At the instigation of Joe Katzman (thanks, Joe!), "Tom Paine" last week posted the text of a most amazing essay he wrote back in 1999. It's written from the perspective of 200 years into the future.
If I recall correctly, this isn't the first time "Tom" has contemplated the directions that Judaism might take as the technology and vision of humanity continues to expand in both predictable and unpredicatable ways. If you have any interest at all in this sort of stuff (or in the 'high frontier' in general), you really shouldn't miss this one.
Well, we may live different lives, have different problems, face different challenges, but we’re still Jews. Here in the O’Neill habitat we may live in a hollowed-out asteroid, but we still mark the passing seasons with our festivals, the harvest, the planting, the first rains, and we count the Omer still. We may do most of our work in front of a viewscreen with instant access to the sum total of human knowledge, but the Torah we read from in our sanctuary is parchment, written by a sofer, in the ancient way. And most importantly, the words we read, are the same as they’ve always been. They may mean different things to us nowadays. Would the Rabbis sitting in Yavneh have dreamed that the laws of shatnez, of mixing wool and linen in the same garment, or of cross-fertilising different seeds would one day be applied to the deliberate alteration of human DNA? Maybe not. But I believe they would have understood and appreciated that their insights into human nature and the way to live a good and meaningful life, would still be studied and argued over, thousands of years into the future.
Yeah, goosebumps. And there's lots more.
