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.
Jewish futurism: A creative and philosophical framework suggesting that Jewish civilization is closer to its beginning than its end, using Jewish ideas, symbols, stories, and values to imagine and design ethical futures. It resists nostalgia that freezes the past while rejecting futures that erase identity or ethics.
Judeofuturism: An alternative term emphasizing the honoring of infinite bounds of Jewishness while imagining desired Jewish futures. Often used interchangeably with Jewish futurism in artistic and cultural contexts.
Metamodernism: A cultural discourse and paradigm that emerged after postmodernism, characterized by oscillation between modernist sincerity and postmodernalist irony, hope and melancholy, naivety and knowingness. It integrates aspects of both modernism and postmodernism, accepting progress, spirituality, and grand narratives while maintaining critical self-awareness. [Inference] This framework aligns with Jewish futurism’s simultaneous engagement with tradition and radical future-building.
Areyvut (mutual responsibility): A foundational middah (ethical quality) in Jewish futurism, emphasizing that future-building is a collective project rather than an individual quest. This principle grounds innovation in communal accountability.
Avodah (sacred service): The practice of treating innovation and creative work as sacred service. In Jewish futurism, this reframes technological and artistic creation as spiritual practice.
Creative middot: [Inference] Ethical qualities or character traits applied to creative and design practice within Jewish futurism. This extends the traditional concept of middot (virtues) into the realm of innovation and making.
Hiddur olam: [Inference] A term combining hiddur (beautification, enhancement) with olam (world), suggesting the beautification or enhancement of the world. [Inference] In Jewish futurism, this concept may relate to world-building and the ethical imperative to make beautiful, livable futures.
Liminal space: From the Latin limen (threshold), the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to their new status. Liminal spaces are characterized by ambiguity, potentiality for transformation, and often create a sense of communitas (deep togetherness). In Judaism, the mikvah (ritual bath) serves as a quintessential liminal space, marking transitions from unmarried to married, non-Jew to Jew, and symbolizing moments of profound transformation and renewal. The mezuzah on doorposts also marks liminal space, acknowledging thresholds as sacred transition points between outside and inside, public and private.
Temporal Concepts
Short-termism: The practice of prioritizing immediate results and quick rewards over long-term consequences and far-seeing action. Jewish futurism explicitly resists short-termism by emphasizing multi-generational responsibility and ethical planning that extends beyond a single lifetime.
Backcasting: A planning method that begins by defining a desirable future and then works backward to identify the steps needed to achieve it. Unlike forecasting (which projects from the present forward), backcasting starts with a vision and maps pathways from that future goal back to current actions.
Forestalgia: A yearning for an idealized future, as opposed to nostalgia’s longing for the past. [Inference] This concept resonates with Jewish futurism’s forward-looking orientation while maintaining connection to tradition.
Forward-looking responsibility: The ethical obligation rooted in ancient texts and lived memory to ask “What kind of world are we building next?”. This reflects Judaism’s historical orientation toward future generations.
Long-term thinking: An exercise that Jewish futurism frames not as escapism or frivolity but as a core calling.
Creative and Methodological Framework
Flow state: A psychological state of complete absorption in an activity where nothing else seems to matter, described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as optimal experience. In flow, skills seamlessly meet challenges, self-consciousness disappears, and action and awareness merge. [Inference] Flow states are central to creative practice in Jewish futurism.
Experiential learning: A learning approach that emphasizes hands-on activities, concrete experience, and reflective observation. [Inference] This method supports the embodied, practice-based nature of Jewish futurist work.
Divergent thinking: A mental process that generates multiple creative solutions to a single problem by exploring various possibilities, brainstorming, and taking unconventional paths. It encourages thinking outside conventional boundaries and considering different perspectives without immediately worrying about feasibility.
Systems thinking: An approach that analyzes problems by understanding the broader context and examining relationships and interactions between components. Rather than focusing on isolated elements, systems thinking reveals how all parts connect and influence one another, helping designers anticipate unintended consequences and solve root causes.
Design thinking: [Inference] A human-centered problem-solving methodology that emphasizes empathy, ideation, prototyping, and iteration. [Inference] In Jewish futurism, this approach is integrated with Jewish ethical frameworks and values.
UX Design (User Experience Design): An approach that focuses on optimizing user interactions with products and services. When combined with systems thinking, UX design considers how all parts of a product, user, and environment connect rather than isolated touchpoints.
Ethical and Creative Framework
Creation as systems design: One of two foundational coordinates of Jewish futurism, derived from the Zohar’s vision of divine networks. This approach views creative work through the lens of interconnected systems.
Ethics as boundary of holiness: The second coordinate defining Jewish futurist practice, informed by warnings about unintegrated revelation and the Golem narrative’s lessons about ethical creation.
