Even the Future has a History

I had intended to write more about Ahad Ha’am this week, but events in Israel and Gaza are such that proceeding as if I was writing from a bubble seemed false. I leave it to others to have their say on that subject though.

We often hear Der Nister described back to us as a Yiddishist project. This is a common misperception. We are Jewish Civilizational project, though it is true that we are strong in our Yiddish programming, and so, Israel as well as the many other centers of Jewish life are always on our minds. We hope to be able to do more to present programming that reflects better that full range of the Jewish experience.

The writing that I have been doing is part of my large amorphous consideration of the idea of Judeo-Futurism. My initial question was more contained. I wanted to know if the term could describe a useful name for a type of developing Jewish culture. After a lot of thinking I can say that I run hot and cold on the idea. Clearly a Judeo-Futurism which is a kind of plug-and-play knock-off of Afro-Futurism isn't worth much. However, the general principle of Afro-Futurism, the effort to project your people into an imagined future where you can thrive is a worthwhile goal. 

The question that arises is one of messianism. Do we need to depend on some kind of supernatural force to provide us hope or can we support that hope through our own efforts? This question came to me because I have seen how messianism allows people to skip some of the due diligence and the broader consideration of the rights and desires of others. This is not my opposition to Jewish theology and spirituality. Rav Kook’s messianism took into account the actions of both those who acted and those who prayed. There is a joke whose punchline starts, “I sent you a boat, I sent you a helicopter…”

What occurred to me when I was studying the origins of Afro-Futurism was that it was not an idea that was born out of nothing. There was a history behind it. The future is always built on the past, no matter how shocking it may be as it rises. The new grows atop the old, but the roots that it sends down can go deep. 

We forget sometimes how much history we are sitting on and what kind of a hold it has on us. My writing on Zionist figures is part of the larger search to understand what the Jewish future looked like in our recent past and how we responded in previous moments of despair, searching for hope. Even the future has a history.