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The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds
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A gemlike book, sharply incised and multifaceted, The Talmud and the Internet is not really about either of the two titular entities but about the worldwide web of loss and connection. The book opens with a computer crash that leads to the virtual loss of the author's grandmother (in the form of diaries kept about her final days). This event leads Jonathan Rosen, in thought and meditation, to the actual, physical loss of someone he loved, which in turn leads to his search for a poem by John Donne on the Internet. There is something Victorian about the scope of this book, which encompasses the creation and emendation of the Talmud; the career of the traitorous Jewish-Roman historian Josephus; the sly and symbolically rich story of a famed rabbi's attempt to sneak out of newly Roman Jerusalem; the author's personal family saga; a visit to Chartres; Odysseus' journey to the land of the dead with buckets of blood; and a summoning of the ghost of the eminent Victorian Henry Adams. The prose is deceptively casual, but it carries an immense weight of thought and feeling.
A gemlike book, sharply incised and multifaceted, The Talmud and the Internet is not really about either of the two titular entities but about the worldwide web of loss and connection. The book opens with a computer crash that leads to the virtual loss of the author's grandmother (in the form of diaries kept about her final days). This event leads Jonathan Rosen, in thought and meditation, to the actual, physical loss of someone he loved, which in turn leads to his search for a poem by John Donne on the Internet. There is something Victorian about the scope of this book, which encompasses the creation and emendation of the Talmud; the career of the traitorous Jewish-Roman historian Josephus; the sly and symbolically rich story of a famed rabbi's attempt to sneak out of newly Roman Jerusalem; the author's personal family saga; a visit to Chartres; Odysseus' journey to the land of the dead with buckets of blood; and a summoning of the ghost of the eminent Victorian Henry Adams. The prose is deceptively casual, but it carries an immense weight of thought and feeling.
As the title indicates, Rosen finds parallels between the Talmud and the Internet. The core of the Talmud is the Mishnah, a statement of Jewish law. Surrounding the Mishnah are blocks of commentary on the laws written by various scholars and rabbis, in addition to metacommentaries on the original commentaries, spanning in all more than a millennium's worth of deliberation and debate and giving the appearance that a rabbi in the 2nd century is directly commenting on something one of his peers had to say in the 11th. The Internet is similar, in that a page you're currently viewing may have links to jaw-dropping associations of widely varied material. Rosen suggests that the Talmud and the Internet are magical spaces that can connect you with all eras and with a multitude of persons. Both become economical metaphors for serendipity, openness, connection, and knowledge.
Elliptically touching on subject after subject, Rosen beautifully allows one to bear on another, and his themes of Talmud and Internet are subtly woven throughout. Rosen's magic loom spins a skein of association and colorful detail that unweaves and reweaves itself, like Penelope's endless funeral shroud, in ever-changing patterns. So tender and beguiling on first reading, the book leaves traces that deepen and entwine with each successive perusal. Rosen informs us that the rabbis called the Talmud a sea. His extraordinary book is at least a star-filled mountain lake -- bracing, meditative, calm, and wondrous.
Edward Sien, a grant maker to renascent Jewish communities in Russia and Ukraine, lives in New York, where he listens to music, reads, writes all too little, and dreams.
Paperback
First published September 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
February 7, 2010
What I like about Jonathan Rosen is his craftsmanship as a writer. Unfortunately, in this book, he seems to brush upon a few different themes, without committing to any one of them. The net result is a monologue that meanders without delivering on the promise suggested by the title. The book is part memoir about the lives of his grandmothers - one of whom lived and died in safety in the United States - and the other, who died during the Holocaust. He says his father, who lost his entire family at the age of 14, thought the world needed to be redeemed, but his mother, who grew up here, thought the world fine as it is. Rosen compares the commentaries in the Talmud to following Internet links. I'm not sure what his point was, although many of his seemingly unrelated observations are interesting.
