The Jewish future in a time of horror

Futurism cannot escape the present, and the present must not sacrifice the future. Especially in Israel.

A rocket hit immediately adjacent to my relative’s home, setting fire to the nearby trees. The fire department was able to extinguish the flames.

Who cares about Jewish futurism when people are dying?

This is the question that I’ve asked myself, over and over, for the last eleven days. I don’t need to tell you why. You know all about how Hamas murdered and violated more than a thousand people, taking two hundred more hostage. Like many of you, I have family in the line of fire, am only one or two steps removed from the dead and mourning. Gaza’s residents, meanwhile, are dying and suffering without food or electricity, and Israeli soldiers are gearing up for a dangerous ground offensive. It is a terrible, terrible situation.

It has taken me time to write this piece. When a dead relative lies before you, Jewish law recognizes you to be a state of aninut, a kind of shock, that persists until the body has been buried. Our dead are still before our eyes; our people are not all home. The national shock persists, and I do not think it will fully subside in my lifetime. I am not a first responder, or even a second. You didn’t need to hear from me last week, and so I kept quiet.

But now I want to tell you something. Actually, I want to tell you two things—and if these things feel tangential to the present moment, then you are exactly my audience.

First, to futurists and technologists: Your love of the future does not exempt you from the requirements of the present.

And second, to everyone else: Do not let the future be a casualty of the present violence. Do not let the present eat you alive—especially if you care about Israel.

Futurism cannot be escapism

In the Guide for the Perplexed, the philosopher Maimonides (d. 1204) makes what I think is an extraordinary claim: the vast majority of the commandments are not ends in themselves. They are, instead, simply means towards the singular goal of keeping society peaceful so that people can focus on “the welfare of the soul” (ṣalāḥ al-nafs), essentially a kind of intellectual activity and discourse.

Despite not being an end in itself, the work of keeping people healthy and at peace—which Maimonides calls “the welfare of the body” (ṣalāḥ al-badan)—must come first. In his words:

A person that is suffering from great hunger, thirst, heat, or cold, cannot grasp an idea even if communicated by others, much less can he arrive at it by his own reasoning. (Guide, III:27)

This story is as old as civilization itself. Humanity could not develop until it had access to more than the bare minimum needed to survive. Students cannot learn properly if they are hungry or stressed. Science cannot advance if scientists and their experiments are being disrupted. An unfathomable number of things have to go right for a person—let along a group of people—to contribute positively to society. It only takes a little violence for so much hope to fall away.

Futurists and technologists tend to “forget” this. This is in part because most of them live comfortable lifestyles, but it’s also because the world is a mess and the future looks so clean. Indeed, that cleanliness is what draws many people to the future in the first place; it is appealing to hold the world at arm’s length, and see individual human beings as abstractions or statistics. Effective altruists do this explicitly by turning human goodness into a numbers game, and longtermists do it by looking so far into the future that the concerns of the present feel like nothing but a blip. In the chaos of the world, it can be so tempting to choose, literally or metaphorically, to live on another planet.

Religious technological ethics is supposed to push back on this; its raison d'etre is to ensure that we do not abandon human welfare in our race for the future. Futurism, effective altruism, and longtermism all have value, but they are also susceptible to real cruelty. A few months ago, I wrote about how the religious critique of the Apollo program was about the US government prioritizing space over racial violence and welfare. For all technologies, it is crucial that religious leaders refuse to be dazzled by their coolness and novelty and instead ask: will this help people or harm people? Nobody else has this moral mandate, and the world is worse off when religious leaders abdicate this responsibility.

Futurism is not a luxury good…

But the future still matters, especially during times of unspeakable destruction. Just as the welfare of the soul requires the welfare of the body, the welfare of the body is incomplete if it is treated as an end itself. Safety and food and health and peace aren’t enough. Humanity is engaged in a project of radical self-improvement, and we want the world to be better tomorrow than it is today.

The unfortunate hallmark of these improvements is that they always, definitionally feel frivolous. Long-term planning in the face of short-term catastrophe always feels like a luxury. But this luxury also represents a kind of defiance, an unwillingness to be trapped by the terror of the moment, a supreme confidence that better days are coming. In Biblical terms, we are a bush that is always on fire, and yet we refuse to be consumed by it.

