Arnold Eisen, “Theology and Community,” in David Teutsch, ed., Imagining the Jewish Future (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 247-260 (original) (raw)

J ews have never been big on futurology-perhaps because we have always, as believers in mashiach, taken the potential for future transformation so very seriously. We are much better as creative rememberers of the past and as perceptive critics of the present. That perceptiveness has repeatedly (though not always) helped us to survive and adapt, keeping us one step ahead of changes that might otherwise have overpowered us. Remembrance has no less helped us to survive, particularly in the modern period. It has done so by keeping us several steps behind-behind the urge to novelty that threatens to render our traditional commitments innocuous, behind the compulsion of reality, which silently challenges our view of things with the awesome force of "the facts." Our futurology, then, has been of a very limited sort. It has generally been more prescriptive than predictive, and has usually been constrained by our need to place one foot forward as far as it can safely reach, while at the same time keeping the other foot anchored firmly in our immensely usable past. I will play that sort of hopscotch here as well, jumping cautiously when I jump at all, and landing, I hope, at a place where we can all stand comfortably.