The Boy on the Door on the Ox (review)

Reviewed by: The Boy on the Door on the Ox Avraham H. Feder (bio) The Boy on the Door on the Ox, by Martin S. Cohen. New York: Aviv Press, 2008. It can be argued that there are sections of talmudic literature that are not only emotionally dry but also cognitively opaque to the contemporary sensibility. In Martin S. Cohen’s preface, he acknowledges that Seder Tohorot—the order of the Mishnah that he has invited his readers/ students to study with him—“is unremittingly obscure in more places than anyone writing about the material should feel comfortable admitting in print.” Yet, [End Page 111] Cohen explains that he was drawn to this material precisely because it represents for him a golden opportunity to cultivate both “spiritual and intellectual integrity while searching for God in this peculiar world we all inhabit.” How does Cohen convince his readers/students to join him on a journey in search of God by means of—what seems at first thought—a quixotic exploration of an ostensibly irrelevant text? He claims that he has discovered within Seder Tohorot individual guides to accompany us on this journey; that is, human beings who may not be real (as literary characters are not real), but who appear fortuitously between the lines of the legalistic mishnaic text. But Cohen himself is the principal guide, teacher, and communicator, as he weaves back and forth in his narrative between his own “real-world” travels and the spiritual journey that he is recommending through the “magic mishnaic multiplex” that is Seder Tohorot. Cohen adopts a disarming strategy of narrating his own contemporary physical and spiritual journey with rich novelistic imagery, as he welcomes his readers/students into this ancient world so consumed with issues of ritual purity and impurity. Cohen’s journey is framed by his and his family’s professional moves from Canada to California to New York. But his spiritual and ethical goal is to journey to his spiritual Jerusalem. And as a pulpit rabbi—that is, as a rabbi serving living Jewish souls, whom it is his charge to help along in their search for their own spiritual Jerusalems—Cohen is honest enough to admit his own inadequacies. He has committed himself to the study of these mishnayot as part of his own perceived need to grow spiritually, long after he qualified for his profession intellectually. The journey to the spiritual Jerusalem is the search for communion with God. Where is God? For Cohen, “God . . . exists in the world at the unattainable yet fully real confluence of the focused intellect, the willing spirit, and the soul unsullied by sin.” Put another way, Cohen brings his readers/students to an appreciation of the sages’ spiritual-moral achievements. It is they who have taken the bald, often stern, scriptural laws, and through their own “unfettered human intelligence,” buttressed by uncompromising moral integrity, have built a spiritual edifice waiting to be discovered by those curious and courageous enough for the spiritual-moral struggle. The struggle, as Cohen readily testifies, is difficult: full of doubts, ambiguities, and insecurities. But one learns, for example, from the woman entering and emerging from her mikveh with coins in her mouth that honest doubt is a precondition for genuine faith; that ambiguity as a bedfellow of insecurity is not to be denied, concealed, and thereby falsified, but is to be accepted as “honorable” in the search for faith. One has to read Cohen’s virtuoso explorations of the mishnayot to see how these and other guides—the boy holding the lilies by the side of a cemetery, the former leper with no right ear, the ape-valet, the maid losing milk over an oven, the zav lying on a scale, the boy on the door on the ox, and others—contribute [End Page 112] to his understanding of major theological, psychological, and ethical issues. Without being esoteric, he succeeds in explaining why the Bible and its later exponents, the rabbis, were so concerned about tumah, about impurity. According to Cohen, they saw all things as existing “in some sort of real or potential relationship with the three ever-burning, ever-whirling axes of contamination—sex, death, and...

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