Jonathan Rosen And Elon Analysis
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,
talmudand 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 on Helpwriting.net ...
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