Ritual innovation: The practice of adapting and transforming Jewish rituals for contemporary contexts. This includes AI-integrated rituals and speculative narratives exploring modern Jewish spirituality.
Hitpashtut ha-gashmiyyut (stripping of corporeality): A Hasidic concept meaning liberation from the material to make room for the spiritual. In Jewish futurism, this can inform approaches to technology and embodiment.
Artistic and Design Terms
Neon-infused aesthetics: Contemporary visual language in Jewish Futurist art that uses bright, technological imagery to explore Jewish themes. This aesthetic bridges traditional symbolism with speculative design.
Speculative chronology: The use of speculative fiction, alternate histories, and future narratives to explore Jewish identity and possibilities. This encompasses literature, art, design, architecture, music, and technology.
Tel Atid (Hill of the Future): A symbolic concept in Jewish futurism representing future-building sites. The term combines archaeological connotations with forward orientation.
Let me start by saying what Jewish futurism is not, at least for me.
It is not putting a Star of David on a sleek sci-fi object and calling it a day. It is not “Jewish, but make it cyberpunk.” And it is definitely not about predicting the future like some kind of techno-prophet.
For me, Jewish futurism feels more like a reunion of kindred spirits.
A pulling back together of a long, messy line of prophets, mystics, cartoonists, coders, muralists, and weird uncles who stayed up too late arguing midrash. A line that runs from Torah and golems to comics and game engines. Not to escape history, but to carry it forward with intention.
When I build something under this banner, I try to remember that I am plugging into that line. And I need a way to check myself while I’m doing it.
So think of this not as a manifesto, but as a conversation. Something you can keep open next to your sketchbook, your code editor, or your half-finished ritual prototype.
Before you make anything, pause
Before the fancy shaders. Before the slick prompts. Before the paint flies.
Ask a simple question: What am I actually doing here, and who does it impact?
I come back again and again to this tension.
Am I sanctifying technology, or am I just showing off?
Tech is a utensil. It is not the main character. So I ask myself: what am I trying to elevate? Where is the kavannah? Where is the hiddur mitzvah, the moment where something becomes more beautiful, more meaningful, more reachable for someone else?
If the honest answer is “it’s just cool,” that’s not a failure. But it is a cue to slow down and look again.
Every golem needs an off switch
This part matters more than we like to admit.
The Golem story is our original dev-ops parable. The impressive part is not that the creature walks or lifts heavy things. The Jewish part is the letter you can erase to stop it.
When you’re working with powerful systems, AI, networks, social platforms, feedback loops, you have to ask:
What is the kill switch?
What are the limits, the norms, the literal or metaphorical buttons that stop this if it starts causing harm?
If there is no answer, you may be building the wrong kind of golem. Or at least one that needs more thought before it leaves the workshop.
And while we’re here, I try to be suspicious of the word “disruption.” Disruption is easy. Repair is harder.
So I ask: what does this actually repair? A dead corner of ritual? A missing story? A lack of joy? A pattern of exclusion?
If I cannot name the repair, I might just be speeding up something that was already broken.
The future does not work without memory
Jewish futurism is obsessed with what comes next, but it refuses to get there by burning the archive.
I try to ask myself: am I innovating with memory, or without it?
Innovation without memory is another version of a golem. Powerful, impressive, and hollow.
So I name my sources. Texts, stories, communities, teachers. I try to let at least one move in the work be a reply to someone who is not in the room anymore.
And I think about time differently.
Jewish time loops. We return to the same holidays, the same readings, the same traumas, but never in quite the same way. There is always another layer.
Does my work do that? Does it circle, repeat, echo, or sync to rhythms larger than me? Or is it just a straight rocket out of history?
I think of this as visual midrash
Midrash is not commentary. It is argument. It is wrestling.
Visual midrash just uses different tools.
Pixels. Lines. Sound. Code. Motion.
So I ask: which story am I arguing with? Which verse am I stretching, healing, poking at, or refusing to let go of?
If I am using generative systems or futuristic aesthetics, can I actually point to the Torah, prophet, or folktale that is in the room with me while I work?
If I cannot, that is information worth listening to.
If it costs nothing, it might not be finished yet
This is the uncomfortable part.
Good Jewish futurist work usually carries some tension. Between me and my community. Between hope and fear. Between what feels safe and what feels honest.
I think about Asher Lev painting the crucifixion. Not because I want to shock anyone, but because he showed what it looks like to take your tradition seriously enough to struggle with it in public.
If everything in the work feels pleasant and agreeable, I pause. I ask what I am avoiding.
And I try to practice anavah, humility, especially when working with big ideas and powerful tools.
Where do I admit I do not know? Where do I invite critique? Where do I let uncertainty live inside the work instead of editing it out?
