What happens when flow has no boundaries? In Episode 4 of The Jewish Futurism Lab, I explore how creativity without limits turns into exhaustion, addiction, or production without reflection. This episode introduces Shabbat not just as religious practice, but as a design principle: a refusal built into time that prevents work from consuming the people inside it.
Drawing connections between Mussar ethics, inclusive design, and systems thinking, I examine how Jewish tradition offers practical frameworks for sustainable creativity. From classroom constraints that sharpen student focus to the Golem story’s “erase key,” this episode asks: Where is your pause? Where do you step back before momentum takes over?
Join me as I unpack why limits aren’t the enemy of creativity. They’re what make creativity sustainable and accountable.
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.
In this first episode, I’m introducing The Jewish futurism Lab and what this podcast is here to build: a space where Torah learning, creative practice, and emerging technology meet. I’ll share a quick bit about who I am and why I’m drawn to Jewish futurism, then lay out what you can expect in future episodes, essays, and projects connected to my work at mikewirthart.com. We’ll start with the foundation, what Jewish futurism is, why it matters right now, and how we can imagine bold, ethical Jewish futures without losing our roots.
Images included are used solely for commentary and academic analysis under fair use provisions of U.S. copyright law.
During the first year of the pandemic in 2020, a friend recommended I read My Name Is Asher Lev. We had just finished watching Shtisel, the Israeli drama about a Haredi family in Jerusalem. Akiva, the show’s painter protagonist, is gentle, passionate, and deeply conflicted between his community’s expectations and his need to create (Lyons; Mazria Katz; “The Art and Politics of Desire”). His journey is like Asher Lev’s and raises a still-vital question, what makes art Jewish?
Promotional still from Shtisel. Copyright Yes TV. Used for academic commentary.
Our connection of Asher Lev to Shtisel illuminated an ongoing continuum of reinvention in Jewish storytelling and ritual. Originally a novel, Asher Lev’s journey was adapted for the stage by playwright Aaron Posner, premiering at the Arden Theatre Company in 2012 and later finding success Off-Broadway, where it won several awards including the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play (“My Name Is Asher Lev – Dramatists”; Broadway.com; Fountain Theatre). The adaptation brings Potok’s exploration of art, faith, and family into the lived immediacy of theater, allowing new audiences to encounter and interpret these questions on their own terms. In this way, Asher Lev’s/Akiva’s conflict with tradition, creativity, and communal belonging, continues to inspire and reshape Jewish art in every new medium.
Cover of My Name Is Asher Lev. Copyright Anchor Books, 2003. Used here under fair use for purposes of scholarly analysis.
Reading Asher Lev reframed the question for me. Both Akiva and Asher are artists negotiating communal obligation and personal inspiration, risking nearly everything to remain true to their gifts. Their stories trace a path toward sacred creativity, providing a foundation for what can be called Jewish futurism.
When Chaim Potok published My Name Is Asher Lev, he gave Jewish artists an enduring guide. Potok’s Hasidic protagonist struggles to reconcile tradition and creative drive. As Potok writes, “…an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist” (My Name Is Asher Lev). This tension between individuality and belonging is a persistent theme in Jewish artistic life. Jewish futurism affirms that Jewish art isn’t fixed in the past; rather, it unfolds with every creative act, no matter the medium.
Potok’s novel contends that creative instinct itself is sacred. Asher paints not out of pride, but from necessity, a need that is intertwined with spiritual purpose. Potok argues, “A life is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven” (Potok, Goodreads). For Asher, creative intuition becomes a form of ruach elohim, the divine breath of creation.
The narrative of Asher Lev is rooted in the idea of Tzelem Elohim, the belief that each person is made in the image of God. When Asher paints The Brooklyn Crucifixion, he is not betraying his Judaism. Instead, he translates personal anguish into communal compassion (SparkNotes; LitCharts). This ability to turn emotion into understanding reflects a hallmark of Jewish artistic practice. Maurycy Gottlieb, the nineteenth-century Jewish painter, struggled in similar ways. His art often explored the tensions between personal identity, Jewish tradition, and the surrounding culture (YIVO Encyclopedia; Culture.pl; Jewish Virtual Library; Brandeis).
Maurycy Gottlieb – Ahasuerus wandering (Self portrait) – 1876, Oil on Canvas. Image is in the Public Domain. Used here under fair use for purposes of scholarly analysis.
Like Asher Lev, Gottlieb faced societal expectations and pressures from family, peers, and the broader Jewish community. He frequently channeled his own pain and longing into works that resonate with empathy and universal dignity (YIVO Encyclopedia; Jewish Virtual Library; Brandeis; Segula Magazine). Their creative journeys illustrate how Jewish artists inspired by the concept of Tzelem Elohim bring individual and collective experience into dialogue, turning private struggles into forms of connection and healing.
Akiva’s journey in Shtisel parallels Asher’s in many ways. He transforms his family and grief into paintings, using creativity as a form of tikkun, or repair (Lyons; Mazria Katz; “The Art and Politics of Desire”). Despite resistance from his world, Akiva, like Asher, brings faith and creativity together, refusing to separate the two.
