Discovering the Symmetry of the Talmud and Internet

On a recent Friday afternoon, Jonathan Rosen’s Upper West Side apartment seems the most secular place in the world. In the kitchen, his 10 1/2-month-old daughter, Ariella, occupies a highchair, gumming strips of chicken. High up on a bookshelf, sandwiched between hardcovers by Saul Bellow, E.L. Doctorow and Isaac Bashevis Singer, stands a Michael Jordan nesting doll; across the room sits a Bruce Springsteen box set.

As the gray Manhattan daylight fades to evening, however, the atmosphere in Rosen’s home subtly changes, growing more focused, more pronounced. First, the 37-year-old author dons a yarmulke as his wife, Mychal Springer, a conservative rabbi, lights three candles and recites a brucha, marking the onset of Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, which begins at sunset Friday night.

Then, the couple says a blessing for their daughter before Springer puts her to bed. When she returns, it is to offer another set of prayers, including the motze, a blessing of the bread, which ends with her cutting pieces of challah bread and passing them around. After a minute of silent reflection, Rosen and Springer begin to eat.

Such a ritual is both intensely private and profoundly collective, private in the sense that it takes place in the intimacy of home and family, and collective because there are many Jews across the diaspora spending their Friday evenings in precisely the same way. More to the point, it’s a perfect metaphor for one of the central issues facing society, which is how to reconcile the traditional and the modern, the spiritual and the secular, in a way that makes sense in the contemporary world.

Such a conundrum resides at the heart of Rosen’s second book, “The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a personal meditation on the essence of meaning, and the basic human need to impose order on the chaos of the universe.

Inspired by the death of his maternal grandmother, and the inability of memory or language to restore her, Rosen seeks in “The Talmud and the Internet” a different type of connection, one that, paradoxically, finds wholeness in the fragmentary nature of experience by recognizing that, no matter how much information we gather, we are always operating in the dark.

If, at first glance, the Talmud and the Internet seem somehow incompatible--one representing the accumulated force of history, the other the eternal present of the modern world--there is, Rosen believes, more than a little symmetry between them, starting with their endless loops of self-reference, of commentary layered upon commentary with neither a recognizable beginning nor end. “The larger theme of the book,” he says, “is that we live in a broken world, but because we know it’s been broken for so long, this doesn’t necessarily spell disaster for us. It just means that we have to learn how to accommodate ourselves.”

Even so, Rosen acknowledges, “I’m not trying to harmonize the Talmud and the Internet. I’m just trying to frame them as a poetic paradigm for what I live inside of. The pull of something ancient, and bound up with faith, and the pull of the modern world we live in. I’ve not mastered either, but I wanted to situate myself inside of them.”

When Rosen talks about being situated in both the Talmud and the Internet, he’s really referring to the territory of imagination, an inner landscape where all the polarities of ancient and contemporary co-exist. That’s a hallmark of modern (or postmodern) living, the impetus to make it up for ourselves, and, surely, it’s a defining ethos of the Internet, with its insistence that everyone has a voice.

Yet if Rosen alternately celebrates and questions this--”the Web may well perpetuate the culture of democracy,” he argues, “but I can’t emphasize enough that, unlike the Talmud, it has no moral center, it has no shaping intelligence, and it is not trying to explain the word of God to man”--in the end, he sees the Internet as an open doorway leading back to the world.

In one of the book’s most vivid sequences, Rosen visits a Web site at which a German architecture professor means to re-create the synagogues destroyed on Kristallnacht. When Rosen hits the link, he is disappointed by the flatness of the images, their “dead blues and lipstick reds and cyber greens,” as well as their detachment from real life.

Still, the experience returns him to the imagination, as he moves within the book from the site to a discussion of his father’s escape from Austria after Kristallnacht, then tells us that, half a century later, his wedding took place on the anniversary of that infamous night. As with any line of thought, there’s a certain fluidity to these connections, but that only heightens their congruity, by highlighting the activity of a shaping mind.

“For me,” Rosen says, “the book is really a series of oppositions. But I also wanted to fashion a book that had literary unity. I wanted my book to feel whole and shaped at the same time that I was celebrating the disruptions of the modern world.”

On some level, of course, the balancing act between unity and dislocation is quintessentially Jewish. “It’s not an either/or culture,” Rosen notes, “but one in which conversation and dialogue and disagreement are a healthy part of how you live.” Partly, that’s a matter of historical necessity; in the wake of centuries of persecution, Judaism became a portable religion. Still, while it’s compelling, Rosen says, “that Jews packed their culture into books and took it with them, I’m always reminded that it’s not sufficient. I think there’s a real sadness at the root of it, which is that Jews were forced to live inside books because they lost their actual homes.”

Interestingly, this may be slowly changing; over the past decade, as culture editor of the Jewish weekly the Forward (he left the paper earlier this year), Rosen witnessed firsthand what he calls a shift in American Jewry, from a culture of immigrants eager for assimilation to a society of Americans looking for a way home. “You used to become American,” he explains, “by submerging your religious particularity or your ethnic identity. But [embracing that is] now a way to be American. It isn’t a melting pot anymore.”

Because of this, many American Jews now live in quiet contrast to their parents and grandparents, undertaking a kind of immigration in reverse. “There are people,” Rosen observes, “who are happily assimilated into American general culture. At the same time, they’re like immigrants, wandering around lost inside of Judaism, and making the journey back. By reclaiming their Jewishness, they’re not abandoning their Americanness. On the contrary, they are asserting something that is great about America, which is that it is made up of people of many cultures.”

In that regard, Rosen stresses, “The Talmud and the Internet” is less a Jewish than an American book, even one that’s fundamentally human in its concerns. Certainly, its themes are universal, an idea Rosen makes explicit by invoking a wide array of personalities, from Flavius Josephus, the ancient historian who resolved his own dispute between the secular and the spiritual by trading in his Judaism to sign on with the Romans, to 19th century writer Henry Adams, whose failure to reconcile faith and technology in his “The Dynamo and the Virgin” becomes an uneasy symbol of its own.

Among Rosen’s intentions here, in fact, is to engage Adams in “a little intergenerational disputation,” Talmud-style, over his inability to merge these opposing principles. “Even though he was a terrible anti-Semite, I feel that if he’d known about the Talmud, it might have liberated his thinking because the Talmudic rabbis were deeply concerned with what was then the modern world.”

Ultimately, it is this quality of engagement that defines for Rosen the interplay between spirit and substance, informing his inquiry into both the Talmudic and electronic worlds. The dynamic is played out even here, at the Sabbath table, as Rosen and Springer engage in familiar domestic conversation, discussing the day, or fretting at their daughter’s teething, while remaining simultaneously enfolded in the Shabbat ritual, with its air of contemplation, like a caesura in the midst of busy lives.

What such a moment offers is another example of the balance between tradition and daily living, which is, in turn, Rosen’s impetus for writing, or, for that matter, having a child. “ ‘The Talmud and the Internet,’ ” he says, “is a sort of gift, or a letter, to my daughter, who was in the womb while I was writing. It begins with the death of my grandmother, and it ends anticipating Ariella’s birth. In a sense, there’s this primitive act of faith you have to bring somebody new into the world. It’s a great act of optimism in the aftermath of the destruction of European Jewry, which my father narrowly escaped. That’s not to say she can redeem all his suffering, but she is a piece of the continuing world.”