Category: Jewish futurism art project

  • Liminal Space as Creative Method: Jewish futurism and the Multiverse of Stories

    Liminal Space as Creative Method: Jewish futurism and the Multiverse of Stories

    Back in 2014, when I first started to create my Jewish futurist art and stories, I thought that my character, the Wanderer should live a few hundred years into the future, so my spiritual technology objects could just “work” as he travels through time to different Jewish moments in history. But not everything in the Jewish cannon of stories are historical, so that became a narrative issue for my characters extraterrestrial abilities to be believable. I shifted to think about what if the character existed not in the “future” based on time, but in a liminal space built entirely out of the Jewish cannon of stories. This is the first thing to understand when thinking about Jewish futurism as a creative practice. We’ve learned to think of thresholds as thin lines, transitional moments you pass through quickly on your way from one stable state to another. But Jewish textual tradition suggests something different: the threshold itself can be a world, a zone of variable width where multiple versions of the same story coexist without resolution.

    This is where Jewish futurism lives and works.

    The Wilderness Prototype

    The Book of Numbers, Bamidbar in Hebrew, literally means “in the wilderness.” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks identified this wilderness period as Israel’s formative liminal experience, a space “between Egypt and the Promised Land” where the people transformed from “escaping slaves” into “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation”. The wilderness wasn’t just a route to somewhere else. It was the place where identity formed, where law was given, where the impossible work of becoming happened.

    Wandering Israelites 2024, Digital Illustration, By Mike Wirth

    Jewish futurism inherits this structure. It positions itself in a wilderness between deep tradition and speculative futures, refusing to resolve that tension into either pure preservation or pure innovation. The creative power comes from staying in the threshold.

    Multiformity: When Stories Refuse to Collapse

    Jewish textual tradition demonstrates something unusual: it preserves multiple versions of the same story without declaring one correct and the others false. The Talmud includes the story of how Jewish children survived Pharaoh’s decree in two different midrashim, Exodus Rabba 1:12 and Exodus Rabba 23:8, telling “essentially the same story” with different details and emphases. Both remain authoritative. Both are studied. Neither cancels the other out.

    This happens again with the creation narratives in Genesis, which offer two distinct accounts that the rabbis never harmonized. When Genesis 2:23 has Adam declare “this time (zot hapa’am) bone of my bone,” the rabbis read the phrase “this time” as evidence there must have been a first time, another woman before Eve. This reading generates the Lilith tradition, which itself exists in radically different versions across texts. Sometimes she’s a Mesopotamian demon, sometimes Adam’s first wife who refused subordination, sometimes multiple Liliths entirely (the Matron Lilith mated with Samael, the Lesser Lilith with Asmodeus). The tradition never consolidates these into one coherent mythology.

    This is what I mean by calling liminal space a “storehouse of options.” All these versions exist together, not as rough drafts leading to a final text, but as a permanent multiplicity. The creative work happens in the space between versions, where meaning emerges from juxtaposition and contradiction rather than resolution.

    Metamodernism and the Jewish futurist Oscillation

    Jewish futurism operates through what contemporary theory calls metamodernism, an approach that “oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naivete and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation”. This isn’t confusion or inconsistency. It’s a deliberate method of holding contradictions in productive tension.

    Marc Chagall’s I and the Village (1911)

    Consider Marc Chagall’s I and the Village (1911), which projected “mystical futures” while remaining rooted in shtetl imagery, or Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower (1921), which used “dynamic, visionary architecture” to anticipate “new Jewish identities” while drawing on Jewish cultural memory. Both works refuse to choose between past and future. They exist in the oscillation itself.

    Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower (1921)

    My own practice with neon aesthetics, AI-integrated rituals, and speculative spiritual objects tries to inhabit this same oscillating space. The work is simultaneously reverent toward tradition and radically speculative about Jewish futures. It takes the midrashic impulse (interpreting and expanding upon existing texts) and applies it to material culture, visual art, and interactive experience. The question isn’t whether to look backward or forward, but how to create in the charged space where both directions exist at once.

