The Talmud and the Internet
Oct. 17th, 2004 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
awhyzipI am sitting here at home in Northampton. I am accidentally here; I was meant to be in Cambridge teaching right now, or else still at the Retreat, doing I don't know what with my Havurah. But, I am at home and I just finished reading a book by Jonathan Rosen: The Talmud and the Internet. The book is about 130 pages long. It is light in the hand and small sized. The cover illustration has as a backdrop a reproduced page of talmud, smudged just enough that you can see the words but don't read them. In the book, the author muses about his place as inheritor of two cultures, both Jewish, one American, and one Holocaust European. He reflects on the stories of his grandparents, of his literary heros, and of Talmudic sages. Rosen writes that this book began as an elegy for his grandmother. As I read the book, I could listen to him explore issues that are important to him, issues that are also important to me and on my mind. There was no sense of a finalized argument being put forth; this was not a monograph. There were some passages, where the voice I was reading on the page could easily have been mine, rolling forth from my mind as if I had thought the words directly to paper for the next paragraph.
Rosen is clearly an educated Jew, familiar with Jewish sources as well as modern liberal higher education. The respect he expresses for the traditional texts of our people parallels mine. Neither of us live in the halakic, traditionalist, world, nor do we want to, but our modern lives naturally are and must be informed by Jewish as much as by the "Western" canon. To contextualize our lives, we draw on a collection of stories, value statements, and associations, such that I believe we share, of course enriched by family experiences.
Rosen describes his first trip to Europe. In one passage he half-jokingly explains that the symmetrical layout of a page of Talmud exists that if you should, God forbid, drop your Talmud in a puddle, Rashi would at least be farthest from the mud. As Rosen describes several sections earlier, a page of Talmud has a special and distinctive, almost mandala-like, layout. I recall walking in to a friend's house not seven nights ago, and recognizing instantly the wide, black volume spread on her coffee table atop a small pile of books. The content of our evening had nothing to do with the strictly Judaic, being filled with performance art on queer marriage rights, shoulder rubs, and Indian spices (just as Rosen's trip was filled with pilgimages to Chartres Cathedral and a dissertation on Milton). Nevertheless, there is for me a... a... an indwelling presence of Judaism then. I describe it as this, making the association to the Shechina, "in-dwelling presence" of God. For me, this is the awareness is at the heart of my spiritual life.
The indwelling presence is elusive. It is also flexible and wide-ranging. Everywhere? I could riff on each topic's Jewish connection; they would range from joking to quiet moral imperative. Judaism covers all my moods. Nowhere? Everything had some other sufficient reason for which it was done. I live a modern life. I struggle to describe what contemporary Judaism is.
In my Hebrew School class, I am yearning to pass this on. I want to give as assignments non-particularist books like The Giving Tree and Amos and Boris and Could be Worse! so that the families can learn to read all books with Jewish eyes, even if the protagonist is not named Moishe!
Yesterday evening, I discussed with my mother the plans I am passionate about implementing at E. Ch. Lower School. She knew that a curriculum has been written that approximates my idea of the books. I am lucky and grateful to have such a perfectly-tailored professional resource in my own mother. And my father, too. In fact, it was from his bedside stack of books that I took this Talmud and Internet book. And surmounting the 15-book stack, a wide, black volume. (If this were a short story, I would say it was a Talmud, for the parallelism, but as this is Livejournal and real life: it was a Tikkun, whose two-column bold-and-pale layout was just as distinctive at a quick peek.)
Rosen is clearly an educated Jew, familiar with Jewish sources as well as modern liberal higher education. The respect he expresses for the traditional texts of our people parallels mine. Neither of us live in the halakic, traditionalist, world, nor do we want to, but our modern lives naturally are and must be informed by Jewish as much as by the "Western" canon. To contextualize our lives, we draw on a collection of stories, value statements, and associations, such that I believe we share, of course enriched by family experiences.
Rosen describes his first trip to Europe. In one passage he half-jokingly explains that the symmetrical layout of a page of Talmud exists that if you should, God forbid, drop your Talmud in a puddle, Rashi would at least be farthest from the mud. As Rosen describes several sections earlier, a page of Talmud has a special and distinctive, almost mandala-like, layout. I recall walking in to a friend's house not seven nights ago, and recognizing instantly the wide, black volume spread on her coffee table atop a small pile of books. The content of our evening had nothing to do with the strictly Judaic, being filled with performance art on queer marriage rights, shoulder rubs, and Indian spices (just as Rosen's trip was filled with pilgimages to Chartres Cathedral and a dissertation on Milton). Nevertheless, there is for me a... a... an indwelling presence of Judaism then. I describe it as this, making the association to the Shechina, "in-dwelling presence" of God. For me, this is the awareness is at the heart of my spiritual life.
The indwelling presence is elusive. It is also flexible and wide-ranging. Everywhere? I could riff on each topic's Jewish connection; they would range from joking to quiet moral imperative. Judaism covers all my moods. Nowhere? Everything had some other sufficient reason for which it was done. I live a modern life. I struggle to describe what contemporary Judaism is.
In my Hebrew School class, I am yearning to pass this on. I want to give as assignments non-particularist books like The Giving Tree and Amos and Boris and Could be Worse! so that the families can learn to read all books with Jewish eyes, even if the protagonist is not named Moishe!
Yesterday evening, I discussed with my mother the plans I am passionate about implementing at E. Ch. Lower School. She knew that a curriculum has been written that approximates my idea of the books. I am lucky and grateful to have such a perfectly-tailored professional resource in my own mother. And my father, too. In fact, it was from his bedside stack of books that I took this Talmud and Internet book. And surmounting the 15-book stack, a wide, black volume. (If this were a short story, I would say it was a Talmud, for the parallelism, but as this is Livejournal and real life: it was a Tikkun, whose two-column bold-and-pale layout was just as distinctive at a quick peek.)
