiversity and new understandings of disability, not just in terms of toleration and the building of synagogue ramps but on the deep questions of what it means to move away from a model in which one sort of body or one sort of mind is treated as the default, in which the very notion of “ritual” is re-evaluated in light of what it means across diverse minds and bodies.

Cannabis and psychedelics, which have only recently re-entered the realm of acceptable Jewish discourse, are organically making their way into Jewish ritual spaces with lightning speed, despite most Jewish organizations and leaders continuing to treat such substances as politically radioactive, and they hold out the possibility of opening up entirely new modes of Jewish ritual.

Climate change, which Jewish thought has thus far spoken of solely in a preventative mode, now demands new ideas as the mandate to mitigate is joined by the realities of violent loss that have already begun to manifest and will only increase over the course of our lives.

Even Torah itself, which has been treated as synonymous with text for thousands of years, is now expanding into imagery, visuals, and sounds now that digitization has made these media just as easy to transmit as words. These media, which once were treated as simple adornments to the main textual attraction, are now being explored as instantiations of Torah capable of doing things that mere words could never accomplish.

Lastly, of course, we are responding to the rapid introduction of new technologies with questions that range from “Can I wear a smartwatch on Shabbat?” to “What does it mean to be created in the image of God in the age of AI?” to the ideal balance of work and leisure in an automated world to the ethics of genetically edited human beings to make them smarter or taller or much more long-lived.

These ideas, as well as many others which will inevitably arise, must be championed as the core works of a Jewish civilization that has no expiry date, that is already deeply in conversation with its own past and can, if we try, model a direction for humanity that treats the future not as a supersession of the past but a continuation, that there is no future in which the species we wish to become requires that we forget who we have been.

Our roots

Importantly, the future I am describing is not just designed to make just Jewish life more fulfilling. If we truly do wish to be a light unto the nations, our understanding of human existence must sync up with civilization as a whole, which is thinking in increasingly broad terms about the future of our species and is deeply in need of moral guidance as it wades into unknown waters. Jewish futurist leadership, therefore, cannot just be about Jews; it must be about presenting and modeling ideas about what makes a good life, a good family, a good community, a good country, a good globe, a good solar system. These are topics that Jewish leaders do already engage with, but the ways in which they engage remain too strongly dictated by their past history of engagement, which results in patchy responses that do not do the hard work of helping us all understand how we should live. Jewish futurism develops Jewish life, but it also uses Jewish community and Jewish education as moral factories in which to manufacture ideas for the world.

Of course, what makes this work difficult is that constant innovation leads to discomfort—at times because the new ideas are contrary to one’s beliefs, but more often simply because novelty itself is hard, like opening a window onto a winter morning when you are sitting comfortably in a warm house. It is no accident, I think, that the two time-travel stories recorded in the Babylonian Talmud both end with the traveler finding himself out of place, unsure of his relevance despite the future world’s gratitude for his existence. It would be simpler to stay home, but Jewish futurism demands that we head back out into the desert, back into the blank spaces where nothing has been built. If we are annually commanded to see ourselves as those who left Egypt, if we believe that all Jews who ever did or will live were also at Sinai, perhaps we are also commanded to go back there, to hear something that we missed the first time, to meet and learn with the people who have only just arrived.

It is tempting—it will always be tempting—to leave Jewish futurism on the cutting room floor. In both Israel and the Diaspora there are near-term perils that can easily draw our attention away. There is a fire in the house, and it would be irresponsible to ignore it. But part of what it means to be Jewish is to recognize that there is always a fire in the house, and that it is the ultimate sign of defiance to dare to dream in spite of its flames.

This post was adapted from a sermon delivered in December 2023 at Darkhei Noam in New York.