My new Aviv Press book, The Boy on the Door on the Ox, is a good example. On the one hand, it’s not "about" me. It’s not "about" anyone. It’s about being a rabbi, about studying Mishnah, about what I’ve managed to learn over all these years of devoting myself day and night to the study of the text. It’s about Jewish law and Jewish values. It’s about a lot of things. But I now realize it really also is about me. Each of the stories I tell – finding stories in the Mishnah where most have found only brief, one- or two-sentence illustrative examples of legal principle has become my specialty – brings into existence a personality that, in some overt or covert way, mirrors who I am, who I have made myself into.  Like all great literature, rabbinic literature has the capacity to serve as a mirror any reader can hold up and peer into, and in which anyone can find him or herself ably reflected: if the light is strong enough, if you can look deeply into the glass without flinching or turning away, if you can bring yourself to stare deeply into your own eyes. No one sees it that way. Works that have analyzed rabbinic literature, and especially the Mishnah, as literary works are very few and far between. None of them has found fiction where I have, I don’t believe. And, as a result, no one, I also don’t believe, has found the merit, the power, or the potential to inspire in the portraits I wrote my book to bring to the attention of the reading public.

It’s an odd book in many ways. Even I think that! But it’s also been a true labor of love, a sincere effort to bring together all the lanes I have serially travelled on my own spiritual journey-the path of fiction and of poetry, the path of the lifelong student of Mishnah, the path of a working congregational rabbi, the path of the husband and father and son, the path of self-discovery through prayerful, ruminative introspection and to make of them one wide highway that others so inclined can travel along with me. That, after all, is what it means to write a book: not just to fill up page after page with words, but to invite others into one’s private universe of discourse, to admit others to the seraglio, to the archive, to the vault that is…my life, my memories, my perception of the world around me, my sense of who and what I am in this world, and what I am doing and hope to do. Like I said the other day, the sign of great books is the way that they start out as a sheaf of pages, but then morph into a road, then a gate, then a door…and how they beckon readers along, inviting them to share the journey, to follow the path, to open the gate, to knock on the door…and then, together with the author (or the author’s ghost) to step over the threshold into another’s private universe, into the beating heart of another human being. It is in this sense that literature is transformational, why it matters…to me, and to so many, even after a lifetime spent reading.

And so I bid you all farewell. My fifteen minutes are up! I step back now to allow some other author the opportunity to step forward and introduce himself to the reading public. I hope all my readers here find their way to my new book, The Boy on the Door on the Ox. I hope it satisfies, that it beckons, that it suggests ably why I think it matters, why I devoted all that time to trying to get it write, to set it down, to make it sing. Whether I was successful…that’s another story. I suppose I’ll find out soon enough! But the point was not merely to bring out another book. It was, with this one possibly more than any other of my books, to invite others into my universe, into my sphere of being, into my space. Why I find that an appealing prospect…well, that’s a different question, one I’ll have to think about carefully before answering. If any of my readers here do read the book and you’d like to comment directly to me, feel free! (You can reach me through my synagogue’s website: www.srjc.org.)  I’ll look forward to hearing from you!

Martin Samuel Cohen, author of The Boy on the Door on the Ox, spent the past week guest blogging on Jewcy. This is his parting post. Want more? Buy the book!

The post And Now I Must Be Going appeared first on Jewcy.

I was the first Aviv author. My book of Psalms, called Our Haven and Our Strength, came out in 2004, and set the tone for the list that has developed over the years: books of applied scholarship that speak directly to the hearts of interested Jewish readers. I know all the other authors and feel proud to be in their company. We’re a disparate group, but we all have that the same idea churning around at the center of our literary lives: that the much-spoken-of distinction between real scholarship (the dry-as-dust kind published by academic presses mostly for purchase by libraries) and vibrant, creative writing possessed of intellectual and spiritual integrity, suffused with an author’s sense of deep personal engagement with the material at hand, and offered to the reading public not merely to inform but also to inspire – that that distinction, for all it truly exists, does not have to imply that books in the latter category (what I called "applied" as opposed to "pure" scholarship above) are somehow less valuable contributions to the cultural lives of real, 21st century Jewish people. Just the opposite is true, I think. And so do my colleagues on the Aviv list.

I’ve read all the books Aviv has published, some of them several times. Jewcy readers should take a good look – these could well be the books you’ve been waiting for, the ones reflective not merely of their authors’ fantasies about the world, but of those authors’ ability to stand at the confluence of reason and religion, of creativity and sober evaluative effort… and (for most of us) also of productivity and exhaustion. We’re a busy group. None of us is a pure academic author; all of us have "real" jobs. I feel honored to be in their company, and pleased beyond the telling of it.

Jonathan Wittenberg lives in London and writes the kind of prose about the intersection of the natural and spiritual worlds that I personally have only found previously in the prose of Thoreau and the poetry of William Cullen Bryant.  Ira Stone lives in Philadelphia and writes to suggest how the old musar movement, that nineteenth century effort to suffuse ritual with ethical decisiveness, could profitably be revived to transform our ritual lives into something far more profound than most of us know or even know of. Jon Slater’s book, Mindful Jewish Living, the result of years upon years of focused thinking about how to create a kind of Jewish life not merely suffused with ritual exactitude but infused and invested also honest, productive spirituality, is one of the books that has influenced me personally the most over these last years. I’ve known the author for more than thirty years. I encouraged him to write the book, but the work is wholly his…and so suffused with his own sense of spiritual integrity so as, in my opinion, to be a landmark work in the evolution of the literature of religion (and not even just Jewish religion) in our day. Miriyam Glazer lives and works in Los Angeles. Her book on the psalms used liturgically in Jewish worship isn’t quite out yet–it will be out in early January–but I’ve read the manuscript and I think I can promise that readers will find it exceptional in many different ways, but mostly in terms of the richness of the poetry and the focus and intelligence of its prose: it is a book for serious worshipers eager to find a way into the psalms that we read over and over again in shul, but often remain obscure and inaccessible even to regulars who know them more or less by heart. 

There are other books to read on the Aviv list. Elliot Dorff’s book on the evolution of Jewish law and Ismar Schorsch’s rich, satisfying book of comments and observations on the weekly Torah readings have already become classics in their respective categories. And there is a very rich and interesting list of books set to come out in the course of the next few years as well. All together the books on the list represent the single idea stated above: that there will always be a willing audience for books that sit precisely at the intersection of intellectual integrity, spirituality, and creativity. It’s a great list and, like I said, I’m very proud to be part of it.

My new Aviv book, The Boy on the Door on the Ox, is part of the larger effort to bring that kind of book to the attention of the reading public. It’s about me personally and my life in the rabbinate, but also about the ways traditional Jewish learning (in this case, the study of Mishnah and, at that, of its most intractable, apparently unfriendly, section) can yield the most interesting and spiritually useful results. Like all books, it’s about a lot of things… those two just mentioned, but also about the much vaunted choice rabbis are supposed to have to make between being pastors or scholars, between being working congregational clergy and creative, thoughtful authors. I’ve met that challenge by denying that it exists in the first place… and so have most of the authors on the Aviv list. We’re not the only ones, obviously. But, taken together, we hope to be taken seriously as the ultimate refutation of the concept in the first place: there is no problem choosing paths, because the choice itself doesn’t really exist. The thoughtful mind, the creative heart, the willing hand, the productive life, the literary spirit…all these can come together (and do come together) in the personalities represented on the Aviv list. Like I said, I’m proud to be among them.

You can check out the Aviv website and read interviews with the authors about their books. And Aviv books can be purchased on-line almost everywhere, as well as in person at many bookstores. I hope you all enjoy all the Aviv books!

Martin Samuel Cohen, author of The Boy on the Door on the Ox, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

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The same thing is true about books. There are way more books in the world – works of fiction, I mean – than there are great plots. How many story lines are there, after all? Love thwarted and love consummated. Violence squelched or given in to. Justice administered or perverted. Children obeying or disobeying their parents.  Contests real and artificial yielding productive results or mere malign competitiveness. The difference between a great novel and a less great one is only very rarely that the great one presents the reading public with a story line that is totally new. (Even Moby Dick, the greatest American novel, had its anterior sources, incidentally.) That’s not to say that there’s never anything new under the sun…but how many examples can you name of books that present totally novel story lines?

So that brings me to my work in The Boy on the Door on the Ox. What’s "great" about great literature, as noted, isn’t that it presents plot lines no one has ever thought of before. Nor is does the greatness of great literature lie in the author’s ability to invent new words or a new kind of grammar. (Books like that do exist, but they mostly exist to irritate readers, then to live on as undergraduate reading assignments.) To my way of thinking, what makes books great is their authors’ consummate ability to commune with readers by investing even banal story lines with so much of their own personalities, of their own enduring presence, that readers even decades (or centuries) later can somehow commune with them through the medium of the written word. In other words, the point of reading Moby Dick isn’t to meet up with Ishmael or Queegqueg (fictional characters, both of them), but to meet Melville. And to transcend knowing of him and then to move on to knowing him in the intimate way great authors’ ghosts inhabit the minds of those who take their books to heart, who attempt to decode the text to turn it first into a mirror, then into a road, then finally into a door.  That’s gives the reader an edge (and, at that, a huge one) over the tourist. To meet the man Melville, you could, I guess, camp out on East Twenty-Sixth Street in Manhattan and hope that his ghost might float by to honor your vigil (Melville lived at number 104 from 1863 on). Or you can undertake to step outside of time entirely… and meet the writer through the medium of the written word.

It took me a long time to realize that the point of Mishnah study isn’t to learn this or that thing about ancient times, but to commune with the spiritual masters of antiquity through the medium of the literature they left behind. My own contribution to the effort is to have noticed that these books are studded with stories. Not long complex ones, to be sure. Most of the stories I write about are a sentence or two long, some less than that. The personalities depicted in them, however, are wan and incredibly alluring, somehow, at the same time. They hardly do anything.  None is given a name. Most are not heard to say a single word. They appear formally in the text to illustrate some point–usually some incredibly arcane point–of the law. But by taking them seriously as literary characters according to the method I worked out and tried to apply, it turned out to be possible to commune not with the characters themselves, who don’t exist any more really than Queegqueg or Ishmael, but with the authors of the texts in which they are preserved.  And, really, that’s what my book is about. Reading ancient books like the Mishnah as literary works usually means subjecting them to the kind of withering analysis only a graduate student could love. My contribution is to have noticed that taking books like the Mishnah seriously as literary works can also mean using their stories, even the incredibly brief ones I like the most, as a means of communing with the authors of those stories. I suppose I’ll find out later on if I was successful. But I think I was. And I wrote the book to explain why I think that…and how I think that others, possibly, could profitably follow me in this and find their own guides on their own journeys by mining in the same quarry that I did… and do.

Martin Samuel Cohen, author of The Boy on the Door on the Ox, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

The post Kissing and Reading appeared first on Jewcy.

I read a lot. I already did read a lot, but I’ve kept it up. And I’ve never given up the kind of reading you’re probably supposed to give up once you have almost no time to read anything anyway and the little time you do have you feel guilty for not devoting to reading sober works of academic scholarship about… something. About religion. About rabbinics. About, even, the Bible.  When I was younger, I read a lot of the so-called classics of spiritual literature, and not specifically the Jewish ones. I read Thomas Merton and Alan Watts, St. John of the Cross and Theresa of Avila, Kirkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr. I found them all interesting, but only the occasional work in that world spoke to me deeply. The masterpieces of Jewish spirtuality – the merkavah texts, the Bahir, the Zohar, etc. – I also waded through, but without finding my guides there. Information, yes (and lots of it.) But guides – in the sense of people able to move me forward on my own spiritual journey, on my own pilgrimage, on the trajectory of my own life through history to destiny – I didn’t find. Not really!

The authors who did call to me, and who still do call, are the ones that feel divorced from the spiritual enterprise. I wander far off, but I always return to Melville, to Hawthorne, (especially) to Walt Whitman, to Poe, to William Cullen Bryant, to Longfellow (so underrated!), to Thoreau, to Emerson.  All dead white guys and not a Jew among them. But these are the authors who have framed my sense of myself as a Jew not merely looking back but moving forward, as someone who doesn’t only want to be on some sort of endless treadmill that exhausts those who run on it to the extent that they forget to notice that they’re not actually going anywhere, but who actually does want to move forward towards the redemptive moment, towards the kind of spiritual wholeness that is the prerequisite for faith, towards Jerusalem.

So I suppose (or maybe I do) that it was natural for me to hit on the idea of trying to find characters like those in the works of the authors who really did and do call to me in the arcane chapters of the Mishnah, the ancient rabbinic work I feel the most personally drawn to. In the book – in my book, I mean – I tell the story of how I found these people, what led me to look in the corner of the Mishnah in which I finally did find them, how I slowly came to realize that these were my guides, my barely visible (and wholly unreal) mentors. In the context of the Mishnah itself, they barely exist.  (I can attest to that by pointing to my own experience of studying the texts in which they appear for more or less my entire adult life without ever noticing them lurking in the shadows, waiting for someone or, more likely, for anyone to be willing to be led forward.) They’re barely there, but "barely there" doesn’t mean "non-existent." And the truth is that, once I figured out where to look, I did find them, and more than I would have expected.   The book is about the journey (all books are about journeys, aren’t they?) that has taken me to this point in my life. It’s about studying Mishnah, but it’s also about me… and about being a rabbi in a world that wants its rabbis to be rabbinic scholars, but which rarely pauses to ask why that is (and, even less frequently, to answer the question).

