Rebecca's Interview with Jonathan Rosen

Author of
The Talmud and the Internet

Rebecca :
In this day & age, when people who have no electricity, can carry cell telephones, tell me a little about embracing such contradictory forces as The Talmud & The Internet?

Jonathan :
I think it has always been hard to live an integrated life, long before technology became as advanced as it has. What is “natural” and what is “artificial” is a very complicated thing to figure out. Jews have been circumcising their sons for thousands of years - adding a human stamp to their created form. Tribes with almost no technology to speak of paint themselves, scarify themselves and reconfigure themselves to conform to an idea of who they are rather than accept their “natural” selves.

This is a roundabout way of saying we may have more of a distance to travel when bridging the religious, traditional world and the modern, technological world but living inside paradox is part of the human lot. Human invention, our own imaginations -- for better or worse -- have always been necessary in making us human.

I happen to be an avid birdwatcher. Birdwatching is really a twentieth century phenomenon because it requires the technology of binoculars, perfected during the First World War. I never feel so close to nature as when looking at a bird through binoculars - ironic, isn't it, that a twentieth century military technology draws me closer to the animal world? Why can't the Internet, like binoculars, draw me closer to a world that's hard to see - to other people, to information, to God?

Rebecca :
Our Poppa died at home, in peace near his beloved Buddy-dog, chipmunks & blue jays with us in service. It was a profound & passionate period for us all; knowing & yet not knowing. Like you, so many memories surfaced. For all that time I kept hearing William Shakespeare's words about Falstaff. In what ways did your perspectives change because of your grandmother's dying?

Jonathan :
My grandmother had lived so long and was so sturdy that I think I believed in some secret childish way that she had passed the point of death. She was nearly 95 and I sort of forgot that she could die. Her death was therefore the ultimate reminder of mortality. And I missed not only someone I loved but - and this is a far more selfish aspect of grief - someone who loved me simply because I had been born. There are very few such people in the world and they do not renew themselves. And I felt my responsibility shift - a bad word but I can't think of a better one. The debts I owed to the past - and to the future - became clearer to me. My book began as an elegy for my grandmother but it was written while my daughter was in the womb and became, in some way, a letter to her, a line between the past and the future.

Rebecca :
Being a war orphan with little genetic history to know about, I remember my adoptive father always becoming furious when the subject came up of all his relatives who would not get out of Germany in the 1930s. It wasn't until I found my way to the American Midwest & lived among the Jews there that I caught glimpses of the Holocaust & how it had demolished so many families. It was one of my great comforts to learn in that caring Jewish community about the connectedness to the passions & lives of ancestors. You often touch on how heavy is the burden of the past & how light it can be to carry. Would you explain that a little?

Jonathan :
There are days, I should begin by pointing out, when the past and all its sorrows is crushing. Just when I've molded it into a metaphorical, portable shape, I will see a picture of a little girl -- as alive as my daughter, her eyes as bright, her face as sweet and yearning, her parents as full of love and hope, and I know she was killed in the Holocaust. And I multiply her death by a million - the number of children the Nazis killed - and I know I can't assimilate the information or make sense of it. Language fails. And I am crushed. And I have to wonder if one can only assimilate the past by distorting it. That's why I limit myself to writing about my murdered grandmother, the one I never met, and try to fit her into the world of my American born grandmother. I wanted to create a space where these two women with their different lives - and different deaths - could live side by side, if only for the brief space of my book. But “live” is a metaphor, because one was murdered and both are now gone. And maybe “metaphor” is the answer to your question. Because untransformed reality IS too much to bear. Which takes me back to my first answer - we need imagination to survive.

Rebecca :
When you made those connections between one of your grandfathers' lives & that of Henry Adams it makes me re-think the life-spans & adventures of the parents of my childhood. How can we nurture that curiosity in our young who seem so disinterested in their parents' lives?

Jonathan :
I don't know the answer. But America is a place of self-invention and that often bleeds into self hatred. Parents who have erased their own past aren't likely to raise children curious about origins. But even as I say it I wonder if it's true - because the past is as hard to hide completely as it is to recover completely. It's like the spinning wheel in sleeping beauty, it usually is found.

Rebecca :
“...because the business of life is to learn, not to know...” Could you expand on that & how real is that today in our public education system? What have our children lost when they are not introduced to The Classics?

Jonathan :
Well, I'm sure you can tell from my book that I love the classics. My parents' library meant a great deal to me and there were many classics there. But I feel there is no ideal education, no single set of books. And the sense that knowledge is always incomplete seems to me a key element in true wisdom. But that goes out the window if kids aren't being taught anything at all. So once again I seek a balance.

Rebecca :
Anti-Semitism has been so acceptable down the ages, I remember my class reading Sir Walter Scott's “Ivanhoe” & listening to the comments of mistress & students when my namesake hove into view. It was a shock to hear the age-old stereotypes mouthed as if I were invisible, as if I agreed with them. It prompted me to write an essay in which I attacked the assumption that everyone would really rather be Male, Christian & English. It pushed my English mistress' envelope & most reluctantly she gave me a high mark. How do you cope with it when you come upon Jew-hating comments by your literary heroes?

