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

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СКАЧАТЬ their text to an idealized agent (real or imagined) who operates in this world with the purpose of avoiding impurity to the best of his abilities.⁹⁶ To be sure, the Mishnah makes abundantly clear that a state of ritual purity can by no means be a perpetual one, but is rather always a temporary and transient state. By the mere fact of being in a physical body and of engaging with the material world, one contracts impurity, purifies oneself, and before long contracts impurity again, in an unending cyclical process. But it is nonetheless the mishnaic subject’s responsibility to take measures to purify oneself after having contracted impurity, and to try to maintain this state of purity for a certain duration of time, at least for the purpose of engaging in particular activities, which in the Mishnah have mostly to do with the preparation and consumption of food.

      Here a short digression is in order so as to contest a common view according to which, in the setting of the Mishnah, impurity is completely inconsequential throughout one’s everyday life, since the only time in which impurity has any repercussions is when one is approaching the sanctuary or handling holy articles.⁹⁷ According to this view all the intricate considerations of impurity and doubtful impurity throughout daily interactions and spaces that we have seen pertain only to priests, or at most to pilgrims in the vicinity of the Temple. This, however, is not commensurate with the rhetoric of the Mishnah nor with the scenarios it discusses, which assume an overarching commitment to purity in nonconsecrated times, in nonconsecrated places, and in regard to nonconsecrated objects. While the Mishnah acknowledges that not everyone is or can be committed to this high standard of purity, it does posit an idealized subject who is strongly defined by his commitment to this standard.⁹⁸

      The view that impurity is only consequential in the vicinity of the Temple and the sancta is a long-standing one in the Jewish tradition,⁹⁹ and was most famously and influentially articulated by Moses Maimonides, who contended that “all that is written in the Torah and in the traditions [divrei qabala, that is, in rabbinic literature] regarding the laws of impurities and purities does not concern anything except for the Temple and its holy articles and heave-offerings and tithes.”¹⁰⁰ The roots of this prevalent view are in the fact that according to the Hebrew Bible, the only realm in which impurity is proscribed is that of the sanctuary and the sancta.¹⁰¹ However, there is no reason to assume, even in the biblical context, that if impurity is explicitly prohibited only in the context of the sanctuary and the holies, it is overlooked everywhere else.¹⁰² The expectation that those who have become impure will purify themselves as soon as they can is made abundantly clear in various Priestly passages, without any suggestion that such purification is necessary only for the priests or only for those approaching the sanctuary.¹⁰³ Furthermore, it is stressed that anyone who does not take measures to purify himself or herself in due time commits a transgression,¹⁰⁴ regardless of whether he or she approached the sanctuary or not. The Priestly rhetoric leaves little room for doubt that constant striving toward ritual purity was expected of all the Israelites at all times, needing no further justification other than the all-encompassing requirement to be holy.¹⁰⁵

      While we have no way of knowing whether, to what extent, and by whom, if at all, ritual purity was observed in biblical times, it is quite evident that in the Second Temple period ritual purity was observed in everyday life, beyond the precinct of the Temple, and by nonpriests. While the ubiquity of the observance of ritual purity is debatable, the literary and archeological evidence from this period strongly suggest that such observance was not restricted to festival times or to the Temple area.¹⁰⁶ In an article that has become a classic, Gedalyahu Alon showed that in Second Temple literature we find persistent views according to which daily practices of religious significance must be conducted in a state of ritual purity.¹⁰⁷ This includes not only activities such as prayer and reading of the Torah,¹⁰⁸ but also, and most notably, the consumption of nonconsecrated foodstuffs (hullin). Whereas in the Hebrew Bible the only restriction on the consumption of food in a state of impurity pertains to priests who eat holy foods,¹⁰⁹ a large number of Second Temple sources point to a lay custom of eating ordinary food in a state of ritual purity. The literary evidence for this practice brought forth by Alon is strongly supported by the Qumran Scrolls, which are unequivocal that the members of the community eat all daily meals in a state of ritual purity.¹¹⁰ Moreover, as Jacob Milgrom showed, it seems that in the Qumranic legislation an impure person is prohibited from eating anything at all during his or her first day in a state of impurity (that is, before performing a preliminary rite of purification).¹¹¹ Thus, in the writings of Qumran “purity” in its most basic sense is purity that allows one to consume ordinary food.

      As more recent scholarship has shown, the literary evidence for the custom of eating ordinary food in a state of purity is corroborated by archeological findings, and especially by the large number of stone vessels from the Second Temple and mishnaic periods found in various areas in Palestine. Since stone vessels were considered to be “impurity-proof,” this was the material of choice for making utensils that were to be used in settings in which purity had to be maintained. It is not surprising that many remains of stone vessels were found in the vicinity of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, but such vessels were also found in abundance in other parts of the country, especially in the Galilee.¹¹²

      The Mishnah seems, in this respect, to be in keeping with evidence from the Second Temple period, and it does not suggest in any way that the pursuit of purity is restricted to the priests or to those about to approach the Temple.¹¹³ As we have seen and will continue to see throughout this book, in the Mishnah considerations of purity guide one through the most quotidian aspects of life.¹¹⁴ It is hardly clear why the rabbis would bother to elaborate on the ways in which household furniture such as commodes and beds contract impurity,¹¹⁵ or on the ways in which fish, which cannot be brought to the Temple or given to the priests as a heave-offering, contract impurity,¹¹⁶ if impurity is only of consequence for priests or in the vicinity of the Temple during festival times. By and large the assumption in the Mishnah, as it is in Second Temple literature, is that people strive (or should strive) to maintain themselves and their possessions in a state of purity at all times, to the limited extent that this is possible. Furthermore, in most of the legal discussions of the Mishnah the rabbis operate with the premise that nonconsecrated food is ideally handled, prepared, and consumed in a state of ritual purity.¹¹⁷ Indeed, unless specified otherwise, the appellation “pure” in the Mishnah refers to the level of purity required to consume nonconsecrated food.¹¹⁸

      Given that ritual purity is assumed to be a desirable and even expected goal of the mishnaic subject, the question arises of whether and how maintaining a state of ritual purity is even tenable in the conditions I described above, namely, in a world in which the transferability of impurity is so great and its incidence so ubiquitous that every person and every object is assumed to be impure unless distinctly known otherwise. Is purity not a lost cause to begin with? How can the Mishnah pose an unspoken expectation that its subjects should strive to be ritually pure, at least for the purpose of certain activities, and at the same time assert that they are inescapably surrounded by impurity and are prone to contracting it, knowingly or unknowingly, at any given point?

      On the face of it, one could dismiss this question by saying that the Mishnah does not concern itself with tenability. It describes a world in which impurity is ever present, because this is the result of systematically applying the rabbinic developments in the concept and scheme of impurity unto the lived environment, and it maintains a view in which one strives to be pure because impurity is by definition an undesirable condition and purity a desirable one. Whether or not it is actually feasible for one to be ritually pure for more than a few seconds or minutes at best in the impure world that surrounds him—this, one could argue, was of little interest to the rabbis, who were invested in the production of principles and not in the trifles of practice.¹¹⁹ However, a closer look at the Mishnah’s way of approaching cases of doubtful impurity of the type described, that is, cases in which the guiding premise is that everything and everyone is impure by default, reveals that the rabbis were in fact highly concerned with the tenability of ritual purity. As we see in a series of rulings regarding doubtful impurity in tractate Tohorot СКАЧАТЬ