Martin Samuel Cohen's writing career is remarkable for its range of topics and genres. The author of a scholarly monograph on early rabbinic visionary texts of the shi'ur qomah tradition and a remarkably original translation and commentary on the Psalter, he is also a novelist, essayist, literary editor, and composer of liturgies for the synagogue whose pulpit he occupies in suburban Long Island. In the present work, he offers a genre-defying literary and theological homage to the foundational document of the rabbinic legal tradition.
The “strangest Jewish texts” of the book's subtitle are none other than the twelve tractates of the Mishnah's Order of Purities (Seder Tohorot). The “spiritual journey” on which Cohen takes his readers is a hike through some of the most arcane topics of the halakhic system of the Tannaim. These laws govern how people, foods, and useful everyday objects—such as stoves, ovens, cattle prods, Hawaiian shirts (OK, Sidonian togas), and sieves—contract tum'ah, a form of intangible yet virulent contagion conveyed by corpses, menstruants, parturients, gonorrheacs, and those suffering a rash (żara'at) rather more troublesome than “the heartbreak of psoriasis.” Each of Cohen's twelve chapters is devoted to an anonymous “spiritual guide” whom he discerns hiding in the shadows of an obscure mishnaic legal dilemma, silently pointing by his or her mute presence to the larger lesson about the life of the spirit that the compilers of the Mishnah (in Cohen's view) conjured that very soul to embody.
One of these mysterious psychopomps is “the boy on the door on the ox” of the book's title. He makes his fleeting mishnaic debut (and curtain call) in Tractate Parah 3:2–4. There, the Mishnah illustrates the lengths to which participants in the rabbinic version of the Rite of the Red Cow (Numbers 19:1ff.) are preserved in a state of physical isolation from corpse contamination so that they may ensure the production of a purifying detergent made of the ashes of a red cow and water. “The boy,” raised since infancy in a Temple apartment isolated from all possible impurity, sits on a door tied to the back of an ox as he is conveyed to the pool of Shiloach. There, perched (according to at least one mishnaic Tanna) on the door to prevent himself from inadvertent pollution derived from a corpse that may have become buried in the waters, he draws water into stone vessels for use in the ceremony.
Let us review the text in Cohen's own free translation/paraphrase:
There were once courtyards in Jerusalem that were built on bedrock, but which also had beneath them hollow space of the kind able to protect against the kind of impurity associated with unknown graves sunk deep in the earth. To this place would be brought pregnant women, who would then give birth and raise their sons there. Eventually, oxen bearing doors on their backs would be produced, and the boys would ride atop the doors holding cups made of stone in their hands. When they would come to the Siloam spring, they would climb down and fill up the cups, then climb back up and sit again atop the ox. Rabbi Yossi is of the opinion that they would lower the cups on ropes without actually descending themselves. (296)
Cohen's explication of “the boy's” significance in the context of the Mishnah's system is itself a marvelous example of “guiding.” In Cohen's view, this completely pure child is a kind of metaphor for the virtue of “spiritual audacity” that, in his opinion, runs through the entire rabbinic tractate on the Red Cow. To disclose in a review just how Cohen brings his reader through various dimensions of the Mishnah's meaning, including his own state of mind when he first encountered this particular psychopomp in the course of his studies, would be akin to tipping off in a review the ending of a movie thriller. Suffice it to say that “the boy” caught Cohen's eye in a chance moment of mishnaic study while Cohen was recovering from the dislocations of a cross-country move from one pulpit in California to his present one on Long Island. Cohen's commentary weaves this autobiographical moment of (self-) discovery into an uncluttered, elegant, and witty prose narrative, expertly mediating for the reader the main exegetical options exposed by earlier generations of the Mishnah's rabbinic readers as well as more recent historical discussions, and effectively seducing the reader into affirming Cohen's utterly idiosyncratic opinion that this particular psychopomp has come to teach the rabbinic virtue of “spiritual audacity.” Namely,
[The Rabbis] make it perfectly clear that the point of their creative work was not to suggest that they felt justified in relating to the word of God casually, but just the contrary: to show that they took the word of Scripture totally seriously by interpreting it as they saw fit. And so they enacted this long list of incredibly exaggerated legal requirements [including, among others, the entire concept of children raised in purity to ride on door-laden oxen] precisely to underscore their insistence on their own right to interpret the law according to their own lights in sync with their own sense of the innermost meaning of Scripture. (124)
In this, as in each chapter, Cohen's goal is not to isolate the historical or halakhic peshat of the Mishnah, but rather to enable the simple sense of the Mishnah to launch the reader into the moral world of the system of purities that emerges in and through the halakhic details. As the microscope's lens discloses a cosmos in a drop of water, Cohen's literary style discloses a host of contemporary spiritual preoccupations lurking in the Mishnah's laconic accounts of the rabbinic law as it stood in the late Roman era.
This book is not pitched to an “academic rabbinic studies” audience in any sense, although the author, trained at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, clearly is in touch with up-to-date rabbinics scholarship of both the traditional and the academic variety. But it is a fresh and virtually unique essay in constructive Jewish theology that should engage the attention of anyone who is involved in the academic world of contemporary Jewish studies. As in his commentary on the Psalter, Cohen presents his texts in ways that startle the attentive reader into considering the world of the text as somehow more real than one's own.
The value of Cohen's book for nonacademic readers lies in his ability to turn the most obscure (and, it must be said, at times unappetizing) halakhic problems into a platform for launching flights of literary artistry and religious insight of the most unsuspected kinds. He finds in the dankest corners of halakhic curiosity—such as the ancient notion, adopted by the rabbis by way of Galen, that male semen is produced in the brain—food for thought that nourishes daring explorations of the meaning of seeking the divine in a world constantly suffering the existential assaults of death and disease.
Cohen's reading of the Mishnah may indeed be idiosyncratic and personalistic, but his hermeneutic is not arbitrary or willful; rather, it is humbled by immense respect for the mishnaic text as a tutorial voice to which the reader is invited to respond in full hermeneutical openness. His explications of the lessons learned from each of the Mishnah's twelve psychopomps at times appear only loosely linked to a literal reading of the Mishnah; at times they are audacious in their assertions. But they are always thoughtful, provocative, and engaging. It is not too much to say that in Cohen, American Judaism has produced a union of poetic sensibility, theological vision, and religious sensitivity the likes of which have not been seen since the heyday of Abraham Joshua Heschel.
I enthusiastically recommend this book as a text in advanced classes on contemporary meta-halakhic reflection, to anyone who is curious about contemporary Jewish theology and religious thought, as well as for readers who are simply in love with and curious about rabbinic texts and their interpretation.
