The Eight Frontiers of Jewish Thought
The Eight Frontiers of Jewish Thought
What does Jewish futurism mean practically? This.
In the classic essay “No Silver Bullet,” computer scientist Fred Brooks argued that coding will always be hard. Its difficulty isn’t about the quality of coders, but is an essential feature solving complex problems. In a world that is complex and ever-changing, no code can ever be fully and forever sufficient.
Brooks’ argument about code can apply equally to Jewish thought. Judaism, which purports to be both a perspective through which to view the world and a set of actions to live by, has seen constant and uninterrupted growth over thousands of years as its stakeholders strive to match the contours of the religion to the political, social, and intellectual contours of the world itself.
We might call these changes “innovation,” but innovation is a fraught word. Like all religions, Jewish communities and institutions rely on stability, regularity, and predictability; it is these things that allow people to participants to feel that they are part of something larger and have the fortitude to withstand innumerable existential threats. This leads to a strange state of affairs: while religions most certainly do innovate, “innovation” per se is often stigmatized. The Bible itself warns against adding or subtracting from God’s law (Deuteronomy 4:2 and 13:1), even as the Bible innovates on itself, and the Torah’s authenticity and inalterability become an important retort to both Christian and Muslim supersessionism.
But, as Albert Baumgarten and Marina Rustow have written, tradition and change are “like two sides of a single coin.”1 Claims to tradition, which emerge most vocally at exactly the moments of greatest change, are effectively innovation by another name; Orthodoxy, to pick one example, is just as much of an innovative response to modernity as the Reform movement.
I say this not to discredit such forms of innovation. Quite the contrary: responding to world changes with a mixture of new and old is a hallmark of Jewish thought that, at its best, thoughtfully integrates novelty with the wisdom of the past. Done with eyes wide open, this method ameliorates the disruptions to life and society that newness so often brings.
But the frontiers of innovation are constantly changing, and they can be overlooked or misunderstood if they’re not properly identified. Here, I want to lay out the frontiers of Jewish innovation as I see them at the close of the 21st century’s first quarter.
This is not, I emphasize, a list of the most important concerns for Jewish communities today. Antisemitism, for example, is an important communal issue, but addressing it lies firmly in the realm of policy and politics, not innovations in Jewish thought. The areas I highlight below are places where there is a gap between Jewish thought and the world as it is that cannot be bridged by simply extrapolating from existing Jewish wisdom. These are areas where creativity and novelty are not just possible, but actually required.
A few notes on this list:
The first four items represent projects necessitated by new facts on the ground: new climates, new technologies, new media, and new legal realities. The need for innovation in these areas is relatively uncontroversial because there is broad consensus on the facts—but investment in these areas is typically seen as a tool for increasing Jewish engagement, rather than the development of Jewish thought itself.
The next four items, by contrast, have largely been motivated by new ideas which have not been universally accepted. As a result, innovation in these areas carries an additional political weight that places a drag on development (and funding).
I have ordered these projects based on their mutual similarities, not their overall importance. Their importance will be determined by the people who innovate in them!
I am involved in some but not all of the projects described below. Where possible, I have consulted with area experts to ensure accuracy.
1. Extratextual Torah
Torah and text are intimately linked. The very phrase “Torah study” conjures up images of people hunched over books or source sheets; it is hard to imagine a beit midrash (study hall) without books.
Text is undoubtedly a powerful communicator, but that is not the only reason it has so dominated Jewish thought. For the post-Temple Jews who wanted to turn the Torah into a “portable homeland,” text’s ability to both preserve and spread traditions was simply irresistible; when a people is existentially threatened, posterity trumps all. Oral Torah, a category of knowledge which the rabbis fought hard to keep separate from the written-down Hebrew Bible, was eventually collapsed into writing for fear of forgetting.
