THE TALMUD AND THE INTERNET

How do we mix ancient wisdom and modern technology? The author of Eve's Apple (1997) and former culture editor of the Forward seeks an answer.

When his elderly maternal grandmother died, Rosen began a self-questioning journey into the Talmud, the 2,000-year-old collection of commentaries and other texts assembled by the brilliant rabbis of the Second Commonwealth era of Jewish history. Rosen reflects on that search and on the two streams of Jewish history embodied in his two grandmothers: one American-born and raised, a defiantly unreligious woman but also a believer in God; the other East European, Orthodox, murdered by the Nazis. In the same way, Rosen believes, the dialectic of his very modern American maternal grandmother counterpoised to his no less traditional European paternal grandmother is enunciated in the contradictions between the "ancient tradition and contemporary chaos" as represented by the book's title. The crux of his odyssey is an attempt to unite and embrace the contradictions inherent in these seeming polar opposites. The result is a slender volume that drifts from Homer to Henry Adams to Josephus, trying to find a thread in Jewish and American history that will allow Rosen to reconcile the poles. Rosen writes quite well. The book is full of handsomely crafted passages that yearn to be read aloud. But the connections he makes are tenuous, forced, and arbitrary. The Talmud and the Internet are both collections of seemingly random scraps; granted, but united to what purpose? A Web page and a page of Talmud are both jigsaw-like constructions, palimpsests built around intricately interlocking commentaries—but so what? Regrettably, the results are aesthetically pleasing but intellectually facile and attenuated.

It’d be lovely to read a more fully fleshed-out family reminiscence, but this is a disappointment.