    The Danger of Over-Explanation

    Here’s where methodology becomes crucial. The liminal space has power precisely because it resists total systematization. When you map everything, explain all the connections, resolve all the contradictions into a coherent world, you destroy the liminal quality you were trying to work with.

    The internet phenomenon of The Backrooms demonstrates this perfectly. In 2019, someone posted a single unsettling image on 4chan: an empty office space with yellowed lighting that evoked uncanny familiarity and wrongness. Its power came from mystery and minimalism. You could project your own dread onto that space. It remained undefined.

    But as one analysis explains, “the internet tends to reject simplicity. A mere image cannot suffice; it demands depth, a narrative, characters, and intricate worldbuilding”. Within months, The Backrooms “transformed from a strange setting into an entire alternate dimension, complete with its own physical laws and terrifying creatures. There are countless levels, each featuring unique themes, ecosystems, backstories, and factions”. A commenter captured what was lost: “Modern Fandom kills that feeling of liminality and making up your own interpretations. You’re never just ‘alone’ with a game or story giving you fractured information”.

    The lesson for Jewish futurism is clear. The moment you turn the “storehouse of options” into a fully mapped shared universe (like the Marvel Cinematic Universe or an RPG sourcebook), you’ve left liminal space behind. You’re no longer working with multiformity but with a single systematized world that happens to contain variety.

    Dwelling in the Threshold

    Jewish futurism as creative practice means learning to dwell in the threshold rather than passing through it. It means producing work that operates like midrash, creating new versions that coexist with rather than replace existing ones. It means embracing the metamodern oscillation between tradition and speculation, between melancholy and hope, between the archive and the unknown.

    Most importantly, it means resisting the urge to explain everything, to make it all cohere. The wilderness between Egypt and the Promised Land was where transformation happened precisely because it was undefined space, liminal territory where old certainties no longer held but new ones hadn’t yet solidified. That’s the space where Jewish futurism works.

    The magic is in the mystery. Once the mystery is gone, so is the magic.

  • Vibe Coding for 8 Crazy Nights

    Vibe Coding for 8 Crazy Nights

    During my semester long sabbatical, I set out to experiment with new ways to tell Jewish stories, and I kept coming back to the immersive feeling of games. While I stayed focused on my main objective, completing my book Hiddur Olam: Bereshit – Genesis and telling new Jewish stories through art and writing, this Hanukkah, I also felt a pull to expand this idea of immersive storytelling into video games, where players could step inside the work rather than only view or read it. Framing the game projects as interactive midrash let me treat code, mechanics, and level design as another layer of commentary on the same questions that animate the book: how to re engage with foundational Jewish narratives, how to honor tradition while playing with form, and how to imagine Jewish futures that feel both grounded and newly alive in digital space.​​

    Vibe coding and my AI toolbox

    For all of these projects, I leaned heavily on what I think of as vibe coding. By vibe coding, I mean describing in natural language how I want something to feel, look, or behave, then using AI coding tools to generate or refactor code until the game’s behavior matches that feeling. I used ChatGPT, Gemini, and GitHub’s coding assistants as a rotating team, asking for everything from small bug fixes and refactors to full systems like player controllers or state machines. I have 20 years of front-end and back-end web development coding experience. Having been a part of a wave of student designer-artist-coders in NY in the late 90s and early 00s making websites by day and net-art by night, vibe coding is great method to make code sketches of ideas or experiments. In this project, I would move the same block of code from one model to another when I got stuck, wanted new insight, or when I wanted to shift from quick procedural hacks into a more object oriented structure. Each of the the different LLM code “voices” helped me see new paths through the same problem. These tools gave me a sense of freedom to soar with code, where in the past I would have been creeping along, slowly teaching myself new methods and getting bogged down in syntax rather than in the Jewish and ludic questions that actually interested me.​

    Research questions that guided me

    A cluster of questions ran through everything I made:

    • How can I evolve dreidel gameplay beyond a single spin and four letters?
    • With only four sides, can a dreidel still function as a rich, reusable dice object in a larger game system?
    • Can the dreidel be used more effectively to tell the story of Hanukkah, not just reference it visually?
    • What are better ways to tell the story of Hanukkah using the immersiveness of games?
    • How can I tell new digital Jewish stories that feel both grounded in tradition and native to contemporary game culture?
    • Is this creative act, moving ritual objects into speculative, interactive worlds, an example of Jewish futurism in practice?
    • How will Jewish people play dreidel in the future?

