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In a sermon, Rabbi Dr. Andrew Goldstein suggested another interpretation of Pardes: “But what if it was Paradise… meaning that the four tried to envision the perfect world and then were forced to compare it with the world in which they lived. And this examination proved a great trial of their religious faith. In many ways, their world had many of the challenges of ours today.”
(https://www.liberaljudaism.org/2018/09/four-rabbis-entered-paradise/)
The Christian Theologian Harvey Cox had this to say about living in the future: “if he is to survive, man must be both innovative and adaptive. He must draw from the richest wealth of experience available to him and must not be bound to existing formulas for solving problems. Festivity, by breaking routine and opening us to the past, enlarges our experience and reduces our provincialism. Fantasy opens doors that merely empirical calculations ignore. it widens the possibility of innovation.”
If Pardes is to serve as a model of a Jewish Future, it must provide a structure into which we can enter to explore ourselves. Ellis Rivkin’s perspective of the past as scenario for the future is insightful: “The goal of the Jewish community must be the individual who “recognizes that Judaism has been the manifold expression of human beings struggling and wrestling with their human problems, and he therefore can enter into the thoughts and feelings of each historical moment and come forth enriched.” “Free to draw on the riches of our past we need no longer be slaves to it. Judaism, for us, is not only a past, but a future.“
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