Jonathan :
It is painful of course. But it is a two edged lesson for me: one is not to make an idol out of anyone, even a great writer, because humans are always flawed. But the other is not to reject everything because it is produced by imperfect people. It's how I feel about America - the ideals of the Declaration of Independence are greater than the flawed slave-holder who produced that document.

Rebecca :
Like your American Grandmother, I had a strange mixture of Jewish family life where we held Sabbath Dinners & lit the Menorah yet ceremonially decorated a tree in our dining room beneath which we secretly placed gifts. I was encouraged to sing in the London School Girls' Choir where I shone as Lead Alto in Handel's “Messiah”, as well as the Christmas Carol services at school. Is this, perhaps, the effort of an isolated people to become assimilated? To become citizens of the land in which we reside more than remaining outsider Jews?

Jonathan :
I don't know. It's maybe a little of everything. It's hard to be hated for so long without absorbing an aspect of that loathing. A lot of Jews wanted social acceptance but retained an inner sense of difference. For others it was practical. At the same time, Judaism is a fearless culture that assimilated elements into itself as much as it was assimilated by other cultures. And so much Christian culture is derived from Jewish culture that many Jews were reclaiming renounced bits of their own religion. I'm a believer more in individual stories more than generalizations. I feel myself drifting into sociology where I don't belong. Every question really deserves a story for an answer.

Rebecca :
Is there much humor in The Talmud? Rabbi Bag Bag's name suggest the possibility.

Jonathan :
There's humor - some of it intentional, some of it accidental. But it's too full a reflection of human life not to have humorous moments, particularly when the Rabbis' personalities start colliding. Which is not to say there's a lot of chuckling in a traditional Yeshiva.

Rebecca :
When Webmaster first took me out into cyberspace to show me the wondrous sites there, I was amazed & utterly lost. On pages 8 & 9 of your book you describe a page of The Talmud for those of us who have not only never seen this venerable tome, we wouldn't know what we were looking at if we had, do you think your knowledge of what the writings on those pages are about - the commentaries on commentaries - had helped you decipher a web page? Sorry for such a convoluted question!

Jonathan :
I've been told by people who know Talmud much better than me that their Talmudic expectations, the idea that everything is linked, the interrupting referrential style, makes visiting the Web natural. I'm not enough of a Talmud adept to pretend that I look at the world from an authentically Talmudical perspective. And yet I suppose I'm arguing that there's something in the culture I inherited that makes the fragmented world of the Web oddly comfortable. (Sorry for such a convoluted answer!)

Rebecca :
84, Charing Cross Road has ever been a favorite of mine - partly because I have wandered around those book stores on that very road during my student years. Partly because I emigrated to America & could look back to England & hear both sides of that story. The inexactness of quotations or titles for searching the Web has often been a stumbling block for me, have you since become more expert?

Jonathan :
Not really. I still stink at finding anything, either on my desk or on-line. Maybe that's why I elevate the search over the discovery.

Rebecca :
Your description of The Talmud as being a virtual home for an uprooted culture, fascinates me. I realize The Talmud is a series of books discussing various subjects, however, what language is it written in? Is an English translation available? Why was there a need to write all those laws about so many everyday activities & then to argue about them?

Jonathan :
The Talmud is written in Aramaic - the vernacular of the day, the language that Jesus spoke. It's a hard language for me - harder than Hebrew - but I remind myself that it was the vernacular, which is why it was used. It wasn't obscure and difficult at the time it was being spoken. This makes me feel more comfortable using my own language to look for God and to explore my religion.

There are several English translations available. The one I like is by Adin Steinsaltz - several volumes have been published by Random House. These include modern Hebrew translation but the bulk is in English. It retains much of the layout of a traditional page of Talmud but also has Steinsaltz's explanatory notes.

As for all those laws - I've always thought a lot of them had to do with the anxiety of exile - without the Temple and the mediating high priests, the Rabbis were afraid people would fall away from God. Those laws did hold Judaism together but I can't pretend they aren't a burden - even the Rabbis refer to them as a “yoke.” But the arguments in a sense imply that the laws are human creations as well as Divine and need argument to animate them and keep them relevant to the humans they're meant for. And of course the arguments are themselves a form of Jewish culture, as much as the laws -- an ongoing debate about what it means to live according to Divine expectations.

Rebecca :
I found the links between the profound history that took place at Lord Balfour's estate - your father being able to finish his childhood plucked from a world utterly destroyed - circles touching circles - the writing of the Balfour Declaration & your wife's family being freed to go to Palestine - circles touching circles - I find those links powerfully evocative of Cosmic energy at play. Gives me goosebumps, makes me humble.

Do you have anything new in the works?

Jonathan :
I'm writing a novel for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that is due next year and then I owe them another non-fiction book - about bird watching.

Rebecca :
Thank you, Jonathan Rosen, for your meditative, enriching & catholic(sic!) read. You certainly did take me on A Journey between Worlds. I learnt so much & now, like the links on a webpage, have places to go & sites to visit.

Jonathan :
Thank you for reading my book so intelligently and with such an open
heart as well - what more could a writer want?

Rebecca :
Do check out my review of The Talmud and the Internet.

Rebecca
(Published November 19)