I’ve never much liked the title of my book “The Talmud and the Internet” — written, to my amazement,
10 years ago — because I always think of it as essentially about my two grandmothers, neither of whom studied Talmud or knew anything of the Internet.
But I did want to suggest two unlikely things yoked together, perhaps in the manner of a Talmudic point and counterpoint, which is in fact how I saw my grandmothers.
One I knew well — she was born in New York and had a long and prosperous American life. The other was murdered in Europe and was always just a ghost to me. One spoke of lucky American exceptionalism, the other of ineluctable European tragedy.
How, I thought, could I ever write in one place about these two women, who seemed like matter and anti-matter, embodying opposite realities and pointing to metaphysically opposed conclusions about the nature of Jewish life?
I wanted to build a house in which both of these women could live together — I am, after all, heir to both their worlds. And a book is like a house.
Around this time my wife and I had a little Talmud study group with friends, and it was borne home to me, not for the first time, that one of the marvels of the Talmud is that it is pretty much a container for, well, everything.
The Talmud even says this about itself: “Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it.” These are the words of Ben Bag Bag, a sage not known for much else, but that’s as fine a formulation as one is likely to find.
I remember in college Harold Bloom, the great literary critic, writing that quotation on the board the first day he taught about Freud. This, he said, was Freud’s idea of the unconscious — a sort of secular mysticism that implied the answers are all there, if you know how and where to look.
It was exhilarating because it spoke to the dream that even in our modern, fragmented state, wholeness is still possible. Even Freud believed there existed a realm where all the answers live. But the Talmud wasn’t a secularized version of this but the great original.
I’d always been taught that the Talmud is what saved Jews from simply disappearing after the destruction of the Second Temple, when God and the Jewish people lost their bricks-and-mortar world, as the business analysts call it. For most vanquished peoples, you can’t take it with you, but Jews, it seemed, could.
We carried words, and a culture of words, into the death of exile, and these words allowed us to avoid death, to make a rough translation of ourselves from one way of life — rooted in the land, and the blood and fire of Temple sacrifice — into another way entirely.
These packed-up words became the Talmud, codified around 500, a shared body of knowledge that linked Jews to each other, no matter where they were, and to God.
Somehow, though — and here perhaps the ghost of my murdered grandmother was whispering to me — I felt what a great sadness the Talmud represented, along with the glory of survival. The unifying physical world had been destroyed, and however small and friable and particular and tribal that world might seem today, filtered through all those ages of exile, it was, like the body of a loved one, not translatable or replaceable.
Indeed the immediate impetus for my writing “The Talmud and the Internet” was the death of my grandmother and the simultaneous crashing of my computer on which I’d kept a record of her dying.
I was desperate to get my words back but when I did, at great expense, retrieve them, I felt abashed — not only at the poverty of my words but at the shallowness of the notion that words are in fact a consolation in the face of lost life. And this was the grandmother whose life I had turned, rather simplistically and artificially, into an emblem of lucky American exceptionalism, when in fact I came to learn her life, like all lives, was mottled with loss.
How much more bottomless the loss represented by my murdered grandmother, whose death was part of a destruction as cosmically great as the destruction of the Temple. And yet I also came to learn that her life had, before her death, had its share of joy.
All these thoughts filtered into my thinking about the Talmud, that semi-virtual world that took the place of a Jewish homeland. Here was a world of study and disputation that was both an emblem of survival and a symbol of loss all at the same time. And these thoughts leaked into my thinking about the Internet, which, 10 years ago, was already dominating communication and culture.
Globalization and dislocation are flipsides of the same coin, and the Internet was the currency of those transformations, a tool to make you feel everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Where else but in exile do you need a home page?
The Talmud began life as the Oral Law — whispered, the sages tell us, in the ear of Moses as he was handed the written Torah. The Oral Law was intended to be just that: oral. But after the Roman destruction, the air was no longer a safe place to keep words. And so the Oral Law was written down in the aftermath of exile. But a book was not really a safe place either.
The Talmud was a book and not a book. This was one of the things that intrigued me about it. It did not view itself as an end in itself, which really ought to be true for all writing.
Writers know better than anybody else how dangerously close books come to being graves. One of my favorite quotations comes from Walt Whitman in “Democratic Vistas”: “Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That were to make a nation of supple and athletic minds, well-train’d, intuitive, used to depend on themselves, and not on a few coteries of writers.” Whitman was envisioning the ideal American reader, but I think the Talmud could make the same claim.
Part of the appeal of the Talmud, as well as one of its great frustrations to me with my dreadful skills, was that nothing in it is whole in itself. A few lines of commentary, a few lines of commentary on the commentary, a few lines of commentary on that, a cross reference to the written law, a little Rashi — everything is a text box, a doorway, a hyperlink.
There are more differences than similarities between the Talmud and the Internet. But I was never trying to harmonize our modern fragmentary culture, losing its grip on the printed world and groping in its own way for wholeness among the fragments, with the world that produced the Talmud.
My book was always about the differences as much as the similarities, and undoubtedly the differences are greater now, 10 years later, with instantaneous communication twittering into every fiber of our collective consciousness, with sustained thought more easily drummed out by mere verbiage than ever, with the amplification of evil or mendacity by a handful ever more technologically simple.
Unlike the Talmud, the Internet has no editor, no shaping consciousness; it has no moral center. And yet it still seems the fit emanation of a culture that values multiplicity. And perhaps the ever-widening notion that the world is an intimate, interactive conversation that knows no time or space constraints has also made the relationship between the Talmud and the Internet closer as well as farther apart.
I was always stirred by the Talmud’s continually eschewing the notion that one could ever master the welter of words that a culture of commentary continually spawned.
I continue to find inspiring, in both the Talmud and the Internet, the world of unlikely joinings, the implicit recognition that there is not always a synthesis but sometimes just juxtaposition and that seemingly opposite things can live side by side.
How else can we be numerous as the stars and a scattered remnant? Blessed, chosen — and also derided, imperiled and wounded almost beyond recognition? People of the book and an embodied flesh-and-blood nation? Masters of diaspora and people who, without our land, are nothing?
Those contradictions bring me back to where I began 10 years ago; with a simple wish to allow two women, with radically different lives, to live somehow side by side, if only in a book.
Jonathan Rosen edits the Jewish Encounters series published by Nextbook/Schocken. His most recent book is The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature (Picador).
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