Chassidic Techno-Optimism Embraces the Darkness

"Jewish optimism is pessimism that despaired."

When we call the Rebbe an optimist about technology, we risk misunderstanding the term “optimist.” An acquaintance recently shared on Twitter that he heard an Israeli say that “Jewish optimism is pessimism that despaired.” Truer words have never been spoken.

When we say “optimism,” some imagine mere positivity or a kind of faith commitment in the face of evidence. While the Jewish optimism is full of faith, it’s not faith that withstands, but faith in what precedes all testing and remains when trying is done. The Jew, if anything, is an inveterate tester, a measuring instrument. It’s so core to our nature that we test even when we don’t want to, against our will. We like to think of ourselves scientists of a sort, but in Judaism it is more accurate to call G-d the one taking the measurement and us His perennially disgruntled thermometers. We don’t want to find out what percentage of American or European society will still believe Jews are the puppetmasters of global politics, but we were chucked by the Hand of G-d into the beaker of history and like our grandparents and great-grandparents get to observe what from the abysm froths forth. Our faith is that there was, indeed, a Hand that placed us, who (we hope from not too far away) is also watching the bubbles, and has a plan.

The world fails our tests so often and so consistently that pessimism suffuses our very sanity. However, once this pessimism reaches the bottom, we are surprised (dismayed?) to find that it cannot seal the deal, cannot close, cannot make a final pronouncement. Our pessimism doesn’t conclude— doesn’t gain a beatific smile of gentle despair—but neither is it refuted at its own level. Its refutation is rather contextual; it is non-total. The experiment in which the Jew is a tool is an experiment; what it is allowed to define is curtailed in advance. The world’s formal brokenness despairs at swallowing the Jew himself, but not because there is anything it finds that it cannot swallow. When Golda Meir says she believes in the Jewish people and the Jewish people believe in G-d, and this conditions her personal atheism, it mirrors the Jew believing in G-d and G-d believing in the world, which conditions the Jew’s total pessimism.

So when we say that the Jew “de-apocalypses apocalypses,” we don’t mean returning to a status quo ante and forgetting the whole catastrophe ever happened. The victory is not and doesn’t have to be a triumph over the form of darkness. Rather, darkness can remain in its place and shine.

The Beis Hamikdash was actually destroyed; Babylon genuinely was a profound exile. Things have been lost, and everything we do is conditioned by that loss. The Jew doesn’t become an optimist by denying these things. The Jew becomes an optimist by delving to their depth, by understanding the immensity of the loss, yet still being a Jew. We should say the exact same thing about the world after the printing press. Or Claude. The Jew’s optimism about technology is not a prediction about technology. It is the Jew seeing himself for what he is, in the dark.