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.


From Library Journal
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.


From The Industry Standard
Internet culture is not a pretty thing. It is the dominion of Drudge Reports, Jennycams and assorted other embarrassments; a medium in which every idea, image and opinion is equally valid - thus equally worthless - and nothing means anything except in relation to something else. So many of us find it more heartening - and practical - to think of the Internet in terms of software design, network access or venture capital.Jonathan Rosen, the former culture editor for Jewish weekly the Forward, takes a different tack in The Talmud and the Internet. He attempts to make sense of Internet culture by applying a sweeping metaphor. The result is a spry 130-page meditation that uses the fragmented world represented in the Talmud to demonstrate the Internet's paradoxical potential for wholeness.The Talmud is a sprawling text that addresses every aspect of Jewish life: from dietary laws to animal husbandry to what God and Moses really talked about on Mount Sinai. It began as an oral tradition and was first transcribed during the Roman era, but the rabbis continued inserting commentary through medieval times. In the process, God was transplanted from a stationary home of bricks and blood sacrifices - the Temple - to a portable, "virtual" home with a shifting architecture of words, thought and prayer - the Talmud.The Internet has numerous parallels to the Talmud. Both are the products of countless contributors, both aspire to be perfectly encyclopedic and both express their wisdom in an ad hoc web of references to other authorities (the Hebrew word for a passage from the Talmud means "webbing"). They even use similar visual strategies to represent the simultaneity of their voices. A page of the Talmud resembles a Web page, explains Rosen, in that "nothing is whole in itself. ... Icons and text boxes are doorways through which visitors pass into an infinity of cross-referenced texts and conversations." Rabbis who lived centuries apart appear on the same page, conversing across time, commingling with Biblical excerpts, parables and bits of history.Somewhere near the roots of modern Western culture lies the belief that there are unbridgeable gaps between religious and secular, sacred and profane. Rosen counters that the Internet's gaudy melange of politics, porn, commerce and soap-box-preacher nuttiness suggests that everything is part of the same graceless totality. Jesus insisted on an either/or when he booted the money-changers from the Temple, but the Talmud, like the Internet, "talk[s] about God one moment, sex the next and commerce the third."Far from "a broken-down state of affairs," this strikes Rosen as "astonishingly human and therefore astonishingly whole." By relating absolutely every idea from all possible angles, without passing final judgment on correct or incorrect, relevant or irrelevant, the Internet and the Talmud each invest their shattered, centerless cultures with a kind of mosaic unity. The Internet, like the Talmud, becomes "not merely a mirror of the disruptions of a broken world," but something that "offers a kind of disjointed harmony." No matter how ridiculous or vulgar the parts, the whole cannot help but make sense.Connecting all of this is Rosen's conviction that the "Jewish condition" - institutionalized exile, inherent uncertainty, fragmented memory - is itself a metaphor for the alienation and hope of contemporary culture. While this is not a novel argument, Rosen takes up the mantle with wit, smarts and conviction, and by applying it to the Internet he shows that the piecemeal culture we describe (and deride) as postmodern is neither as unprecedented nor as tragic as we often believe.Hal Cohen is a contributing writer for Lingua Franca.


Nessa Rapoport, The Los Angeles Times
"A lyrical meditation about the quest to illuminate what has come before us. . . . [A] stirring book."


From Booklist
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


From Kirkus Reviews
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.


Jim Crace
"Wisdom, intelligence and tenderness, all in one short volume. Brilliant!"


Review
“Rosen’s wise and heartfelt book is a home page with links to infinity.” —Anne Fadiman, author of Ex Libris

“The Talmud and the Internet is a lyrical meditation about the quest to illuminate what has come before us in order to live wisely...(it) is a journey, not only between two worlds but among the great questions and the great souls who have considered life’s purposes amid often horrifying evidence.”—Nessa Rapoport, Los Angeles Times

“We are moved and enlightened...Others have raised the felt contradictions between the tragic and luminous Jewish heritage and the ahistorical comforts and complacencies of American life. Few have managed to do so with such a mix of the searching, the modest and...with such charm.”—Richard Eder, The New York Times

FROM OUR EDITORS

Our Review
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.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Talmud and the Internet, in which Jonathan Rosen examines the contradictions of his inheritance as a modern American and a Jew, is a moving and exhilarating meditation on modern technology and ancient religious impulses. Blending memoir, religious history and literary reflection Rosen explores the remarkable parallels between a page of Talmud and the homepage of a web site, and reflects on the contrasting lives and deaths of his American and European grandmothers.

FROM THE CRITICS

Jim Crace

Wisdom, intelligence and tenderness, all in one short volume. Brilliant!

Nessa Rapoport

The Talmud and the Internet is a lyrical meditation about the quest to illuminate what has come before us in order to live wisely...[it] is a journey not only between two worlds but among the great questions and the great souls who have considered life's purposes amid often horrifying evidence.

Frank Kermode

Reading and re-reading Rosen's little book I found myself thinking, to my own surprise, of E.M. Forster....All through this humane and gentle book one is reminded of the famous epigraph of Forster's Howard's End: "Only connect." Connecting is a practice encouraged by both the Talmud and Internet, and by Jonathan Rosen as well.

Richard Eder

We are moved and enlightened...Others have raised the felt contradictions between the tragic and luminous Jewish heritage and the ahistorical comforts and complacencies of American life. Few have managed to do so with such a mix of the searching, the modest and...with such charm.

Publishers Weekly