In this episode, I move from defining Jewish futurism to actually doing it. What does it look like to practice Jewish futurism in your creative work, your teaching, your community building, or your daily life? How do Jewish texts, rituals, and patterns of thought become tools for imagining futures rather than artifacts of the past?
I explore Jewish futurism as a lived methodology. One that shows up through design, storytelling, ritual adaptation, speculative thinking, and creative constraint. Drawing from Torah, rabbinic interpretation, art practice, and my own community-based projects, this episode looks at how Jews have always practiced futurism by rehearsing futures, holding multiple meanings at once, and designing systems meant to survive change.
This episode is an invitation. Not to agree with a definition, but to experiment. To treat Jewish tradition as a living design system. And to ask how your own creative practice might become a site where past, present, and future meet.
Episode Transcript
Welcome back to the Jewish futurism Lab, where we unpack Torah, tech, and tomorrow. Shalom, future friends. I’m Mike Worth, Jewish futurist, community artist, and educator, coming to you from Crowntown, Charlotte, North Carolina. In the first episode, I talked about what Jewish futurism is. And in the second, I followed up and made the case that it’s an ancient thing that has always been a way of thinking embedded in the Torah itself. And today, I want to talk about how this actually shows up in practice, in rooms with actual people, in classrooms, workshops, in moments where something shifts and you can feel it. This is the episode where Jewish futurism stops being an idea and starts being something you do. Let’s get into it.
I want to say this clearly from the start. Jewish futurism is not a belief system I’m trying to convince you of. It’s a way of working, a way of paying attention, a way of designing experiences that help people move through change with memory, limitations, and dignity intact. And as an artist, a designer, and an educator, I’ve come to realize that many of the tools we already use, often intuitively, line up almost perfectly with how Jewish tradition has always functioned. It’s cool. One of the ideas that helped me understand this more clearly comes from the great psychologist Mahali Chinsen Mahali. Hard to say but amazing guy and his work on the flow state. Flow is that condition where you are fully absorbed into what you’re doing. Time bends. Self-consciousness drops away. Challenge and skill are in perfect balance. You’re not forcing the work. You’re not coasting by either. You’re inside of it. What struck me was when I first encountered this theory is how familiar it felt. Flow isn’t just a creative state. It’s a spiritual one. It shows up in my prayer, in dovening, chanting, study, in creating, and in communal ritual. It’s what happens when attention, intention, and action align. I see this constantly in my design classes. When students stop asking, is this right? And start asking, “What happens if I try this?” Something really starts to open up. The room changes. The critique becomes a dialogue instead of some judgment. Iteration becomes curiosity instead of fixing failures. And what’s important here is that flow doesn’t happen when there are no constraints. It happens because of constraints, clear parameters, real stakes, enough structure to hold people and enough freedom to let them move. That balance is deeply, deeply Jewish. This is where design thinking quietly mirrors the Torah. Design thinking doesn’t start with solutions. It starts with empathy. Who is affected? What are they carrying? What problem are they actually living inside? Jewish texts do this constantly. Shabbat isn’t an abstract command. It responds to exhaustion, exploitation, and the human tendency to let systems run without restraint. Shabbat becomes a designed interruption. And when I teach design thinking to my students, I often tell them that good design doesn’t begin with what you really want to make. It begins with what people need in order to remain human beings. Systems thinking deepens this idea further. Systems thinking teaches you to look for patterns, feedback loops, and unintended consequences that may occur over time. The Torah is saturated with this kind of awareness. I talked in episode two about how Cain is known for the first murder, but he’s also less known for building the first city. The text is also asking what happens when power, technology, and density scale faster than ethics. And we also talked about Babel and how the people there didn’t just build a tower. They created a centralized system optimized for sameness and speed. That failure wasn’t technical. It was systematic. Jewish futurism pays close attention to how systems behave once momentum takes over. This is why limits matter so much in Jewish thinking. Systems without limits eventually harm the people inside of them. Shabbat functions as a systematic pause. Shabbat cycles reset extraction. Dietary laws slow consumption. There are not arbitrary rules in Judaism. They are feedback mechanisms. And when I work with students or communities around technology or identity, I keep returning to this question. Where does this system need to pause? An off switch or human intervention. UX design helps translate this into lived experience. UX or user experience asks what it feels like to live inside of a system, not how impressive it looks from the outside. Judaism teaches through embodiment. You don’t learn Shabbat by reading about it. You learn it by living it, lighting the candles, eating together, singing, pausing. In my classes, this is why experiential assignments matter so much. I don’t want students to just understand concepts and store the information in their brain. I want them to feel what those concepts do to their attention and their sense of self. This connects directly to art therapy principles, even when we’re not calling them that explicitly. Professionally, I’m not an art therapist, but I found resources that have incredibly interesting ideas that connect back here, and I’m curious to see what this leads to. Art therapy, which is a very respected discipline, understands that making is a way of processing what can’t yet be spoken. Images, gestures, repetition, and material engagement help people integrate memory, trauma, hope, and identity. I’ve seen this play out again and again in Jewish community workshops, especially when people are invited to make together rather than explain themselves. There’s a moment from a synagogue workshop that keeps coming back to me when I think about all this. I was working with a small group of teens on the story of Noah. And instead of teaching it as a text to analyze, because you know, I’m not a rabbi, I wanted people to step inside of it. I handed everybody two Post-it notes and I asked them to do something very simple. On one note, write one thing that you would bring onto the ark to preserve. And on the other note, write one thing that should not be brought onto the ark. Then I asked them to place these notes onto two large pieces of paper on the wall. One labeled keep and the other labeled leave. Very Marie Condo, if I may say so myself. What happened next was one of those moments where you can feel the room change. At first, the keep side filled up with exactly what you might expect. Uh there was some Judeaica, family heirlooms, photos, ritual objects, books. People wanted to preserve memory, identity, and continuity. Some added entertainment, games, music, things that would help pass the time and stay human while waiting out the flood. It all made sense. But when people started posting on the leave side, something deeper emerged. People didn’t just write down objects. They wrote down things like bad habits, patterns of behavior they were tired of carrying, objects that reminded them of mistakes they wish they could outgrow, like grades from high school or college, criminal records, things that anchored them uh to shame, fear, or an earlier version of themselves that they wanted to forget. The ark stopped being a boat and started being a threshold. The flood stopped being punishment and started being a transition. What struck me was that no one argued, no one tried to correct anybody else. People just stood there reading, nodding, and sometimes laughing softly, sometimes going quiet. Without calling it therapy, the room entered into a therapeutic-like space. Making something physical gave people permission to name what they were ready to carry forward and what they were ready to release. That’s art therapy logic at work. Externalize the internal, give it form, let the body participate in meaning making. And what I was really trying to do in that workshop and in many others like it was find activities that actually aligned with the para the stories themselves not just as illustrations but as a lived embodied experience. I wanted to take the decisions and the considerations that biblical characters had to make and put them back into the hands of real people, my neighbors, not as hypotheticals but as felt choices. Noah had to decide what was worth carrying forward and what had to be left behind. So I wanted people to sit with that same tension in their own lives. That exploration, watching how text, making, memory, and future thinking converged in real time is where the different parts of my professional life really started to lock together tightly. My work as a designer, an educator, a community artist, and as a Jewish creative thinker stopped feeling like separate lanes. They started to form a system. That convergence is what ultimately led to the creation of my Hidora Lum framework and the book series I’m currently producing. It grew directly out of classrooms, workshops, and communal art projects just like this one. I’ll talk much more about that in future episodes, but I wanted to name it here because this podcast is very much a part of that same unfolding process. I saw this most clearly during a weekend-long artist residency that I had at Temple Shir Tikva in Whan, Massachusetts, where my goal wasn’t to teach or present, but to actually interact with the community in a way that invited memory to surface through creative making. Over the course of the weekend, I asked congregants a simple but surprisingly powerful question. What is a sacred Jewish object that makes you feel connected to your Judaism? Not something abstract, something real, something you could hold, remember, or describe. We set up a kind of photo booth and scanning station and adults from the community lived up to have their objects scanned. Kiddish cups, candlesticks, prayer books, talite clips, handwritten notes, family heirlooms. Each object came with a beautiful story and people really wanted to tell it. At the same time, the kids and the teens were invited to participate in their own way. They drew pictures of their own objects. They wrote descriptions and explanations of what they had made. They described why a particular item mattered to them, sometimes in ways that were funny, sometimes surprisingly deep. No one was graded. No one was corrected. The point was participation, not polish. So I took all those materials home, the scans, the drawings, the writing, and compiled it into a growing database. Every object carried equal weight in my mind. A mass-roduced sitter uh sat next to a one-of-a-kind heirloom. A child’s drawing sat next to a carefully photographed artifact. Out of that archive, I created a largecale collage, layering all the images together into what would eventually become the Sakot time tapestry for Temple Shir Tikva. What mattered just as much as the making was the return. The following year during Sikkot, I came back to unveil the final tapestry now hung in the main hall of the Shul. People walked in and immediately started looking for themselves in the tapestry. There was delight, recognition, and pride. And then something else happened. People began talking to the people next to them, saying, “Is that yours? I didn’t know that story. Why does that object matter to you?” Conversations sparked across generations, social circles that didn’t always overlap otherwise. Judaism stopped being an abstract identity and became something visible, shared, and relational. What struck me was the time loop that formed. People remembered participating. They remembered choosing their object. They remembered being scanned or drawing at the table. And now they were seeing the afterlife of that moment transformed and returned to them as a communal artifact. The project didn’t just document memory, it activated memory. That return, the second sote, that reveal of a year later mirrored the cyclical structure of Jewish time itself. You do something, you mark it, you return. Meaning deepens because it’s revisited, not just because it’s finished. For me, that project crystallized so much of what I mean by Jewish futurism in practice. It wasn’t about novelty. It wasn’t about spectacle. It was about designing an experience where memory, creativity, and community could reinforce one another over time. The future wasn’t something abstract we talked about. It was something we built together slowly and then came back to see later. This is where Jewish futurism actually becomes real for me. It’s so much more than designing distant sci-fi futures. It’s about designing conditions where people can encounter change, loss, continuity, and hope with intention in the classroom. That might mean asking students to redesign a ritual for a digital generation, not to replace it, but to understand what it protects. In community settings, it might mean creating shared art experiences that allow people to process grief or transition together rather than alone. flow, design thinking, systems awareness, user experience design, and the logic from art therapy all converge here. They remind us that meaning doesn’t move through people by argument alone. It moves through embodied experience, through creative making, and through repetition of that creative making. Jewish tradition has always known this. We don’t just tell the story of our liberation. We eat it. We sing it. We ask questions. Jewish futurism treats future making the exact same way. In my own practice, this often starts very small. A sketch, a prompt, a ritual tweak. Not trying to solve everything. I’m trying to create conditions where flow can happen, where people feel held enough to explore and challenged enough to care. That’s not just good design, it’s good teaching. And I would argue it’s good Judaism. So if there’s one takeaway from this episode, it’s this. Jewish futurism lives in action. It lives in how we design learning, how we build systems, how we create rituals, and how we invite people into meaningful participation. Artists, designers, educators are uniquely positioned to do this work because we are trained to hold ambiguity, to prototype instead of declare. and to see making as a form of thinking. So before the next episode, I want you to pay attention to your own creative energy. Notice when you feel yourself enter a state of flow, when time changes shape and the work starts carrying you instead of the other way around. Don’t try to optimize it. Just notice what conditions made it possible. What constraints are present? What distractions melted away? What intention was quietly guiding you inside? Then ask yourself how often you design those conditions on purpose and how often they happen by accident. Jewish futurism doesn’t begin with the answers. It begins with awareness of how we make, how we focus, and what kinds of futures our habits are already training us for. So that’s it for this episode. Next time we’ll talk more directly about limits, ethics, and restraint, and why Jewish futurism is especially weary of speed without wisdom. As always, the writing and visuals live at [www.mikewirthart.com](https://www.mikewirthart.com). And thank you friends. I’ll see you next time.