How Should We Humans Prepare A Good Future For Our Kids & Grandkids? Rosh HaShanah Morning
5776
Sometimes I look at my kids, Elijah and Rachel, and wonder what the future will hold for them. I look
forward to seeing them get married and raising kids of their own. I’m really fascinated to find out who
they’ll fall in love with. Even though I cherish the many moments with them as small children I also
contemplate what it will be like to have conversations with them as grown ups. Then my thought
process grows slightly more melancholy. I begin to wonder what their lives will be like after Sarah and I
are gone. Once in a while I really start to flip out and ponder what will come of humanity in the coming
decades and centuries.
When Rabbis become that addled there is usually a sermon inside of them fighting to get out. Then it
occurs to me that there are others out there wondering the same thing. So, I ask you this morning, “How
should we humans prepare a good future for our kids and grandkids, for the coming generations?” Do
you feel the same? Do you wonder what life will be like for your kids and grandkids and future
generations? Will your great-grandchildren face totally different challenges? Will they make new
discoveries the like of which we could never even imagine? Will the ancestors of young people you see
playing in the local park live in a time of unprecedented war or unparalleled peace? Will your great great
grandchildren be around at a time when humanity makes huge advances in technology and medicine?
What do we need to teach children to prepare them for life? Last night we dealt with the past year. This
morning, with the coming decades and centuries.
To predict the future and prepare the way for it, we have to understand the past1. Firstly, we have to
know that Homo sapiens were not the only kind of human. You might have heard the term,
“Neanderthal”. It’s the name of one of the other human species about seventy thousand years ago. We
survived, Neanderthals didn’t. Probably because we learned to lie.
If any of you have seen the Ricky Gervais film, “The Invention of Lying” you will understand. In the film,
the main character lives in a world where humans only tell the truth, all the time. He gains fame when
he decides, one day, to tell a lie. The face of the human race changes and life is never the same again. At
some point, due to evolution, this actually happened. We learnt how to think in a more sophisticated
manner, to gossip and deceive, and that gave Homo sapiens a big advantage. It also meant we could use
our imagination to construct common stories about our past, things like the Flood or the Exodus, which
ensured we stuck together more. If none of these things had happened the Neanderthals might have
survived to be our rivals. There would have probably been rival synagogues. Imagine the conversation: “I
hate that Neanderthal shul, it’s so unfriendly”. “Yeah, I’m going to the sapiens Temple, they have better
bagels”.
The other developments of our species were agricultural and scientific. We worked out how to mass
produce crops and got much better at looking after animals. This, of course, led to conflict. Some people
wanted what others had. If you were too weak to protect your crops or animals you had to move and so
humans spread out across the planet. The big scientific development for our species was more recent. In
the last couple of hundred years, we acknowledged our ignorance, admitted we didn’t know important
things and worked out how to fix that by doing scientific research. In the old days, when we didn’t know
1
Harari (2015), Sapiens, HarperCollins, p.3
something, we asked someone who was perceived as wiser or consulted our religious tradition, we
asked our king, our bishop or our rabbi.
So that’s the historical, anthropological, scientific account of human development, of how we got here
as a species. We learned how to lie which made Neanderthals obsolete, we spread out across the globe
because of conflict about crops and animals, we got smarter through science and didn’t rely so much on
kings and clergy. Overall, as our species developed and multiplied, there was potential for problems and
fighting between its members. Since that was our past, we should think about it when building a future
for our kids and grandkids.
Now, let’s just check in with the Jewish version of the development of our species. The two versions
don’t compete. The one I just laid out is more or less what happened. The one I am about to lay out
speculates about the point before we existed. So, imagine this, the Jewish account of how humanity
came to be. It all stems from those early words in Genesis: “Let us make “man” in our image”2. The
rabbis saw that and thought “Let us make man in our image” sounded strange. Anyone get why it
sounded strange? Exactly, because it’s “our” image, not My image. It makes it sound as if there were
more than one god which, if you follow Judaism at all, is not really on message!
