Taking my lead from the title, I downloaded this book from the Internet and read it on my Kindle. Spark-like thoughts shot out from the "e-ink screen which reads like real paper and boasts 16 shades of gray for clear text and sharp images." So says Amazon.com.
The author deftly weaves the very old and the very new with reflections on his relation to religion and his Jewish identity. He views the Talmud (2000 years of rabbinic commentary on the Torah) as a sort of Internet chat room of indefinite duration and scope. As Rosen points out, rabbinic scholars speak of "the sea of the Talmud" to convey the organic size and neural connectivity of the work, which can be entered at almost any point in time and on any topic along the vast shoreline of its ocean.
Most unusual to the uninitiated (and perhaps most intriguing), the Talmud like the Internet reflects and refracts an overwhelming array of views, often directly contradictory, even on matters that are settled confessions of faith in most other variations of occidental monotheism. Possibly (plausibly) this seeming chaos of uncertainty emerged from the destruction of the temple at Jerusalem in the second century of the Common Era and ensuing Diaspora. Judaism, to survive and even sometimes thrive, evolved into a "grass roots" organization in which each Jewish household, wherever it existed geographically, became a functional equivalent of that temple, at least in some important respects. Thus, Judaism in exile became a portable religion of the book and never-ending commentary on the book, a sort of evolving collective covenant of memory that bound a people. The Talmud bundled culture, customs and practices into a portable abstract world of the word that was realized in the here and now wherever it was studied, revered and shared.
Rosen raises the provocative possibility that the Internet may (has) become the collective enduring consciousness of this century and, like the Talmud and the Torah before it, both memorializes and retroactively reshapes the past. Being of a literary bent, Rosen feels no discomfort by the evident and heavy pen applied with equally heavy moral judgments and consequences (real or imagined) by those priestly and later rabbinic scribes and commentators to those familiar and oft re-interpreted stories from the Tanahk (roughly what is also known as the Old Testament). Unlike the ancient Egyptians, the Romans, Russians, Nazis and other lesser known enemies and oppressors, Jews have survived and controlled the telling and re-telling of the past.
Rosen does not reflect on the Orwellian aspects of the enterprise. In the slogan words of Big Brother: "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." Rather, Rosen explores more deeply the importance of remembering in order to establish identity and in order to defeat attempts to erase memory (in fact, to erase any remembrance that Jews or Judaism existed). He does this by reflecting on the two lines of his ancestors, one escaping from the Shoah to spend the duration of WWII in a camp for Jewish children on the estate of Lord Balfour and the other having arrived and becoming established in the United States before the great calamities of the 20th Century claimed the lives of a third of the world's Jewish population.
One cannot read The Talmud and the Internet without being inspired to follow the path of Rosen's reflections. In 2000, when the book was first published, Wikipedia had not yet taken off. Wikipedia's own history of Wikipedia states that the Wikipedia was not formally launched until January 15, 2001, quickly became a large global project that today includes over 14 million freely usable articles in hundreds of languages worldwide, and content from millions of contributors. Some of them even rabbis.
In a partial recounting of what Jews faced from several centuries in Europe, Rosen mentioned a particularly loathsome tract penned by Martin Luther later in his life, "The Jews and Their Lies." Luther had, at the beginning of the Protestant break from the Catholic Church, been sympathetic to the plight of the Jews. The sympathy evaporated when it became apparent that Jews could not be converted to Luther's vision of Christianity. This should not have surprised Luther since his theological concept of redemption by faith alone is the perfect antithesis of the Judaic emphasis on the hard work of achieving by practice and conduct what is promised in the covenant. Judaic deed versus Lutheran creed or otherwise put in the disputation between Erasmus and Luther, works versus faith.
A significantly large number of Lutherans in the late 18th Century, the Pietists, also essentially rejected the central Lutheran doctrine, some of my forefathers among them. Because the establishment Lutheran church began to assume the outward trappings of Catholicism, the Pietists started to meet in household conclaves, dress simply and work hard on conforming personal practice to ethical ideals. The established church viewed them as trouble makers, even though generally they were widely regarded as conforming their behavior to a higher standard of moral conduct.
In the 18th Century, first Peter the Great and then Catherine the Great sent an invitation to prosperous farmers to resettle in the Ukraine near Odessa in land seized from the Ottoman Turks. My ancestors accepted and went in family groups known as "harmonies". They settled in self-governing colonies, guaranteed by the Czarist edicts (ukases) to be exempt from military service, taxation for a period of years, military service and complete freedom of religion. An added incentive to those, like my chiliastic forefathers, who fervently believed the world would end in the 1830's, was the proximity of Odessa to Israel. They were ex-communicated from the Lutheran church when they left as reflected in the large "X" through the church records of their family births, baptisms, marriages and deaths.
