The Laughter of the Future

Az — then. The verse is careful about time in a way that is easy to read past. Not now. Then. The laughter is placed in a future tense and the present is left as it is.

The tense is the argument

A religious tradition under pressure has an obvious temptation: to insist that the suffering is already fine, already meaningful, already secretly joy. Tehillim 126 does not do this, and neither does the passage in Yirmiyahu about Rachel.

The structure in both is the same. The grief is stated without qualification. The answer is a future event. And nothing in between is offered as consolation — no explanation, no reframing, no argument that the loss was not a loss.

Yitzchak

The name means he will laugh — future tense, given at birth after a laugh that was not entirely joyful. Sarah laughs when she hears the promise, and the laugh is at least partly disbelief; the name is fixed in the future tense, and the tradition has kept it there ever since.

It is a strange thing to name a child. It is also, structurally, the same move as az yimalei: laughter located ahead, honestly.

What resolution is not

The chapter on the purpose of history has already drawn the necessary distinction and it applies here with more force. Saying that the process arrives somewhere is not saying that every element of it was a justified means.

The laughter of the future, in this reading, is not the discovery that the suffering was secretly good. It is the arrival of a state in which the question of what it was for is answered by what it produced, and the mourning that occurred is not thereby retroactively deleted or endorsed.

A tradition that keeps its tenses honest is one you can still be inside when things are bad. That is not a small feature. It may be the load-bearing one.