    Each experiment became a different argument or provisional answer to these questions.

    ​So, over 8 nights, I played with various game and interaction experiments. Here are my best of the best, in no particular order.​

    Dreidel Run: Neon Grid

    Best for dreidel kinetics

    With Dreidel Run, I leaned into the question of how to evolve dreidel gameplay at a purely kinetic level. Here, I made the case that the dreidel can succeed as a contemporary and arguably futuristic game mechanic when it is allowed to be fast, flashy, and even a little mindless, while still anchored in

    Hanukkah imagery like gelt and glowing colors. Using the Temple Run game mechanics, the experiment argues that not every Jewish game needs an explicit narrative lesson, and that embodied fun, quick reflexes, and the pleasure of catching coins and dodging hazards can themselves be a form of connection, a way of feeling Hanukkah as energy and rhythm rather than only as a story told in words.

    ​

    Dreidel x Katamari mashup

    Best for dreidel physics

    In the dreidel and Katamari Damacy inspired mashup, I took seriously the question of whether a small, four sided object could scale up into a world building tool. The design argues that as the spinning dreidel absorbs gelt and grows, it enacts a kind of visual and mechanical midrash on Hanukkah’s themes of accumulation,

    excess, and the tension between material things and spiritual light. By exaggerating the physics, I could show how a simple ritual object might literally reshape its environment, and in doing so, I tested how far dreidel based mechanics can stretch before they stop feeling like dreidel play and become something new. Another fun way to play with the dreidel kinetics.

    ​

    Dreidel Physics Sandbox

    Best Holiday Stress Reliever

    The smaller dreidel physics sandbox experiments addressed the quieter research question of how players might encounter Jewish content without a fixed goal at all. The spinning battle top game transforms the dreidel into a tornado like object tasked to destroy Seleucid idols of the Temple. It’s instant gameplay makes the argument that

    open ended, low stakes experimentation can be a valid form of digital Jewish learning, where the “lesson” is not amoral but a felt sense of spin, friction, wobble, and collapse. In the second experiment I used the Marble Madness type game play, making the dreidel become

    a tiny lab for thinking about stability and risk, which echoes Hanukkah’s precariousness, and invites players to linger, tinker, and waste time in a way that is still charged with symbolic possibility. These were worthwhile explorations of the exciting and kinetic nature of the dreidel game.

    ​

    Dreidel Catan prototype

    Most conceptual

    In my Catan style prototype, I explored whether a four sided dreidel could act as a meaningful dice object inside a complex resource and territory game that could help tell the story of Hanukkah in terms of the Maccabees, Hellenized Jews, and Seleucids as groups competing for resources and domination in Jerusalem. The design argues that it can, because each side of the dreidel already carries narrative weight, and that weight can be elevated when paired with a card, tableau and board game system like Catan. Resource bonuses, penalties, or events that shape a shared board.

    By letting the dreidel drive the different outcomes for each player I was curious to replace the dice with two dreidels. Pushing the game narrative of dreidel from a closed loop into a network of context specific effects.While buggy and complicated, this was one way that Hanukkah themes of scarcity, risk, and negotiation might live inside a modern strategy game.

