Customer Reviews

The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey between Worlds

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Jonathan Rosen, who enjoys virtual reality on the Internet, has written a fetching introduction to the Talmud. Less informed critics (usually people who have not studied this incomparable work of scholarship) have given the word talmudic the connotation of "differentiating to the point of absurdity." Rosen convinces us otherwise.

He finds in the Talmud the key to living with the multiple worlds he has inherited, with an assist from the Internet. Deeply grounded in the great works of Western culture, Rosen seeks to keep in his head the voices of John Donne, Homer, John Milton, Henry Adams, Blake ....

From the model of the Talmud Rosen derives his model for accepting side by side realities. In this model science and technology do not destroy faith. The universal longings expressed in the medieval Chartres Cathedral can evoke awe in a Jew who keeps the memory of the Crusaders of the same medieval period who, on their way to the Holy Land, plunged into wholesale murder of Jews in the Rhineland and in France.

Rosen tells tales. There are memorable stories that exemplify Talmudic wisdom. There is, also, the story of Henry Adams's faith becoming overwhelmed by the awesome power of the dynamo (electricity). And the tale of Josephus, the turncoat Jewish historian of the Roman period who left us a vivid account of the decisive moment in Jewish history: the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. Best of all is the story of Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai, the creative genius who started the process that became the Talmud as the ashes of the Second Temple still smoldered.

Starting with Rabbi Yochanan's circle of scholars, the Talmud was 1500 years in the making. The last addition to its pages is the work of a 16th century scholar. Arguments and counter-arguments are the essence of Talmudic discourse. Rabbis argue with each other across the centuries.

Rabbi Yochanan created the Talmud to repair a broken Jewish world, deprived of the central focus of its religious rituals, the Temple. In Rosen's thought, the Internet too has emerged in a broken world. He sees the Internet both as mirror of a broken world--in its disjointedness--and as offering "a kind of disjointed harmony."

Since the establishment of the Talmudic academies in the first millenium, rabbis have answered questions that come from afar through "responsa", utilizing whatever communication network existed, usually depending on Jewish traders on camel or ship. To me "responsa" appear to have an unexpected parallel in the exchange of information between individuals that is made possible by the Internet.

The Talmud and the Internet is all about nothing ever being lost & about losing The Temple in the War against the Roman Empire; about Rabbinic stories & Internet sites; marriage & death; about connections to the past & thinking of the future.

It is an astonishing read filled with the stories that make up Jonathan Rosen & his beloved wife. It starts out as his maternal grandmother, a sturdy 95 year old suddenly dies & how, soon afterwards when his computer crashes, the journal he had been keeping was lost. It ends up with the author pondering on the heritage which his soon-to-born daughter will inherit.

In between, this thin little book travels far back to the Destruction of the Second Temple & Flavius Josephus' record of that time. About a rabbi who chose life rather than death. About a great American thinker & his anti-Semitic bent; about this author's other grandmother who was murdered by the Nazis & his father who was rescued.

This is an amazing exploration of living Divine expectations, seeking a life of balance. It is certainly a keeper & a super idea for a gift! ...

As a computer nerd, I'd always heard that an article in a 1940's magazine used the model of the Talmud to "invent" the concept of hypertext which is the conceptual model of the internet. Therefore, in reading the first section of this book I was bemused by the author's "discovery" of the similarities between the internet and the Talmud.
The subtitle of this book, however, gives an accurate hint of the contents "A Journey between Worlds". The book is broad in scope considering a variety of different worlds - Judaism before and after the destruction of the temple, the titled upper class in Scotland before and after the erosion of their wealth and position, European / American Jewish experience in the World War II, ...
While the meditation focuses primarily on living with the dichotomies of life rather than forcing an unreal reconciliation on them, there are a handful of sentences that open wide and interesting questions. For example, he contrasts the Christian "the word became man" i.e. became embodied with the Jewish experience of the destruction of the temple - seeing the temple to book transistion as the physical becoming "word".
This is an excellent, thought-provoking book that should appeal to anyone with an interest in religious and/or emotional displacement in our rapidly changing and chaotic world.