Jewish stories are full of vessels that shatter when they hold too much light. That warning is still relevant.
Speed is not the same thing as light
Early Futurism loved speed for its own sake. Jewish futurism is more interested in illumination.
So I ask: does this actually help someone see something? A wound. An injustice. A joy. A strange truth that needed a frame.
If I am accelerating things, is it in service of understanding and empathy, or just adrenaline?
That distinction matters.
This is not a solo practice
Jewish futurism is a team sport. No lone techno-messiahs.
I try to ask: who is the “we” in this project?
Every healthy Jewish creative space I admire, from the Bezalel workshop to Vitebsk to the beit midrash, includes peers, elders, skeptics, and students. If I am making in a vacuum, I want to know what that protects me from, and what it costs the work.
This is where areyvut, mutual responsibility, shows up.
Does the project open doors for others? Share tools? Offer access or visibility? Leave the landscape more generous than it found it?
And when I step away, can anyone carry something forward? A format. A method. A story. A set of instructions.
Jewish futurism often moves like a relay baton. If everything ends with me, I might be breaking the chain.
Finally, I listen to the feel of it
Jewish futurism has a particular emotional texture.
Not “does it include a Jewish symbol,” but does it feel like it belongs to our long, strange story?
Could it sit next to a page of Talmud? A Chagall window? A Jack Kirby spread? A poem written in exile?
Is there any trace of the desert, the shtetl, the city, the bus stop, the protest, the beit midrash?
And is there a move here that only I could have made?
The future is full of generic chrome. Jewish futurism gets specific. It brings in accents, neighborhoods, family stories, and uncomfortable details. That specificity is what makes the work feel like a real chapter in the Jewish story, not a reskinned sci-fi asset pack.
I keep this list nearby when I work. Sometimes taped to the wall. Sometimes scribbled in the margins.
I do not try to hit every point every time. That would freeze the process.
But if I cannot hit any of them, that is usually a sign. What I am making might be about the future, just not yet operating in the Jewish futurist key.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I teach graphic design history at Queens University of Charlotte, we hit a point in the semester that always makes me a little uncomfortable, because I know it’s coming before the students do. We’re talking about Italian Futurism, those bold typographic posters, a visionary sounding manifesto bursting with energy, those declarations about speed and machines and destroying museums. At first, students lean forward and feel like the work looks alive and feels thrilling. And then we read more deeply into the Marinetti’s words and we see that this movement became a propaganda apparatus for Mussolini’s fascist regime.
The first page of the manifesto of Il Futurismo by FT Marinetti 1909
Those promising-sounding ideas about breaking with the past? They’re loaded with fascist and racist intentions. That gorgeous energy? It was weaponized.
FT Marinetti 1909
This is the pedagogical tightrope I walk every semester, and it’s the same tightrope I’m walking in my work on Jewish futurism.
I’m trying to rescue the core impulse of futurism, the bold, beautiful desire to imagine and design better futures, from what Italian Futurism did to it.
Because here’s the thing: Italian Futurism started with legitimate, even utopian desires, and it still became a cautionary tale. If you’re going to study any kind of futurism seriously, you need to meet Italian Futurism early, not to emulate it, but to understand exactly what can go wrong when speed replaces wisdom and aesthetics trump ethics.
Futurism vs futurism: Why the Capital Letter Matters
I’ve started being very careful about capital F versus lowercase f. Futurism with a capital F names a specific historical movement: Marinetti’s Italian avant-garde, with all its inherited baggage. It’s bound up with nationalism, misogyny, the glorification of war as “the world’s only hygiene,” and an eventual merger with Mussolini’s Fascist Party in 1920. When I write “Futurism,” I’m signaling: we’re talking about that movement, that history, those consequences.
Futurism with a lowercase “f” names something broader and more perennial: the human impulse to imagine, prototype, and design what comes next. It’s the practice of speculating about futures, whether through art, spirituality, technology, or politics. Lowercase futurism is a method and a desire, not an ideology. It’s the thing Jewish futurism, Afrofuturism, Queerfuturism, Sinofuturism, and Gulf futurism all share: the courage to ask what could be, and the willingness to build toward it.
This distinction isn’t just academic. It gives us critical vocabulary. Capital-F Futurism becomes an object of analysis and caution, the ancestor we study to avoid repeating. Lowercase futurism becomes a space for repair, reinvention, and new ethical commitments. Jewish futurism inherits the impulse without inheriting the violence.
How Futurist Movements Emerge: What They All Want at First
Futurist movements consistently arise during periods of dramatic technological transformation and cultural rupture. Italian Futurism emerged from a very specific crisis. Turn-of-the-century Italy was struggling in ways that made the country feel stuck in the past. The government was weak and unstable. There was no real national identity binding the regions together. Industrial development lagged decades behind other European powers. Poverty was widespread, modernization faced fierce resistance, crime and corruption were endemic, and millions of Italians were emigrating in search of better lives.
