The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds - Hardcover

Rosen, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374272387 ISBN 13: 9780374272388

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2000

Synopsis

Blending autobiographical musings, religious history, and literary reflection, the author of Eve's Apple explores the relationship between ancient religious tradition and modern technology as he reflects on the very different lives of his two grandmothers--one American, and one murdered by the Nazis--and examines the parallels between a page of the Talmud and the home page of a website. 50,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Rosen is the author of the novel Eve's Apple, which The New York Times praised as "an absorbing, intelligent tale of love and the mysteriousness of the other." He created the Arts & Letters section of the Forward, which he edited for ten years. His essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The American Scholar and several anthologies. He lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.

From the Inside Flap

"An admirable essay . . . All through this humane and gentle book one is reminded of the famous epigraph of Forster's Howard's End: 'Only connect.'"--Frank Kermode, The New York Times Book Review

"Others have raised the felt contradictions between the tragic and the ahistorical comforts and complacencies of American life. Few have managed to do it with such a mix of the searching, the modest and . . . with such charm."--Richard Eder, The New York Times

"A brief but elegant meditation that seeks to reconcile the spiritual and the secular, the traditional and the technological . . . linking past and present, heritage and innovation, in the most visceral way."--David Ulin, Newsday

Reviews

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.

How do we mix ancient wisdom and modern technology? The author of Eve's Apple (1997) and former culture editor of the Forward seeks an answer.When his elderly maternal grandmother died, Rosen began a self-questioning journey into the Talmud, the 2,000-year-old collection of commentaries and other texts assembled by the brilliant rabbis of the Second Commonwealth era of Jewish history. Rosen reflects on that search and on the two streams of Jewish history embodied in his two grandmothers: one American-born and raised, a defiantly unreligious woman but also a believer in God; the other East European, Orthodox, murdered by the Nazis. In the same way, Rosen believes, the dialectic of his very modern American maternal grandmother counterpoised to his no less traditional European paternal grandmother is enunciated in the contradictions between the "ancient tradition and contemporary chaos" as represented by the book's title. The crux of his odyssey is an attempt to unite and embrace the contradictions inherent in these seeming polar opposites. The result is a slender volume that drifts from Homer to Henry Adams to Josephus, trying to find a thread in Jewish and American history that will allow Rosen to reconcile the poles. Rosen writes quite well. The book is full of handsomely crafted passages that yearn to be read aloud. But the connections he makes are tenuous, forced, and arbitrary. The Talmud and the Internet are both collections of seemingly random scraps; granted, but united to what purpose? A Web page and a page of Talmud are both jigsaw-like constructions, palimpsests built around intricately interlocking commentaries-but so what? Regrettably, the results are aesthetically pleasing but intellectually facile and attenuated.It'd be lovely to read a more fully fleshed-out family reminiscence, but this is a disappointment. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Rosen, author (Eve's Apple, LJ 4/15/97) and culture editor of the Forward, has written an engaging little book, originally intended, as he tells us, as an elegy for his grandmother. This is a reflection, a meditation, and a collection of stories, centering around or inspired by the Talmud. The author offers good insights into what being Jewish is like in modern America. He shows how his grandmothers, one of whom perished in the Holocaust while the other died at an old age in America, represent two different Jewish worlds. As Rosen admits, he does not discuss the Internet much, but it stands for the modern world of technology as the Talmud stands for tradition. Both bring different worlds, such as those of his grandmothers, together. The Talmud embraces a variety of ancient stories, traditions, and rabbinical positions on a multitude of topics; the Internet likewise encompasses almost innumerable web sites on almost every subject. Recommended for public and academic libraries and collections of inspirational reading.
-DJohn Moryl, Yeshiva Univ. Lib., New York
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Rosen, the author of the psychologically elegant novel Eve's Apple (1997), presents a fluidly imagined, deftly argued, deeply felt, and powerfully affecting meditation on the overlap of the ancient and the contemporary, the secular and the religious, the lost and the regained. Contemplation of the death of his grandmother, and the loss of a computer journal of her final days that he'd failed to back up, lead Rosen to perceive parallels between the Talmud and the Internet, realms that possess a "vastness and an uncategorizable nature." As he explores this unexpected similitude, he considers how the Talmud "offered a virtual home for an uprooted culture," and how the Internet provides a sense of connection, even community. Plunging even deeper into his quietly thrilling analogy, Rosen observes that both the Talmud and the Internet embrace ambivalence and an "incongruous blend of elements," thus reflecting the jumbled nature of actual experience. Ultimately, this poetic perception helps Rosen accept his grief not only for his maternal grandmother, who died naturally, surrounded by family, but for his paternal grandmother, who was murdered during the Holocaust. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Not long after my grandmother died, my computer crashed and I lost the journal I had kept of her dying. I'd made diskette copies of everything else on my computer -- many drafts of a novel, scores of reviews and essays and probably hundreds of articles, but I had not printed out, backed up or made a copy of the diary. No doubt this had to do with my ambivalence about writing and where it leads, for I was recording not only my feelings but also the concrete details of her death. How the tiny monitor taped to her index finger made it glow pink. How mist from the oxygen collar whispered through her hair. How her skin grew swollen and wrinkled, like the skin of a baked apple, yet remained astonishingly soft to the touch. Her favorite songs -- "Embraceable You" and "Our Love Is Here to Stay" -- that she could no longer hear but that we sang to her anyway. The great gaps in her breathing. The moment when she was gone and the nurses came and bound her jaws together with white bandages.

