Q & A …

… A Religion of the Text - The Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

"One of the foundational principles of Judaism is that it is a religion of the text, of the book: “The people of the book” is the cliché. What happens to a people when books disappear? When you say “people of the book” to a Jewish person — if there are any, in 200 years, 600 years, a millennium — are they going to know what the book was? Not necessarily the codex, but the meaning that a book had in the culture? Additionally, I saw strategies that are very familiar to people who study the Talmud and Torah — the commentary, the re-commentary — laid bare and secularized by the internet."