FIAT, 1927 Giuseppe Romano (1905–67) Fondazione Massimo e Sonia Cirulli Collection, Bologna
Meanwhile, foreign tourists flooded Italy to gaze at ancient ruins and Renaissance masterpieces, treating the country like a beautiful museum, a relic of what it once was. For young Italian intellectuals like Marinetti, this was humiliating. People came to see what Italy was, not what it is or could become. The weight of the past felt suffocating.
This pattern repeats across other futurist movements. Afrofuturism developed in response to the ongoing trauma of the transatlantic slave trade and systemic oppression, seeking to reclaim narratives and imagine liberation. Gulf futurism arose from the rapid, oil-driven transformation of the Arab Gulf states. Sinofuturism responds to China’s technological rise and Western anxieties about shifting global power.
Despite their different contexts, these movements share foundational patterns. They reject traditions they perceive as inadequate or stifling. They embrace technology as a catalyst for radical cultural change. Most importantly, they assert the right to imagine and define their own futures rather than accepting externally imposed visions.
Futurist movements emerge from communities experiencing rupture, whether from rapid modernization, colonialism, diaspora, or globalization. They often adopt manifesto culture, broadcasting bold visions to gather followers. They’re youth-driven, appealing to younger generations eager to break free from what they see as the constraints of older orders.
At their inception, futurist movements typically seek cultural sovereignty, the synthesis of heritage and innovation, celebration of dynamism and transformation, radical breaks from oppressive pasts, and social change through technology. These are legitimate, even beautiful desires. The critical question is: what values guide those transformative visions? Italian Futurism demonstrates what happens when the desire to destroy the past overwhelms the responsibility to build just futures.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti launched Italian Futurism with his 1909 manifesto, and it crackled with revolutionary energy. He declared the racing car more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace and announced war on museums, libraries, and academies. The movement promised total cultural transformation through speed, machines, violence, and youth.
But Marinetti wasn’t speaking metaphorically. He made actual political proposals to sell off Italy’s art heritage in bulk to other countries. Museums were “graveyards,” he argued, places that paralyzed Italy and prevented it from joining the modern world. Venice, beloved by foreign tourists, was dismissed as “Europe’s brothel”. Art critic John Ruskin, who had celebrated Italian cultural heritage, became an enemy figure.
John Ruskin, 29 June 1863, Photo by William Downey (1829-1915)
The Futurist manifesto even contained a self-consuming logic. It declared that when Marinetti himself turned 40, younger futurists should throw him “into the trash can, like useless manuscripts”. The movement advocated not just destroying museums once, but periodic cleansing of cultural memory. Nothing could be allowed to accumulate tradition or meaning.
FT Marinetti’s Futurist Cook book- where he calls for the ban of pasta form the Italian diet, 1913 Posterhaus
The seeds of destruction were there from the beginning. Marinetti glorified war as “the world’s only hygiene” and promoted aggressive Italian nationalism. When the Futurist Political Party merged with Mussolini’s Fascist movement in 1920, artistic vision was subordinated to political power. The philosophical contradictions, celebrating individual creative genius while demanding conformity to nationalist ideology, created tensions that made the movement culturally irrelevant even as it gained political influence.
Aeroritratto di Mussolini aviatore, Alfredo Ambrosi, 1930
Five Things That Went Catastrophically Wrong
1. Glorification of Violence and Destruction
Italian Futurism didn’t just accept violence as a historical reality. It actively celebrated war, aggression, and destruction as aesthetic and moral goods. The movement embraced Italian expansionism and cultural supremacy, making technological progress inseparable from domination. Rather than synthesizing past and future, Italian Futurism sought to obliterate history entirely, creating a vacuum that fascist ideology eagerly filled.
This pattern wasn’t unique to Italy. The source material connects Futurism to similar state-sponsored iconoclasm in revolutionary France, Soviet Russia, and Maoist China. When modernization ideology justifies cultural destruction, it creates dangerous precedents. The logic always sounds progressive at first: we must destroy the old to make way for the new. But that destruction rarely stops where its advocates promise.
2. Absence of Ethical Guardrails
The movement valued technology and speed for their own sake, with no moral framework to guide their application. Machines were beautiful because they were fast and powerful, not because they served human flourishing. This absence of empathy-centered design principles meant that when political power beckoned, the movement had no philosophical foundation to resist authoritarianism.
Marinetti viewed Italy’s cultural heritage not as something to be honored or reinterpreted, but as a burden to be liquidated. There was no question of what wisdom traditions might offer, no consideration of what future generations might need from the past. Speed was the only value.