It did not take long for this retreat into text to turn into an outsized love of it. Jews were early adopters of the printing press and in previous centuries Jews frequently distinguished themselves by devoting great resources to education and literacy. After the Holocaust, text also emerged as a link to a severed mimetic past. For a people that could not anchor itself in monumental buildings or sculpture, and whose chains of tradition were periodically cut by migration and violence, text has been irreplaceable.
Things have changed. Print has evolved considerably since Gutenberg, and the obstacles that once made it hard to reproduce illustrations or represent color have now evaporated. In the digital realm, all 0s and 1s are equally portable and preservable; it does not matter if they comprise a text, image, sound, video, object, game, or a virtual experience. Furthermore, the data tells us that long form textual outputs—a.k.a. “books”—are facing diminished readership, even if the medium itself isn’t dying.
This information revolution has not dislodged text’s status as Torah’s key medium, but it is rapidly raising the status of other data formats. Images have evolved from being trivial embellishments to educational aids to sources of ideas in and of themselves; JT Waldman’s graphic novelization of Esther, for example, is a midrash on par with the best of them (and please watch this space for an announcement about a new edition…). Podcasts have become a favored medium for Jewish teachers worldwide. American Jewish and Israeli music is booming. Recorded services have preserved cantorial traditions that no text could have captured. Video platforms, like YouTube and TikTok, have fostered ideas that would have struggled in static formats, and creators are dipping their toe into interactive experiences like video games and virtual reality.
We are still in a transition period. Despite the popularity of non-textual Torah, many of these ideas still return time and again to the written word, and the “great works” of non-textual Torah, which will be touchstones for future thinkers, have yet to be created. That being said, I think it is just a matter of time until Torah’s reliance on textuality alone will be seen as a historical artifact, and I look forward to the day when it is possible to engage with a Torah video that subverts a well-known Torah graphic novel, which itself was inspired by Art Spiegelman, Stan Lee, Ishay Ribo, and medieval manuscripts in equal parts.
2. Technology
If you read me regularly or you read my articles in Sapir or Mosaic you can probably skip this section.
The relationship between Judaism and technology is as old as Judaism itself, but until the 19th century its role was often felt indirectly through the social, political, and cultural changes in which it was implicated. The identification of Torah with text, discussed above, is one such subtle relationship. Others include the integration of glass utensils into ritual purity laws, the effect of the clock on prayer times, and the influence of coffee on Jewish mysticism. Engagement with these technologies was often indirect, slow, and focused on internal Jewish issues. Exceptions—like the strong and swift rabbinic response to the invention of the printing press through which their ideas could spread—only prove the rule.
But things are different now: technology progresses so fast and with such immediate impact that we can identify it as a major independent factor in the development of civilization. The previous Jewish approach now threatens to make Jewish ethics obsolete. Many new technologies—artificial intelligence, genetic editing, augmented reality, space travel—raise major ethical questions that will profoundly affect society. To ignore these questions is to opt out of moral leadership, and the world will be worse off if Judaism and other faiths leave regulation to tech companies, policymakers, and journalists. Something important will be missing.
The work is important, but it is very hard. Rabbis and Jewish educators are busy, their expertise often lies elsewhere (not many STEM classes in rabbinical school), and religions don’t typically value fast action. Still, there have been some notable successes. The century-old ban on using electricity during Shabbat has served Jews well; today, Shabbat observance stands as one of the only socially-acceptable ways to turn one’s back on technology (albeit temporarily) without turning one’s back on the 21st century itself. The kosher industry, too, was a pioneer in the independent investigation of factory foods.
These responses are largely internally focused, and internal questions (“How will X affect Jewish life and thought?”) will remain important. At the same time, Jewish thinkers must recognize their responsibility to develop moral frameworks for technologies for society as large. To ignore this responsibility is to lean too heavily into our minority status. Global moral problems are always Jewish problems, too; we cannot rely on other religions or moral traditions to do our work for us.
3. Climate Change: Prevention, Adaptation, and Reconciliation
Jewish environmentalism has two origin stories. One of these stories is entwined with Zionism and a land-specific love that was common among the nationalisms of the early 20th century. This particularistic environmentalism can be found in the works of A.D. Gordon, Abraham Isaac Kook, and others.
