Though Jews believe in the coming of the Messiah to set everything straight, I would argue that Judaism is a present-oriented religion in a praxis with the past. This is why Jews every year sit down at Passover to relive their liberation from Egypt—the ur-event that’s the blueprint for their future and the foundation of what we may call their “human rights agenda.” In one sense, Orwell’s mordant dictum in “1984”—that “he who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future”—is a perverse secularization of Jewish theology: relive the past in the present and it will endow your future. But what will be the role of Jewish human rights consciousness in a future in which Jews may shrink to a truly miniscule percentage of the globe’s population and the biggest growth will be among sentient machines? Most readers of Martine Rothblatt’s new book, “Virtually Human: The Promise—and Peril—of Digital Technology,” may pass over this concern, but—reading the book carefully—it emerges as an important Rothblatt preoccupation. A Southern California product born in San Diego and raised in Los Angeles, Martine Rothblatt when we first met at UCLA in the 1970s had a passion for marrying law to satellite technology. Yet in those days, Martine was Martin, the father of a beautiful multiracial child, Eli, whose mother was a young Kenyan whom Martin met and married while on a teenage wanderjahr in Africa without exactly his parents’ approval. During the next fifteen years, Martin earned joint degrees in law and business administration, and became a pioneer of GPS technology and a founder of Sirius Satellite Radio. In the early 1990s, while involved in a project with the International Bar Association to map the human genome for the UN, Martin decided on a life-transforming adventure recounted in the 1995 bestseller, “The Apartheid of Sex.” Throughout the process of gender reassignment, as well as the subsequent founding of the drug company, United Therapeutics (Unither), Martine (who received a doctorate for her study of animal-human transplantation) was supported by second wife (or “spice”) Bina, the mother of the other Rothblatt children. “Virtually Human” explores the technologically-driven transformation of human nature and evolution. Rothblatt sees computer intelligences not too far in the future with the power, not only to upload near-total human memories, but to develop intellectual, moral, and emotional repertoires of their own. Martin calls these mindclones. Of course, the idea of “man machines” is not really new. In fact, in terms of the dark potential, one might even go back as far as the Golem, invented by Prague’s Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (“the Maharal”) who progammed his Jewish Frankenstein monster by reading him sacred words. Rothblatt is careful to balance the book’s discussion of potential benefits with the risks of artificial intelligence and cyberconsciouness that other futurists have emphasized. What specifically for Jews and Judaism is in a “transhuman” future shared by human beings and their biological twins or mindclones? Rothblatt foresees a future in which Jewish mindclones—“free of flesh but born of the mind of flesh persons”—will have “unique terms and meanings for God”: “They will also communicate with in a reciprocal way with God in ways similar to their biological originals. Each Friday a Jewish mindclone may want to recognize the beginnings of Shabbat by lighting virtual candles, praying and resting. They will likely wan to celebrate Passover seder each year. Though unable to drain four cups of liquid wine . . . they will be able to drink four cups of virtual wine. Already many [Jewish and Christian] families use the Skype internet video service to bring geographically dispersed members around a common virtual table.” Already Rothblatt sees the beginnings of a Jewish Renaissance in Aaron Lansky’s saving of Jewish books, much of them disappearing in landfills or fires, by digitizing Yiddish literature—“saving it from death by oblivion via Dumpsters”—and creating a global Jewish book exchange. As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi told us “Zakhor” (1982), memory—not history—is the driving force of the Jewish experience. In addition to literature preservation, cyberconsciousness will open new vistas for memory as biographical history through the uploading of family photographs, diary entries (including records of friendships and love affairs), reading and movie preferences, and moral and religious beliefs. So too for the Jewish imperative of preserving and amplifying the Jewish human rights agenda—from its rough draft in the Ten Commandments to its final elaboration in the age of the Messiah whose praises will be sung by both Jews and Jewish mindclones—for Rothblatt, a distinction but ultimately not a fundamental difference.