The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds

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.

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.

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! ...

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.