The Talmud and the Internet
   Jonathan Rosen
  2000 Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY USA
   ISBN: 0374272387


A Journey between Worlds is a powerful personal consideration of modern technology & ancient religious experiences. A memoir & a hymn in praise of grandparents & the portable Jewish culture.

The Talmud and the Internet is all about nothing ever being lost & about losing The Temple in the War against the Roman Empire; about Rabbinic stories & Internet sites; marriage & death; about connections to the past & thinking of the future.

The Talmud and the Internet is an astonishing read. It is the stories that make up Jonathan Rosen & his beloved wife. It starts out as his maternal American grandmother, a sturdy 95 year old, suddenly dies & how, soon afterwards when his computer crashes, the journal he had been keeping is lost. It ends up with the author pondering on the heritage which his soon-to-born daughter will inherit.

In between, this thin little book travels far back to the Destruction of the Second Temple & Flavius Josephus' record of that time. About a rabbi who chose life rather than death. About the author's other grandmother who was murdered by the Nazis & her son, his father, who was rescued.

About the writings of Henry Adams &, in true Yeshiva style, Jonathan Rosen's desire to argue with some of what that anti-Semitic writer wrote. It is about finding a site on the Web about Kristallnacht & the Balfour Declaration which was written, in part, on the same estate, decades before, where his father had finished his childhood before coming to America.

The Talmud and the Internet is all about balance in this time of technological marvels & everyday incongruities. About the search more than the discovery; about learning rather than knowing; about a personal conversation with God as well as lively discussions about living with Divine expectations.

This is an amazing read, certainly a keeper & a super idea for a gift!

Also from Jonathan Rosen: Eve's Apple

Do check out my fascinating Interview with Jonathan Rosen, I think you'll like it!
(11/19/00)

Rebecca