I’m satisfied with the book. I like writing. I like hearing from readers. What I really wish is that I could send a copy to Edgar Poe.  You can’t send him one either…but you can buy a copy, thus helping the cause along and encouraging me to keep on writing.  Available on-line and in book stores!

Martin Samuel Cohen, author of The Boy on the Door on the Ox, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

The post Putting Those Readings to Work appeared first on Jewcy.

Hello… hello… is this mic on? (Taps microphone, smiles shyly – or tries to, steps back, clears throat, steps forward, surreptitiously wipes sweat from brow, clears throat again, smiles again.) Okay, so I don’t know much about how to do this. But what I do know about, I know a lot about. I’ve been a student of rabbinics – the great sea of talmudic and extra-talmudic literature that the ability to swim along well in is supposed to be the defining feature of the intellectual life of anyone who calls him or herself a rabbi. I’ve been studying this stuff my whole adult life, which is way more than half of it. And, except when drowsy or in a poor mood, I still feel far more energized than paralyzed by my studies, which I continue to keep up: a daily chapter of Rambam (always) and a daily chapter of Mishnah (almost always), plus whatever I’m working on with an eye towards making it into…something: a book, an article, an essay, a sermon, a lecture, a class… something!

You’d think that the obvious question (what exactly do you get from all that studying?) would have an equally obvious answer. I suppose, even, that it does have an obvious answer (you get to know a lot of things you wouldn’t know otherwise), but – and this is the point of my new book, The Boy on the Door on the Ox, published two weeks ago by Aviv Press – there are also all other sorts of answers, some only tangentially related to the "real" subject of whatever it is you’re studying at the moment.  The Mishnah – the oldest extant Jewish law code, the basis for the Talmud, the foundation document of all subsequent rabbinic law – is a good example. It’s "about" a lot of things… about civil and criminal law, about the commandments, about the festivals, about societal institutions of various sorts, about the ancient Temple, about the laws of impurity and purity… but it’s also supposed to be about Jewish spirituality, about the path a devoted student of its six huge volumes can follow not towards knowing more and more details about ancient tort law, but towards spiritual fulfillment, towards wholeness, towards not only knowing of God, but towards the actual redemptive moment that beckons the faithful, always slightly out of reach, at the confluence of faith, observance and hope.  So the first part is the easy part: to learn the things that the Mishnah is "about", you have to read, to study, to master commentaries, etc. But the other part, the part about using, say, the Mishnah, as your personal path forwards towards your personal Jerusalem–that’s the part that it’s way less obvious how to manage. And that’s what my book is about.

I’ve always like the last of the Mishnah’s six great sections best of all, the part that deals with the laws of purity and impurity. Why that is… who knows? Maybe it’s because the sixth section, called Seder Tohorot, depicts a world that reminds me of the one I actually do live in. It’s a world of broken things, of uncontrollable forces, of only sometimes governable outside factors. More to the point, it’s a world intersected by the three great axes of death, illness and putrefaction… and in which the will towards degeneracy, decrepitude, and despair can only occasionally be warded off in advance, thus effectively dealt with by not being dealt with at all. It’s a world in which people are forever battling against forces they can’t quite see, malign influences generally masquerading as the most banal, ordinary appurtenances of daily life. It reminds me of the real world… and to a far greater extent than the other parts of the Mishnah. 

This week, while I’m posting these notes for you to read, I want to introduce you to the specific way that I’ve found to read Mishnah as a spiritual document, as a kind of guide book for people interested in using the literary heritage of ancient Judaism not as a library to read books in, but as a path to journey forward on.  Herman Melville (in Redburn, a vastly underrated novel) wrote that all great novels are essentially guide books. I think that’s right… and that its true of great literary works in general as well.  If you read along with me this week, I’ll show you what I’ve done… and, I hope, make you want to read the book and to see how this all works in far greater detail.

I also have some other books that might interest readers: my edition of the Psalms, called Our Haven and Our Strength, my edition of the prayer book called Siddur Tzur Yisrael, my book on grief, loss, and restoration called Sefer Zot Nechamati (the words mean "This Is My Consolation"), and my novels and books of essays. Just lately, I’ve been putting the finishing touches on a new novel set in ancient times, tentatively called Jerusalem Ghosts, all about the murder of a Levite and introducing just the kind of sleuth I’d like (a lot) to be remembered one day for having introduced to the reading public. Stay tuned!

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Martin Samuel Cohen, author of The Boy on the Door on the Ox, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

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