November 22, 2015
This is a short book of the thoughts of a young man trying to find meaning in his family history, the history of Jewish and European history as it relates to his family, and the meaning of history as he and his family move into the future. It is sprinkled with lovely family stories, nods to great literature, and bits of history. If you want to get a taste of a thoughtful, contemporary Jewish-American life, Jonathan Rosen is one of the go-to authors.
It is a short, pleasant read. It is tender, thoughtful, but not evenly written. It is an early book in his career.
It is a short, pleasant read. It is tender, thoughtful, but not evenly written. It is an early book in his career.
May 12, 2013
Through a series of essays, Rosen unpacks the layers of his own relationship to religious and personal ambiguity, to suffering and joy, and to seemingly disparate 'ancient' and 'modern' approaches to knowledge, finding nourishment in the struggle.
He uses what I would call narrative theology to examine the metaphors we use to define our understandings of home, exile, and knowledge. He finds that the structure of the internet mirrors deeper truths of the Talmud and of our own spiritual journeys: characteristics that I couldn't do justice here. Much like a good story, what is rich about these essays can't be boiled down or summarized; they must be experienced.
The author and I would no doubt use very different labels for much of what we consider most important to us in outlook and politics. But I found a certain kinship with him in his valuing of a multiplicity of truths, and in his ultimate trust in chaos as a path to disjointed harmony. The book spoke to me and to recent spiritual struggles of mine in nourishing and strengthening ways.
He uses what I would call narrative theology to examine the metaphors we use to define our understandings of home, exile, and knowledge. He finds that the structure of the internet mirrors deeper truths of the Talmud and of our own spiritual journeys: characteristics that I couldn't do justice here. Much like a good story, what is rich about these essays can't be boiled down or summarized; they must be experienced.
The author and I would no doubt use very different labels for much of what we consider most important to us in outlook and politics. But I found a certain kinship with him in his valuing of a multiplicity of truths, and in his ultimate trust in chaos as a path to disjointed harmony. The book spoke to me and to recent spiritual struggles of mine in nourishing and strengthening ways.
May 20, 2012
Raises some interestingpoints, but.... could have been/should have been/would have been... oh well - probably to be forgotten in the near future. NOT what I would put down as one of my more influential reads. Most interesting point (IMMHO) was a comparison of the lives and times of Flavius Josephus and R Yhanan Ben-Zakkai. Again could have had more to it. Maybe this is what contemporary liberal American Jewry is idolizing?
June 13, 2024
A slight book of essays about religious texts, modern realities and family legacy.
When Jonathan Rosen’s maternal grandmother passed on, he came to a crossroads about his personal identity. On the one hand, he mourned the woman he knew who died of natural causes after a long life. On the other hand was his paternal grandmother, forever a ghost in his familial memory, who was murdered during the Holocaust.
Comparing the Talmud and the Internet seems a paltry secondary theme, except that both are about “contradictory forces: ancient tradition and contemporary chaos, doubt and faith, the living and the dead, tragedy and hope,” Rosen wrote in his forward. There’s a lot of big ideas in here, though sometimes the ruminations aren’t as anchored as I’d like.
The first essay dives a lot into what the Talmud and other literature say about loss, but perhaps the most heartbreaking element centers around computer repair. Rosen lost a digital “journal” he kept about his grandmother in her last months, paid a fortune to have it restored, only to realize that the actual text wasn’t as all-encompassing as he remembered. Maybe this *is* Talmudic; the memory of a vanquished people is bigger than the reality.
As the Rabbis of two thousand years ago translated “one way of life into another way of life” after the Diaspora, the man who in essence made Rabbinic Judaism possible looms large on the page. Yochanan Ben Zakkai was smuggled out of Jerusalem in a coffin, not to save him from the Romans, but from a sect of his own people: the Zealots who insisted that everyone become a martyr for the city. Judaism was a temple religion; the temple was the point, so it took some radical thinking to posit a theological evolution.