    ​

    Hanukkah Quest 1: The Temple of Gloom

    Best for Hanukkah story

    Hanukkah Quest 1: The Temple of Gloom tackles the question of how to better tell the story of Hanukkah with the immersiveness of a game. Here, I argue that interactive midrash is possible when puzzles, jokes, and spatial navigation all serve as commentary on the holiday’s themes, such as hiddenness,

    illumination, desecration, and rededication. Instead of retelling the miracle in a linear script, the game invites players to stumble through a gloomy, playful temple and slowly piece together meaning from their own actions, which models a Jewish way of learning that is iterative, interpretive, and grounded in wandering and return.

    ​

    Jewish futurist wisdom

    These experiments do not just gesture toward Jewish futurism, they enact it and point toward where it might go next. They show that Jewish futurism means keeping ritual objects and stories in play, while re staging them inside interactive systems where players can touch, bend, and argue with them in real time, like a digital beit midrash that anyone can enter. By dropping the dreidel and Hanukkah into arcade runners, resource economies, absurd physics toys, and point and click temples, the work suggests that the future of Jewish storytelling may live in responsive systems rather than fixed scripts, and in shared worlds that generate many valid readings instead of a single correct answer. Your vibe coding practice, using AI to rapidly prototype and reconfigure these systems around a felt sense of Jewish meaning and play, is a clear example of Jewish futurism in practice, and it opens hopeful paths forward: networked Jewish game spaces, collaborative “midrash servers,” classroom rituals that unfold as playable worlds, and future projects where new holidays, communities, and speculative texts are first tested as games before they are written down. In that sense, these games are not an endpoint but a launch pad, a sign that Jewish life will keep unfolding inside new technologies, still circling the same core questions of memory, risk, light, and communal responsibility, while inviting the next generation to help code what comes next.​​

  • AJS Perspectives Journal: The AI Issue

    AJS Perspectives Journal: The AI Issue

    I had the pleasure of contributing both an interview and original artwork to the cover and interior of the AI Issue of AJS Perspectives, published by the Association for Jewish Studies. The issue explores how artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape Jewish scholarship, pedagogy, and creative practice, and it was meaningful to participate in that conversation from both a visual and conceptual standpoint.

    Cover the AI Issue Summer 24′

    I especially enjoyed working again with Doug Rosenberg, whose editorial vision I deeply admire and with whom I have collaborated in the past. Doug thoughtfully framed the issue by placing two distinct but complementary approaches into dialogue. He focused on Julie Wietz’s use of the Golem as a performative and robotic avatar alongside my own work around Sar Torah, a model of generative knowledge that treats Torah as a living, evolving system rather than a static archive.

    Julie and I have also worked together previously, and seeing our practices paired in this context was especially rewarding. Her embodied, mythic approach and my systems-based, generative approach ask similar questions from different angles: how Jewish imagination, ethics, and inherited narratives shape our relationship to emerging technologies.

    Feature spread by Doug Rosenberg- AJS Perspectives Journal Summer 24′

    I also greatly enjoyed working with the editorial team to develop artwork that could serve as a cohesive visual theme for the issue. That collaboration gave me the opportunity to show my Jewish futurism work in action, not as speculation, but as a visual language actively engaging with contemporary Jewish scholarship. It felt meaningful to bring this work into conversation with this part of the Jewish academic world, where ideas, tradition, and future-facing inquiry meet.

    Overall, the experience reaffirmed for me that discussions about AI within Jewish Studies are ultimately about people, values, and responsibility. They ask how we carry tradition forward, how knowledge is generated and shared, and how creativity remains a sacred act even as our tools continue to evolve.

  • Rimon: The Cosmogranate, A Jewish futurism Interactive Light Installation

    Rimon: The Cosmogranate, A Jewish futurism Interactive Light Installation

    • Project Title: “Rimon: The Cosmograntate”
    • Project Type: Interactive Installation
    • Year Created: 2023
    • Technology: Controllable LED, ESP32 Microcontroller, WLEDs, Ultrasonic Sensors, Microphone input
    • Goal: Create an immersive space that reacts to participants’ audio and motion input.
    • Awards: 2023 Blumenthal Arts Fellowship Grant Winner

    “Rimon: The Cosmogranate” is an immersive art piece, inspired by the Hebrew word ‘rimon,’ meaning pomegranate. Its form mirrors the fruit, emitting a radiant significance. At its core, it merges art with interaction. Inner sensors respond to audience movement and sound input, translating presence and voice into a dynamic interplay of lights and sounds.

