This presentation is part of an ongoing project on intertwined meanings of solidarity and sustainability and potential contributions that resources of Jewish Thought can make to that broader, shared inquiry.
Sustainability, however understood, means acting as justly as we can with future generations, who we will never know but with whom we declare our solidarity. It is thus inextricably intertwined with the idea of time, in which we live with the legacies of generations past, and shape, however imperfectly, the heritage of our successors. Yet the asymmetries - of understanding and capability - between ourselves, our descendants and our ancestors too - are numberless as time itself. And the Anthropocene deepens that chasm even more. The difficulty is compounded when considering a key feature of justice - equality. What can an obligation of equality towards future generations possibly mean? What moral authority and capability can we and the future, as well as the humans of the past, have over one another? Who or what can bind us all, and how?
Is the temporality in which we all swim and breathe, simply a fate into which we are thrown? Is it a process - or destiny - we all share? Or both and more?
The questions are impossibly vast, but our moral obligations as human beings demand that we start somewhere, not least with the legacies and resources of the moral and intellectual traditions to which we are heir.
Recent decades have seen what Lynn Sarit Kattan Gribetz and Lynn Kaye have called a "Temporal Turn in Ancient Judaism and Jewish Studies," explicating rich understandings of time and its moral obligations in classical rabbinic sources. I hope to bring their work into conversation with Emmanuel Levinas' investigations of time's role in framing our moral self-understanding, looking for concepts of time and justice that can help us think and act today.