Later, Rosen compares Ben Zakkai to a more reviled Jewish contemporary: Josephus. Josephus betrayed his own men in battle and surrendered to the Romans, to live a cushy, Judenfrei life above his peoples’ ashes. But he also gave the world to come an invaluable first-person account of the loss of Judea.
But how do descendants contextualize this history? Rosen doesn’t have to go back as far as 2,000 years to find tragedy when most of his family was murdered by fascists who saw themselves as Rome’s heir. And yet, part of his family survived the Holocaust in the US, in safety. “I find myself fearing that these two grandmothers cannot exist simultaneously in the same world, even though I am equally a product of both of them,” he writes. He wants to embrace his murdered grandmother’s reality without falling prey to the despair, and honor the freedom he shares with the grandmother who survived, without ignoring the realities of history and suffering.
The Talmud provides a gateway into grappling with these realities, as Rabbis and scholars have done for thousands of years. Rosen has time to impart a few stories from this gargantuan text, as well as stories about his own family, which would probably land better with a wider audience. The Jewish stuff is a fair bot of insider baseball.
Ergo, perhaps the best way for the gentile mind to understand the Talmud is through the Internet, as a “text” that increasingly feeds upon itself, growing with a myriad of new and recontextualized material. “It seems to me the challenge, and the trick, is to find wholeness among the infinite,” Rosen writes. “The Talmud helped Jews survive after the destruction of the Temple by making Jewish culture portable and personal. In the same way, there are elements in the inclusiveness of the Internet well suited to a world that is both more uprooted and more connected than ever before.” (Those two quotes are from two separate essays, but mashing seemingly disparate quotes together is also very Talmudic. :P)
A fun romp for the Jewishly inclined. I’m grappling with similar themes in my Jewish fantasy novel, and was certainly taken with some quotes. Very niche presentation, but there’s an audience.
When Jonathan Rosen’s maternal grandmother passed on, he came to a crossroads about his personal identity. On the one hand, he mourned the woman he knew who died of natural causes after a long life. On the other hand was his paternal grandmother, forever a ghost in his familial memory, who was murdered during the Holocaust.
Comparing the Talmud and the Internet seems a paltry secondary theme, except that both are about “contradictory forces: ancient tradition and contemporary chaos, doubt and faith, the living and the dead, tragedy and hope,” Rosen wrote in his forward. There’s a lot of big ideas in here, though sometimes the ruminations aren’t as anchored as I’d like.
The first essay dives a lot into what the Talmud and other literature say about loss, but perhaps the most heartbreaking element centers around computer repair. Rosen lost a digital “journal” he kept about his grandmother in her last months, paid a fortune to have it restored, only to realize that the actual text wasn’t as all-encompassing as he remembered. Maybe this *is* Talmudic; the memory of a vanquished people is bigger than the reality.
As the Rabbis of two thousand years ago translated “one way of life into another way of life” after the Diaspora, the man who in essence made Rabbinic Judaism possible looms large on the page. Yochanan Ben Zakkai was smuggled out of Jerusalem in a coffin, not to save him from the Romans, but from a sect of his own people: the Zealots who insisted that everyone become a martyr for the city. Judaism was a temple religion; the temple was the point, so it took some radical thinking to posit a theological evolution.
Later, Rosen compares Ben Zakkai to a more reviled Jewish contemporary: Josephus. Josephus betrayed his own men in battle and surrendered to the Romans, to live a cushy, Judenfrei life above his peoples’ ashes. But he also gave the world to come an invaluable first-person account of the loss of Judea.
But how do descendants contextualize this history? Rosen doesn’t have to go back as far as 2,000 years to find tragedy when most of his family was murdered by fascists who saw themselves as Rome’s heir. And yet, part of his family survived the Holocaust in the US, in safety. “I find myself fearing that these two grandmothers cannot exist simultaneously in the same world, even though I am equally a product of both of them,” he writes. He wants to embrace his murdered grandmother’s reality without falling prey to the despair, and honor the freedom he shares with the grandmother who survived, without ignoring the realities of history and suffering.