    This kinetic symphony crafts a unique and captivating experience that boasts shining over 14k LED lights. The project honors a tradition of Jewish ingenuity, echoing the pomegranate’s role in the Torah and the cherished Sukkah during Sukkot. Rooted in Mike Wirth’s Jewish futurism body of work, the project blends ancient wisdom with futuristic visions.

    illustration of Mike's cosmogranate.
    Mike’s original illustration that inspired the installation. (2021)

    This resonant symbol, shared across cultures and religions, serves as a unifying emblem. Here, technology, spirituality, and community converge, each light and sound carrying a timeless narrative. Step into this radiant realm, where history’s echoes meld with the pulse of innovation, weaving a tapestry of unity and celebration across generations.

    The Interaction

    Audio Input Test in Mike’s Studio (2024)

    Exhibitions

    Charlotte International Arts Festival

    Charlotte, NC, USA

    AUG – SEPT 2023

    Read More

    Art Fields

    Lake City, SC

    JUN – AUG 2024

    Read More

  • The Jewish futurist Manifesto

    The Jewish futurist Manifesto

    9–14 minutes

    Introduction: Why a Jewish futurism Manifesto

    Almost every modern era or movement of art has announced itself with a manifesto to declare what must come next. Often these manifestos of the past were blustery often spoke in the language of conquest. Most notably, the Italian Futurists (1909-1943) text glorified war, destruction, and exclusion of certain types of people. Unfortunately, their call for progress came at the expense of compassion and aligned themselves with fascism and antisemitism. For more insights, please read the previously wrote about the warnings that we can head from Italian Futurism in this article. Others defined themselves by what they rejected, not by what they hoped to heal.

    I wrote The Jewish futurism Manifesto as an act of tikkun, to repair that lineage. It reclaims the idea of the manifesto as a sacred, inclusive, and ethical declaration of creative purpose. Where earlier manifestos worshiped speed and dominance, this one turns toward kavvanah (intention), chesed (compassion), and tzelem Elohim (the divine image in all). Read more about Mussar, Jewish ethics here.

    We stand at a new threshold: between text and code, between human and machine, between memory and invention. Judaism, with its deep traditions of questioning, balance, and ethical creation, offers precisely the framework that modernity has lacked. This manifesto emerges from that realization that art, design, and technology can be Jewishly spiritual, halakhic, and humane.

    Where other groups intended to shatter, we intend repair. Where others sought power, we seek presence. Jewish futurism is not rebellion for its own sake, but a recommitment to the creative covenant that began at Sinai. To make the world more beautiful, conscious, and just.

    Throughout history, Jewish creativity has emerged in response to the extremes of its age. The Kabbalists of Safed (Tzfat, Israel) turned exile into cosmic repair; the artists of the Haskalah transformed enlightenment into moral awakening. From illuminated manuscripts to, the printing press, to digital light, Jews have continually reimagined how revelation meets reality. Jewish futurism continues this lineage, translating timeless values into the language of design and technology. It sees every tool, from ink to algorithm, as part of the same creative inheritance, each awaiting sanctification. Ours is not a rupture from tradition, but its renewal in the medium of the future.

    The Manifesto

    The Future is Jewish

    Jewish futurism envisions a world where Jewish wisdom, art, and halakhah evolve in dialogue with technological creation. We reject nostalgia as fear disguised as reverence. Tradition is not a cage but a scaffold for renewal. Jewish identity thrives through adaptation, spanning from parchment to print, from diaspora to data. We imagine futures where Torah and technology are not opposites but partners in creation. The Jewish future is not going to be inherited, it needs to be designed.

