Michael Chabon on past and future in Judaism

From Salon Books:

Is there something about Jews and Jewishness that makes the 'what if' story so appealing?

Michael Chabon: I don't know. Certainly it's hard to think of something that would be more focused simultaneously on the past and on the future than Judaism, because Judaism is all about history and what happened to us and how we got where we are. The patterns of our history and the crucial moments -- the destruction of the temple, the expulsion from Spain, Kristallnacht, these key moments, these dates that both seem to change everything and yet merely were repeating, in some way, the last time.

And yet at the same time Judaism, in its truest form, is very focused on the future, on the coming of the Messiah, on the redemption of the world. To have that sort of simultaneous sense of looking backward and looking forward -- I think it does definitely lend itself to the kind of speculative, hypothetical thinking of the counterfactual novel. You're looking at history ... and asking, 'Where are the moments where things changed, where history forked and it could have gone this way?'