3. Authoritarianism Over Democracy
Italian Futurism began with anti-monarchist and anti-clerical positions, challenging established power. These principles were quickly abandoned when Marinetti saw opportunities for influence within Mussolini’s regime. The movement became a propaganda tool, with artistic vision subordinated to the authoritarian state. Individual creative genius, once celebrated, was channeled into serving nationalist ideology.
4. Exclusionary Cultural Supremacy
Italian nationalism and cultural dominance were core tenets from the start. There was no space for pluralism, interfaith dialogue, or universal design principles. The aggressive rejection of tradition created a vacuum where fascist ideology could flourish, as the movement offered speed and violence but no sustaining vision of human connection. Not to mention that the regime implemented Italian Racial Laws in 1938, introducing discrimination and persecution against Jews of Italy.
The humiliation Marinetti felt when tourists treated Italy as a museum of the past was real. But his response, to erase that past entirely rather than build new futures in dialogue with it, became toxic. Cultural sovereignty doesn’t require cultural amnesia.
5. Aesthetic Without Substance
When Mussolini refused to make Futurism the official state art of fascist Italy, the movement collapsed into cultural irrelevance. Decades of manifesto-writing had produced style over philosophical depth. Without a sustainable ethical foundation, Italian Futurism had nothing to offer once political winds shifted.
The movement’s self-consuming logic guaranteed this outcome. If nothing is allowed to accumulate meaning, if every generation must destroy what came before, then no stable cultural foundation can ever form. You can’t build futures on ground you keep setting on fire.
Jewish futurism: Building From Different Ground
This is where my work begins. Jewish futurism emerges from fundamentally different premises, offering a model for how technological optimism can coexist with ancient wisdom and ethical responsibility. Where Italian Futurism glorified destruction, Jewish futurism centers empathy-led innovation, positioning technology as a tool for meaning-making rather than domination.
Jewish history demonstrates millennia of resilience and reinvention without destroying the past. Continuous reinterpretation, of texts, traditions, cultural practices, allows Jewish communities to honor ancestral heritage while embracing modernity. This mirrors Afrofuturism’s Sankofa principle, which emphasizes learning from the past to inform future trajectories. Rather than revolutionary destruction, Jewish futurism practices synthesis and transformation.
In my own practice, Jewish futurism is rooted in Jewish thought: tikkun olam (repair of the world), justice, responsibility. Technology is never valued for its own sake but always in service of deeper moral commitments. This philosophical grounding provides the ethical guardrails that Italian Futurism catastrophically lacked. The question at the heart of my work is: “What kind of ancestor will you be?” That question changes everything.
Where Marinetti wanted to be thrown in the trash at age 40, Jewish futurism asks what we’re building that will outlast us, what we’re passing down that future generations will need. It’s not about preserving everything unchanged. It’s about being in active, creative dialogue with tradition while we build what comes next.
What We Can Learn: Five Lessons for Building Responsible Futurisms
Ethics Must Precede Aesthetics: Beauty and innovation without moral grounding enable atrocity. Technology requires wisdom traditions to guide its use. Speed without wisdom is just velocity. It doesn’t know where it’s going or why. When Marinetti proposed selling Italy’s art heritage in bulk, he showed what happens when aesthetic ideology overrides ethical consideration.
Honor the Past While Building the Future: Synthesis surpasses destruction as a strategy for cultural renewal. Tradition provides foundation for innovation rather than serving as an obstacle to it. Jewish tradition treats time as cyclical rather than linear, where past, present, and future dynamically interact. The humiliation Italy felt at being treated as a museum was real, but erasure isn’t the only response. We can acknowledge what’s broken in our inherited traditions while keeping what sustains us.
Center Human Dignity Over Cultural Supremacy: Universal design principles create futures for all people, not just dominant groups. futurism must be liberatory rather than oppressive, replacing nationalism with empathy and collaboration. Jewish futurism creates shared spaces for collective growth and interfaith collaboration. The pattern of state-sponsored iconoclasm, from revolutionary France to Soviet Russia to Maoist China, shows us what happens when one vision of the future tries to erase all others.
Resist Political Opportunism: Artistic movements must maintain ethical independence even when political power beckons. When survival requires moral compromise, the movement has already failed. Marinetti’s compromises to ensure the movement’s survival hollowed it out from within. The proposals to liquidate cultural heritage weren’t just aesthetic statements. They were political calculations about access to power.
Root Innovation in Community: Collective meaning-making replaces the cult of individual genius. As I’ve learned in my own practice, the future, like design itself, is fundamentally a team sport. It thrives when we create collectively and collaboratively. Collaboration and care supersede competition and domination. The Futurist manifesto’s call to throw Marinetti himself in the trash at 40 reveals a movement with no concept of intergenerational continuity, no way to pass wisdom forward.