The Talmud provides a gateway into grappling with these realities, as Rabbis and scholars have done for thousands of years. Rosen has time to impart a few stories from this gargantuan text, as well as stories about his own family, which would probably land better with a wider audience. The Jewish stuff is a fair bot of insider baseball.
Ergo, perhaps the best way for the gentile mind to understand the Talmud is through the Internet, as a “text” that increasingly feeds upon itself, growing with a myriad of new and recontextualized material. “It seems to me the challenge, and the trick, is to find wholeness among the infinite,” Rosen writes. “The Talmud helped Jews survive after the destruction of the Temple by making Jewish culture portable and personal. In the same way, there are elements in the inclusiveness of the Internet well suited to a world that is both more uprooted and more connected than ever before.” (Those two quotes are from two separate essays, but mashing seemingly disparate quotes together is also very Talmudic. :P)
A fun romp for the Jewishly inclined. I’m grappling with similar themes in my Jewish fantasy novel, and was certainly taken with some quotes. Very niche presentation, but there’s an audience.
January 12, 2020
In this short book Rosen muses on loss, renewal and connections. The connections between past and present, between people, between ideas. He focuses on the Talmud and the Internet as two mediums for connection. He likens a page of the Talmud to a website’s home page, both complete with links to other places in time and space.
November 22, 2008
I was delighted to happen upon this little volume which brings together my interests in two areas - Jewish philosophy and modern computer technology. This is a somewhat autobiographical memoir of a man who is Jewish, though not a rabbi or scholar. He's also a fairly amateurish user of the Internet (and the book is now somewhat dated, since it was published in 2000 and so much has happened in technology since then). But he meditates effectively on the relationship and similarities between the Talmud, the "holy book" of Judaism, and a webpage, giving some interesting insights into the applications of modern technology. He weaves into his essays many personal insights about his own ancestors (including those killed in the Holocaust), along with Jewish teachings and legends - the wisdom and martyrdom of Akiba, the mock funeral of Yochanan ben Zakkai, destruction and diaspora, the survival of the Western Wall, the Jew-turned-Roman-historian Josephus, etc. For me, this was a very satisfying collection of thought-provoking essays. But in computer lingo, YMMV.
November 22, 2012
A tip of the old hat to Keith Leverberg who expressed my thoughts almost exactly with his title of his Amozon review, although I judge Rosen a little less harshly. This book is carelessly constructed, with such screamers as, at page 130, "The Talmud that my wife and I study from together belonged to her grandfather, who immigrated to Palestine, thanks to the Balfour Declaration, in 1924, was wounded in the 1948 War of Independence and devoted the rest of his life to the study of Talmud." Or something like that. Read it with a grain of salt, and buy it at your peril.
February 14, 2013
A slim book but not necessarily a quick read. It's an elegant personal essay interspersed with musings about the chaos of the Internet and the Talmud-- and such chaos represents the creativity, dynamic growth, and inter-relatedness of human nature/human society. It made me want to adopt several of his Judaic philosophies about the boundless nature of learning, the unfazed mixture of the divine and the mundane, the embrace of messiness, uncertainty, and all the stuff that as a slightly type-A, abstract perfectionist , absolutely elude me.
July 6, 2009
An interesting meditation on the relationship between the internet and the Talmud, filtered through the death of the author's grandmother. Very enlightening for those not familiar with the ins and outs of the Talmud beyond the occasional Yom Kippur service. It's a short book and that may be its biggest flaw—I really wanted it to go deeper in the end, despite the author's effective matter of fact tone.
May 15, 2012
This is my second read of this truly amazing essay/reflection/memoir by Jonathan Rosen, a smart articulate thoughtful writer/editor in New York. The book is a tool, in itself, for navigating the hard questions about who we are, where we position ourselves and how we understand meaning, the sacred and the profane. I read this ten years ago and it was a great book, I read it this year and it was an even better book, I'll read it again in a decade and record my thoughts.