I think about this obligation as a religious one. Among the Jewish people there is a subset called kohanim, supposedly patrilineal descendants of Aaron, the first High Priest of Israel. Being a kohen means following additional rules not incumbent upon other Jews. One of these rules: a kohen cannot attend bury the dead. With the exception of immediate relatives, they are not allowed to get too close to corpses, to morgues. Long ago, it was these removed-from-death people who performed the Temple’s daily rituals.

This rule has always had a clear logic to me: kohen or not, the world needs people who are removed from death, who stand somewhat apart from the unending suffering of the world. It is not always possible; some tragedies are so terrible or so personal that they are all-consuming. But distance from horror is a form of human diversity, and in our darkest moments it plays a crucial role in preventing us from falling into despair.

…especially not for Israel.

Over the past week, I have been obsessed with the question: what is supposed to happen next?

I don’t just mean how Israel ought to deal with Hamas. I mean: Is there a route to a lasting peace—and if there isn’t, what happens? Will the government revert to its policy of just keeping Palestinians out of the way of “normal” Israeli life? What, in the long run, do we want?

I am obsessed with this question because people have stopped asking it seriously, let alone trying to answer it seriously. At the moment, the possibility of a lasting peace feels so utterly hopeless that many people have stopped being able to even treat it as a worthwhile objective. Without even realizing we are doing it, we’ve attenuated our own goals in search of something plausible to hope for: not a lasting peace, but a shrinking of the conflict, or minimizing civilian casualties, or an end to a blockade, or a less right-wing government, or better public statements, or a better conversation about conversations.

What makes this shrinking horizon extra painful is that Israel was founded on some of the wildest dreams ever dreamt. Theodor Herzl wasn’t just a Zionist; he was a futurist. Der Judenstaat, which I will discuss in a future post, is a piece of utopian fiction inspired by one of the first sci-fi novels ever written; furthermore, it is just one of half a dozen Zionist utopias written by others. Herzl was not only aware of the technological inventions of his time, but asserts that the future state should be run by technical experts. This long-term thinking feels more distant than ever.

People who argue about Israel often accuse each other of forgetting the past, but forgetting the future is just as dangerous. In the space of a few generations, Israel went from being the radical hope of the Jewish people to a place in which hope seems hopelessly far away. This is not to discount the many stories of hard-won partnership between individual Israelis and Palestinians; but after reading this stories, I am always left wondering: are these candles in the dark really the height of our aspirations?

Restoring hope requires a measure of distance. As Seneca wrote two millennia ago, violence cuts people off from both past and future.

The mind that is untroubled and tranquil has the power to roam into all the parts of its life; but the minds of the engrossed, just as if weighted by a yoke, cannot turn and look behind. And so their life vanishes into an abyss; and as it does no good, no matter how much water you pour into a vessel, if there is no bottom to receive and hold it, so with time—it makes no difference how much is given; if there is nothing for it to settle upon, it passes out through the chinks and holes of the mind. (On the Shortness of Life, X)

These days an Israel truly at peace can feel like something out of science fiction—and while it is almost certainly far away, perhaps something you or I will not live to see, we cannot ever allow ourselves to stop seeking it.

Look up

Our time to think big thoughts is so short, so easily disrupted. In one of the very first time travel stories ever written, God sends Moses to see the magnificent classroom of Rabbi Akiva, far in the future—and then, after showing Moses how the Torah he had received would one day be taught by so great a figure, God showed Moses that Rabbi Akiva would later be flayed alive, his flesh weighed out in butcher shops. We are mortal beings. Nobody escapes the violence of the world forever. All we get are moments. If we’re wise, we use them wisely.

And so—even though it’s not going to be top of mind for most, and even though I know many of the people who read these words have their attention elsewhere, 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 that desperately require Judaism’s moral guidance. 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.

The Talmud says that when Adam first saw the sun set, he thought it was gone forever, and he wept. He was too young to know the sun would come up again. He didn’t know about sunrise. We humans will always have the tendency to be like Adam, to become trapped by the short term, to equate the stories of our short lives with the story of the long world. It's not going to be easy. Sunset isn’t permanent, but bad things do happen in the dark. But we're not going anywhere; we'll be here, perhaps afraid, but here. And for all that we are afraid of the dark, it is so much worse to forget the glorious sunrises yet to come.