The Responsibility of Imagining Futures
Every speculative vision carries political and ethical consequences. Italian Futurism’s trajectory from revolutionary art movement to fascist propaganda machine demonstrates that enthusiasm for the future, absent ethical grounding, can enable profound harm.
When I stand in front of my design students at Queens, looking at those bold Futurist posters, I don’t want to just critique them. I want to show what it looks like to rescue the core impulse, the courage to imagine radically different futures, from what got corrupted. The frustration Marinetti felt was real. Italy was stuck. The weight of the past was crushing. Foreign tourists treating the country as a beautiful corpse was genuinely humiliating. But his solution, to burn it all down and start from nothing, created more problems than it solved.
Jewish futurism offers that alternative model: technological optimism rooted in ancestral wisdom, innovation guided by empathy, futures built through synthesis rather than destruction. We can honor what we’ve inherited while transforming it. We can be critical of traditions that harm while keeping what sustains. We can build futures that acknowledge the past without being imprisoned by it.
The question isn’t whether we’ll imagine futures. In periods of technological transformation, futurist movements will inevitably emerge. The question is what values will guide those visions. Will we learn from history’s warnings about the price of speed without wisdom, aesthetics without ethics, innovation without responsibility? Or will we repeat Italian Futurism’s mistakes with new technologies and new manifestos?
I’m betting we can do better. Jewish futurism, and the broader family of ethical futurisms it’s part of, shows us how. We can be bold and careful. We can embrace transformation and honor memory. We can design futures that are actually livable, not just fast. That’s the work. That’s what I’m trying to build.
Vitebsk, a small, mostly Jewish city in the old Pale of Settlement, is remembered in the art books as a birthplace of the Russian avant‑garde, but almost never as a place where Jews were actively prototyping their own futures (Vitebsk; “In the Beginning”). In the years 1918 to 1922, if you set Vitebsk next to the qualities that define Jewish Futurism in my own framework (tradition as engine, explicit future‑orientation, speculative design, tech–spirit entanglement, liberation, and collective imagination), it starts to look less like a side chapter of Russian modernism and more like an early Jewish futurist lab. What follows is that story, told through those lenses.
Town of Vitebsk 1919 (Modern day Belarus)
Jewish futurism as a lens
In my own writing, Jewish Futurism is a creative framework that blends design, spirituality, and technology to reimagine the future of Jewish identity, ritual, and ethics. It treats Jewish sources and symbols as engines for new worlds, leans into speculation and prototyping, and loves that “ancient in the present” feeling, where neon‑lit interfaces sit next to kabbalistic cosmology and golem legends.
If you strip that down to core moves, you get: start with Jewish values and stories, ask “what if” questions about the future, use speculative design and prototypes instead of just commentary, entangle tech and spirit, and keep liberation and repair as the moral north star. That is the checklist I am quietly running in the background as I look at Vitebsk.
The political weather
The Vitebsk experiment sits right in the storm of the Russian Civil War. The Bolsheviks had just seized power and dissolved the Constituent Assembly; Red, White, and nationalist forces were fighting across the old empire, and by 1918–1921 the war had wrecked the economy and militarized everyday life, especially in borderlands like Belarus and Ukraine (“Russian Civil War”). The new regime promised a rational, classless future, but enforced it with emergency repression and the Cheka, the Soviet secret police (“Russian Civil War”).
Bolshevik Festival, 1918
In culture, that meant art was not neutral. Festivals, agit‑prop posters, and street decorations became tools for staging the future socialist society in public space (“Russian Civil War”). In contemporary language, the state was demanding “design, not just description”: artists were expected to prototype the look and feel of a new world, not only paint it from the sidelines. Vitebsk’s People’s Art School and the UNOVIS collective were very much inside that program (“Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich”; “UNOVIS”).
Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, El Lissitsky, 1919
Jewish life between emancipation and trauma
For Jews, the ground had just shifted. The revolutions abolished the Pale of Settlement and the old quota regime, so on paper Jews could live, study, and work without the old legal shackles (“Pale of Settlement”). Cities in the former Pale, including Vitebsk, suddenly opened up Jewish participation in schools, professions, soviets, and new cultural institutions (Vitebsk).
Jewish Socialist Group, The Bund, election poster, 1917
At the same time, the civil war unleashed catastrophic pogroms. In nearby Ukraine and parts of Belarus, White armies, nationalist militias, and irregular bands killed tens of thousands of Jews and displaced many more; refugees and bad news moved through the region constantly (“Pogroms during the Russian Civil War”). Early Soviet nationality policy recognized Jews as a “nationality” and created Jewish sections of the Party (Evsektsiia), pushing Jews into the socialist project while attacking synagogues, Hebrew, and traditional institutions, even as secular Yiddish culture and left‑wing Jewish politics boomed (Vitebsk).
In other words, Jews in and around Vitebsk were newly emancipated on paper, traumatized and precarious in practice, and under pressure to imagine “what happens to Jewishness next”.
Map of the Pale of Settlement highlighting Vitebsk. Image by author
Vitebsk as a Jewish, experimental city
Before the revolution, Vitebsk was a major Jewish center, with synagogues, heders, Yiddish markets, and a thick stew of Zionist, Bundist, and other Jewish politics (Vitebsk; “In the Beginning”). After 1917, Soviet institutions sat right on top of that fabric: workers’ councils, clubs, and schools tried to re‑engineer daily life (“In the Beginning”).
In 1918, Marc Chagall came home from Petrograd and founded the People’s Art School, a free modern art school for local working‑class youth who had been locked out of Imperial academies, many of them Jewish (“Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich”). He recruited avant‑garde teachers, turned Vitebsk into a small node in the international modernist network, and handed real tools and training to kids whose families had been under Tsarist restrictions only a few years earlier (“Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich”). That is very close to what I mean today by a Jewish futurist “lab”: a place where a specific Jewish community uses design and education to build its own cultural future (Wirth).
In those Vitebsk years, Chagall painted the works everyone now knows: flying couples and goats, skewed rooftops, synagogues hovering over town, a fiddler straddling chimneys. These are not just nostalgic postcards of the shtetl; they warp gravity and time. Past, present, and some maybe‑world bleed into each other.
From a Jewish futurism angle, Chagall is doing exactly what I try to do with neon interfaces and AI‑inflected ritual objects. He is starting with Jewish stories and symbols and then using them as engines to invent new visual physics. The familiar becomes strange without losing its soul. That “ancient in the present” feeling that I care about so much is already there in his sky‑bound Vitebsk. His paintings read like prototypes of Jewish life under different rules, which is one of the key tests I use today for whether something is really operating as Jewish futurism.
Over Vitebsk, Marc Chagall, 1913
UNOVIS in the streets: the classic proto–Jewish futurist moment
The moment that feels most like a straight‑up Jewish futurist intervention is when UNOVIS took the streets. Around 1919–1920, the collective of teachers and students around Malevich designed Suprematist banners, painted trams and building facades, and marched in revolutionary festivals with Black Squares and other abstract emblems.
This is happening in a mostly Jewish city. The same streets that carried Jews to synagogue and market are suddenly wrapped in a new visual operating system. Instead of only Stars of David and Hebrew letters, there are squares, circles, and crosses floating over shopfronts and tram cars. The Black Square, which Malevich had already framed like a kind of icon, becomes a civic ritual sign on flags and sleeves.
If I treat this like any other futurist project, it is textbook: a collective of young artists, many Jewish, redesigns the visual and ritual grammar of their own city, at scale, as a way of sketching a possible future world. It is design, not description. It is explicitly future‑oriented, embedded in a particular Jewish place, and it lives at the intersection of politics, symbol, and street‑level experience. Those are all the boxes I check in my Jewish Futurist design process today.
Workshop of the Committee to Abolish Unemployment in Vitebsk with Suprematist panels by UNOVIS, 1919
Lissitzky: from Had Gadya to pangeometry
El Lissitzky is the other key bridge figure for me. Before and during his Vitebsk period, he designed Hebrew and Yiddish books, including a famous Had Gadya, where the Aramaic Passover song gets re‑composed with bold letters and geometric forms. Scholars like Igor Dukhan describe this as a move from “Jewish style” into a universal “pangeometry,” but they note that the universalism is built right on top of Jewish source material.
In my terms, that is pure tradition‑as‑engine. He is not sprinkling Hebrew as flavor; the text itself is the design brief for a new visual system. In Vitebsk, Lissitzky then develops PROUN, a body of hybrid painting‑architecture pieces that look like floating structures in non‑Euclidean space, which he framed as “stations” between painting and architecture for a future society.
That move—from a Passover song to speculative spatial diagrams for a different world—is the same arc I trace when I talk about going from Torah into high‑tech ritual objects. It is also a strong example of what I call entangling technology and spirituality: using the tools of print, geometry, and architectural thinking to work through spiritual questions about where and how a Jewish (and human) body might live in a new order.
Chad Gadya – El Lissitsky
Proun 19 D- El Lissitsky
Malevich, UNOVIS, and secular ritual systems
Malevich arrives in Vitebsk in 1919, invited by Lissitzky, and soon becomes the center of gravity at the People’s Art School. His experience with Cubo-Futurism ignites a shift in painting in the town. With him, teachers and students form UNOVIS, sign work collectively, and treat Suprematism as a total worldview. He talks about the Black Square as an “icon” and about non‑objectivity as a new metaphysics of pure feeling.