Many Jews from the same regions of German speaking Europe also accepted the invitation. For a time, the deal worked for both groups. The Jews generally worked in trades within the larger
population centers and the German farmers remained within the small walled villages. In the end, with the rise of Slavic nationalism, the promises of the ukase were rescinded. It turned out to be a deal with the devil.
Rosen's mention of the Luther tract startled me. The Lutheran environment in which I grew up was nearly devoid of Jews and completely devoid of anti-Semitism. My Lutheran heritage had been shaped more by the tripartite, internecine and fratricidal wars of Lutherans, Calvinists and Catholics causing both maternal and paternal ancestors to flee Alsace and Weurtemberg. The maternal side came to colonial western Maryland where they found ways to cooperate even to the extent of sharing church structures and pastors with other Protestant denominations, an arrangement that never would have happened in Europe.
I was also struck by Rosen's reference to his father's involvement, like my own father's, in Masonic orders, which are open to all monotheistic faiths. My father repudiated the Lutheran church, which his step-father built and served as a deacon. See Pastor Poisons Girl Gets Life. The Masonic orders became an outlet for a deeply held, but rarely expressed spirituality.
It did not seem at all unusual to me that my father had as a close friend one of the handful of Jews who lived in Helena, Montana. Jerry Karasik owned and operated a cafe on Rodney Street called the Dutch Maid from 1955 until sometime in the 70's or 80's. Jerry's parents were "Bohemian Jews," according to census records recently located. Jerry was born in Canada. He came to the United States and eventually to Fort Harrison just outside Helena to train as a paratrooper in a Canadian-American commando unit that came to be known as the Devil's Brigade, 1st Special Service Force, organized in 1942. Helena's Memorial Park is dedicated to the unit, along with I-15 and its extension into Alberta, Canada all the way to Lethbridge. A couple of Hollywood action movies, notably "The Devil's Brigade", have been made about it, but certainly bear almost no relation to the reality of the training or what these men actually faced in combat.
Jerry liked Helena, and came back after the war. It must have seemed like a return to paradise. Jerry and my father got to know each other in the late fifties when my father was frequently in Helena to bid on state and federal highway contracts. My father consumed large amounts of beer and coffee, so I suspect the location the Dutch Maid near two of his favorite bars, Jesters and the Red Meadow, had a lot to do with the initial acquaintance. Also Dad's low/middle German shared vocabulary and idiomatic expressions with Yiddish, so they probably had that in common as well. For some reason, Jerry either never learned to drive a car or at least never owned one, so Dad got in the habit of driving him back and forth to grocery stores and other places. Later on, when Dad's company failed, Jerry reciprocated by providing a relatively unlimited supply of "Jewish road oil" (Dad's term for Jerry's coffee and his notion of friendly harassment) and odd jobs around the malt shop.
The friendship may also have had something to do with the Masons. At least one group of German Mason's openly repudiated the rampant anti-Semitism in Germany prior to and during the rise of Hitler, though others were not so righteous. See www.bessel.org/masjud.htm David Kaufmann, the author of the piece and a free mason, summarizes the intersection of the fraternal order and Judaism. Both subscribe and aspire to respect and support individual freedom, moral responsibility, the symbolic finding of "light" through moral practice, ridding oneself of all prejudices and a deep respect for learning. Of course, Masonry also borrows freely symbols that are central to Jewish liturgy, literature and practice, most especially the Temple of Solomon and light as the symbol of divinity. The place where I scattered my parents ashes on the crest of the continental divide hosts an open air Masonic structure commemorating the first Masonic meeting in Montana. The structure faces and points to Jerusalem, more specifically and symbolically the location of the Temple.
No doubt, because of the this notable influence, Free Masonry has often figured prominently in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Once again, from a Wikipedia article entitled "The Judaeo-Masonic Conspiracy:"
The International-Communist-Judaeo-Masonic Conspiracy, sometimes called
the international-marxist-masonic conspiracy, or simply the judaeo-masonic
conspiracy, is a conspiracy theory involving a secret coalition of Jews, Freemasons,
and communists. The coalition's dark aim, especially in the view of franquist pain,
would be world domination. The absence of evidence for such a world-spanning
is taken as further demonstration of the influence of the conspirators, who are
understood to be working to suppress evidence of their activity.
What else is there to say in the face of such logic?
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
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