Rosen - The talmud and the internet: a journey between worlds
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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 Rosens 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.
Rosen: author's other books
Who wrote The talmud and the internet: a journey between worlds? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Steinsaltz Adin
Solomon
Mayzlish Saul Charney Leon
Barry Scott Wimpfheimer
Eisenberg
Moulie Vidas
Norman Solomon
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Table of Contents
Even a short book accumulates large debts. Had it not been for the persistence and editorial enthusiasm of Anne Fadiman, the first chapter of this book, first published in The American Scholar, would not have been written. Jonathan Galassi, my splendid editor, allowed that essay to become a book. Sarah Chalfantagent, friend and readerhelped, as always, in every imaginable way.
David Kraemer, my Talmud teacher when I was a teenager and now my friend, read the manuscript with a scholars eye and a friends generosity. Other friends made invaluable contributions as well: Stephen Dubner improved this book with his suggestions; Ellen Binder was generous with her time and talent; Cindy Spiegel and Robert Weil were enthusiastic supporters from the beginning.
Leslie Brisman taught me that Milton knew Hebrew, and changed my thinking forever.
Seth Lipsky, creator of the English-language Forward , gave me a home there and a great deal more.
My family, by birth and by marriage, has encouraged me in countless ways.
Finally, Mychal Springermy wife and hevrutahas inspired me with her love and learning more than words can say.
Eves Apple
Turn it and turn it for everything is in it
Babylonian Talmud
N ot long after my grandmother died, my computer crashed and I lost the journal I had kept of her dying. Id made diskette copies of everything else on my computermany 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 songsEmbraceable You and Our Love Is Here to Staythat she could no longer hear but that we sang toher 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. Id thought of that passage when my grandmother died and had tried to find it in my old college edition of Donne, but I couldnt, so Id settled for the harsher comforts of Psalm 121more appropriate for my grandmother in any case. But Donnes 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 Gods 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 Donnes words, and I decided that, as soon as I had the chance, I would find the passage on the Internet. I hadnt 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 Donnes heaven.
There was another passage I wished to findnot on the Internet but in the Talmud, which, like the Internet, I also think of as being a kind of terrestrial version of Donnes divine library, a place where everything exists, if only one knows how and where to look. Id 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 medespite her living will and the hopelessness of her situationand I tried to recall the conversation the Rabbis had about the ways one canand cannotallow 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.
The story, suggesting the virtue of letting the dead depart, was comforting to me, even though I know that the Talmud is ultimately inconclusive on end-of-life issues, offering, as it always does, a number of arguments and counterarguments, stories and counterstories. Not to mention the fact that the Talmud was finalized in the early sixth century, long before certain technological innovationscomplicated questions of life and death. I also wasnt sure I was remembering the story correctly. Was I retelling the story in a way that offered me comfort but distorted the original intent? I am far from being an accomplished Talmud student and did not trust my skills or memory. But for all that, I took enormous consolation in recalling that the Rabbis had in fact discussed the matter.
Turn it and turn it for everything is in it, a Talmudic sage famously declared. The sage, with the improbable name of Ben Bag Bag, is quoted only once in the entire Talmud, but his words have a mythic resonance. Like the Greek Ouroborosthe snake who swallows its own tailBen Bag Bags words appear in the Talmud and refer to the Talmud, a self-swallowing observation that seems to bear out the truth of the sages observation. The Talmud is a book and is not a book, and the Rabbis phrase flexibly found its way into it because, oral and written both, the Talmud reached out and drew into itself the world around it, even as it declared itself the unchanging word of God.
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