4 | AUGUST 25 • 2022

PURELY COMMENTARY

continued on page 7

opinion

When Judaism Considers The
Long Term, It Looks to the Past
M

any years ago, I
was asked to speak,
on short notice,
at a symposium in Geneva
about the future of the global
climate refugee
crises. It was
an important
opportunity
but attending
meant I was
going to miss
my 11-year-
old daughter
Eliana’s choir concert, the
one for which she had been
rehearsing for months. I was
crushed, but no compromise
was possible — I’d be on the
other side of the globe for
every performance.
To my great shock, Eliana
didn’t care, at least not
exactly.
“It’s OK, dad,” she said. “If
you miss it, you miss it. But
do me a favor. When you
are here, how about actually
being here?”
I was stunned, a little
hurt, but I knew just what
she was talking about. For
the past year-plus, I’d been
wandering around the house,
conducting half my business
by cell phone, distracted
even when I was playing a
board game with her. In the
great way that children can
state a complex thing simply
and purely, my daughter
had summarized our whole
culture’s dilemma.
Stuck in a forever state of
reactive short-termism — an
almost obsessive focus on
the near future — glued to

our devices and grappling
with never-ending “breaking
news” and business plans
measured in hours and even
minutes, we’ve become too
much tree and not enough
forest. News about the most
recent COVID variant, for
example, is a tree. Being
part of my kid’s growing
up? That’s the forest. Our
short-term addictions,
understandable as they are,
are obscuring our longer-
term potentials.
In another story from
the home front, my 9-year-
old Gideon recently did
something … improper. It’s
not important what, but let’s
just say he wasn’t being his
best self. When I found out,
I flipped out and really read
him the riot act.
My wife, Sharon, pulled
me aside and whispered,
“Ari: longpath.” The word is
a mantra in our household
— it stands for the deliberate
practice of long-term,
holistic thinking and acting
that, at its root, starts with
real, hard-earned self-

knowledge. At that instant
I saw how off I was. Instead
of modeling behaviors of
self-awareness to help my
son grow, I was reacting, and
probably overreacting at that,
glued once again to the short
term at the expense of the
long-term relationship with
my son.
On the highest level, I
knew who I wanted to be in
that moment with my son,
but we are reactive creatures,
easily prone to short-term
decision making.
So why is a futurist, who
works with multi-national
organizations, governments
and leading foundations, and
whose TED talk has been
viewed several million times,
writing about conversations
with my children?
The future is not just
about flying cars, jet packs
and robots doing our
laundry. Nor is it just about
climate change, rampant
inequality or the loss of
global biodiversity. Taken
together, these aspects —
good and bad — leave us

with an incomplete picture
of tomorrow’s promises and
perils.
The huge challenges we
face as a society are going
to require significant action
at a political level. We need
to vote at the booth and
at the check-out counter
in a way that aligns with
our values. But that is not
enough. Shaping the future
also entails doing something
beyond the political,
something in some ways
more difficult and definitely
closer to home. Shaping the
future toward a world we
want to see necessitates that
we connect with each other
— at the human-to-human
level — in a way that has
significantly more impact
than just how we vote or
consume.
How?

TRIM TABS
Trim tabs are the small
edges of a ship’s rudder
that, although tiny, can
make a huge impact on the
direction of the ship. The
futurist Buckminster Fuller
used the metaphor of a “trim
tab” to explain how even
small actions could have
massive long-term effects,
especially when scaled across
populations.
Shaping the long-term
trajectory of society means
connecting with others
through a lens of empathy
and with an eye on how
those interactions will
ripple out through time.

Ari Wallach
JTA

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