    Sar HaTorah vs. Golem Mindset

    Jewish futurism begins where two myths meet: the Sar HaTorah, the angel of instant wisdom, and the Golem, the creature of blind obedience. One represents revelation without readiness; the other, power without conscience. Both warn of imbalance. The Sar blinds with too much light; the Golem crushes with too much force. Jewish futurism seeks a third way by introducing a design ethic that blends divine insight with moral integration. Our task is not to summon knowledge nor to manufacture strength, but to cultivate binah, discernment. In the age of AI, this means we pursue creativity with kavvanah (intention) and gevurah (restraint), so that what we build remains worthy of the divine image in which we were formed.

    Technology as Sacred Instrument

    Technology is never neutral. Each codebase, algorithm, and interface embodies human ethics. Jewish futurism treats technology as a potential kli kodesh, a vessel for holiness, when guided by Halakhah and Mussar. Like Betzalel and the artisans of the Mishkan, we design not for utility alone but for meaning. AI and creative machines can assist, but they cannot own intention. Tzelem Elohim makes moral authorship a human mitzvah. When we design with reverence and responsibility, innovation itself becomes my concept of Hiddur Olam, the beautification of the world.

    Speculative Imagination is Torah

    To imagine is to interpret. Prophets, mystics, and sages were Jewish Futurists long before the term existed. The Zohar’s visions, the debates of the Talmud, and the architectural dreams of the Temple are all acts of sacred speculation. Jewish futurism extends this lineage into art, design, and digital creation. Speculative fiction and AI-generated imagery become new midrashim, helping us ask: What does redemption look like in an age of code? What new mitzvot emerge when creativity itself becomes shared with our tools? If we aren’t asking these questions then we aren’t really looking at these technologies seriously as a people worthy of wielding it and will unfortunately become victim of it if we don’t take our rightful place as spiritual designers.

    Diaspora, Zion, and the Digital Beit Midrash

    Jewish peoplehood has always been networked. From Babylon and Jerusalem Talmuds to the Sefaria.org, our collective consciousness and knowledge move with us. The digital realm is today’s Beit Midrash, a study hall without walls. Wherever Jews gather, be it in sanctuaries, studios, or shared screens, Shekhinah shruyah beynayhem, the Divine Presence dwells among them. The next Zion may be both physical and virtual, both rooted and planetary. Jewish futurism honors multiplicity as our strength and connectivity as our new covenant.

    Rituals for the Coming Age

    Every generation reshapes ritual. The sages debated how to light candles or bind tefillin and we now ask how to sanctify the click, the stream, the prompt. AI-generated liturgy, AR sukkot, or blockchain tzedakah are not departures from tradition but continuations of its creative evolution. Halakhah is a living design system that adapts intention to circumstance. To innovate within it is to participate in revelation itself. The question is never only “Can we build it?” but “Can it carry holiness?”

    Memory as Living Code

    Jewish memory is dynamic, recursive, alive. To remember is to remix, to link past and future through creative continuity. AI and design tools can help us recover lost melodies, visualize midrashim, and illuminate forgotten voices. But data alone is not zekher, memorial. Memory without relationship becomes archive, not covenant. Jewish futurism calls us to use digital recall as teshuvah to renew moral awareness, not mere nostalgia.

    Justice and Halakhic Design

    Tikkun Olam, beautifying the world, remains the core program of Jewish futurism. We code, design, and build through chesed (kindness) and yirah (awe). Halakhah becomes a form of systems design when we build a moral architecture balancing din (structure) and rachamim (compassion). We recognize the commandment lo ta’amod al dam re’echa, do not stand idly by, as an ethical requirement for algorithmic justice, environmental stewardship, and digital accessibility. To design ethically is to fulfill mitzvah.

    Art as Prophecy, Design as Teshuvah

    The artist stands between the Sar HaTorah and the Golem, by receiving insight yet shaping it responsibly. Art is prophetic when it awakens conscience, not when it predicts trends. Design becomes teshuvah when it restores balance between human and machine, intention and automation. Jewish futurism teaches that the act of creation must include reflection that supports the feedback loop of soul and system. To make without reflection is to build a Golem; to seek revelation without preparation is to summon the Sar. To create with awareness is to become a partner in tikkun.