June 24, 2014
This book is a small gem. It's a beautiful meditation on Rosen's identity, Talmud, the internet and the bridge between the past and the present. Rosen has an easy and approachable style, and the book is chock full of insight that will appeal to all readers - even those with little interest in ancient Jewish texts or the web. As someone who spends a great deal of time thinking about what it means to be a cultural Jew, I found this book illuminating and thought-provoking. Highly recommend.
December 11, 2014
The Talmud and the messy Internet of 2001, when this book was written, are both conversations between many different people, across time and space, where one topic can lead to the next in the blink of an eye. Jonathan Rosen suggests that for people living in exile, both are, oddly enough, home. This slim book contains deep wisdom. Read my full review at http://dfischman.blogspot.com/2014/12....
November 14, 2011
This book has promise. It reads smoothly, yet smartly, like an extended New Yorker article. The authors points and personal touches are well formulated. Unfortunately, a number of his historical facts including dates are incorrect. I think that may be more of an editor issue, given the rest of the book though. Worth a read, but for religious or personal rather than for scholarly reasons.
August 25, 2012
The title is a bit misleading as it's not so much about the Talmud and the Internet specifically but about making sense of the contradictions in one's life. Beautifully written, I found myself drawn into the author's story of his life, his parents, grandparents and the histories he brings forward - messily, with conflict and contradictions.
August 31, 2013
اسمعي يا اسرائيل إلهنا واحد" (شمع يسرائيل أدوناي إلوهينا أدوناي أحد). اباناالذى فى السماء ليتقدس اسمك لتكن مشيئتك" إسمع صوتنا يا ربنا واشفق علينا وارحمنا واقبل برحمة ورضاء صلاتنا ومن بين يديك يا ملكنا لا تردّنا خائبين إذ أنت سامع صلوات كل فم دعاك سبحانك وتبارك اسمك يا سامع الصلوات ومجيب الدعاء
المجد فى الاعالى و على الأرض السلام و بالناس المسرة. #أمين
المجد فى الاعالى و على الأرض السلام و بالناس المسرة. #أمين
May 15, 2008
I really enjoyed this book. It's funny, easy to read, informative and raises some important questions. He captures a lot of beautiful if esoteric moments that somehow I think we can all relate to. Def. give this one a whirl!
April 9, 2009
This book is really well written and does a good job of weaving stories from the Talmud with the Author's own personal story. It illustrates the relevance of studying ancient texts in post-modern times and offers powerful insight into the human condition.
June 16, 2010
Although a great example of postmodern fiction and autoethnography, I found this book to just be kinda boring. Maybe it would have been better if I knew more about the Jewish religion but I guess it's too late now.
July 3, 2007
This is really awesome I think you would like it.
November 17, 2007
much better than you'd think from the title.
June 2, 2010
Really interesting look into a modern Jewish-American ethnography. A good, quick read that's really pleasant and gives you some good things to think about.
August 30, 2008
I loved this book. I really can't put a finger on why.
January 28, 2009
This is another one that I've read before and am just refreshing.
April 5, 2010
So good it makes me want to convert to Judaism!
February 28, 2012
a little bit hard to understand with the Jewish references, but interesting read. Probably wouldn't read again, a one time experience.
March 5, 2012
Pure post-modernism. When you become an established writer you can work out childhood issues in book form. Very similar style to In Bed with the Word.
February 13, 2018
A tiny treasure. Very thoughtful and meditative reflection on bridging worlds. Many quotable passages. A book to reread.
May 5, 2018
I assumed this would be an enormous book about the Talmud ON the Internet. No, it's a tiny, idiosyncratic, charming meditation on many contradictory pairs, in particular the Talmud and the Internet.
January 13, 2019
Pretty interesting little read, good thoughts to chew on
Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews