Rabbi Joshua Cahan
Last month I went down to a NY Philharmonic concert in Van Cortlandt Park. They played the classics: Beethoven’s 5th, the Blue Danube Waltz, and, one of my favorites, Rossini’s William Tell Overture, familiar as the theme music for the Lone Ranger and other things equine. This last piece was composed, as implied by the title ‘Overture’, as the introduction to an opera. Yes, indeed, William Tell is an entire opera about, of all things, a legendary Swiss military hero. But few even of the opera buffs among us have heard it. The Overture, meanwhile, has become one of the most recognizable pieces of the classical canon.
It is common for a single element of a larger work to achieve popularity far surpassing the composition from which it is taken. This is true for symphonies, musicals, and others. But I find something particularly striking about the emergence of an overture. An overture is, after all, specifically composed to introduce the tone and motifs of the larger musical piece. Its role is by definition secondary – it is not meant to have an identity of its own. In this case, the popularity of the introduction is such that it has entirely eclipsed the larger work, and I honestly am only aware of the opera because the name ‘overture’ made me curious. There is a profound reversal here, where a piece meant as prologue becomes celebrated on its own while the work it introduced falls into obscurity.
A similar inversion, one between past and future, inspired my friend David Zvi Kalman to lay out an idea he terms ‘Jewish Futurism’. Futurism more broadly is a movement that is based on the idea that, given the history of various species on our planet, we humans can expect, barring massive acts of self-destruction, to be around for many millenia to come. All of human history thus far should be imagined as the opening chapters of an epic novel, with the potential to grow in unexpected and unimagined new directions, rather than a story nearing completion. Given that, they argue, we should be giving much more consideration to how our choices in the present will shape the world of, potentially, many future generations.
Jewish Futurism would start from a recognition that the future of our community is a story that is as yet unwritten, one that ought to be written with intentionality and forethought. It would invite us to enter into real, substantive, open-ended conversation about where that future might lead. It would both grow from and nurture a belief that our future holds vast potential and that we have the power to nurture it wisely.
This idea has a long history in Jewish texts. Consider the talmudic story of someone who encounters an old man planting a tree that will not bear fruit for 70 years. He asks the man why he is planting a tree whose fruit he will never see, and the man answers that he is planting trees for his grandchildren just as his own grandfather planted trees for him. Planning for the world our grandchildren will inherit is seen as a sacred duty, its rightness inherently obvious. We know we should act now with the future in mind. Yet despite this and similar stories, it is challenging to actually think this way. We tell and retell stories from our past, but our images of the future are often limited to imagining a return to either the best or the worst parts of that history.
The story of the tree is powerful precisely because thinking futuristically is so difficult. The past is finite and, at least in its broad outlines, knowable, while the future is by definition opaque and uncertain. There is an element of human nature as well – despite our rational minds, most of us are hard-pressed to prioritize long-range goals over immediate needs or desires even for ourselves, let alone for future generations. And looking farther into the future can be frightening. The task of securing that future can seem overwhelming. But I think there is a religious component as well. It has been a pillar of both Jewish and Christian theology for 2000 years to expect that, whatever the bonds that oppress us at any given moment, they will soon be released by the coming of Redemption and thus the End of History. We rarely recognize the extent to which the Messianic hope shortens our horizons. It entails a belief that we are living through the final chapters of the human drama, leaving little future left to map out. It also inevitably carries an assumption that the redeemed state will look like an idealized version of our past rather than reaching new forms that we have yet to imagine.
We see this limitation across Jewish history. Rabbinic texts are suffused with a deep romanticism and longing for the lost glory of the beit hamikdash in Jerusalem. Its most creative innovations are attempts to preserve or recreate elements of Temple ritual. Rabbis across the centuries made sense of events of their own time by understanding them as variants of past events, guided by Kohelet’s maxim that ‘there is nothing new under the sun.’ Or, as the 13th century bible commentator Nachmanides puts it, maaseh avot siman lebanim, the deeds of the parents are signs for the children. The experiences of later generations, he wants us to believe, are best understood as cyclical recurrences of events in the Bible.
Kalman highlights the way we talk about the modern State of Israel as reshit tzmichat geulateinu, the dawn of our redemption. The controversy around this phrase has mostly pitted those who ascribe religious significance to the modern state against those who reject it. But the language itself is limiting. It asks us to see the creation of the state as the beginning of our final chapter instead of the opening lines of a new, exciting tale yet to unfold. And this sharply limits our ability to think or talk about what is possible. Kalman writes, ‘Israel is clearly a long way off from being the ideal Jewish homeland—on this everyone agrees—but we’ve run out of narrative room to talk about why this is the case, or where we want to go.’
