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.
