Martin S. Cohen

A Conversation with the Author

What prompted you to write a book about the most obscure, least studied, part of the Mishnah?

My journey through the part of the Mishnah described in The Boy on the Door on the Ox is my personal one. As I describe in the book, I left my pulpit in Vancouver, where I had been for thirteen years, on the day in 1999 that my father died. Then, in the space of fewer than six weeks, I faced more or less every single one of life's major stressors: the death of a parent, the sale of a home, the purchase of a home, leaving one job, undertaking a new job, moving to a different country, dealing with three children starting three different new schools and a spouse starting a new job, the complexity of undertaking immigration to the United States (my wife, now an American citizen, grew up in Canada), the sale of two cars and the purchase of two different ones. It was all too much and it came at me way too fast for anyone to have digested easily or well. But, somehow, I found the inner calm I needed to succeed in my new situation from the study of Mishnah. And The Boy on the Door on the Ox is the chronicle of how that worked…and what specifically I learned once I undertook the study of the Mishnah's last and largest section with care.

Do readers have to know anything about the Mishnah to enjoy your book?

No, not at all. The book is less about the Mishnah per se, and more about my study of Mishnah. More than anything, it's about how the ancient saw about how “everything” can be found in the Torah turns out to be true…but not at all in the way I had previously thought.

Could you remind me what exactly the Mishnah is?

In the wake of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in the first century C.E., the nature of Jewish learning underwent a sea change. The history behind that change is obscure—there are hardly any contemporary documents that actually describe the course of events in anything like a cogent, easily fathomable way—but the eventual result seems to have been that the oral traditions that had been developing in learned Jewish circles for centuries were themselves codified in oral, then written, works of various sorts. Of these efforts to preserve the tradition, the one that gained ultimate authority is the one written by Rabbi Judah, patriarch of the Jews of Roman Palestine, which eventually came to be called the Mishnah, that is, the “Recapitulation” of the oral traditions.

And the Mishnah was published in different parts?

Yes, in six parts, each of which is called a seider in Hebrew or an “order” in English. Mostly, they're arranged topically—the one called “Holidays” deals with the festivals of the year, the one called “Sacrifices” deals with the Temple cult, etc. And the last seider, the sixth and largest of the orders, is called “Purities” (the Hebrew is Seder Tohorot) and deals with the detailed elaboration of the Bible's laws about purity and impurity, mostly the latter.

Almost none of those laws are observed by anyone today, even in the most religious circles. Why would anyone care about material like that?

Well, that's a good question. But it misses the point, at least a little bit. The rabbis were philosophers too, not just jurists. However, they expressed themselves not by writing dialogues like Plato or treatises like Aristotle, but through the detailed elaboration of the law of the Torah. When they worked on the laws of purity, which they themselves mostly were unable to observe (because so much depended on the Temple, which was in ruins), they were also expressing themselves on the nature of things in our world. There are passages here that talk about what it means to be a human being and about human nature. There are sections that talk about the relationship of faith and doubt, about the relative worth of certainty and uncertainty. And there are passages that, for all their almost byzantine complexity, are truly beautiful expositions of the rabbis' feelings about the nature of the world, and about the possibility of living decent and noble lives. It's very interesting material!

You've written specifically about certain people you found lurking in the corners of the book. What's that about?

The rabbis often conjured up specific individuals in specific circumstances to illustrate specific points of the law. Mostly, students skate right past these people, seeing them as stick figures meant simply to elucidate some point by making it slightly simpler for the reader to imagine what the text is talking about. It was my personal insight—and this, if anything, is my gift to the study of Mishnah in general—to consider these individuals as literary personalities in their own right, and to write about them not as line drawings in a book, but as real people. I've allowed myself to imagine who they were, how they got into the situation in which they are depicted in the Mishnah…and to ask myself the larger question too, which is: what does this person have to teach me. It turned out that they had a lot to teach. The Boy on the Door on the Ox is about what I learned from these people once I seized on the possibility of taking them seriously as literary characters and treating them as such.

I've heard the book is also pretty funny. Is that true?

I think so. I laugh when I read some passages, so maybe readers will too. But the funniest ones are about my life as a rabbi in California and New York.

Is there a lot of biographical material in the book?

Not a lot, I don't think…but enough to describe where I was in terms of my professional or personal life as I encountered the personalities described in the book. Didn't Goethe say that all books constitute fragments of their author's great confession? I guess that's true of The Boy on the Door on the Ox, too.

Do you plan to write analogous volumes treating the parallel personalities in the other five orders of Mishnah?

Not this year!

Are you involved in new literary projects? What else are you writing?

Well, my book, Riding the River of Peace: A Philosophy of Mitzvot for Young People, is coming out this fall. And the large compendium, The Observant Life: A Guide to Ritual and Ethics for Conservative Jews is being published by Aviv next spring. (I served as general editor for the full volume, along with Michael Katz, and wrote three of the thirty-nine chapters. It's a vast project—there are thirty other authors in all—that covers almost every area of Jewish law, specifically including areas like intellectual property law that are, to say the least, underdiscussed.) And I'm working on a fifth novel, this one involving a rabbi and a runaway slave in 1851, which I hope to finish in the course of this coming year. And I have plans for two new books I want to undertake in the future: a devotional commentary on the Five Megillot written in the style of my commentary on the Psalms published by Aviv in 2004, and a book about the ancient Temple in Jerusalem showing how it can serve, even today, as a symbol for precisely the kind of Jewish spirituality I personally find the most compelling and satisfying.

That's a lot of books!

Isn't that what Kohelet said, that there really isn't ever an end to the making of books?