How did the rabbis get around that? They speculated that the “our” in that Torah verse included G along
with the angels as His counsellors3. I’m about to take a bit of poetic license with this ancient
interpretation. You have to imagine a room somewhere in the heavenly realm. Maybe the room looks
like the room that creatives use in an advertising agency. In the room, G and some of the angels:
Gabriel, Uriel, Raphael, kicking around possibilities. “So”, G says, ”I’ve had this idea, it’s gonna sound
crazy but just hear me out”. The angels look up from their Starbucks or smart phones for a second to
stare at G skeptically. “I know all of these animals, fish, plants, birds and insects we’ve put out there
have been pretty successful in days one through five of our grand opening but I think we need
something more. A being which is smarter than the others, which controls the others, has better
developed language. We’ll call them humans. Whadya think?”
The angels stare open-mouthed, assuming angels have mouths. You can hear a heavenly pin drop. After
a few more moments of slack-jawed pause, Gabriel pipes up: “Sounds good boss. It’ll take a big effort on
day six but then we’ll have a day off to admire what we did”. A couple of others nod supportively. The
Angel of Love motions to G: “Boss, I’m all for it. I reckon humans will be affectionate and loving, works
for me”. The Angel of Truth calls out: “No way boss, humans are going to be full of lies, it’ll never work”.
The Angel of Justice: “Sure boss, these newfangled animals, they will be fair, no chance for anarchy”.
The Angel of Peace: “Whoa boss, these humans will be warmongers, they will never give each other a
moment’s peace”.
Now, of course, I’ve taken a few smidgeons of poetic license in rendering my version of this rabbinic
legend but any version of the story, ancient or modern, speaks to the same fundamental truth. There is
a core worry in the hearts of humans. That humans themselves do more harm than good, that the world
would do quite nicely, thank you very much, without the presence of humans. Plants, fish, animal, birds,
2
1.26
3
Bereishit Rabba 8.1
and insects, would flourish in our absence. Therefore, our species’ future looks troubled along with the
future of our kids and grandkids, our students and families.
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, like most things. Humans did noble deeds and evil acts
in the past but what about the future? What is there about which our species, homo sapiens, should be
hopeful or fearful? How do we learn from our species’ troubled past to build a better future? What are
our prospects? How do we build a future existence that our kids, our grandkids, our students, our
subsequent generations can thrive in? How can we load the odds in their favor that they will have a
good life?
Judaism actually has plenty to say about preparing future generations. In our tradition, we are told4:
“The father is bound in respect of his son, to circumcise…….teach him Torah, take a wife for him, and
teach him a craft. Some say, to teach him to swim too”. To circumcise and teach him Torah – to teach
him or her their heritage, the beautiful wisdom accumulated over thousands of years to help them
navigate the difficult moments of life. Take a wife for him – we might not do that nowadays but we still
have a role to prepare our kids and grandkids, our students, to find the love of their life, their soul mate.
We still have responsibility to mold them into the kind of humans who can give and receive love. Teach
them a craft – we owe it to future generations to the homo sapiens who come after us to ensure they
can survive, to teach them skills so they can make a living. My wife Sarah, often talks to me about what
we want our kids to learn so they can be successful in the world. Computer coding, science, maybe
Mandarin Chinese, are some of the things they might need to learn in a changing world. The piece about
teaching them to swim? We have to make them robust so they can stand hardship, so they won’t wilt at
the first time of conflict or challenge. Our tradition is commanding us to do that. It’s not an option. We
can’t leave our kids, our grandkids, our students, future generations of humans to simply drift on the
winds of fate.
Beyond these very practical things, there are three wider issues to grapple with. All of these three issues
are linked to our past. Since homo sapiens have always had to deal with conflict. Since our tradition was
always aware of the potential of humans for evil and good, we have to be wary when building the
future. Firstly, we will have a big decision to make. What do we want our kids and grandkids to know
and what do we want them to stay ignorant of? In other words, such is our scientific power and rate of
discovery, how can we understand clearly which discoveries in the future we should open the door to
and which should we slam the door on? Since in the past conflict within our species increased as we
discovered more, we should be wary but not to the point that we value ignorance because our lot as a
species also improved because of new discoveries.