In a Jewish environment, that lands differently than it would in a neutral setting. This is a town used to Torah scrolls, midrash, and messianic talk. UNOVIS is effectively rolling out a secular ritual system on top of that: new symbols, new processions, new “liturgies” of banners and posters that promise a transformed world. It is not Jewish ritual, but it is a speculative ritual layer in Jewish space, and Jewish students are the ones building it.
Viewed with my framework, that is another type of tech–spirit entanglement: using visual technology and collective performance to test out a different metaphysics in the same streets where older Jewish ones still echo. It shows how close the Jewish Futurist line of questioning is to the avant‑garde’s own messianic streak, even when the language is strictly secular.
The Faculty of the UNOVIS School. 1918
Two Jewish futures in one school
Inside the People’s Art School, there is a clear tension between two ways of thinking about the future. Chagall holds onto figures, stories, synagogues, and shtetl scenes, but floats them, tilts them, and sets them in saturated color. In my terms, he is modeling continuity through creative distortion: Jewish narrative and ritual feeling that survive and adapt without disappearing.
Malevich, and the UNOVIS path, offer a different horizon: strip away all representation and identity markers and escape into pure geometric universals that are supposed to belong to everyone. Many students follow that road. Chagall finds himself sidelined and eventually leaves Vitebsk in 1920.
From a Jewish Futurist vantage point, this is not only a stylistic argument. It is a fight over how you imagine a Jewish future under pressure. One path keeps tradition as engine and accepts that Jewishness will show in the work. The other tries to leap into something like a post‑Jewish universalism, betting that liberation means dissolving markers altogether. That same tension is alive now, whenever Jewish futurist work decides how visible to make its Jewish sources and audiences.
Left- Lazar Khidekel, Suprematist Composition with Blue Square, 1921. Right- Marc Chagall, Anywhere out of the World, 1915–19. Oil on cardboard mounted on canvas.
Why no one called it “Jewish futurism”
Curators and critics have done a lot of work on Vitebsk. The Jewish Museum show “Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich: The Russian Avant‑Garde in Vitebsk, 1918–1922,” along with its catalogue, makes it clear the town was heavily Jewish and that Chagall and Lissitzky’s Jewish identities matter. Reviews in Studio International, the New York Times, Artmargins, Tablet, and Jewish Currents all talk about Vitebsk as a utopian laboratory.
What they do not do is connect that story to the language and methods that Jewish futurism uses now. The town is filed under “Russian avant‑garde,” while Jewish futurism is usually reserved for contemporary art, speculative fiction, and design work. The result is a blind spot: a historical moment that already behaves like a Jewish futurist lab is sitting in one file folder, and the present movement that could really use that precedent is sitting in another.
Vitebsk as an early Jewish Futurist lab
If I run Vitebsk through my own Jewish futurist checklist, it lights up. Tradition as engine: Chagall’s speculative shtetl and Lissitzky’s Had Gadya redraw Jewish stories and symbols into new visual systems. Explicit future‑orientation: a Jewish population just freed from the Pale and brutalized by pogroms is forced to imagine new futures in real time. Design, not just description: the People’s Art School, PROUN, and UNOVIS’s trams and banners are prototypes of new civic and spiritual grammars, not commentary about the old one.
Tech and media entangled with spirituality: abstract signs, print, and architecture take on ritual roles in a Jewish city. Liberation and repair as north stars: even when the rhetoric is Marxist, the underlying drive is to get out from under Tsarist antisemitism and civil‑war terror and build something more just. Collective, situated imagination: a specific community, in a specific town, turns its own streets, schools, and bodies into a laboratory for what Jewish and human life might become next.
Seen that way, Vitebsk is not an odd, provincial side note to Russian modernism. It is an early node in the same line of Jewish making that runs through my own neon‑lit spiritual objects, AI‑inflected Torah experiments, and design‑driven rituals today. Naming it as such is not just about correcting a footnote in art history. It is a way of claiming ancestors for Jewish futurism and remembering that this mode of thinking has been with us, in one form or another, since at least the moment a few Jewish kids in Vitebsk painted Suprematist banners for a world they had not yet learned how to live in.
Dukhan, Igor. “El Lissitzky – Jewish as Universal: From Jewish Style to Pangeometry.” Monoskop, monoskop.org/images/6/6e/Dukhan_Igor_2007_El_Lissitzky_Jewish_as_Universal_From_Jewish_Style_to_Pangeometry.pdf.
“In the Beginning, There Was Vitebsk.” The Forward, 12 Mar. 2008, forward.com/culture/12913/in-the-beginning-there-was-vitebsk-01455/.
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.
