In reviewing any book titled The Talmud and the Internet, I figured it would only seem reasonable to go online in order to sample for myself some of the astounding array of scholarly 'and not so scholarly' articles and Talmudica Exotica which is readily to be discovered on the Internet. Here is a shamefully incomplete listing of only the very first 486 sites under the heading "The Talmud."

Gates to the Talmud: An interactive media project studied by several million people on a daily basis.

Talmud as Analyzed by the Catholic Encyclopedia

Talmud Torah.Org Network: Online Jewish information.

Talmudic University of Florida: Over 50 Kollel and Yishiva students, headed by Harav Yochanon Zweig in Miami Beach.

Talmud Tora: Basic Jewish Education, philosophy, biographies and a Torah chat room.

Talmud Tora Alfonson Helfson: If you need a menyan in Mexico, come to us.

The Talmud: A white supremacist group takes a harsh look at Jewish beliefs and practices.

A Page of Talmud: Description and layout of a traditional page of the Talmudic text.

Talmudic Exorcisms by Rabbis; the sages and their magic.

Talmudic Era and Jewish Mysticism

Talmudical Academy - Baltimore, MD

Daf Yomi Online Forum: For those studying in a seven year cycle.

Daf Yomi in Yiddish

The Talmud and the Perpetual Virginity of Mary

Web-Shas: An Alphabetical topical index to the Babylonian Talmud.
 

Trust me, my dear friends, everything you can imagine is on the net. In our case: Talmudica Exotica in abundance! It was only a little more than a year ago that I taught myself how to type, and how to boot up my Dell laptop. I still get overwhelmed by the technological challenge of it all.

What is second nature for our Cantor, is perplexing to me. He can do it all, but alas, is too impatient to teach one whose mind just doesn't get it even on the second or third try. It's far more tempting for my Cantor, friend, to just do it for me, than to show me how it's done.

Who could ever forget that day when he bet me he could access dirty pictures in cyberspace in less than ten seconds. And he did it! The possibility had never even entered my mind! A year later, I have that one down to four seconds!

But there are some wonderful usages for the computer, and as the author of The Talmud and the Internet, Jonathan Rosen, makes abundantly and poignantly obvious, perhaps the Talmud and the Internet do have their striking similarities. His book is an attempt, sometimes inspiringly clear and direct, but at others, somewhat unfocused and blurred, to mix ancient wisdom with modern technology. Here, in Rosen's own words, is his point of departure. He tells us -
 

This book began as an elegy for my grandmother, who died three years ago and who wasn't much interested in either the Talmud or the Internet. Nevertheless, her life and death evoked for me elements that reach back into the murky Talmudic past and forward into the elusive technological future.

In writing this book I realized that what interests me is learning to embrace contradictory forces: ancient tradition and contemporary chaos, doubt and faith, the living and the dead, tragedy and hope.

"Not long after my grandmother died, my computer crashed and I lost the journal I had kept of her dying."

If I cared enough about retrieving my journal, there were places I could send my ruined machine where the indelible imprint of my diary...could be skimmed off the hard drive and saved.

'All mankind is of one author and is one volume,' John Donne wrote in one of his most beautiful meditations. 'When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated.'

At his core, Rosen believes that there are deep similarities between these two. In the same way that the Talmud helped Jews survive after the destruction of the ancient Temple in 70 CE by making Jewish culture both personal and portable, so the all-inclusive Internet now serves a world that is ironically both more uprooted and yet more connected than ever before.

Jonathan Rosen wants to be sure that his readers are able to picture a page of Talmud, reminding us that each one of these pages centers on a few lines of Mishnah, the conversation conducted between the Rabbis for hundreds of years before it was codified around 200 CE.

Later Rabbis conversed about this Mishnah in what evolved over many hundreds of years and is known as the Gemarah. Rosen is impressed how ---

Rabbis who lived generations apart participate and give the appearance, both within those discrete passages as well as by juxtaposition on the page, of speaking directly to each other.

And what did all of this mean to the Jewish people? Well, it meant the difference between continuance and disappearance!

Says Rosen:

When the Jewish people lost their home (the land of Israel) and God lost His (the Temple), then a new way of being was devised and Jews became the people of the book and not the people of the Temple or the land.

Ah, but such is not the nature of real life is it. And Mr. Rosen is painfully aware of that. He is preoccupied with his departed grandmothers, their deaths, but even more so, the terms and nature of their lives. He meditates and broods aloud, comparing what from all outward appearance was the fortunate life of his American-born grandmother with that of his paternal, European-born grandmother who was murdered by the Nazis.

His grandmother's destruction, and that of the other six million of Europe's Jews, and of the disappearance of the European Jewish culture of over two thousand years, profoundly haunts and troubles Rosen, prompting his recourse to the Talmud and his fascination with the Internet. Near the close of his work Mr. Rosen confesses:

The promise of the Talmud, I suppose , is that is isn't a book -- it's a sort of drift net for catching God, stretching out through time and space in ever-widening spools, The fact that just about everything else swims into the net - legal questions and sartorial questions and culinary questions and agricultural questions and calendrical questions and epistemological questions... In that regard, the Talmud is a net for catching God but it ensnares men and women in the process...

It would be nice to think of the Internet as a similar act of communal collaboration,....It holds, like the Talmud, the promise of a book that is more than book.

Jonathan Rosen offers a brief but elegant meditation for any one of us who has ever hungered to reconcile the spiritual and the secular, the inherited past with the innovative present. And perhaps, his greatest service is to those of us, who on occasion, feel peculiarly torn and in-between. For Mr. Rosen shares the Rabbi's story of how Adam and Eve were really created outside of the Garden of Eden, and only placed by God into Paradise at the end of Creation. In other words, you see, when God drove them out of the Garden, they were in a sense returning to their true home which is exile. It is Eden which is alien soil.

And in that regard, perhaps nothing has really changed, for each one of us is still challenged with finding a home inside of exile, finding unity inside infinity, finding the self inside of a sea of competing voices. Such was ever the ancient challenge. And so it remains the modern one too.