Now that we have tools such as the internet, there are individuals and small groups which are “superempowered”, which have access to so much knowledge that they can recreate pandemic scale diseases
in their private residence, weapons of mass destruction in their garage. On the upside, we should be
incredibly optimistic about the potential for human beings to gain more knowledge which will help our
species improve, to beat diseases, to solve the grand problems of food insecurity, war, and the
environment which confront us. We just need to make sure that information stays in the hands of the
humans who will not misuse it.
4
Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Kiddushin 29a
The second issue: we should worry about technology making humans obsolete or at least infringing on
our species’ territory. Scientists have worried for years now that ultraintelligent machines will take over
the world. Mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge simplified this idea to one sentence5:
“Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly
thereafter, the human era will be ended”. The early homo sapiens, as they developed would never have
predicted such a problem. This is not as doom-laden as you might think. I am convinced that there will
never be true replacements for our higher human qualities: love, nobility, perseverance, self-sacrifice. I
don’t care how many Terminator or Blade Runner films you see, or more recently the movie Ex Machina,
which tell us humans have a limited shelf life. You cannot replicate the human soul, the human essence.
So issue number one for our future, the use of information by humans for evil or good. Issue number
two, the manipulation of technology to challenge or complement humanity. We have to deal with both
of those to build a hopeful future for our species, for our families, for our kids, our grandkids, our
students.
Issue number three for the future of humanity is: “Can we be happy?”6 Can we teach our kids, our
grandkids and our students to be truly happy? On one hand there are huge parts of the world where
people have more money, are richer, and this is likely to continue but it seems to be true that as long as
you have a certain amount of money there is a point beyond which it makes no difference. A lot
depends on your expectations. If you desire a horse and cart for market and you get one you are happy.
If you want a Ferrari and you get a Fiat, it’s a problem. At the dawn of our species, all we cared about
was survival. So expectations might be the key to our future happiness. If we wanted less stuff or more
realistic stuff in the future, we might be happier. More than money, preparing future generations to
desire and prioritize tight-knit community and family, having loved ones and friends surrounding us, will
continue to be more important for humanity’s future happiness than money and objects.
I want you to think for a moment. What do you, as one of the seven billion homo sapiens on the planet,
expect from your lifespan and what do you want for those who come after you? Do you hope for wealth
and riches? Is love more important to you than possessions? Do you have complex, high-level
expectations for all the objects you want to purchase or do you have simpler expectations of the handful
of good people you want to spend time with? The latter will make you happier. The expectations and
hopes for loyal, loving family, devoted, thoughtful friends and sensitive, supportive community will
make you happier. If you teach that to your kids and grandkids and students, it will make them happier.
You have control over your own happiness and our future happiness as a species.
We as Jews have, in our heritage, wariness of people as potential actors for either destruction or
righteousness. We have in our tradition specific commands about how to prepare the next generation.
And, as a species we have got at least three issues to grapple with. We need to work out how to use all
of the information at our disposal, not for villainy but for virtue. We have to strike the careful balance
between delegating to machines and recognizing what is unique and noble about humans. Lastly, we
must be clear on what we expect from our individual, human lives in the future. There is nothing wrong
5
Vinge, V. (1993) "The Coming Technological Singularity", Whole Earth Review Winter issue.
6
Harari, Sapiens
with economic advancement but if we focus only on wanting more stuff and ignore community, family
and friends we will be a miserable species in the future. Homo sapiens will be alive but only in name.
Support, strength, love, friendship, tight bonds and understanding with our fellow humans. Those things
will sustain this species of ours long into the future. We humans will inhabit this planet for a good while
to come. While we’re here, let’s give ourselves and the next generations a shot at happiness. Shana
tova.