The other Jewish environmentalism is coterminous with the rise of American environmentalism, as created in the 1960s by Rachel Carson and other pioneering scientists and activists. This environmentalism, universalist from the very start, prioritized political change and emphasized Jewish texts that speak to humanity’s responsibility to care for the planet. Jewish thinking about climate change, which originally sat alongside thinking on pollution, endangered species, acid rain, and the depletion of the ozone layer, got its start in this movement.
This school of thought is in urgent need of an upgrade. It is widely understood that climate change will affect human civilization in drastic and often violent ways. It is also clear that, despite humanity’s efforts, prevention alone is not going to cut it. Our goal now is mitigation, even while wild fires, deadlier hurricanes, and dangerous heat levels proliferate around us. These global changes require us to rethink what ideas about climate change from a people that constitute less than 0.2% of the globe’s population should try to achieve.
The top priority must be a shift in purpose. The message of climate change Torah cannot just be that the Earth is valuable and we must protect it. Instead, climate change Torah must help people grapple with a world that feels like it is fast unravelling at the seams. Yes, it will remain important to effect environmental legislation, but Jewish thinkers will likely have a greater impact on the communities suffering under extreme conditions, or couples questioning whether it is worth bringing children into the world anymore.
In service of this new goal, Jewish thought may very well end up turning back towards its particularistic origins. The central tragedy of Jewish history is the loss of land, and both the Bible and the rabbis link that loss to the Israelites’ moral failings. Strategies for communal self-examination, coping with profound loss, radical adaption, and never forgetting what once was—all of these are already embedded in Jewish thought, and all provide lenses through which leaders can speak to the present moment.
4. Psychoactive Substances: Recreational, Medicinal, and Ritual Uses
American Jewish thought about psychoactive substances has long been dampened by its close adherence to local laws. For rabbinic detractors, there was no reason to harangue constituents about something that the state could better enforce—and for those who thought illegal substances had a place, there were clear political risks for saying so.
But laws are changing, and fast. In 2013, only 2% of American Jews lived in states where cannabis had been legalized for recreational use, and fewer than half lived in states where it was medically available. Ten years later, those numbers are 75% and 95%, and the federal government is now seeking to loosen restrictions nationally. In Israel, small quantities have been decriminalized since 2019 and medical use is permitted, and all Canadian Jews have had full access since 2018. Other psychoactive substances, like psilocybin and MDMA, have been legalized or decriminalized in a few states and municipalities, and scientific studies demonstrating the therapeutic significance of these substances will likely spur societal normalization and potentially legalization.
At the same time, Americans increasingly understand that legal does not mean safe. Alcohol’s potential for abuse is higher than that of cannabis, tobacco is famously addictive, and both are leading causes of preventable death in the US. Most recently, prescription opioids have killed half a million Americans in the last 20 years. The Sackler family, whose drug Oxycontin fueled the drug epidemic, spent years taking advantage of the drug’s supposed non-addictiveness to increase sales, and has used the substance’s medical benefits as a way to dodge penalties.
These revelations and legal developments point towards one conclusion: when it comes to drugs, Jewish thought cannot rely on the law to be its moral compass. Instead, Jewish philosophy and norm-setting around drugs must flow from existing ideas about how people ought to spend their time, half a century of learned wisdom about the use of psychoactive substances in both spiritual and therapeutic contexts, and a mind towards how these substances might advance or fracture communities.
These ideas are not going to converge on a single answer. There are regional and generational differences of opinion on these issues, and communal leaders should not be too far out of step with their constituents. Saying nothing, however, is no longer sufficient: The substances are available, they are powerful, and Jews are using them (anecdotally, they’re using them quite a bit!). The emergent use of cannabis on Shabbat—including in synagogue—deserves to be discussed in the open, as does the use of psychedelics as an augment to Jewish spiritual practices. Though these topics have been explored in limited ways by thinkers like Zalman Shachter-Shalomi, Eliezer Berkowitz, and others since the 1960s, they have remained largely marginal. It is time for this to change.
