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Jonathan Rosen And Elon Analysis

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Jonathan Rosen and Ari Elon are from two different worlds. Both live, however, in diaspora—Rosen in the void between the Holocaust and American plentitude, and Elon in that between the existence of a Jewish state and the inability of such a state to survive. Of course, these simple monikers do nothing truly to exemplify fully the great conflicting ideas with which these individuals deal; antiquity and modernity, talmud and Torah, life and death, exile and homeland, and, admittedly, many more dominate the situations of both authors. This is, perhaps, a testament to the condition of Jews today—ensnared between conflicting worlds, and forced into exile between disparate ideals, the Jewish people must make complex decisions as to which side …show more content…

If we look to the Babylonian Talmud, we see that few codes are so constant so as to escape discursive confrontation by the rabbis, and, even in places of common dispute or apparent consensus, there exists a multiplicity of layers of meaning and conclusions. In short, the Talmud exists, similarly, between worlds, such that, for a contemporary audience, no definitive codes regarding any halakhic concern can be easily extrapolated, if at all, as tempting a challenge as that may be. Elon and Rosen, accordingly, both deal with the idea of the Talmud as static only in its dynamic and discursive nature, and apply this trope to finding Jewish identity in continued diaspora, such as those revealed earlier. We, then, will explore how they do so by observing each author’s description of their own “exile,” one might say, and of the Talmud’s, in an effort to begin a definition of the current and historical condition of Judaism. Jonathan Rosen, in The Talmud and the Internet, asserts in a brief introduction that his book began “as an elegy for [his] grandmother,” eventually growing into a study to help “make sense of the multiple worlds [he] inherited.” It is easy to see exactly how such a transformation occurred through his opening description of a journal lost on a computer which he kept of said grandmother’s …show more content…

“The tension between a rabbi and a talmid hakham,” he notes, “Is the concrete expression of the universal tension between the two elites present in every society the mediating elite and the creative elite. Moshe [Moses] is the archetypal representative of the mediating elite; Rabbi Akiva, the quintessential representative of the creative elite.” With the former category of interpreters referring to creators of and adherents to various halakhic statutes, and the latter being the sages to whom scholarship attributes the production of talmud, Elon makes the intriguing point that, in these canonized disputes where all voices have equal stakes in “correctness,” as Rosen alluded to, the participants lie in what appears to be a defined role. When we look closer, though, we might observe, as Elon guides us to do, that those such as “Rabbi Akiva and his students create universes, and with the breath of their mouths they destroy them.” They study for the sake of studying, “build in order to build,” and are thus “antifunctional.” Taking into account this refinement of the role of the talmidei hakhamim, one can now assert confidently that the corpus they produce, indeed which they create by “turning over” every page, world, letter, and symbol in the Torah, exists intentionally in a different world—one that is distant from their own

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