Is uncertainty (or ambiguity, loss, exile, conflicting inheritances, conflicting traditions, multiple interpretations, contradictory information) something to eliminate and overcome, or something we should learn to live with and even celebrate? In this short meditation on the relevance of the Talmud in the modern world (despite the title, this is *not* a book about the Internet, which is only touched on briefly as emblematic of the confusions of modern life), Jonathan Rosen shows us that ambiguity, loss and conflict are ancient issues, and that not only can we live with them, we can even find a kind of freedom and creative energy in the process. Rosen gives his ruminations immediacy by exploring the different cultural strains to which he is heir: the grandmother who lived a long and comfortable life in America, the grandmother who perished in the Holocaust, the monolithic Western culture that Rosen identifies with Henry Adams and T.S. Eliot, the Jewish culture of elusive words, whispered to the child in the womb and forgotten at birth. The process of learning from these contradictions, of living with uncertainty, becomes a goal in itself, connecting us to prior generations of strugglers, and giving us a kind of rootedness (a "homepage") in the midst of chaos.

Rosen makes many unexpected connections in this beautifully written book (how many people would think to compare Henry Adams' attitude toward Chartes with the rabbis' attitude toward the Temple?). Although loss is a major motif (the death of his grandmothers, the destruction of the Temple), and the tone is elegiac, Rosen does not leave us without hope. If we cannot answer all questions, perhaps it is enough that we try: as Rosen quotes from "Pirke Avot," "It is not your duty to complete the work; neither are you free to desist from it." I know that I will come back to this book again in my own struggles with the uncertainties of life.

Over 2000 years ago (after 586 BCE), Jewish life in its land was destroyed, and sacrifices were no longer carried out; there were no high priests. Instead, the Jews wrote the Talmud, and the Jewish people were transformed into a dispossessed, portable, evolving, People of the Book. The Talmud was born out of loss, just as Rosen was born a son of a Kindertransport survivor. The Internet, Rosen writes, has made us both feel dispossessed, for it has exiled us from that which with we are familiar, yet it has made us more connected than ever -- Connected, just as a reader of Talmud feels connected to the rabbis and commentators from generations passed. Rosen asks, what will we evolve into in the new internet culture? Will the synagogue be replaced by computer servers? As it is written in Pirke Avot (Sayings of the Fathers), "turn it, turn it, for everything is in it." Were they talking about the Internet or the Talmud? Rosen writes, "Not long after my grandmother died, my computer crashed and I lost the journal I had kept of her dying." But do the deaths of people or hard drives mean that lives or data are actually lost? What can be recovered? Is there a Norton Utilities Unerase utility for your memories of your loved ones? How do you TOGGLE between the Internet of modern technology and the demands and pulls of The Talmud of religious order. (or how does one create a marriage between a culture editor and a rabbi?) Just as he compares the choices and legacies of Josephus and Yochanan ben Zakkai, Rosen compares the fortunate life of his American-born, pragmatic grandmother, with baked apple skin, who lived to be nearly 95, craving pastrami before her throat surgery in a modern hospital, to the life of his European-born grandmother who was shot and murdered by Nazis. The "Talmud and the Internet" explores the contradictions of Rosen's inheritance (religious and pragmatic). Do we create our religion or only inherit it? Rosen chronicles the remarkable parallels between a page of Talmud and the home page of a Web site, with hyperlinks across the generations and worlds. For example, did you know that the word for Talmud pages is webbings? Or that the Talmud is compared to the Sea (as in surfing)? Didn't a rabbi once write that everything is in the Talmud, and don't people believe that the whole world is in the Internet also? Rosen charts the territory between doubt and belief, tragedy and prosperity, the world of the living and the world of the dead.

Mr. Rosen shows us in this well written short book the difficulties of what it means for him to be Jewish. Two grandmothers dominate his inner life. One, on the maternal side, born in America, thoroughly assimilated, who died at a ripe old age in the midst of her family. The other, whom he never knew, had lived in Vienna and had become a victim of the Nazis murderous fury. Rosen's father experienced Hitler's invasion of Austria as a thirteen year old boy and was fortunate to have been sent with one of the "Kindertransporte" to Scotland and eventually came to America. The father's family perished during the war as part of the Holocaust. Thus Rosen tries to come to terms with these conflicting fates which still haunt him.
His family epitomizes the Jewish dilemna of belonging, but not quite. America with its material benefits is felt as a blessing. At the same time it is not truly "home" because part of Rosen's soul is still in the Poland of his grandmother's ancestors, as experienced in the study of the Talmud. As the title of the book indicates Rosen tries to make a connection between the material and the spiritual aspects of his heritage and he has done so quite convincingly. He also gives the non-Jewish reader an inkling of why the Talmud is relevant for today's Judaism.
Rosen points out that it is the Jewish New Testament. But in Judaism it is not the "word" which became "flesh," but the "flesh" became "word." This happened when Jochanan ben Zakkai had himself smuggled out in a coffin from beleaguered Jerusalem. With Roman permission he then founded the Yeshiva at Yavneh and thus became the father of rabbinic Judaism as we know it today. The consequences of this inversion of terms are actually enormous and I leave it to the reader to ponder them.
Let me just point out that the Talmud is not a book but an encyclopedia which consists of many volumes. It contains widely differing opinions on Jewish law, legends, moral exhortations, and day to day advice on the most diverse subjects. It is as disjointed as the Internet and similar to the Internet you can find almost everything you want but it surely takes patience to locate the needle in the haystack.
Nevertheless this is, as far as I am concerned, not really the Talmud's major importance for the Gentile world. It is rather the fact that Law even if it is divinely ordained through Moses in the Pentateuch, can and should be disputed. Dissent is encouraged. Arguments are held over words and sentences which are given meanings which are totally different from what one would expect Moses had intended. This attitude that "everything is negotiable," which does not stop at the doors of the synagogue and the word of God, makes Judaism profoundly different from all the other great religions of the world. It is this "talmudic thinking" which has invaded America's culture. Whether or not this has been of benefit to society at large each one of us has to decide in his/her own mind. While the Talmud may provide solace for some it also perpetuates an "us versus them" attitude and as longs as this mental framework exists Rosen's newborn daughter will inherit a world which will continue to be torn by strife.