5. Israeli Narratives and Diaspora Narratives
The paradox of Zionism is that the founding of the State of Israel also closes out the main narrative of Jewish history. For centuries, Jews have yearned for a return to Jerusalem and the Land of Israel, and religious Zionists view the establishment of the state as a key milestone in the process of messianic salvation. Now that Israel exists, that story is largely concluded. Though Israel is acknowledged only as the “first flowering” of our redemption in the Prayer for the State, in practice Judaism does not have a strong story to tell about what is supposed to happen next.
The lack of narrative may seem unimportant, but its absence has major consequences. Narratives can hold people together and allow them to accomplish great things. Without the power of the Zionist narrative, which itself built on centuries of yearning for return to the land, Israel surely would never have been founded. It is one thing to acknowledge that there is a gap between Israel and our aspirations for it, but this acknowledgment becomes more fraught if the Jewish narrative suggests that such a gap should not exist. If the Jewish narrative implies that Israel ought to be the happily-ever-after of Jewish history, then it is hard to see the state’s flaws as anything other than a erosive force, slowly but inexorably wearing away at the old narrative from within.
As the country’s first centennial draws nearer, this absence has become impossible to ignore. Demographic changes, efforts to weaken the country’s democratic mechanisms, and dwindling prospects for an end to the occupation of millions of Palestinians have meant that many Israelis are resetting their expectations for how long it will take the country to resolve some of its major problems.
This narrative also leaves Diaspora Jewry out in the cold. The American Jewish journey is remarkable and has been transformative for global Jewry and Jewish thought, but from a theological perspective it is no more than a mild diaspora experience, like the Germany or Iberia or Egypt of bygone times. This message is not accidental; early Zionists intentionally advanced “negation of the exile” (shelilat hagolah) as a way of encouraging immigration. But many people stayed behind, and the second largest Jewish community in the world now has no religious narrative to tell about what it is, why it matters, or how it wants to exist in relationship to Israel. In short, the major narrative of Jewish history is sufficient neither for Israeli Jews nor for diaspora Jews. This is a hard truth, but unless it is plainly acknowledged there is no change that it will be fixed.
I do not pretend to know what direction these new narratives ought to take, and I will be frank that because I have found the discourse on this topic so unpleasant I have avoided developing ideas for this space, something that I am now trying to correct. However, I wonder if the path forward might not look like the trajectories for feminist, queer, and neurodivergent Torah described below, in which a narrative of center/periphery transforms into one that acknowledges the validity and value of all communities and allows each to speak for itself.
6. Many Bodies, Many Minds
To tell an extremely simplified story: There was once a time when Western society (and Western science) believed that the human mind and body had an ideal form. Under this understanding, humans could be evaluated through simple objective criteria. The IQ test, for example, was all that was needed to describe a person’s intelligence, and fitness was simply a question of adequate sight, hearing, and mobility. For people diagnosed with conditions like autism and ADHD, or those with disabilities, the goal of treatment was to integrate into the world of standard minds and bodies.
These understandings have changed many times over. Educators, psychologists, and neurologists alike now understand that minds can excel along multiple axes and are not captured by a single metric. Activists and scholars have reframed disability as a social construct organized around society’s understanding of the range of “normal” human ability. Self-organizing communities of people with autism, ADHD, and deafness have greatly destigmatized these conditions, and have helped themselves and others learn what it means to navigate social and professional settings designed for other types of minds, at times to celebrate the unique characteristics of these minds and bodies. As a result of these efforts, we can embrace humanity in all its varieties like never before.
