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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