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| The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey between Worlds | 
| Author: Jonathan Rosen
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: $12.00
Buy New: $4.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  20 reviews
Sales Rank: 575166
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 144
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5 x 0.3
ISBN: 031242017X
Dewey Decimal Number: 296.1206
EAN: 9780312420178
ASIN: 031242017X
Publication Date: September 15, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Ships immediately! Perfect and New! Has a publisher remainder mark. 2001 Paperback.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
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
Product Description
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.
Download Description
"Not long after my grandmother died, my computer crashed and I lost the journal I had kept of her dying". So begins this powerful, personal consideration of modern technology and ancient religious impulses by the celebrated young novelist, essayist, and culture editor of the Forward. Jonathan Rosen blends religious history, memoir, and literary reflection as he compares the fortunate life of his American-born grandmother to the life of his European-born grandmother who was murdered by Nazis. The Talmud and the Internet explores the contradictions of Rosen's inheritance and toggles between personal paradoxes and those of the larger world. Along the way, he chronicles the remarkable parallels between a page of Talmud and the home page of a Web site. In the loose, associative logic and the vastness of each, he discovers not merely the disruption of a broken world but a kind of disjointed harmony. In the same way that the Talmud helped Jews survive after the destruction of the Temple by making Jewish culture portable and personal, the all-inclusive Internet serves a world that is both more uprooted and more connected than ever before. In this profound, ultimately hopeful meditation, Rosen charts the territory between doubt and belief, tragedy and prosperity, the world of the living and the world of the dead.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 15 more reviews...
 Everything is hyperlinked May 20, 2008
A short, pleasing essay on the different strands that inform our lives, which we weave into our consciousness. Rosen speaks often of personal things, but stays more on the philosophical level in his overall writing. The reader comes away knowing more about his analytical tendencies than his own history.
I agree with the author that the Internet is a powerful metaphor for the interconnectedness of life. The Talmud, in its turn, may indeed be the original "hyperlinked" document, and I smile in wonder at the thought of trying to bring the full complexity of life to a sheaf of written pages, as (I hear) the Talmud aspires to do. In these days, can we all create our own Talmuds from the Internet, interconnected references to explain our lives? But if they are all individual, then what culture remains in common? Rosen addresses these questions briefly and with grace.
More Talmud please. February 22, 2007
Mr. Rosen's book has little to do with the internet and only a bit more to do with the talmud, but is an excellent discussion of his own philosophy. I found his ideas interesting and often provocative. It would be a better book if Rosen had drawn more from the vast treasure of stories, ideas, arguments and discussions from the talmud and less on his personal life.
 a Talmud for the rest of us January 4, 2005
No, Rosen is not really trying to explain the Talmud to us Gentiles, and he would only deserve a grade of "C+" if this were his meager attempt to demonstrate some heuristic connection between the Talmud and the Internet. Fortunately, neither is the case here. Rosen is grappling with the same angst, sadness, and threatening unsettledness that all of us encounter with that first realization of finitude when confronted with the loss of a close friend or family member. His descriptions of these first-time feelings and fears are vivid and grounded in real life everyday people, places, and things. The outside possibility of lost hope in all our lives is material enough for a genuine horror story. Fortunately, the book is short, the reading is easy, and the ending is worth waiting for. Rosen makes magnificent use of the Talmud and the Internet to weave a tale that can't help but touch the most hardened heart - even a techno-challenged Gentile like myself!
 A thought provoking essay- memoir December 15, 2004
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a very thought -provoking essay-memoir. Rosen connects Talmud and Internet as ways of reading hypertext, of skipping back and forth, of placing commentary against commentary, of finding diverse worlds in the text. This comparison on one level works while on a deeper one does not. The Internet is easy and children can manage to work on it. Talmudic Study is extremely difficult, tremendously challenging intellectually, requires a very practiced and sharp mind. I learn in a Daf Yomi shiur in which we study each day one page of the Talmudic text. I find tremendous difficulty in even understanding what is going on, much less contributing meaningfully to the discussion. I use the Internet all the time, without much difficulty. I read articles on all kinds of subjects and find understanding no great problem.
Rosen uses his comparison as many Amazon reviewers pointed out to help him get into and tell his own family story. He does this in a moving and interesting way. On this level the book truly works. Also his interest in Judaism and knowledge of it is considerable .The problem is he taking the Internet as model tends to use one historical stage of Jewish existence the stage of exile and wandering as Ideal. This is of course in total contradiction with the Tradition itself, whose ideal is not scattering but rather ingathering. Return to Israel, Ingathering, fulfilling the Biblical Covenant are the Ideals Jews held through the centuries and those given in the Tradition. Rosen's private definition of Jewish being everywhere and nowhere at once connects with other such historical definitions such as Neitzsche's about Jews being ' the first Europeans'. But it does not really speak to the Tradition.
Another point about the Internet. The Internet enables everyone in the world to say anything they want to say. This is in one sense a miracle and a great realization of human dreams. On the other hand it enables the worst elements - the Evil, the Haters,
the Jihadists, Nazis,- all those who diminish our Humanity to have their say. The Talmud on the other hand is a religious text sanctified in its learning. The moral difference between the two kinds of text and activity is night and day. And here I should make the point that the Internet too can and is used for noble purposes. However so far as I know it is not primarily a sacred text.
Again this is a thought - provoking and interesting work. Very highly recommended.
 Void and Unformed April 27, 2004
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
A tip of the old hat to Keith Leverberg who expressed my thoughts almost exactly with his title, 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.
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