Jewish modernism’s dialogue with tradition is exemplified by Marc Chagall, whose paintings fill modern art with Jewish memory and mysticism. As Chagall observed, “If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing” (Chagall qtd. in “Analysis of Marc Chagall”; Grad). Chagall’s career models how Jewish creativity can look forward while remaining emotionally and spiritually grounded.
Self portrait with palette 1917, Marc Chagall, Liozna, near Vitebsk, Belarus, Image from source. Used here under fair use for purposes of scholarly analysis.
This same process of transformation is reflected in Potok’s exploration of art’s creative and destabilizing power. “Art is a danger to some people… Picasso used to say, art is subversive,” Potok reminds us (Bookey). In both modern and traditional contexts, Jewish artists risk pushing boundaries in order to offer new interpretations of spiritual experience.
Jewish spiritual practice teaches that every action gains significance through intention, or kavanah. Potok mirrors this sentiment: “Creativity, self-expression, and truth…emerge from honesty about oneself” (LitCharts). Jewish futurists apply this mindset to every new creative medium, continually asking if their work reveals more goodness and light.
Today, artists like Deborah Kass and Archie Rand carry these values forward as Jewish artists fully integrated into the mainstream art world. Kass’s OY/YO at the Brooklyn Museum and Rand’s The 613both embody the creative tension between reverence and innovation (Brooklyn Museum; Rand).
Silent Remembrance (self-portrait), 2024, Mike Wirth, Digital Illustration. Image property of artist.
My own contemporary Jewish work was inspired by these characters. In my digital illustration piece, Silent Remembrance, I restaged a self portrait by Felix Nussbaum, a Jewish-German painter who perished in the Shoah (Holocaust).
All of our artwork is apart of a has a legacy and reaffirms the idea that beauty and sacredness can and should coexist.
The journeys of Asher Lev (page and stage), Akiva from Shtisel, Maurycy Gottlieb, Marc Chagall, and many Jewish contemporary creatives illuminate a vibrant continuum of Jewish artists who, across generations and media, confront the tension between personal inspiration and communal tradition (Morinis; Segula Magazine; YIVO Encyclopedia; SparkNotes; LitCharts; Wullschlager). Each pursues the middah of emet (truth), striving for honesty and authenticity in their creative practice, even when this honesty leads to conflict or alienation within their communities. Asher paints his deepest truths, Akiva wrestles to honor his art within the constraints of Jerusalem’s Haredi world, Gottlieb channels his longing for acceptance and identity into portraits and biblical scenes, and Chagall infuses his canvases with heartfelt reverence, mystical memory, and universal feeling (Grad; Art Prodigy Blog).
Along the way, each artist embodies anavah (humility), recognizing their role as a vessel for creativity, and rachamim (compassion), using their gifts to turn personal struggle and sorrow into works of empathy and communal connection. Their creative processes mirror the stages of Mussar: deep self-examination, engagement with inner and outer conflict, risking rejection or misunderstanding, and ultimately returning to offer artistic repair, tikkun, to their communities and to Jewish tradition itself (Morinis; Mussar Institute; Ritualwell; My Jewish Learning).
Through these acts of creative repair and ethical growth, their art becomes a conduit for goodness and revelation. Their stories remind us that Jewish artistic futurism is not static but unfolds wherever artists grapple honestly, humbly, and compassionately with the tensions of their lives. Revelation and healing do not end in moments of exile or struggle; rather, they continue through every artist who brings fresh insight and loving repair to their people.
If you’ve not read My Name is Asher Lev, watched Shtisel, or viewed Gottlieb’s work, I highly recommend all three. I’m excited to see the stage production, myself. I hope you find kindred souls in these stories, like I have.
When I teach Design history courses, my students love how similar events, people and milestones are neatly packaged into movements and eras with interesting names, usually with an “ism” thrown in for good measure. One of our favorite thinking exercises is to try and apply a movement or era name to the art happening today. We mostly think of Frankenstein-like names, following the contemporary trend of making combinations of specific cultural groups, places, with older movement names. Like Jewish and futurism, we learned that every movement has its ancestors, both good and bad, even if they didn’t call themselves by the same name. I can say that as teacher and artist in this story, the feeling of placing oneself into the continuum of creative history is inspirational and revealing of purpose.
Before “Jewish futurism” was a modern phrase, there were lowercase “f” futurists in Biblical prophets, medieval mystics, modern artists, inventors, and one rejected capital “F”, Futurist (Italian), who for better for for worse, all had dreams with variegated mixtures of optimism and pessimism of the world ahead. Jews who were in awe of speed, energy, and light- imagined boldly and used creativity to repair what was they saw as broken in their time. They were asking the same or similar futurist questions we ask now, but with varying intentions:How do we sanctify technology? How do we balance innovation with ethics? How can art and design deepen our connection to our values rather than distract from it?
But unlike other futurist movements, Jews were rarely gathered under one banner. In the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, they were often distributed participants within the world’s avant-garde movements.
Photo of futurism vs Futurism notes on whiteboard 2018, Queens University of Charlotte, Photo by Mike Wirth
They were scattered across modernism, abstraction, and science fiction. Jewish artists and thinkers helped define of futurist leaning movements like Cubism, Vorticism, Constructivism, Art Nouveau (Jugendstil), the Bauhaus, comics, science, cinema, and technology, yet they entered these movements as outsiders, navigating exile, assimilation, and the tension between belonging and vision.
