Reading the newspaper yesterday, I found myself recalling a line from The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, Lily Tomlin’s 1985 one-woman stage show. After reciting a litany of anxieties, she says: “I worry no matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.”
The world we are living in is changing in unpredictable ways — or in predictably discouraging ways — so some cynicism seems warranted. People come to me and ask for a dose of optimism, but despite appearances, I am not, in fact, an optimist. I don’t hold a belief that things will inherently turn out well. What I do have is hope, based on the best that I see in people — their courage, creativity and adaptability, their willingness to be in it without knowing how the “it” is going to end. I don’t hope for a world without harm; there has not yet been a day in all of history that we humans got through unscathed. But I do hope for our collective ability to limit and withstand harm and emerge with something of value intact.
Our long survival as a Jewish people may have some guidance to offer. One account of this impressive record of resilience attributes it to the accomplishments of the ancient rabbis, who responded to the calamity of the Temple’s destruction in 70 CE with a brilliant wave of invention, enabling the shift from a land-bound Israelite nation to a portable Jewish people. They replaced Temple sacrifices with communal prayer, pilgrimages with home ritual, and the Temple itself with the synagogue down the road. And it worked. The fact that there is a recognizable Judaism alive in the world today is testament to their success.
I’ve taught this story more times than I can count. But in this moment when the world order is being reshuffled, democratic norms are under siege, the environment is devalued, old hatreds are resurfacing and the poor and the stranger are being sacrificed to the hungers of the cruel — in this moment, the brilliant invention story feels entirely insufficient. It elevates the uniqueness of those rabbis and turns a process of incremental grassroots change into a triumphant tale of rabbinic revival.
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Although the rabbis asserted their authority to legislate how Jews lived their lives, that happened within a context. Jewish prayer had already become a custom hundreds of years before the Roman conquest. There were already rabbis, already synagogues. The sages of the Talmud were not starting from scratch. They were legislating, but they were also documenting change that was already in progress. Their brilliance was in embracing the change and proudly calling it Jewish.
How might this understanding be helpful to us in these untethered times? Maybe by encouraging us to inquire not just about survival, but about how to embrace the ongoing dynamism of change and bring our humanity to it.
I wrote last year that I was giving up looking to the future for salvation and was committing instead to the now. I’d like to refine that thought. I want to commit not only to the now — to the moment that I’m writing this or that you’re reading it — but also to the longitudinal now, the unfolding now, the dynamic process of being in the metamorphosis of past into future.
My teacher Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi developed a framework for Jewish ritual change that he called “integral halakhah.” If we are living intentional Jewish lives, he asked, what principles and values might inform the changes we make? Among other factors, he suggested that our Jewish practices should have “backward compatibility.” They should be in conversation with the practices of our ancestors. And borrowing a principle from Native American culture, he suggested we ask whether our practices will strengthen Judaism seven generations in the future — impossible to know, but important to imagine.
Being held in this intentional way between past and future is the unfolding now that I want to be part of. Instead of being isolated within a snapshot of time, I want to rally my values, my lineages, and my allegiance to those who will come after — and bring all of this to the inevitable process of change.
A dynamic relationship with the unfolding now is a piece of how our people survived millennia of restrictions and banishments and massacres. A capacity for real-time adaptation and forward motion has taken us over mountains and across seas. It has resulted in Jews who are Ashkenazi and Sephardi, Hasidic and Reform, feminist and queer, secular and atheist — incredible diversity and adaptability flowing from a shared source. We have survived with scars, of course, but also with poetry and music and language and cuisines and in-jokes and beautiful prayers and moving practices.
This is what I want for all of us — Jews and everyone else living in this time — to survive the terrible and to keep flourishing through it. To be present in the unfolding now, responding to the needs of the moment while remembering where we came from and imagining the world we are leaving for others. To lean into it all with dignity and beauty and care.
Maybe this is the true invitation of our Shehecheyanu blessing — not just that we see the holy in this particular moment, but that we see the holiness in our ongoing partnership with time and change. Blessed is the One who invites us into the ongoing, unfolding now.
This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on February 21, 2026. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.