    The Messianic and the Real

    Jewish futurism lives between utopia and maintenance, between the dream and the debug. We do not await redemption as download or singularity; we construct it through ethical iteration. L’taken olam b’malchut Shaddai, to repair the world under divine sovereignty now includes building technologies that emulate divine attributes like compassion, humility, and restraint. Every ethical choice is a small redemption, a patch to the cosmic code.

    A Shared Horizon of Jewish Becoming

    Jewish futurism is not one style, and it is not one door into tomorrow. Some of us arrive as Merkavah Mystics, building visionary symbols and dream logic. Some arrive as Constructivist System-Builders, treating typography, image, and structure as the scaffolding of new worlds. Some arrive as Civic Blueprint Futurists, designing society forward through public space, planning, and collective infrastructure. Others are Archive-to-Future Salvagers, gathering fragments of story, object, song, and memory as raw material for what comes next. Others are Diaspora Worldbuilders, shaping Jewish futures through language, publishing, education, and cultural networks. And some are Ritual Prototype Designers and Ethical Speculators, turning Jewish practice into a living design lab where values lead and the future is built on purpose. Different lenses, same horizon. We are all staring at the same point in the distance, and arguing with it, praying with it, designing toward it, because the future is not a place we wait for. It is a place we make.

    Becoming Future Ancestors

    To be Jewish is to live across time and to carry memory forward and design possibility backward. Jewish futurism asks us to leave behind moral infrastructure, not just digital traces. The mitzvah of areyvut, mutual responsibility, extends to those who will inherit our algorithms, our art, and our stories. We are not only descendants of Sinai; we are its next iteration. To design consciously is to code for eternity.

    Collective Imagination and Creation

    Jewish futurism is a collective project: part yeshiva, part studio, part lab. It belongs to all who seek to sanctify imagination. We will build this future together, not as masters of machines but as students of wonder. The choice before us is ancient. Should we create as the Golem, blindly powerful, or as the Sar HaTorah, radiantly wise. Or should we find the sacred balance between them, where halakhah, creativity, and humility converge.

    Let us design toward Hiddur Olam, a world made more beautiful through seeking wisdom, restraint, and awe.

    Works Cited (MLA) Updated, with Sar HaTorah + Golem sources added

    Fishbane, Eitan. “Tikkun Olam: Repairing the World, Healing God in Kabbalistic Thought.” The Jewish Theological Seminary, 17 July 2023, https://www.jtsa.edu/event/tikkun-olam-repairing-the-world-healing-god-in-kabbalistic-thought/. Accessed 19 Jan. 2026.

    Han, Jae Hee. “Angelic Contemplation in the Sar Torah and the Prognostic Turn.” Prophets and Prophecy in the Late Antique Near East, Cambridge University Press, 26 Oct. 2023, https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/prophets-and-prophecy-in-the-late-antique-near-east/angelic-contemplation-in-the-sar-torah-and-the-prognostic-turn/C8EE08B1543602E7BFC79CF912D8331A. Accessed 19 Jan. 2026.

    Jones, Jonathan. “‘We Will Glorify War – and Scorn for Women’: Marinetti, the Futurist Mussolini Sidekick Who Outdid Elon Musk.” The Guardian, 9 Jan. 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/jan/09/marinetti-the-futurist-mussolini-sidekick-who-outdid-elon-musk. Accessed 19 Jan. 2026.

    Kaval, Allan. “Rome Exhibition on Futurism Exalts the Italian National Narrative.” Le Monde (English edition), 20 Apr. 2025, https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2025/04/20/rome-exhibition-on-futurism-exalts-the-italian-national-narrative_6740429_23.html. Accessed 19 Jan. 2026.

    Library of Congress. “Manifesto of the Futurist Painters.” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2021667100/. Accessed 19 Jan. 2026.