This new knowledge have had a major impact on Jewish pedagogy, but pedagogy is only the beginning. Much as LGBTQ Torah and feminist Torah have been enriched by re-reading the tradition with an eye towards what had previously been invisible, we are now beginning to re-read the tradition to better understand all the various sorts of minds and bodies and to heed the messages contained within. As Liz Shayne has argued, neurodivergent Torah can mean coding Moshe as autistic because he struggles to communicate, but it can also mean identifying with Moshe’s difficulty in saying what he wants to say, regardless of how he is labelled (read my recent interview with her for more on this). Julia Watts Belser, meanwhile, reads the Bible’s obsession with “flawless” priestly bodies as “a call to confront and to challenge entrenched patterns of social and religious violence that have contoured our lives.”
This school of thought is the youngest of all projects mentioned here, but as it grows I expect it will lead to a re-examination of Jewish practice itself. For a person with ADHD, the consistency of Jewish prayer might constitute a lifelong struggle; for someone on the autism spectrum, the structure of Jewish life might be useful yet tactile sensitivities may make some rituals very difficult. Meanwhile, people with deafness or blindness frequently find that Jewish ritual gatherings are not designed with them in mind; people with mobility issues sometimes can’t even get in the building. Praxis may be intended to bring people together, but we now understand that the same ritual can mean radically different things to different people. This understanding should at least generate sympathy—but my hope is that it also leads to better-tailored rituals that make all Jews feel heard and represented so that they can better represent the community in its fullness.
7. Queer Torah
There are two ways to talk about LGBTQ Jews in the 21st century. From the perspective of the cis/straight majority, the project of increased acceptance has seen both gains and backsliding. On the positive side, queerness has been greatly destigmatized and even embraced in many Jewish communities. All non-Orthodox denominations now accept queer rabbinical students and condone same-sex marriages, and much has been productively written about reconciling same-sex attraction with Biblical prohibitions. At the same time, full acceptance is by no means inevitable. In both America and Israel, religious conservatives are attempting to roll back hard-won legal victories, and trans people in America have seen their access to necessary health services reduced through a concerted Republican effort. It is still not safe for all queer Jews to go to shul.
This story isn’t wrong, but it is incomplete. Queer Jews and queer Torah are not minor irregularities for cis/straight Jews to sort out and then safely ignore. Instead, the desire to find places for themselves within the Jewish tradition has led queer Jews to become some of the most innovative Jewish voices of our day, and their attempts to grapple with questions of gender and sexuality have implications for everyone. It is not a small thing to reinvent the Jewish wedding, or the brit milah, or the use of mikvah, or create new prayerbooks, and yet queer Jews have done all of these things, in the process digging deep into the tradition to understand what it is they are adapting.
This is easier said than done. Even in the most tolerant communities, cis/straight Jews may not see why they need to expend energy on innovations that seem superfluous to the majority, and the principle of “nothing about us without us” is still frequently ignored. Queer Jews, too, do not always broadcast their ideas outside of queer circles, either because they do not think others will be interested, or because they are concerned they will be attacked. But straight Jews need queer Torah, too, and the queer Jewish project deserves to be understood as simultaneously just-for-us and something much grander.
An example of this promise is Jamie Weisbach’s responsum on whether a trans person experiencing dysphoria can wear a chest binder while immersing in a mikvah, a space which normally requires all clothing to be removed. While it would be simple to argue for this allowance as an act of compassion for people in distress, Weisbach—whose responsum was published as part of a collection from Svara, a yeshiva for queer Jews—thinks this misses the point: the binder really is a part of the body for some people, and removing it makes them feel less at home. As Weisbach notes, this is not just a trans issue. There are many people for whom bodily augments (artificial limbs, glass eyes) are simply a part of their person. In this way, a simple chest binder ends up being a vehicle for a larger conversation about the human body’s many varieties.
Much like its feminist counterpart, LGBTQ Torah is building ideas for internal and external use even as the political project of equal rights and the social project of full acceptance remain incomplete. These three projects are necessarily intertwined, but LGBTQ Torah enhances the other two in important ways by flipping the script on the standard critique that queer Jews and their ideas are nothing but deviations from correct thinking and practice. The conceit of LGBTQ Torah is that queer Jews embody Torah, both literally and figuratively, and the ideas and rituals they construct emerge from that embodied knowledge. Understood this way, Jews of all kinds would do well to appreciate queer Torah for the powerhouse of innovation that it is.
