The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey between Worlds (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Not long after my grandmother died, my computer crashed and I lost the journal I had kept of her dying..." (more)
Key Phrases: firm perswasion, Yochanan ben Zakkai, Lord Balfour, Henry Adams (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Talmud and the Internet by Jonathan Rosen is a small, wise, ingenious meditation on faith, technology, literature, and love. In the book's opening pages, Rosen (formerly the culture editor of Forward) seeks solace after his grandmother's death in the poetry of John Donne. Nagged by a half-remembered phrase from one poem, Rosen tracked down the text online, and "For one moment, there in dimensionless, chilly cyberspace, I felt close to my grandmother, close to John Donne, and close to some stranger who, as it happens, designs software for a living." In the Internet's "world of unbounded curiosity, of argument and information, where anyone with a modem can wander out of the wilderness for a while, ask a question and receive an answer," Rosen finds a real parallel to the Talmud, "a place where everything exists, if only one knows how and where to look." The literary resemblance has a cultural resonance, too. Rosen observes that "the Talmud offered a virtual home for an uprooted culture, and grew out of the Jewish need to pack civilization into words and wander out into the world." And the Internet suggests to Rosen "a similar sense of Diaspora, a feeling of being everywhere and nowhere. Where else but in the middle of Diaspora do you need a homepage?" In Rosen's analysis, the Internet and the Talmud signal and salve social and spiritual isolation. His book does this same thing, too. --Michael Joseph Gross

From Publishers Weekly

In 1990, when the Forward was established as a national Jewish weekly newspaper, Rosen was appointed arts and culture editor. For 10 years, until his recent resignation, he presided over a sprightly and highly regarded section of features and book reviews. This book is an autobiographical memoir in which he muses about his experiences and his family, while comparing the ocean of the Talmud with the vastness of the Internet. Both are described in clear language as unfinished metaphors for tradition and technology. Rosen artfully mingles facts about his wife, parents and grandmothers with erudite thoughts about his broad range of reading in Judaica and the classics. He explores John Donne, the Odyssey, Josephus and Henry Adams, mingling them with his admiration for Rabbi Akiva and Yochanan ben Zakkhai (the founder of Yavneh, where "Talmudic culture was saved"). The book ends with a moving account of visiting the present-day Lord Balfour on his Scottish estate, where Rosen's father spent WWII, having escaped from Vienna on a Kindertransport. Finally, Rosen expresses the hope that his baby daughter will maintain her connection to family history and the past, represented by the Talmud, while embracing the future, represented by the Internet. The book reveals far more about the author than it does about the Talmud or the Net, but it successfully introduces readers to all three with considerable sensitivity. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 132 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux; 1ST edition (September 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 031242017X
• ISBN-13: 978-0374272388
• ASIN: 0374272387
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 4.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,521,730 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Only Connect, September 28, 2000

By	Ms. Lyle L. Warner (Cambridge, ma USA) - See all my reviews

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.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Talmud & the Internet is a lyrical meditation balance., November 26, 2000

By	Rebecca Brown "rebeccasreads" (Clallam Bay, WA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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! ...

19 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Turn it, Turn it, for everything is in it. Talmud or Cyber?, September 19, 2000

By	Larry Mark "editor of MyJewishBooks.com" (nyc) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.