This idea of Jewish Futurism helped me to clarify the significance of a moment in Parashat Mattot that I find quite striking. It is the final year of the desert journey. As the Israelites approach the place where they will enter the Land, they conquer the lands of several tribes east of the Jordan River. The tribes of Reuven, Gad, and part of Menashe approach Moshe requesting permission to built their permanent settlement in that area rather than across the river, citing their large flocks that need room to graze. Moshe is scandalized by the request, likening it to the spies who rejected the Promised Land and accusing them of separating themselves from the other tribes. Nonetheless, they ultimately reach a compromise which allows them to build shelters for their families and flocks which will serve as the kernel of their permanent settlement, provided they fully take part in the campaign to conquer Canaan.
These tribes do not fare so well in the court of history. In the Torah itself Moshe’s agreement feels grudging, leaving us with the sense that their choice is vaguely shameful. Commentators depict it as a repudiation of God’s gift, of which this particular land was not meant to be a part. They also point out that it creates significant distance between them and their fellows, threatening both the unity and security of the community. The river is wide enough to require divine aid to cross. It will become a significant divider between tribes once they are settled on opposite sides, where it should have offered a natural defense against outside threats. It is in fact surprisingly reminiscent of Jacob and his family’s arrival in Egypt, when they ask to live away from the Egyptians in Goshen because of their large flocks; and Lot who separates from Avram for similar reasons.
And yet, however unwise or impious their choice, this episode leads to their doing something that feels unique and highly significant. In order to meet Moshe’s conditions, they become the first, and within the Torah the only, group to physically lay the foundations for the end goal toward which the whole journey has been leading, establishing a final, permanent Israelite settlement. It is one of the rare moments that reminds us concretely that this is indeed the end goal. I want you to just consider for a moment how radical this is. The Torah is entirely the story of the journey. It recounts, and we study, these stories in such detail that we forget that this journey is meant as prologue, as preparation, building toward the goal of permanent, peaceful settlement in the Land. That is, except for this one crazy moment when we get to see 2 ½ tribes actually building those eventual homes, making that future seem, for an instant, very real.
This is, I should note, part of a larger shift in the text toward a focus on next stages. Moshe has just appointed Joshua as his successor, and presents the plan for dividing the land by lot among the tribes. The book of Devarim talks repeatedly about laws that are to be implemented only once the people are safely settled in the land. But all of that feels a bit far off in the hazy distance – in that future time, when… This is even more true for us as readers. We experience this journey as an endless, recurring loop. We reach the end of the journey, on the cusp of fulfilling the promise, one foot suspended over the waters of the Jordan, when everything dissolves to nothingness, to tohu vavohu, and we are back at Creation. The Torah carries a sacredness, a weight, that dwarfs all subsequent texts, and so its story overshadows all of the chapters that follow. We read it, both in its law and its narrative, as the main story, the blueprint for all future experiences. Everything that comes after reads like merely a series of codas.
Reuven, Gad, and Menashe building their settlements is a sharp, tangible reminder that this was not the original intent, that the Torah was written as part prologue and part instruction manual for the long, unfolding saga of Israel’s life in their land. After all, condemned to endured 40 years of desert wandering, what kept the Israelites pushing ahead year after year if not a belief that that their grandchildren would ultimately get to live out the fullness of God’s promise?
The Torah is in this sense, and I hope some of you saw this coming, like an Overture that has lost its opera, a prologue that has completely eclipsed the work it was meant to introduce. And reading it as story rather than prologue creates the danger of seeing our past as static and its meaning fixed, of forgetting that, to use the Shakespearean expression, ‘the Past is Prologue’, meant to prepare us for and help us envision the future, not to lead us to ignore it.
A focus on the future does not entail dismissing the past. Far from it. But it does mean reorienting ourselves, asking how that past sheds light on present challenges instead of how the present is replaying bygone eras. It asks us to have not just a Messianic hope but a vision of a future that it is in our power to build. When we can do it, imagining possible futures is exciting, brimming with opportunity. It gives our tasks and choices in the present a sense of importance that we often struggle to find.
What would a future-oriented Judaism look like? It could look beyond mere questions of survival, of Jewish Continuity, to tell a story, however fanciful, about where we as a community might go. I imagine this kind of reorienting could help us resist the tendency to let ourselves be defined by past oppressions and present hatreds. We could talk more seriously about Israel’s future as well. Yehuda Kurtzer wrote a powerful piece last Fall in Sources that mused about modern Zionism recapturing Herzl’s founding ethos, one animated by ambitious visions of what the future could hold combined with a tenacious belief that ‘If you will it, it is no dream.’ Whatever their form, I am confident that those conversations would not be stuck reharshing the same fears, beliefs, and arguments over and over. They would feel new, they would feel important, and could help us recapture a sense of excitement and possibility about our own place in that great chain of tradition. We all have people who, from faraway places, imagined and then pursued a different future for us. May we learn how to plant new trees for our grandchildren as our grandparents did for us.
Shabbat shalom.