A Journey of Great Questions and Great Souls

Shortly after Jonathan Rosen’s beloved grandmother died, his computer crashed and he lost the journal in which he had translated her final illness into words. With no copy of his writing on disc or paper, Rosen imagines his lost text as “what the Rabbis in the Talmud call a goses: a body between life and death, neither of heaven nor of earth.”

Unlike the death of a cherished human being, however, this loss is reversible. Through expensive technology, Rosen reclaims his journal. But when he reads his words at last, they are “paltry, sparse,” not at all what he believed he had rendered so eloquently.

“The Talmud and the Internet” is a lyrical meditation about the quest to illuminate what has come before us in order to live wisely. The intriguing correspondence Rosen uncovers between the ancient moral questions and replies, stories, fables, history and exegesis of the Talmud on the one hand and the Internet’s “world of unbounded curiosity, of argument and information” on the other allows him to make sense of loss, to understand what can be retrieved of the past and what must remain unknowable.

For Rosen also had a grandmother he never met, his father’s mother, who was murdered in the Shoah. He has glimpsed her in a single photograph, the “before” of his father’s ruptured life.

The American grandmother who died in her 90s and the Old World grandmother shot half a century ago are the seemingly fixed points between which Rosen shuttles, trying to reconcile the two lives, trying to accept the irreconcilable histories that shaped him.

Like the Talmud, Rosen’s narrative accrues its vitality by the juxtaposition of apparently unrelated subjects: his pastrami-loving grandmother and John Donne on the Internet; the Chartres Cathedral and a destroyed Frankfurt synagogue “reconstructed” in cyberspace. The leaps are exhilarating, but the book gains its tantalizing power in the interstices. The white spaces within each of the six contemplative chapters invite us to enter the conversation Rosen conducts with himself, his ancestors and the literatures of Judaism and the West.

Rosen is fascinated by a paradox of Jewish history: With the destruction of the Second Temple and the ensuing exile from their land, Jews lost their geography but survived by making a virtual place of their texts. The embodied people became a dispersed people of the book, “the flesh become word.” In intriguing sympathy, Rosen is negotiating his own paradoxes. He wants to retrieve a venerable tradition in order to embrace uncertainty more knowledgeably; to choose continuity over cataclysm but retain the prospect of future catastrophe; “to make each fragment [of the past] feel whole” while recognizing exile as the human condition, a “true home.”

As I turned the pages, I began, like the rabbis of old, to argue. For centuries, the Jews longed for Zion. Now I longed to hear Rosen apply his metaphysics to the physical return that the state of Israel represents. It is, of course, a salvation still awaiting redemption--like all imperfect human enterprise--but one whose establishment only a decade earlier than 1948 would have saved his relatives, and mine.

But Rosen’s sense of displacement cannot be displaced. Even the literal return of Zionism “couldn’t erase the inner shadow of Diaspora.” To find a home within exile is the purpose of his investigation. The “sea of the Talmud,” its nonlinear debates between rabbis who lived centuries apart, and the “loose, associative logic of the Internet” mirror disruption in “a kind of disjointed harmony.”

“I have always loved the story,” said Rosen, “of the rabbi who in one pocket kept a piece of paper on which he wrote the words ‘dust and ashes.’ In the other pocket he kept a piece of paper on which he had written the words ‘a little below the angels.’ Every day he would take these two slips of paper from his pocket, read them and contemplate the fate of man.”

Ultimately, “The Talmud and the Internet” is a journey, not only between worlds but among the great questions and the great souls who have considered life’s purposes amid often horrifying evidence: the dead who cry out ceaselessly, “Remember me.” Appropriately, our guide is a person who, as a child, was capable of formulating such questions as: “Would you rather be drowned or burned alive?”

It is better not to be born, the rabbis of the Talmud respond, but now that we are here, “the world is a wedding.” Rosen ends his stirring book with the forthcoming birth of his daughter, a body not between life and death but between imminent life and life, a child who will be given, in Jewish custom, his grandmother’s name, flesh and word reconciled.

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Nessa Rapoport is writing “House on the River,” a memoir of family and place.