I was ashamed of my need to translate into words the physical intimacy of her death, so while I was writing it, I took comfort in the fact that my journal did and did not exist. It lived in limbo, much as my grandmother had as she lay unconscious. My unacknowledged journal became, to my mind, what the Rabbis in the Talmud call a goses: a body between life and death, neither of heaven nor of earth. But then my computer crashed and I wanted my words back. I mourned my journal alongside my grandmother. That secondary cyber loss brought back the first loss and made it final. The details of her dying no longer lived in a safe interim computer sleep. My words were gone.

Or were they? Friends who knew about computers assured me that in the world of computers, nothing is ever really gone. If I cared enough about retrieving my journal, there were places I could send my ruined machine where the indelible imprint of my diary, along with everything else I had ever written, could be skimmed off the hard drive and saved. It would cost a fortune, but I could do it.

The idea that nothing is ever lost is something one hears a great deal when people speak of computers. "Anything you do with digital technology," my Internet handbook warns, "will leave automatically documented evidence for other people or computer systems to find." There is of course something ominous in that notion. But there is a sort of ancient comfort in it, too.

"All mankind is of one author and is one volume," John Donne wrote in one of his most beautiful meditations. "When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated." I'd thought of that passage when my grandmother died and had tried to find it in my old college edition of Donne, but I couldn't, so I'd settled for the harsher comforts of Psalm 121 -- more appropriate for my grandmother in any case. But Donne's passage, when I finally found it (about which more later), turned out to be as hauntingly beautiful as I had hoped. It continues:

God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

At the time I had only a dim remembered impression of Donne's words, and I decided that, as soon as I had the chance, I would find the passage on the Internet. I hadn't yet used the Internet much beyond E-mail, but I had somehow gathered that universities were all assembling vast computer-text libraries and that anyone with a modem could scan their contents. Though I had often expressed cynicism about the Internet, I secretly dreamed it would turn out to be a virtual analogue to John Donne's heaven.

There was another passage I wished to find -- not on the Internet but in the Talmud, which, like the Internet, I also think of as being a kind of terrestrial version of Donne's divine library, a place where everything exists, if only one knows how and where to look. I'd thought repeatedly about the Talmudic passage I alluded to earlier, the one that speaks of the goses, the soul that is neither dead nor alive. I suppose the decision to remove my grandmother from the respirator disturbed me -- despite her "living will" and the hopelessness of her situation -- and I tried to recall the conversation the Rabbis had about the ways one can -- and cannot -- allow a person headed towards death to die.

The Talmud tells a story about a great Rabbi who is dying, he has become a goses, but he cannot die because outside all his students are praying for him to live and this is distracting to his soul. His maidservant climbs to the roof of the hut where the Rabbi is dying and hurls a clay vessel to the ground. The sound diverts the students, who stop praying. In that moment, the Rabbi dies and his soul goes to heaven. The servant, too, the Talmud says, is guaranteed her place in the world to come.

Copyright © 2000 Jonathan Rosen

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374272387
• ISBN 13: 9780374272388
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 132