In this episode, I make the case that Jewish futurism isn’t new at all. Long before rockets, algorithms, or AI, Jewish tradition was already asking future-oriented questions about survival, ethics, memory, and change. From Noah and Enoch to Babel, Joseph, exile, and Shabbat, this episode traces how Torah stories are structured around anticipating disruption, redesigning meaning, and passing responsibility forward to people we will never meet. Jewish futurism, I argue, isn’t about predicting the future. It’s about preparing us to meet it awake, accountable, and in relationship.
You can read about this in more detail in my article A Brief History of Jewish futurism.
Episode Transcript
Welcome back to the Jewish futurism Lab, where we unpack Torah, tech, and tomorrow. I’m Mike Wirth, Jewish futurist, community artist, and educator coming to you from Crowntown Charlotte, North Carolina. This is episode two and is titled, “Jews have always been futurists.” I swear it’s true. Today, I want to slow things down and make one point clear. This way of thinking is not new. When I say Jews have always been futurists, I mean it structurally. Jewish stories, laws, and rituals are built for a changing world. Asking not what will happen, but how do we live with meaning when things shift beyond our control? Let’s get into it.
Let me start with two questions. One sounds ancient and one sounds futuristic. The first, how will I keep Shabbat outside of Israel? and how will I keep Shabbat in space? Structurally, those are the same exact question, but both assume displacement. Both assume unfamiliar conditions. Both assume that old answers may not work as is. And both assume that walking away is not an option. Judaism has been answering this kind of question for thousands of years. Not by freezing practices in time, but by identifying what really matters, redesigning the form around it. Placing limits on power and making sure meaning can travel forward to people who are not here yet. That instinct, that pattern is what I’m calling Jewish futurism. As I’ve been writing an essay alongside this podcast episode, trying to articulate that pattern more clearly, I keep seeing the same set of moves appear again and again. I hesitate to even call it a checklist because it’s less a formula and more of a habit of mind, a way Judaism approaches the future. But once you notice it, you start really seeing it everywhere. Okay, so this first move is anticipation. Jewish stories assume disruption is coming. Floods, exile, loss of land, loss of innocence, forgetting, technological change. The Torah rarely asks if things will change. It asks when. That alone is a futurist posture. It means you design before the crisis, not after it arrives. The second move is selection. Not everything gets saved. Every story makes a choice about what truly matters. In Noah’s case, it’s life itself. In exile, it’s time rather than place. In Joseph’s story, it’s memory and orientation, not comfort. Jewish futurism is cleareyed about this. It asks, what core value must survive even if everything else has to change its shape? Then comes redesign. Once the value is clear, the form becomes more flexible. The ark replaces the whole world. Shabbat replaces territory. Blessings replace institutions. Bones replace land deeds. Judaism doesn’t cling to forms just because they’re old. It shapes them so meaning can travel. And that’s not betrayal. That’s continuity. But redesign is never allowed to run wild. There is always a fourth move which it limits. Power is constrained. Covenants appear. Arguments are preserved. Off switches are built in. The golem doesn’t just come to life. It can also be shut down. Thank God. Abraham doesn’t just receive a promise. He challenges it. Babel doesn’t just build upward, it gets fragmented. Jewish futurism never trusts unchecked power, no matter how impressive the construction. And finally, there is transmission. Almost nothing in Torah is designed to end with the person who started it. The future is always imagined as inhabited by people you will never ever meet. Noah builds for generations. Abraham invests in his descendants. Jacob speaks to tribes that don’t exist yet. And Joseph leave instructions that uh will take centuries to fulfill. Even Shabbat assumes repetition long after the first sunset. Jewish futurism always asks how meaning gets carried forward without ever being frozen. Once you see these moves, the Torah starts to read differently. Take Noah. Noah doesn’t react to a disaster. He plans for one. He builds before the rain. He gathers life before extinction and designs a system meant to function after the world he knows no longer exists. That’s not faith alone. That’s foresight. And notice what he chooses to preserve. Not comfort, not normaly, but life itself. That choice tells you what value the future is being designed around. Just as important, once that flood ends, the story immediately introduces boundaries, a new covenant, limits on violence, rules about power. This isn’t creation run wild. It’s creation paired with responsibility. Noah isn’t imagining the future as a spectacle. He’s designing continuity under catastrophe. Then there’s Enoch, one of the most unsettling figures in the entire Torah. Enoch never dies. The text simply says he walked with God and then he was no more because God took him. There’s no grave, no bones, no instructions or living will for his descendants. Enoch represents a different kind of future question. not how we preserve systems, but how humans themselves might change. Later Jewish tradition turns Enoch into the angel Medatron, a being that crosses between human and divine realms. Whether you read that literally or symbolically, this move matters. Enoch suggests that the future is not only about survival, it’s also about transformation, about who we are becoming over time. Jewish futurism isn’t just adaptive. It’s aspirational, but with humility. That tension appears right at the beginning of the Torah. Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge and something irreversible happens. Innocence never comes back. Knowledge can’t be unlearned. Time becomes directional. From that moment on, the Torah is quietly asking how humans live responsibility after such an irreversible change. That question should feel very familiar to us today living in this world. Cain from Cain and Abel pushes this even further. Cain doesn’t just commit the first murder. He actually builds the very first city. The Torah places those two acts right next to each other. And that feels quite intentional. It’s already asking what happens when power, density, and technology scale faster than ethics. Cain’s future is impressive but unstable. This is futurism without repair, without restraint. The Tower of Babel makes the future question explicit. Let us make a name for ourselves. This is a planned future, coordinated, efficient, unified, and it fails. Not because ambition is bad, but because sameness erases difference. The response isn’t destruction, it’s diversification. New languages, new frictions, plurality. Jewish futurism is deeply suspicious of futures that demand everyone become the same in order to move forward. And rightfully so. Abraham enters futurism a little bit differently. He’s asked to leave without knowing where he’s going. The problem isn’t the collapse this time. It’s stagnation. Abraham invests in a future he knows he won’t personally see. And that really matters. Jewish futurism is comfortable designing for descendants rather than personal payoff. And even here, power is constrained. Abraham argues with God. Justice isn’t suspended for destiny. The future is wrestled into being. At the end of Genesis, Jacob blesses his sons. These aren’t sentimental blessings, folks. They’re forecasts. Jacob is speaking to tribes that don’t fully exist yet. He encodes strengths, dangers, and roles into that language. He’s designing identity to travel forward. Joseph makes this physical. He knows he will die in Egypt and leaves an instruction. Take my bones with you when you leave. His body becomes a message to people he will never meet. A reminder that comfort in exile is not the end of the story. Joseph designs memory to outlast assimilation. And all this brings us back to Shabbat. Outside the land of Israel, Jews had to ask how sacred time survives without sacred place. And the answer wasn’t abandonment. It was redesign. Shabbat becomes calendarbased instead of geography based. Meaning survives by becoming portable. This is why Shabbat in space isn’t a joking question. Judaism already trained us for this moment. not by giving us fixed answers, but by teaching a way of thinking. If you want to see how this pattern continues beyond the Torah, I wrote an article on my website called A Brief History of Jewish Futurism, tracing how these instincts reappear in modern art, design, comics, and speculative culture. The podcast is an extension of that work, just slowed down and spoken aloud. And I’ll have an episode on those more modern examples to come. So when I say Jews have always been futurists, I’m not importing a modern label into ancient texts. I’m naming a pattern that’s already there. From Noah to Enoch, from Babel to Joseph, from exile to Shabbat, Jewish tradition is less concerned with predicting the future than with preparing us to meet it responsibly. And this is where the historical material stops being history and starts being instruction because the questions we’re facing now are not actually new. They’re just wearing different clothes. Noah asked how to preserve life when the environment collapses. We’re asking that now with climate change and mass extinction. Babel asked, “What happens when humans try to scale power, speed, and unity without humility?” We’re asking that now with global platforms, algorithmic sameness, and systems that reward domination over care. Adam and Eve asked how to live after knowledge can’t be undone. We’re asking that now with AI, data, and technologies that permanently alter what it means to know, create, and decide. Enoch asked whether the future is only about survival, or whether humans themselves are meant to change. We’re asking that now, too, as we merge with machines, networks, and identities that blur the boundaries of what a human even is. When Jews in exile asked how to keep Shabbat without the land, they weren’t being nostalgic. They were futureproofing meaning. When Joseph asked his descendants to carry his bones, he wasn’t being sentimental. He was designing memory to survive comfort and forgetting. When the rabbis argued and preserved minority opinions, they weren’t indecisive. They were assuming future conditions would demand new readings. These weren’t theoretical exercises. They were survival strategies wrapped in story, law, and ritual. That’s why I resist the idea that Jewish futurism is about novelty or aesthetics alone. It’s not about slapping Hebrew on a sci-fi idea and calling it deep. It’s about recognizing that we’ve been here before structurally, if not technologically. The tools change, the stakes prime, and the tradition keeps offering a way to meet the future without surrendering ethics, memory or our responsibility. So when we ask questions uh today like how does prayer work online? How does community function without physical presence? How do we teach wisdom when attention is fractured? How do we build technology without becoming servants to it? How do we keep Shabbat, metaphorically or literally in a world that never wants to stop? Those aren’t signs that tradition has failed. They’re signs that tradition is doing exactly what it was built to do. Jewish futurism at its core is the refusal to let the future be designed only by speed, profit, or power. It insists that memory belongs in the room, that limits matter, that humility is a feature, not a bug, and that people who come after us deserve more than clever systems. They deserve futures that remember what it means to be a human. And here’s where I want to land. Jewish futurism is about novelty. It isn’t about chasing technology for its own sake. It’s about refusing to let the future belong only to forces that don’t care about memory, ethics, or human dignity. Judaism assumes that the world will change. It always has. The question it keeps asking is whether we will meet the change awake, accountable, and in relationship. Whether we will design futures that remember where they come from and care about who has to live inside them. That to me is what it means to design the future Jewishly. Okay. So friends, before our next episode, episode three, I have a challenge. I want you to pick one Jewish story or practice that you know really well and ask yourself, what future problem was it trying to solve? Next time we’ll talk about how to use this instinct consciously today. how to practice Jewish futurism as a studio method rather than just a historical observation. And as always, the writing and visuals live at [www.mikewirthart.com](https://www.mikewirthart.com). Thank you, friends. Until next time.