The Talmud and the Internet
A Journey between Worlds
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- 105,00 kr
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- 105,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
"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.
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.