In contrast, Jewish futurism, then, is a reunion of that diaspora. It’s a collective recognition that Jewish creativity has always been dispersed, but futurist. Our task now is to connect those remote sparks into a shared constellation.
Jewish futurism, as I understand it, isn’t about breaking from tradition, it’s about revealing the through line of Torah, design, and imagination. The real work is to dialogue with this evolution together. Our ancestors did it through parchment, pigment, and print. We do it through pixels, algorithms, and immersive light.
This essay is an attempt to trace that lineage by identifying the people and moments, ancient and modern, that carried the qualities of Jewish futurism before we had words for it.
2. Prophets and Visionaries: The First Jewish Futurists
The Jewish imagination has always been forward-looking and possessed the virtues of futurist thought. Many stories in the Torah show characters facing grave challenges who reluctantly, yet diligently, press onward toward many future promises. Isaiah dreamed of a world where swords would become plowshares (Isaiah 2:4), reimagining technology as an instrument of peace rather than domination. The non-canonical, Book of Enoch envisioned the celestial ascent of a very minor Torah character, an early meditation on transformation and transcendence.
Enoch 1806-7, William Blake, Via Wikimedia Commons
These were not myths of escape but frameworks for moral invention and prototypes of a better world.
The Torah itself ends in anticipation when Moses glimpses the Promised Land but never enters. The Jewish story begins by looking at the horizon toward a promise deferred, yet always pursued. That restless hope is also in the DNA of Jewish Futurism.
3. “Next Year in Jerusalem”: Our First Futurist Statement
The phrase L’shanah haba’ah b’Yerushalayim, Next year in Jerusalem, has always been the ultimate Jewish futurist phrase. It is both prayer and design challenge. It asks: what will it take, ethically and creatively, to build the world where that hope becomes real?
“Next Year in Jerusalem” translated from Hebrew, Birds’ Head Haggadah, 1296 Image via Sefaria
Jerusalem is not only a city but a symbol of the convergence of heaven and earth, ethics and aesthetics, faith and form. Every Jewish generation has tried to construct its own version of it. Jewish Futurism is our turn to do the same, using the tools and technologies of our age to reimagine what Jerusalem might mean tomorrow.
4. Mystics, Makers, and the Ethics of Revelation
Centuries later, the mystics of the Zohar built the first great Jewish model of complexity. Attributed to Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the Zohar describes creation as a system of divine emanations, the Sefirot, a network of energy, feedback, and interdependence that sounds remarkably like a precursor to modern systems or network theory.
An even earlier mystical text, the Hekhalot Rabbati, contains the story of the Sar HaTorah, the “Prince of Torah.” In it, a rabbi summons an angelic teacher to grant him instant divine wisdom. The revelation overwhelms him beyond capacity, leaving him nearly destroyed. The angel warns that knowledge received without readiness shatters the vessel. This is not a warning against study, but a parable about integration, teaching that divine insight requires ethical preparation, humility, and spiritual maturity.
This early mystical story prefigures a central idea of Jewish Futurism: revelation without discipline leads to collapse. Innovation, like wisdom, must be tempered by moral structure.
A few centuries later, in Safed, Isaac Luria (the Arizal) and his circle extended that vision, transforming cosmic trauma into design theology. Their concept of Tikkun Olam, repairing the world, framed healing not as an abstract ideal but as an iterative process of creation and refinement. The Kabbalists turned Divine catastrophe, the shevirat ha-kelim or shattering of vessels, into a blueprint for human creativity, a call to rebuild with intention.
In the same spirit, Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague gave shape to one of Judaism’s most enduring myths of technological creation, the Golem, a being formed from clay and animated through sacred language. The Golem’s body was innovation, its control was halakhah. It remains Judaism’s first meditation on artificial life, automation, and moral limits, what we now call the ethics of technology.
Together, these three sources, the Zohar’s vision of divine networks, the Sar HaTorah’s warning about unintegrated revelation, and the Golem’s lesson in ethical creation, form the foundation of Jewish Futurism. They map the two coordinates that still define our creative practice today: creation as systems design, and ethics as the boundary of holiness.
5. Enlightenment, Utopia, and Early Jewish Design
The 19th and early 20th centuries brought the industrial age, and with it, new Jewish imaginings of the future. Theodor Herzl’sAltneuland (1902) offered not just political
Theodor Herzl in Basel, 1901, Photo by EM Lilien via Wikimedia Commons
Zionism but a speculative blueprint of his vision of a technologically advanced society guided by justice. Ephraim Moses Lilien, often called the “first Zionist artist,” translated Herzl’s ideas into visual form, merging Art Nouveau (Jugendstil) beauty with prophetic idealism.
Around the same time during late Ottoman period (1906) and into British Mandate rule, Boris Schatz founded the Bezalel School of Art and Design in Jerusalem.
He believed that Jewish creativity could rebuild both spirit and society and was a major shaper of the Zionist art movement. The school fused European aesthetics, often brought by fleeing Jewish practitioners, with biblical themes, teaching the essence of Hiddur Mitzvah, beautifying the mitzvah.
Logo of The Bezalel School 1906, by EM Lilien. Via Wikimedia Commons
The Bezalel School was the first organized institutional embodiment of Jewish Futurism making art and design as acts of national and spiritual renewal.
1. Futurism vs. futurism: Origins and Overlaps
Futurism (capital F) was first coined as an art movement name by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909. His Futurist Manifesto, published in Le Figaro, announced a radical social ideology backed by an aesthetic devoted to speed, light, energy, and the mechanical beauty of modern life. Artists such as Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini sought to capture motion and power in a new visual language for the twentieth century. Yet as the movement matured, its rhetoric of destruction and renewal fused with Italian nationalism and ultimately fascism, turning artistic innovation into ideology.
One adjacent Jewish figure, Margherita Sarfatti, an art critic and Mussolini’s cultural adviser, championed early Futurist ideals while stressing that art must bridge past and future, not obliterate tradition. When fascism hardened, she was expelled from Italy under the racial laws, exposing Futurism’s fatal contradiction — a vision of progress that devoured its own makers.
By contrast, futurism (lowercase f) describes the broader impulse toward innovation that surfaced across Europe under other names: Vorticism in Britain, Constructivism in Russia, and the Bauhaus in Germany. The same fascination with machines, energy, and new media became, outside Italy, a moral and creative language for modern life.
The groundwork for all of these movements was laid by proto-futurists — visionaries who imagined the future before it had a name. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells wrote of flight, electricity, and space travel. Scientists and photographers Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge dissected motion through sequential imagery.
Photo montage of flying pelican taken by Étienne-Jules Marey 1882, Image is in the Public Domain from source
Philosophers Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche, along with Symbolist poets, infused culture with ideas of vitality, time flux, and transformation that would animate futurist art decades later.
Although none of these early futurists were Jewish, Jewish innovators shaped the technological world that made Futurism possible.Albert Einstein’s relativity redefined time and space.
Yiddish language advertisement for Edison’s Phonograph, the competitor of the Gramophone, 1909, Weekly Jewish Bits Newspaper. Image via source
Emil Berliner invented the gramophone making it possible for Jewish sound and oral tradition to be archived and disseminated globally for the first time; Charles Adler Jr. created the traffic-signal system that organized modern cities.
In the arts, Jewish modernists such as Marc Chagall and Jacques Lipchitz extended Cubist abstraction into spiritual allegory, transforming the language of modernism into a vessel for transcendence. Chagall, especially in his Paris period, reimagined futurism not as mechanical speed but as illumination and ascent. Paintings like Paris Through the Window (1913)
and The Eiffel Tower (1911) shimmer with the chromatic pulse of electric light, fracturing the modern city into simultaneous layers of time, memory, and dream.
The Green Violinist 1923-24, Marc Chagall, Oil on Canvas, Image in Public domain via source
His Violinist series vibrates with musical energy rendered as color and form, suggesting that sound itself could become a visual current. In Chagall’s hands, the machine age becomes a theater of revelation—modernity recast as a mystical experience of motion, radiance, and spiritual flight.
Jacques Lipchitz, working in sculpture, carried this vision into three dimensions. His early Cubist bronzes such as Man with a Guitar (1915) and Flight (1918) dissolve the human form into rhythmic, interlocking planes that seem to oscillate in space. Rather than glorifying machinery, Lipchitz sought to capture the vital energy and inner light of movement itself. Both artists turned Cubism’s structural analysis into a Jewish futurism of rhythm and spirit, where motion was not domination but devotion, and modern form became a bridge between earth and heaven. And in Britain, David Bomberg fused modern geometry with prophetic vision. Bringing a softer humanism to the abstract modernist aesthetics of Vorticism, the UK cousin of Futurism.
The Mud Bath 1914, David Bomberg (1890-1957) oil on canvas. Image in the Public Domain via source
His painting The Mud Bath (1914) exemplifies the mechanical rhythm of Vorticism, while The Vision of Ezekiel (1912) merges machine aesthetics with biblical wonder. For Bomberg, the mechanical and the mystical share a single pulse — creation itself.
Vision of Ezekiel, 1912,David Bomberg, oil on canvas. Tate Gallery.
A telling example is Margherita Sarfatti (1880-1961), the only female member associated with the Italian Futurism art and design movement (1909-1944), was Jewish, an art critic and intellectual. She once championed the movement’s early aesthetics of speed and even personally advised Mussolini as well as being his mistress.
While Sarfatti’s writings do not emphasize her Jewish background, they articulate a sustained belief in modernity that is anchored in continuity that art must recall and transform tradition, not demolish it. In her words: “This idea of art as a bridge from past to future aligns with the broader notion of futurism not as mere disruption but thoughtful renewal.”Her reviews and essays would propel the Futurist movement to a national level.
Margherita Sarfatti, (1920s) Photo by Litta Carell Image via source
When fascism hardened in 1938, she was expelled from Italy for being Jewish. Her story encapsulates the fate of many Jewish modernists: contributors to cultural innovation, later rejected by the very movements they helped inspire.
5. Modernism and the Avant-Garde: Lissitzky to the Bauhaus
In Eastern Europe, El Lissitzky carried Jewish visual tradition into modernism. His 1919 lithographs for Had Gadya reinterpreted Passover through Constructivist abstraction,
Had Gadya 1919, Lithograph by El Lissitsky. Via Wikimedia Commons
using geometry as theology. His phrase, “The goal is Jerusalem,” perfectly captured the Jewish Futurist impulse: the messianic hope rendered through design.
At the Bauhaus Design school(Germany 1919-1933), Jewish artists such as painter and photographer László Moholy-Nagy, architect and designer Marcel Breuer, and textile artist and printmaker Anni and Josef Alberses continued this lineage.
Bauhaus Curriculum Chart 1922, Walter Gropius,
They believed design could uplift society through clarity, functionality, and light. Through their curriculum of studying various materials, these educators echoed the rabbinic principle bal tashchit (do not waste) and the mystical pursuit of the illumination of ideas in visual and functional forms that solve problems as well as dialogue with beauty.
Their classrooms were secular temples of Tikkun Olam: ethical creativity as public good.
6. Mythmakers: Sci-Fi, Comics, Cinema
Jewish imagination found new life in mass media, Especially in science fiction writing, comics, and cinema, where exile and ethics could hide in plain sight.
As modernism gave way to the machine age, a new arena for Jewish imagination emerged in the world of pulp magazines and speculative storytelling. In 1926, Hugo Gernsback, a Luxembourg-born Jew, founded Amazing Stories and coined the term
Cover of Amazing Stories Magazine- Issue #1, 1926, Editor-in-chief Hugo Gernsback, Via Wikimedia Commons
“scientifiction,” launching the modern science fiction magazine industry. Through his editorial vision, the future became a place to test human ethics as much as scientific progress.
Jewish writers soon filled those pages. Isaac Asimov, William Tenn (Philip Klass), Robert Sheckley, and Harlan Ellison turned speculative fiction into a moral and philosophical workshop. Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics echoed halakhic reasoning — codifying responsibility before creation. Tenn’s On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi transformed Talmudic humor into cosmic commentary. Their stories asked enduring Jewish questions: What does it mean to create life? To act justly? To be human in a world of our own making?
The science fiction magazine became, in its way, a cosmic Mishnah on paper that featured serialized debates about ethics, invention, and destiny. In these pulp worlds, Jewish storytellers extended the prophetic imagination of Isaiah, Elijah, Enoch and the speculative daring of the Kabbalists into the age of electricity, rockets, and radio waves.
In 1938, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman: an alien refugee, morally bound to defend humanity. Though a very Moses-like framing, Clark Kent wasn’t explicitly Jewish.
Comparison of Moses and Superman stories. Image left by Gavri El Image right is property of DC Comics. CC 4.0
Yet his story’s core themes of exile, justice, hidden identity, redemption, to echo the Jewish experience wrapped in universal myth.
At Marvel, Jack Kirby and Stan Lee filled their universe with wandering scientists and reluctant heroes. Their stories turned vulnerability into virtue. The Spider-Man line, “With great power comes great responsibility,” reads like Pirkei Avot for a new generation.
Kirby’s later series,The New Gods (1970-73), pushed further, turning superhero cosmology into visual midrash. His battles of light and shadow mirrored the Kabbalistic drama of creation and repair, while also superimposing a planetary level version of The Shoah, Holocaust. At that time, Kirby successfully introduced specifically Jewish originating super beings into the American comic book lexicon.
Metron in his Mobius chair as depicted in New Gods #5 (November 1971), art by Jack Kirby (pencils) and Mike Royer (inks) Image property of DC Comics- Under Fair Use.
Notably, Metatron, an angel who Enoch embodied in his adventure through the four worlds of existence in Kabbalah, the Mother box– an Ark of the Covenant like container, the Mobius chair– a holy throne like object that has next level AI capabilities, and a boom tube– a merkaba, chariot-like, teleportation device.
These artists translated Torah’s moral code into pop language, giving the world a modern accessible form of Jewish prophecy.
Many times simultaneously, Jewish filmmakers carried that same prophetic imagination into cinema, using light, time, and narrative as tools for moral exploration. Stanley Kubrick reimagined the Golem story for the machine age, probing what happens when human creation outgrows moral control. In 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and in A.I. (2001), he questioned whether technology could ever mirror compassion, or like the Golem, it would always lack a soul. Though Steven Spielberg directed the movie, Kubrick originally had the rights and was developing the A.I. movie before his death in 1999.
Sidney Lumet turned the courtroom and newsroom into ethical laboratories. In 12 Angry Men and Network, justice and conscience collide with ego, power, and fear. His films translate lo ta’amod al dam re’echa, “do not stand idly by”, into an embodied principle of characters wrestling with justice. Darren Aronofsky brought Kabbalah, gematria and psychology into direct conversation, finding mysticism in mathematics in Pi, and cosmic yearning in The Fountain and Noah. Ari Folman, through animation, examined how memory and trauma shape moral responsibility in Waltz with Bashir and The Congress.
Still from Pi (1998), by Darren Aronofsky, Image is property of Artisan Entertainment. Used under Fair Use.
Meanwhile, the Coen Brothers and Joseph Cedar turned irony and uncertainty into spiritual inquiry. Their stories unfold like modern Mussar mini-dramas of human frailty tested by fate. Mel Brooks reclaimed film genres that once erased Jewish presence, proving laughter itself can be an act of tikkun, repair.
Across their films, the same Jewish questions resurface: What does it mean to be responsible for the world you’ve made? Can imagination redeem suffering? These filmmakers transformed those questions into a universal visual language that wove Jewish ethics, paradox, and hope into the cinema’s shared dream.
7. Jewish Thinkers of Media and Technology
As technology reshaped culture, Jewish thinkers were among the first to ask how it changed human perception. In 1933, German-Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin questioned how the mechanical reproduction of photography altered our sense of the sacred, almost anticipating today’s debates about ethical AI use and authorship.
He deeply questioned the aura of an object by exploring our emotions surrounding originality, creativity and human desire.
Crowd shoots photo of Mona Lisa at the Louvre’ 2014, Photo by Victor Grigas Used under CC ASA 4.0
At the birth of the internet age, Lev Manovich analyzed digital media as a new textual form, understanding databases and user-interfaces to function like Talmudic commentary, where meaning emerges through interaction and dialogue. Ray Kurzweil reimagined transcendence through technology, envisioning the “singularity” when humans merge with machines. I see this as a secular echo of the Kabbalistic longing for devekut, union with the Divine. Yet where mysticism seeks connection through personal refinement, Kurzweil imagines it through building our technical and intellectual abilities.
Revealing both the similarity and the danger of modern transcendence without ethics. And educators like Ari Waller continue to explore how design and interactivity can transform Jewish learning for a digital age.
Together, they extend the Jewish tradition of commentary into the domain of code.
8. Standing in a Chain of Builders
Looking back, it’s clear: Jewish Futurism has always existed in spirit, even if it didn’t have a name. It’s the instinct to design with conscience, to imagine with ethics, and to translate Torah into form.
We stand on the shoulders of those who used story, structure, and symbol to envision better worlds. They left us blueprints that are sometimes literal and sometimes mystical. Our task is to read them carefully and continue the work.
To innovate without memory is to build a Golem. To create without conscience is to call down the Sar HaTorah unprepared. But rather to design with kavvanah and tzedek, intention and justice, is to join the same futurist lineage that began at Sinai.
9. The Present Continuum: Art, Design, and Collective Vision
Today, artists, designers, and technologists continue that same conversation. My own work in digital art, murals, and the Hiddur Olam project is part of that continuum, a lineage of Jewish creativity that treats design as an act of devotion and world-building. I see AI not as a threat but as a kind of Sar HaTorah, a force that can offer insight if met with readiness and humility. Like the artisans of the Mishkan, I believe design becomes sacred when it channels empathy, restraint, and intention.
In 2022, I presented my philosophy and artwork of Jewish Futurism at the Conney Art Conference and later gave a live presentation at the JADA Art Fair during Miami Art Week. Both experiences reminded me how many Jewish creators are already working toward this shared vision—each in their own medium, each blending tradition with technology.
Lech Lecha 2022, AR activated artwork by Mike Wirth, Miami Art Week 2022, Miami Beach, FL
That same year, I debuted my ongoing project Rimon: The Cosmogranate, a digital and physical artwork exploring creation, fragmentation, and repair through interactive design. The piece reimagines the pomegranate—a symbol of divine abundance—as a cosmic interface, linking Kabbalistic symbolism with data visualization and immersive art. Rimon became a practical expression of my Jewish Futurist framework: systems thinking meets sacred storytelling.
Since then, I’ve met writers, digital artists, collage-makers, jewelers, and illustrators who are all exploring what Jewish creativity can mean in the twenty-first century. I’d love to meet them all, to learn what they’re building, and to be in conversation. There are also scholars whose work leans more toward theory than creative practice, but they’re vital too. This movement needs everyone: makers, thinkers, builders, and interpreters.
Together we form a creative ecology of imagination and insight that reaches across generations and disciplines, connecting our past to our unfolding future.
No one can pursue this vision alone. There needs to be a gathering of like-minded Jewish Futurists, artists, technologists, scholars, and dreamers, willing to experiment together. A community that treats innovation as avodah, sacred service, and technology as a tool for renewal rather than disruption. Through shared projects, symposia, and creative residencies, we can imagine and prototype what a Jewish future might look and feel like, rooted in text, tradition, and ethics, but alive with invention.
Jewish Futurism is not about predicting the future. It’s about designing the future, ethically, communally, and beautifully. It is a collective project, not an individual quest. The middah of Areyvut, mutual responsibility, is its foundation.
Every Jewish artist, from Isaiah to Lissitzky, from Herzl to Kirby, from Bezalel to Bauhaus, from Benjamin to Manovich, has been part of that same dialogue, how to turn imagination into justice, light, and meaning. Jewish Futurism invites us to take up that question again, not to escape the past, but to reimagine it as raw material for redemption.
Jewish Futurism isn’t a trend. It’s an inheritance and a responsibility. We’re not just imagining what comes next. We’re continuing a project that began with the words: Let there be light.
What does it mean to make creativity a sacred practice, and how can art transform Jewish life? For me, becoming a Jewish artist wasn’t a career move. It was a spiritual awakening. This article traces how I came to see the creative process not only as a personal path to the divine but as a communal tool for connection, healing, and evolving Jewish tradition. Through murals, rituals, digital artwork, and collaborative design, I’ve learned that creativity can be one of the most powerful forms of Jewish practice we have today.
“Why would you become a Jewish artist?” people used to ask me. “Isn’t that limiting your market to a very small sliver?” It’s true, I wasn’t always a Jewish artist. In fact, for a long time, I rarely made Jewish art. I was unsure. Afraid. Happy to be an assimilated American. Unaware of how essential it would become for me and for my community.
I flirted with Jewish-themed projects years ago. Between 2008 and 2010, I worked with Hillel International and Manischewitz to create Jewish holiday infographic posters for social media. In 2014, I collaborated with the JDC (Joint Distribution Committee) to visualize their financial data and annual reports. I was illuminating the divine, even though I didn’t call it that yet.
My Hanukkah infographic from the holiday set, 2010
It wasn’t until 2015 that I truly made my first Jewish artwork: a portrait of Anne Frank for a mural exhibition called Renegades. Other artists were painting their own cultural heroes. Selecting figures who had gone against the grain. I realized it was time to seek my own. Anne Frank became my entry point into this work, a symbol to me of resilience and a powerful voice against erasure.
Anne Frank by Mike Wirth- Painted in 2015 as part of the Renegades Exhibition- Statesville, NC
That act of painting her opened a door. Slowly, I began to turn toward the sacred in my own tradition. The power of a large, colorful, public mural amplified the song I wanted to play during the process of making this artwork. My art-making became a form of prayer, my studio transformed into a sacred space, and my creativity evolved into an intentional spiritual practice.
This shift happened when I read the Art of Jewish Prayer by Yitzhock Kirzner, Aryeh Kaplan’s Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation, and My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok, that I consciously directed my art towards sacred purposes, rooted in the Jewish tradition of Hiddur Mitzvah, the beautification of commandments. These texts provided context, examples, and permission to dive deep into creation with the Creator. Creating art that explicitly engaged Jewish symbols, rituals, and values was transformative. It connected my creative spirit directly to my Jewish heritage, deepening my understanding of who I was as both an artist and a Jew.
Seeking Spirituality Beyond Home
For years, spirituality felt elusive. I searched widely through books, traditions, and practices that were not native to me. They were meaningful, somewhat familiar, but not quite mine. The connection I sought remained just out of reach, inauthentic because it lacked resonance with my core identity.
But art always felt different. Unlike anything else, the creative process opened a space where I felt fully present, deeply focused, and yet somehow expanded beyond myself. When I was in the flow of making, I experienced peace, clarity, and a sense of connection to something ineffable. Creativity became a spiritual threshold where my ego dissolved, time softened, and I encountered what I can only describe as spirit.
Much like prayer or meditation, creativity required me to slow down, listen, and surrender. There was kavannah or intention and there was surrender to something unfolding through me, not just from me. The act of making was mirroring sacred ritual: there were preparations, gestures, rhythms, and moments of revelation. I realized I was building altars out of paper, light, pigment, and symbol.
In those moments, my studio wasn’t just a workspace, but it was a mikdash me’at, a small sanctuary. Making became prayer. Not metaphorically, but truly: a way of communing with the Divine, of processing the world, and of seeking wholeness through acts of beauty and imagination.
Turning Toward the Divine
Everything shifted when I began to turn that creative intention toward the divine. Through Jewish themes, symbols, and rituals, I discovered a channel between my artistic life and my spiritual heritage. I wasn’t just illustrating ideas anymore, I was beginning to create images of the supernatural sensations I experienced in prayer and meditation. My imagination was filled with light, energy, movement, and meaning that felt deeply sacred and alive. I longed to capture the invisible. To make visible the ineffable sparks, flows, and forces that surged through ritual, study, and spiritual presence. I began to see the hidden energy encoded in the stories of the Torah. Figures like Moses, Miriam, and Elijah took on a new presence in my mind and not just as biblical characters, but as spiritual superheroes, carriers of divine power and transformation. Suddenly, creativity was no longer a separate mode of expression; it became my way of connecting, of serving, of sanctifying.
Cosmic Shema- digital illustration by Mike Wirth, 2022
Deepening Jewish Knowledge and Art
That epiphany led to study. I immersed myself in Jewish art, theology, and spiritual traditions: Betzalel, Kabbalah, Hiddur Mitzvah, Mussar. I found ancient frameworks that affirmed what I had already intuited that art could be holy. That beauty was not frivolous. That creativity could be a form of moral and spiritual refinement.
At a certain point, I realized I didn’t just want to explore this for myself and I wanted to help build a new creative-spiritual system that other Jews could use in practice. A framework that would invite both artists and non-artists to access spirituality through creative intention. A system rooted in Jewish values but expansive enough to meet people where they are in their community centers, schools, studios, or synagogues. A new pathway for sacred practice that could evolve alongside Jewish life itself.
Design and the Sacred Creative Process
As a designer and artist, I began to notice profound overlaps between the spiritual frameworks I was studying in Judaism and the design methodologies I used professionally. Both begin with empathy and intention. Both evolve through cycles. Both aim to make meaning. When I merged these systems, they each became more accessible, emotional, and impactful, not only for myself, but for others engaging with my work.
This led me to develop a process I now use in both personal practice and community workshops. It blends design thinking, Jewish intentionality, and artistic exploration. I begin by identifying a question or tension. Something personal or communal. I respond with sketches, writing, or prototypes, then reflect on what resonates. I refine or rework the ideas in cycles, grounding the process in kavannah (spiritual intention) and humility. Over time, it becomes more than a finished piece, it becomes a tool for spiritual insight and connection. Here’s how it typically unfolds:
A matrix of my creative-spiritual framework
One of the most powerful connectors between these two worlds is iteration. In design, iteration means we test, revise, and revisit ideas. We are always improving through cycles of feedback. In Judaism, iteration is baked into everything: we revisit the same Torah portions each year with new eyes, we refine rituals through lived experience, and we continually return to core questions through study and prayer. This cyclical, reflective approach makes the sacred creative process feel alive. It becomes responsive to both tradition and change of the practice of ritual, liturgy, Torah cycles and compared them to the creative frameworks I used as a designer, I began to notice deep resonances. Jewish time is iterative. Rituals are prototypes refined over generations. Sacred texts are living documents engaged by communities in cycles. These are not just religious structures they are deeply creative systems.
Merging the frameworks of UX design from sources like IDEO, Interaction Design Foundation and Jewish spiritual practice not only clarified both for me, but it made them more accessible, emotional, and human. Suddenly, design became prayerful. And Judaism became a beautifully designed user experience for living with meaning. In that synthesis, I found a personal theology of creativity, one that invites others in regardless of artistic background.
How UX Design and Spiritual Practice overlap
Witnessing Community Transformation
In 2023, I was part of the inaugural Social Practice Institute hosted by the Greensboro Jewish Museum. Over a 10-day intensive, my cohort of Jewish creatives explored the intersections of Social Practice theory and Judaism. As our capstone project, we were invited to create a social practice artwork grounded in Jewish values. I chose to design a ritual rooted in my family’s Shabbat practice by formalizing a simple yet powerful question that my non-Jewish partner asks each week: “What was your high and low?” Working with Rabbi Judy Schindler, I wrote a prayer and developed a ritual element that involved dipping salt and honey, symbolizing the sweet and bitter aspects of the week. This gesture transformed an informal tradition into a shared, sacred moment that felt authentically Jewish to our whole family.
Infographic explaining my High and Low Shabbat ritual- Design by Mike Wirth, 2023
At Queens University of Charlotte, I created a Hanukkah mural project that brought together a diverse and pluralistic group of students and community members. This included Jews from many backgrounds across the Charlotte community, including Orthodox, Reform, interfaith families, and cultural Jews working side-by-side. Each night, a community leader would light our real menorah and then spray paint the flame for that night on our mural menorah. It was a rare, joyous, and profound moment of connection, anchored in creativity and shared ritual.
President Dan Lugo and his family at the final night of the Menorah-mural at Queens University of Charlotte, 2020
In 2024, at Temple Shir Tikvah in Wayland, MA, I worked with the congregation during a 3-day residency to collect hundreds of photos, drawings, and stories of each member of the community’s “sacred Jewish objects.” We meditate on what it means for objects to be “Jewish” and “sacred”. Some gave Judaica while others gave images of a stuffed animal, because it reminded them of a recently deceased loved one. This exercise transformed these individual intimate artifacts into a collective community digital collage of a “time tapestry” of meaning that forged personal connections and bridged generations and practice. The final artwork became a visual record of personal memory and shared identity. We printed the 9 ’ x 9’ on archival fabric, and it currently hangs in the synagogue.
The community time tapestry created with Temple Shir Tikvah, Wayland MA 2024
In 2025, I will be participating in the Jewish Street Art Festival in collaboration with UC Irvine Hillel. That community has experienced deep pain. From campus protests disrupting life for Jewish students to student council boycott votes targeting Israel. Our art will be a form of public healing and spiritual resistance, a sacred reclamation of space through color, symbol, and story.
Even online, I see how creativity becomes a sacred connector. When I post new Jewish-themed artwork for my upcoming Parshat guidebook, the response is immediate and profound. The comment threads and DMs often skip small talk entirely and dive straight into deep conversation about grief, joy, interpretation, and belonging. With just one image, we’re able to arrive at a spiritual place together. And that, to me, is sacred.
Personal Revelation and Commitment
What I’ve learned is simple and profound: creativity is not just for individual enlightenment. It is a communal force. It brings us into dialogue, into presence, and into the work of building something sacred together. My commitment is to continue creating in this way and not just to beautify our tradition, but to actively evolve it with care, joy, and intention.
If this story resonates with you and if you’re looking to bring creative spiritual practice to your synagogue, school, museum, or campus, then I’d love to connect. I’m available for lectures, workshops, and collaborative art projects that help communities deepen their relationship with creativity, tradition, and each other.
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.
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.
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
