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

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СКАЧАТЬ and conscious effort to neutralize some of the most common settings in which one can contract impurity, and thereby to make the contraction of impurity somewhat more controllable and the pursuit of purity more feasible. As I will argue, had the rabbis not been actively invested in their subjects’ ability to maintain a state of ritual purity, there would be absolutely no reason for them to put forth such peculiar rulings.

      Here I will focus on the two most conspicuous rulings in this series, which introduce extremely lenient and completely counterintuitive principles for the determination of purity status in cases in which one cannot know for a fact whether impurity was contracted or not. Both of these rulings essentially present the notion that whenever impurity is most likely to have been contracted, it will be determined that impurity was not contracted.

      The first ruling pertains to cases in which a person is suspected to have contracted impurity, but this person is not capable of accounting for him- or herself. For example, a small child or a mentally inept person is found next to a dead rodent. If they touched it, they have become impure; but it cannot be determined with certainty that they are indeed impure, because they cannot provide a reliable answer to the question “did you touch it?” This principle also pertains to animals that are suspected to have wandered into an impure area (for example, a graveyard) and are carrying articles, thus making the articles they were carrying impure (animals in and of themselves, it should be noted, are not susceptible to impurity).¹²⁰ Such cases are referred to in the Mishnah as cases involving “one who has no mind to be asked” (ein bo da’at lishael). We could assume that in cases of doubt of this sort, the rabbis would rule that the person or articles would be considered impure. After all, is it not especially mentally inept people and animals who are prone to touching things that mentally capable people will be careful not to touch, and to wander into places that mentally capable persons will be careful not to go? But the Mishnah, surprisingly, rules exactly the opposite: in any case of doubt in which one cannot account for oneself, the persons or articles in question are rendered pure. In contrast, in an identical case of doubt involving a mentally capable person, the default ruling is impurity. For example, if an adult capable person says that he is not sure whether he touched a dead rodent or not, he will be determined to be impure, even though he is far less likely to have touched the rodent than a child is:

      A deaf person, a mentally inept person (shoteh), and a minor who were found in an entry way in which there is impurity, are held to be pure; and all mentally capable persons (kol ha-piqeah) are held to be impure.

      Whoever has no mind to be asked, his doubt is pure (that is, will be considered pure in a case of doubt).¹²¹

      This ruling is highly counterintuitive, but it is this very counterintuitivity that indicates how invested the rabbis were in making purity a tenable goal. If persons and animals who cannot be responsible for avoiding impurity and who cannot be held accountable for their state of impurity were considered to be perpetually impure, as would have been the predictable ruling based on the premises we have examined throughout this chapter, then one’s ability to maintain oneself and one’s immediate environment in a state of purity would be significantly compromised. Through this overarching ruling the Mishnah does not dismiss the possibility that those who cannot give account of their actions have in fact encountered a source of impurity, but it allows one to ignore the ever-present potential of impurity that children and animals harbor, thus making the pursuit of purity more feasible.

      The second mishnaic principle I will mention here pertains to cases of doubtful impurity in public as opposed to private domains. According to this principle, in a case of doubt regarding the contraction of impurity in a public domain, the ruling will be that the person or object in question is pure, whereas in a case of doubt regarding the contraction of impurity in a private domain, the ruling will be that the person or object in question is impure.¹²² For example, if one is not sure whether one touched a dead rodent or not while walking in the town square, he will be declared pure; but if he is not sure whether he touched a rodent or not in his own home, he will be declared impure. Similarly, if one sat on a bench that was situated in someone’s backyard, and it cannot be known whether this bench was pure or not (for example, whether a menstruating woman previously sat on it), it will be assumed that the bench was impure and the person who sat on it will also be rendered impure; but if one sat on a bench in the street or in the marketplace, the person who sat on it will be rendered pure.¹²³ Once again, this seems completely counterintuitive: surely there is greater likelihood for a bench on which two hundred people sit in one day to be impure than for a bench in someone’s private quarters, and surely there is greater chance to encounter sources of impurity in the bustling public domain than in the confined space of one’s own home, which can be monitored much more closely. Here too the mishnaic principle does not propose an account of what is most likely to have taken place, but rather functions as a green light for the subjects of the Mishnah to ignore what may have taken place so as to be able to maintain a state of purity in situations in which it seems most impossible to do so.

      These two principles, then, serve as formal legalistic means to inhibit the full implications of the mishnaic system itself. Were the rabbis to follow the logic of their own system all the way through, it would indeed be very difficult to find a time and a place in which one or one’s possessions cannot be at least suspected to have contracted impurity, and thus to be impure by default. The rabbis prevent purity from becoming an entirely lost cause by creating a critical distinction between situations and settings that are at least partially in one’s control and situations and settings that are entirely beyond one’s control, allowing a freer pass for purity in cases of the latter sort. To emphasize, the principles described above pertain only to cases of doubt: if one knows for a fact that a person or an object contracted impurity, it makes no difference at all in which domain this took place or what the mental capacities of the person are. But by declaring that in situations which one cannot control there is no default assumption of impurity as there is in situations that one can control, the rabbis turn the maintaining of oneself in a state of purity from an impossible task to a sisyphic yet feasible task. It is in this distinction between controllable circumstances and incontrollable circumstances, I propose, that the key to understanding the rabbis’ stakes in ritual purity as an aspired ideal can be found.

      Impurity and the Making of the Mishnaic Subject

      The classification of persons, things, places, and bodily conditions as either pure or impure was a critical part of the conceptual framework that the rabbis inherited from their biblical and postbiblical predecessors. This classificatory enterprise is not just a manifestation of an intellectual desire for order and systematization; it also has strong normative implications, since it entails by its very nature an expectation that one should avoid impurity to the extent that this is possible, or otherwise get rid of it as soon as possible. This is not to say that the ritually impure was in any way identified with the immoral or unethical,¹²⁴ or that concern with purity was expected to override any other legal or social considerations: obviously there are legitimate and even highly condoned activities that generate impurity, such as childbirth or care of the dead, and there is no reason to believe that people refrained (or were encouraged to refrain) from such activities so as not to contract impurity.¹²⁵ But regardless of how meritorious the situation in which one contracted impurity was, the very condition of being impure was an undesirable condition that, as is evident in all textual sources concerned with ritual impurity, one should want to change. When the rabbis create an elaborate body of knowledge on the workings of impurity as they do in the Mishnah, explaining exactly how it is transmitted and in what situations it is likely to be contracted, the underlying message of this body of knowledge, so obvious that it does not need to be explicitly stated, is “try to be pure.” In this respect, the Mishnah is not different from earlier and much more concise impurity codes, as we find in the Hebrew Bible and in the texts from Qumran. What does make the Mishnah different, however, is the circumstances to which the implicit-but-obvious injunction “try to be pure” pertains. Whereas in the biblical and the Qumranic systems impurity is consequential mainly for those who function as primary sources of impurity, and at most to those in their most immediate vicinity, in the СКАЧАТЬ