It is November 10, 1938. It’s in a small city in Germany. It is the night after Kristalnacht, the night of broken glass that ushered in the mass roundups and the killings that would become the Holocaust, what we call the Shoah in Hebrew.

There are a group of men shoved together in a cell. They are all of different ages. One of them turns to a much younger man, a rabbinical student who was no more than twenty years old.

“You! You are a rabbinical student. You are a student of Judaism. So tell us – what does Judaism have to say to us at a time like this?”

The recipient of that weighty question was young Emil Fackenheim. He would spend the rest of his life coming up with answers to that question. In so doing, he became one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of our time .

In this column and accompanying podcast, we pose that question to Liel Leibovitz. He is an Israeli journalist, author, media critic and video game scholar. He is a prolific writer, mostly for Tablet magazine. I have followed his work for years.We talk about Liel's fascination with that often arcane, and central, Jewish text... how the contemporary writer Jonathan Rosen called the Talmud “a drift net for catching God”... and how the Talmud is like an ancient version of the Internet.

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