“No, we are not going to talk about [the soccer team] Arsenal," emphatically urged Rabbi Sacks in an interview with Israel Hayon. "...[I]t wins only when I think about other things. Like the Messiah. This, too, comes to its peak when we are distracted.” And yet, throughout much of his body of work, Rabbi Sacks does quite a bit of thinking about the Messiah, the role of messianic hope in "a world still disfigured by evil," and how Jewish conceptions of time shape our agency in shaping the future. This class will explore some of Sacks' ideas around uniquely Jewish approaches to building for a future world and how we can apply those teachings to our own imagined and hoped-for conceptions of the future – Jewish, messianic, or otherwise.

Becca Leviss draws upon her expertise in academia, Jewish practice, community organizing, and faith-based advocacy to direct the Judeofuturism Project, a multi-disciplinary effort that combines art, scholarship, ritual, and practice to envision and build towards expansive Jewish futures beyond trauma, grief, and violence. Prior to her time at Harvard Divinity School – where she explored the intersection of religion, ethics, and politics in community building and civic engagement – she spent several years at Protect Democracy, working closely with major funders, practitioners, and leaders to strengthen the broad coalition devoted to preventing U.S. democracy from authoritarian decline.