    Leiman, Shnayer Z. “The Golem of Prague in Recent Rabbinic Literature.” The Seforim Blog, 3 May 2010, https://seforimblog.com/2010/05/golem-of-prague-in-recent-rabbinic/. Accessed 19 Jan. 2026.

    Marinetti, F. T. “Manifesto of Futurism.” Design Manifestos, 1909, https://designmanifestos.org/f-t-marinetti-manifesto-of-futurism/. Accessed 19 Jan. 2026.

    Robinson, Ira. “The Golem of Montreal.” Jewish Review of Books, 5 Oct. 2022, https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/jewish-history/12566/the-golem-of-montreal/. Accessed 19 Jan. 2026.

    Sefaria. “The Torah and the Angels.” Sefaria: Topics, https://www.sefaria.org/topics/the-torah-and-the-angels. Accessed 19 Jan. 2026.

    “Golem Legend.” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article.aspx/Golem_Legend. Accessed 19 Jan. 2026.

    Areyvut (ar-AY-voot) ערבות
    Mutual responsibility. The idea that Jewish life is bound up together, ethically and practically.

    Beit Midrash (BAYT MEE-drash) בית מדרש
    A Jewish study hall. In this article, a metaphor for shared learning spaces, including digital ones.

    Binah (BEE-nah) בינה
    Discernment and understanding. Not just knowledge, but the ability to interpret wisely and act well.

    Chesed (KHEH-sed) חסד
    Lovingkindness. A core ethical trait and a guiding value for design choices.

    Din (deen) דין
    Judgment or structure. Often paired with compassion to describe balanced moral systems.

    Gevurah (geh-VOO-rah) גבורה
    Strength and restraint. Power that is disciplined, bounded, and ethically contained.

    Halakhah (hah-lah-KHAH) הלכה
    Jewish law and practice. A living system that guides behavior, ritual, and communal norms.

    Haskalah (hah-skah-LAH) השכלה
    The Jewish Enlightenment, associated with modern education, literature, and cultural transformation.

    Hiddur Olam (hee-DOOR oh-LAHM) הידור עולם
    Beautifying the world. A framework where creativity and design serve ethical repair and sacred purpose.

    Kavvanah (kah-vah-NAH) כוונה
    Intention. The inner direction behind an act, not only the visible outcome.

    Kli Kodesh (klee KOH-desh) כלי קודש
    A vessel of holiness. A tool or object used in service of sacred purpose.

    Merkavah (mehr-kah-VAH) מרכבה
    Chariot mysticism. Jewish visionary tradition centered on symbolic, otherworldly imagery.

    Midrash (MEE-drash) מדרש
    Interpretive teachings that expand Torah through story, commentary, and imagination.

    Mishkan (MISH-kahn) משכן
    The Tabernacle. A model for sacred making guided by craft, structure, and intention.

    Mussar (MOO-sar) מוסר
    Jewish ethical discipline focused on refining character traits through practice and reflection.

    Rachamim (rah-khah-MEEM) רחמים
    Compassion or mercy. Often paired with din to describe moral balance.

    Shekhinah (sheh-khee-NAH) שכינה
    The indwelling Divine Presence. In rabbinic language, presence that dwells among people gathered with intention.

    Tikkun Olam (tee-KOON oh-LAHM) תיקון עולם
    Repairing the world. Often used for social responsibility, with roots in Jewish mystical language of repair.

    Teshuvah (teh-shoo-VAH) תשובה
    Return and repair. A process of course-correction, not just regret.

    Tzelem Elohim (TSEH-lem eh-loh-HEEM) צלם אלוהים
    The divine image in every human being. A foundation for dignity, ethics, and responsibility.

    Zekher (ZEH-kher) זכר
    Covenantal remembrance. Memory that stays relational and morally active, not just archived.

    Zion (tsee-YOHN) ציון
    A layered term meaning Jerusalem and the symbolic center of Jewish peoplehood, longing, and future-building.