Living Life With No Future Tense

There are people out there (perhaps you know some) who invoke God in every sentence. The answer to everything is Barukh Hashem. "How are you doing?" Barukh Hashem. "How's work?" Barukh Hashem. "Want to hang out later?" Barukh Hashem.

It reminds me of a video I saw in Arabic 101 in college. The video was attached to one of the first lessons, on greetings. Two men meet in an outdoor coffeeshop. "How are you?" Alḥamdulilláh. "How's your wife?" Alḥamdulilláh. "How's your job?" Alḥamdulilláh. الحمد لله means, more or less, ברוך ה.

Now while I do aspire to live a life of looking through God-colored glasses, all this constant invocation has always sounded corny to me. Yes, if I have a quantifiable reason to thank God I'm going to do so, and I do use phrases such as "thank God" and toda la’Eil when necessary, but there's some kind of smarmy "frumliness"* surrounding the over-use of ברוך ה that makes it just sound corny to me.

*Growing up I never heard the word "frum" — my parents always described our family as 'religious' or 'observant', adjectives that could be applied to non-Orthodox Jews and Non-Jews as well.
My first encounter with the word frum, which has left a bad taste in my mouth associated with the word ever since, was when I was staying over by a friend for Shabbos in 4th grade or so, and his grandmother turned to us and said, "That school you go to isn't frum enough."
Whisper me to friend: Pssssst, what's 'frum' mean?
And since then, I've encountered too many uses of the word in connotations of "oh he's too frum" or "she's not frum enough" — most of the time I've heard the word, it was used to make negative judgments. And so I try to stick to 'religious' and 'observant', and only use "frum" in quotation-marks...

Another "frum" phrase that just doesn't sit right with me is אם ירצה ה. Im yirtzeh Hashem — 'God-willing' — just sounds like a bit too much.

I'm not sure what it is about it. I use it in writing a lot more frequently than I'll use it in speech (especially in abbreviation). Maybe it's that my usual register of speaking is fairly colloquial/slang, whereas my writing style vacillates between colloquial/slang and melodramatic. There's just something needlessly formal about it. Something possibly showoffy. I'm not sure.

But the feeling behind it, the ideology that God can and may affect the world, the sense that all futures — even prophecies — are contingent on the actions and desires of both the Creator [=God] and Subcreators [=people] of Worlds — that's all there. And so there are other ways to express the contingent potentiality of that which has not yet been.

I have gotten used to living with no future tense. There is no "I will be in Israel next week" because maybe I won't. I have no control over a whole host of factors that affect what I plan to do. And so, I plan to be in Israel next week. I hope to be in Israel next week. If all goes as planned, I'll be in Israel next week. Because I just don't know.

Promises are serious things. If I'm not going to lie about the present state of reality, why should I set myself up to be lying about the future state of reality? I can try to do something. And if I'm pretty certain that I'll succeed I can try and do something. But I will? Not necessarily.

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