Political Imagination

We are stuck in the present: in our troubles, in its constraints. The need to respond constantly to an avalanche of events - a lifetime of events condensed into two and a half years - has consumed nearly all our energy. Across the Jewish world, we have been living in a prolonged state of reaction, of fight or flight. And so, perhaps without even noticing it, we have neglected one of the most important political muscles we have: the ability to imagine a future that does not yet exist, and then begin building toward it.

Thirty-two years ago, Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin stood in the desert and gave a speech upon the signing of the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan:

“I look around me from this stage to the Arava, and I see a barren desert on the Jordanian side and on the Israeli side. There is almost no life here, no water, no well, only mines.

Such have been the relations between Israel and Jordan for the past forty-seven years: a barren desert. Not a single green leaf. Not a tree, not a flower. A bold decision was needed, sometimes with gritted teeth, to overcome this dryness, the aridity between the two peoples, the mines… The desert was in the hearts of both peoples for almost two generations. Now is the time not only to dream of a better future – but also to make it.”

What Rabin models here is not optimism, and not fantasy. It is political imagination: the capacity to look directly at a landscape of desolation and still insist on the possibility of another future. Not a far-fetched future, but one that can be drawn, spoken about, and slowly brought into being.

For Jews, this is not a luxury. It is part of our inheritance, and our responsibility. In modernity, what transformed Jewish existence was not only our ability to analyze danger or respond to crisis, but our ability to dream politically: in Zionism, in the building of Jewish sovereignty, and in the creation of vibrant Jewish life in North America. If Jewish life today feels trapped in response mode, then we need to recover that capacity deliberately: to practice imagining the future we want to inhabit, and to speak about it even when it feels distant. Without it, we may know how to survive the present, but not how to build beyond it.