Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature. DR. S Mira Balberg

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ various subtopics that pertain to this general theme, and its main portion addresses the topic of doubtful impurity (safeq tum’a), that is, determining the ritual status of someone or something that could have been in contact with a source of impurity, but cannot be said to have had such contact with certainty.

      As a rule, the determination of ritual status—that is, the discernment of something or someone as pure or impure—is performed through a tracing of the history of the object or person in question.⁸² Simply put, it is necessary to determine with what this person or object had contact since the last time the person or object was known to be pure, as well as to determine whether the things or persons with which the person or object had contact were themselves pure or impure. The assumption in tractate Tohorot, however, is that most of the time tracing this history in full is impossible. Let us suppose that Jill was walking in the street and happened to stumble over a rug that someone had left there. According to the mishnaic scheme of transferability, if the rug was impure (for instance, if it was made impure by a corpse or was trodden on by a menstruating woman) and Jill had direct physical contact with it, Jill also becomes impure. But how can it be known if the rug was impure? To answer this question one would have to trace every single person who happened to touch the rug since it was made, which is of course impossible. In other cases, it can be known for sure whether the object or person in question is pure or impure, but it cannot be said with certainty whether contact indeed took place or not. For instance, the Mishnah mentions a case in which a person came across two dead creatures, a dead creeping-crawling creature (for example, a lizard), which is a source of impurity, and a dead frog, which is not impure. This person knows for sure that he touched one of them, but does not know which one he touched, and thus does not know whether he contracted impurity or not.⁸³

      Through the many examples that the Mishnah provides for such cases of doubt, it portrays the world as pervaded with impurity. To paraphrase Murphy’s Law, the underlying mishnaic assumption is that everything that can become impure will become impure. For example, the mishnaic rule is that if one lost an article and found it the next day, this article is automatically rendered impure: the night that it spent away from its rightful owner is presumed to have entailed contact with a source of impurity.⁸⁴ Other passages in the tractate state even more pronouncedly that objects that have been left unattended, even for a short duration of time, can be assumed to have been touched by people in a state of impurity, and thus to have contracted impurity from them. For example:

      If a potter left his pottery-bowls and went down to drink—the inner ones are pure, and the outer ones are impure.⁸⁵

      If one leaves artisans inside his home, the house is impure, the words of R. Meir. And the Sages say: [It is impure] up to the place where [the artisans] can reach with their hands and touch.⁸⁶

      In the first passage, the Mishnah describes a scene in which a potter, whose merchandise is lined up in rows against a wall, leaves his merchandise for a short time to get a drink. The rule here is that the outer pottery articles, that is, the ones farthest away from the wall and closest to the road, must have been touched (advertently or inadvertently) by passersby, and have thus become impure.⁸⁷ Two assumptions guide this ruling: first, that whatever is left unattended will be touched by someone; and second, that this someone is likely to be impure. Similarly, in the second passage R. Meir and the Sages are in dispute regarding a case in which one leaves artisans unattended in one’s home. Whereas R. Meir believes that the artisans will touch everything in the house, and thus every item in the house is to be rendered impure after they leave,⁸⁸ the Sages maintain that they will only touch what is in their immediate vicinity. Here too, however, both R. Meir and the Sages share the premise that whatever is left unattended is touched, and whatever is touched becomes impure.

      In addition, the assumption in the Mishnah is that every person one comes across, unless publicly known to be stringent in the observance of purity, is potentially impure, and thus contact with this person makes one impure by default. Guided by this assumption, the Mishnah describes the following scene:

      If one sat in the public domain, and another person came and trod on his garments, or [the other person] spat and he touched the spittle, on account of [him touching] this spittle they burn the heave-offering, and in regard to his garments, they follow the majority.⁸⁹

      In this scene, Jack (who is presumably pure) is sitting in the public domain when Josh, a man whom Jack probably does not know, comes and treads on Jack’s cloak or spits in Jack’s vicinity. If Josh happens to be a person with genital discharge or scale disease or a Gentile, then every garment on which he treads and everything that touches his saliva immediately becomes impure. While it cannot be known whether Josh is any of these things, the default option is that he was indeed impure and had transmitted this impurity further to Jack. The consequence is that if Jack had contact with Josh’s spittle, Jack will be rendered impure in such a way that he will disqualify a heave-offering if he touches it, and it will have to be incinerated. As for Jack’s garments, here the Mishnah is more lenient and suggests that, instead of automatically rendering the garments impure, it will be considered whether most of the people in this specific place are usually pure or impure. The Mishnah thus creates a picture of daily human interactions, even of the most random and mundane kind, as inherently defined by the risk of contracting impurity.

      An especially pronounced example for this view of the lived world as pervaded with impurity can be found in the following passage of the Mishnah:

      If there is one mentally inept woman (shotah) in a town, or a Gentile woman, or a Kuthian⁹⁰ woman—all the spittles in this town are impure.⁹¹

      As I have mentioned, the saliva of an impure person is itself a source of impurity. The most commonly encountered impure person in the mishnaic system is a menstruating woman (since unlike other forms of impurity that depend on abnormal bodily states, menstruation occurs on a regular basis), and the overall assumption is that Jewish menstruating women are aware of their status and are careful not to convey their impurity to others. Accordingly, they will be careful not to spit in public or at least to conceal their spittle, lest other people touch it and contract impurity.⁹² However, if in a certain town there is a woman who is not mentally capable of being careful in such a way or a woman who is otherwise considered to be constantly impure and not to be careful about it,⁹³ any spittle found in this town potentially belongs to this woman and is thus potentially impure. Needless to say, in the ancient world spitting in the public domain was an ordinary thing,⁹⁴ and the streets of the town were always replete with spittle. This passage paints a forceful picture of a world in which it is not only a direct encounter with people or objects that harbors the risk of impurity, but even merely walking in the street exposes one to impurity. This is closely related, as Charlotte Fonrobert observed, to the place of fluids, and particularly bodily fluids, in the rabbinic system of impurity.⁹⁵ The very fact that saliva and urine, two substances that are commonly found in the public domain, have the same power to make something or someone impure that their original “owner” has marks the marketplace and the street as potentially laden with impurity, and defines one’s very interaction with space—even if this space does not entail actual people or objects—as noxious in terms of impurity.

      Maintaining Purity within a World of Impurity

      As I hope to have illustrated through the examples above, impurity in the Mishnah is depicted as an ineluctable reality. Not only does impurity potentially lurk everywhere, but it is also highly difficult to discern whether one actually contracted it or not, and thus one is prone to be almost always in a state of doubtful impurity. The mishnaic premise that “everything that can become impure will become impure” makes the task of maintaining oneself and one’s possessions in a state of purity throughout one’s daily interactions and activities seem almost impossible. Nevertheless, maintaining oneself and one’s possessions in a state of purity is unquestionably assumed to be the task of the mishnaic subject. That is to say, while the rabbis of the Mishnah create a world in which impurity is the СКАЧАТЬ