I read this book in one sitting. The writing is extremely eloquent and the personal history moving. I can see why Frank Kermode gave Rosen such a rave review in the New York Times. But what excited me was the personal way in which Rosen made the Talmud so accessible. Not just to a Jewish person who never really studied Talmud in any formal way but, I can imagine, to anyone, Jew or non-Jew, who has wondered about the Talmud. It's an amazing achievement. I have given the book to a number of friends, including several who aren't Jewish.

A short, pleasing essay on the different strands that inform our lives, which we weave into our consciousness. Rosen speaks often of personal things, but stays more on the philosophical level in his overall writing. The reader comes away knowing more about his analytical tendencies than his own history.

I agree with the author that the Internet is a powerful metaphor for the interconnectedness of life. The Talmud, in its turn, may indeed be the original "hyperlinked" document, and I smile in wonder at the thought of trying to bring the full complexity of life to a sheaf of written pages, as (I hear) the Talmud aspires to do. In these days, can we all create our own Talmuds from the Internet, interconnected references to explain our lives? But if they are all individual, then what culture remains in common? Rosen addresses these questions briefly and with grace.

This is a very thought -provoking essay-memoir. Rosen connects Talmud and Internet as ways of reading hypertext, of skipping back and forth, of placing commentary against commentary, of finding diverse worlds in the text. This comparison on one level works while on a deeper one does not. The Internet is easy and children can manage to work on it. Talmudic Study is extremely difficult, tremendously challenging intellectually, requires a very practiced and sharp mind. I learn in a Daf Yomi shiur in which we study each day one page of the Talmudic text. I find tremendous difficulty in even understanding what is going on, much less contributing meaningfully to the discussion. I use the Internet all the time, without much difficulty. I read articles on all kinds of subjects and find understanding no great problem.
Rosen uses his comparison as many Amazon reviewers pointed out to help him get into and tell his own family story. He does this in a moving and interesting way. On this level the book truly works. Also his interest in Judaism and knowledge of it is considerable .The problem is he taking the Internet as model tends to use one historical stage of Jewish existence the stage of exile and wandering as Ideal. This is of course in total contradiction with the Tradition itself, whose ideal is not scattering but rather ingathering. Return to Israel, Ingathering, fulfilling the Biblical Covenant are the Ideals Jews held through the centuries and those given in the Tradition. Rosen's private definition of Jewish being everywhere and nowhere at once connects with other such historical definitions such as Neitzsche's about Jews being ' the first Europeans'. But it does not really speak to the Tradition.
Another point about the Internet. The Internet enables everyone in the world to say anything they want to say. This is in one sense a miracle and a great realization of human dreams. On the other hand it enables the worst elements - the Evil, the Haters,
the Jihadists, Nazis,- all those who diminish our Humanity to have their say. The Talmud on the other hand is a religious text sanctified in its learning. The moral difference between the two kinds of text and activity is night and day. And here I should make the point that the Internet too can and is used for noble purposes. However so far as I know it is not primarily a sacred text.
Again this is a thought - provoking and interesting work. Very highly recommended.

The title is a little misleading. This book doesn't have all that much to do with the internet (Rosen uses it as a point of departure and a point of reference, but I guess I think his analogy can only go so far). But it is a very nice quasi-memoir. Rosen ponders the different experiences and natures of his two grandmothers, one born in America and the benefitiary of a comfortable American upbringing, the other an immigrant and refugee. It's a nice read.