Jeffrey Goldberg notions that CQ's Jeff Stein should be prosecuted, along with his source, for publishing NSA material--that is if we adopt the Justice Department standard under which Steve Rosen and Ken Weissman are being prosecuted, for sharing secret material they got from the government. It's a free speech issue, he says. I don't agree. I think the Rosen/Weissman case crosses the line, or appears to; it involves agents of a foreign government. The public isn't served.
I bring up this disagreement for a different reason. All this is commentary on the law. Goldberg is commenting, I'm commenting. It's being passed around excitedly by other commentators.
In this sense, the internet resembles a Jewish yeshiva, or kollel, where students also comment endlessly on the law, and the great commentators rise over the centuries, or fall. And the commentaries are published, ad infinitum.
So the internet has replaced the yeshiva, and taken what's best about the yeshiva, applying it to vexing modern questions.
Believe me, the questions they're arguing about in the kollel are mostly not that interesting anymore. They're ancient religious questions over issues of law no one cares about in the U.S.--intermarriage, or idolatry, or pork-eating. By and large.
I'm saying that these great debates left a Jewish space a long time ago.
Kafka transplanted talmudic commentary to literature in the 19-teens, with The Trial, and such classics of modernism as the parable, Before the Law. He wrote them in German, for all Europe to read.
Now these questions are argued on the internet, and everyone can participate. Makes the old media seem like a council of bishops.
i'm not sure i understand how the internet replaces the talmud. other than there are arguments about the law in both contexts, the two have virtually nothing else in common. the talmud has much more than the law and it's bounded by canonical references to the mishnah, which is of divine origin, and it's written by rabbis who have achieved some sort of authority in their communities. the internet is unbounded, nothing i have seen in blogs could remotely be deemed to be of divine origin and the authority that people engaged in the debates and disputes here derives from their access to literacy and to the internet. hey i am all for extending the notion of the talmudic to all facets of our lives. but it just needs to be more of analogy than an identity. and being talmudic needs to be defined ad hoc by each claimant to the genre.
Knowing how badly off the Palestinians are by their own accounts means that there are about 1.6 billion citizens of the planet who are worse off with no one accounting for them. in fact the United Nations Human Development Index has Palestine at 106 out of 179 countries and is firmly established in the Medium index. It was last updated in december of 2008.
The operational definition of H.D.I.:
The HDI combines normalized measures of life expectancy, literacy, educational attainment, and GDP per capita for countries worldwide. It is claimed as a standard means of measuring human development—a concept that, according to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), refers to the process of widening the options of persons, giving them greater opportunities for education, health care, income, employment, etc. The basic use of HDI is to measure a country's development
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index#Medium
I agree with you tzvee. Good points.
You are so completely & utterly wrong about this Phil. Do me a favor, find a rabbi and study some Talmud. I know it sounds like an outlandish thought for someone who embraces Jewish assimilation as you do. But unless you learn something about our tradition then you have no right to make such embarrassing misstatements as this one.
The Talmud and Midrash are profound works. Profound not just in Jewish terms, but profound in human terms. I feel sad that you've reduced them to a cartoonish caricature which reflects badly on you. And I say this in all due deference to you who I admire in many other respects.
What good are point-counterpoint tomes when all sides of the debate assume for a starter that there is an ethical and moral double standard handed down by God?
Much of the Talmud is filled with such discussions, and I am not talking about how to keep Kosher rules on food or working on Saturday.
That's about as accurate and honourable as saying that pop music is the new Qur'an, because both are "recited," because pop music is about matters of the heart and the Qur'an is basically spiritual which should mean what *I* think it means damn it and does anybody really care what Muhammed said these days anyway? T-PAIN!!!
Just to be clear: the preceding, in that it's both staggeringly ill-informed and does not add to our understanding of either concept. There are a lot of cool things you can say about the internet and interesting constrasts one could make, but this isn't one of them. And cosign Richard – there seems to be little understanding of what's actually in the Talmud. Or even that other people read and value it.
I also cosign Richard and Yonah's posts. I think it is tragic that serious religious study is being taken over by fundamentalists, and that secular Jews seem to have given up on the idea that the Tanakh, the Talmud, and the learned commentaries have anything to say about humanity and its place in the world.
I'm often struck at how well the great rabbis understood human nature, including those aspects we would rather sweep under the rug.
Umm.. did you see that coming?
Well respect to the sensitivities of others for whom these are symbols evoking profound responses, the idea fits well in the ether-universe: a slightly different slant to the coalescence toward singularity, encompassing NASA survival wisdom, chaos theory and a conscious commons.