A Rabbi and a Futurist Trade Words of Wisdom
Image by Aleph Society
By Josh Nathan-Kazis November 4, 2015
The futurist and the rabbi met on the stage at the Holocaust museum. They talked about evil and progress — and then everyone went upstairs for cocktails.
“Our tools are better and better,” said the rabbi. “Our brains are not better.”
“The amount of violence in the world is at its lowest level ever,” said the futurist. “Life has already expanded.”
“There are depths of human viciousness and human evil,” said the rabbi. “We have a little hell within us.”
The futurist cited Hannah Arendt on evil.
“That won’t be helped by more information,” the rabbi said.
“It’s not just information,” the futurist said. “As communication has improved, so has democracy.”
“Democracy is a nice name,” the rabbi said. “Democracy is a good idea, and democracy is theoretically, with people that have equal intelligence… democracy can work.”
The futurist quoted Churchill on Democracy.
“The most beautiful time in the history of Rome was the time of the…emperors,” the rabbi said.
And then, just as the rabbi seemed on the brink of a broad argument against democratic rule, the moderator cut everyone off and asked them to predict the future. The rabbi said that most people are like chemical elements, but Jews are like radioactive elements. “We are the moving power,” he said.
The futurist, who grew up a Unitarian Universalist, did not respond directly.
N.B.: The part of the rabbi was played by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, translator of the Talmud, who mumbled a bit, but whom I am relatively certain at one point used the expression “donkey doo.” The part of the futurist was played by Ray Kurzweil, prolific inventor and writer and predictor of the Singularity, who brought his kids up Jewish in Newton, Mass.
The setting was a November 2 fundraiser for Steinsaltz’s Aleph Society at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan. Afterwards, the audience retired for drinks and a chicken dinner and a humongous dessert spread.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