8. Feminist Torah
It is strange to say that feminist Torah is a “new” area of innovation. The Jewish feminist movement has been in existence for half a century, and in that time it has made unbelievable strides. Egalitarian prayer services have flowered in both America and Israel, as have female-centered rituals. Jewish women have played a major role in advancing abortion rights, stigmatizing sexual assault, and other social issues. Most importantly, there are now multiple generations of women’s leadership, as both religious leaders and executives, have gained real power and reshaped discourse and practices within Judaism to be more inclusive and egalitarian.
Politically and institutionally, the movement still has a long way to go. Within many Orthodox Jewish communities, female religious leaders still struggle to be taken as seriously as their counterparts, the nomenclature “rabbi” remains contested, and women still cannot count in a minyan or lead all parts of prayer services. Members of Women of the Wall, founded 35 years ago, are still fighting for the right to pray as men do at the Western Wall, and despite gains both Israeli and America men can keep women in dead marriages as agunot. Across many Jewish institutions there is much progress to be made on gender pay gaps, better accommodations for pregnancy and family; even after #metoo, much greater vigilance is needed to protect against sexual harassment in Jewish institutions and deal with it swiftly when it happens. In the scholarly world, there are still too many panels, edited volumes, and source sheets with few or no women.
We need to make progress on these issues, but feminist Torah’s ambitions were never just about politics and policy. As Judith Plaskow has written, “feminists are calling for nothing less than the reconceptualization of every aspect of the Jewish religious experience.”2 This reconceptualization is bearing fruit, but a tradition that men have dominated for millennia cannot be remade in the space of a lifetime, or even two.
Towards this goal, a core project for contemporary Jewish feminism is the development of a whole new corpus of Jewish thought. This project, which necessarily began as a critique of the male-dominated corpus, now exists in a wide variety of sermons, responsa, music, works of philosophy, Torah commentaries, and academic publications; furthermore, it is so diverse that it is hard to find an area of Jewish thought where its influence cannot be felt, even if that influence is not always acknowledged.
Two recent works highlight the promise of the field. Dirshuni, a collection of grassroots midrash by and about women, exemplifies how feminist Torah does not need to simply critique patriarchal texts, but produce new texts all its own as rabbis have done for centuries. Meanwhile, Mara Benjamin’s The Obligated Self demonstrates that feminist Torah can open up powerful themes already contained in Jewish texts (in this case, around theology, caregiving, and motherhood) that have been overlooked by men for centuries. New projects that center infertility, childbirth, and menstruation promise—to use the words of Tamar Ross’s landmark tome—to expand the palace of Torah.
Perhaps more than any other item in this post, feminist Torah suffers politically from being regarded as innovative, which leads many Jews to see it as a threat to longstanding traditions. Because feminist Torah really is innovative, this is a hard accusation to shake off; realizing the Torah of more than half of humanity is a revolution unlike any other in Jewish history. Ultimately, the only effective path forward is to continue running this massive marathon, developing feminist Torah as a school of thought, to the point where it becomes a tradition in its own right.
What’s missing?
Eight is not a magic number. I came to these categories after trial and error; if you think I missed something, make a case for it.
These categories not immutable; the very nature of frontiers is that they change, so please don’t take these categories to be excluding some budding, heretofore unknown area of Jewish thought. This is just where we are right now, and where I think we need to go.
And if you’re interested in these topics…well, they’re what I write about here. If you want to stay in this conversation, you know what to do.
Albert I. Baumgarten and Marina Rustow, “Judaism and Tradition: Continuity, Change, and Innovation,” in Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History (University of Pennsylvania, 2011), 207–238.
Judith Plaskow, “Jewish Feminist Thought,” in History of Jewish Philosophy (Routledge, 2003), 785–793