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

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СКАЧАТЬ prevent any misunderstanding at the outset, this does not mean that the subject can control impurity through his volitions or desires in such a way that one will not become impure if one decides not to become impure. Undeniably, one’s desire not to contract impurity has no more impact on his purity status than one’s desire not to get wet when it is raining has on him actually getting wet. Rather, it is the very inclusion of an object in the impurity system (that is, its definition as susceptible to impurity) that depends on the relation between the subject and the object. As I will show in this chapter and the next, the rabbis introduce a revolutionary perception, according to which the mental investment of a person in a thing is a condition for the inclusion of this thing in the realm of impurity. Thus, while the Mishnah describes the material world as pervaded with impurity, it also makes clear that this material world is shaped, defined, classified, and governed by human consciousness and through dependence on human mental processes.

      In the chapters that will follow, we will see how this notion of subjective investment as a condition for susceptibility to impurity unfolds and gains prominence in the mishnaic discourse. Before I turn, in the next chapter, to explore the multifaceted ways in which subjective investment determines the susceptibility of inanimate objects to impurity (most notably artifacts, but also liquids and foods), I dedicate this chapter to discussing the most central and yet the most complex object that occupies the world of impurity—the human body. As I will suggest, in the Mishnah’s discourse of impurity the (living) human body functions as a paradigm for all other potentially impure objects, and it is by examining the most immediate form of relations between the subject and the material world—namely, the relation between one and one’s own body—that we can begin to understand the weight and function of subjectivity in shaping the world of impurity.

      Here I must account for the very distinction or divide between “one” and “one’s body” that I put forth here and that will underlie my analysis in this chapter. To be sure, the divide or duality I am pointing to is by no means akin to a Platonic or Cartesian duality of body and soul or body and mind, and such a duality is not in any way implied in the vocabulary or rhetoric of the Mishnah.⁵ As several scholars have showed, even when various rabbinic sources do mention body and soul as two distinct entities (with the latter seen as what animates the former), they also make clear that these two entities are inextricably linked and codependent, thus not leaving any room for a view of the soul as one’s “real” or pristine self as we find in the Platonic heritage.⁶ In the Mishnah, moreover, a distinction between body and soul is especially irrelevant and indeed does not appear: given the general nature of this work as a legal code, the Mishnah is concerned with what people do or do not do, rather than with the way they are constituted as persons, and internal divisions or tensions within the individual are not addressed in any way.

      Nevertheless, there is absolutely no denying that mishnaic law assumes that each individual has an aspect of will, intention, and self-reflection, as well as an object-like aspect (that is, a material body) in which he or she is not different from animals and inanimate objects, and that these two aspects are not necessarily commensurate. Both these aspects of the human are expressed in the Mishnah through the same single word—adam, meaning “person,” or “mankind,” but an examination of all the occurrences of this word in the Mishnah reveals that adam can be used in two fashions. The word adam is most commonly used to denote a human agent as a legal subject, in such phrases as “a person should not go,” “a person must bless,” “a person can make a vow,” and so on, but it can also be used to denote a human body to which things happen without any will or deliberation on the person’s end. In cases of the latter sort, in which “person” means strictly “human body,” the word adam almost always appears in conjunction with either artifacts (kelim) or animals (behema), making the object-like nature of humans in the given context quite apparent. To take a few typical examples: “If one threw [an item] in order to cause a wound, whether in a person or in an animal”; “They immerse artifacts before the Sabbath and [they immerse] persons on the Sabbath”; “Whether one rented a person or an animal or artifacts, the rule of paying on the same day applies”;⁷ and many more such examples can be found. Through these and similar conjunctions, the Mishnah reflects an underlying distinction between a person as a willing, active, self-reflective entity and a person as an object-like body, even though it does not map out this distinction by pointing to two separate constituents of the human being.

      The distinction I am offering here between “one” and “one’s body,” then, is a distinction between the aspect of the person that is self-reflective, willing, and deliberative, an aspect to which I refer as “self” or “subject,”⁸ and an aspect of the person that is object-like and is classified in the Mishnah alongside other objects. Again, my intention is not to say that the mishnaic subject is somehow immaterial or nonbodily: I submit that there is no way in which the subject can be in the world, perceive it, and act within it except through a body.⁹ This does not allow us, however, to ignore the fact that the body is often experienced as disparate from the self, as something one has to care for and maintain like one would a car or a coffeemaker, and as an entity that does not always comply with one’s own wills or desires. In the concise words of Bryan Turner, “Our bodies are an environment which can become anarchic, regardless of our subjective experience of our government of the body.”¹⁰

      Nowhere in the Mishnah is the nature of the body as “an environment that can become anarchic” more pronounced than in the context of bodily impurity,¹¹ the emergence or contraction of which is, by definition, something that happens to one’s body despite one’s will.¹² Whether one’s body is deemed impure as a result of a physical condition (such as menstruation or scale disease) or as a result of contact with a source of impurity, the entire experience of detecting, managing, and ridding oneself of impurity is underwritten with a tension between the body as an unruly or passive object and the self as a committed and active legal subject.¹³ Thus, I begin my investigation of the construction and development of subjectivity in the Mishnah’s impurity discourse by exploring the mishnaic body—first, as a central site in which the drama of impurity contraction takes place, and then, as a site that the rabbis attempt to make more manageable and more commensurate with the self by introducing subjectivity as a principle that governs its impurity.

      THE BODY UNBOUND

      In the Mishnah, as in the Priestly Code, the most immediate, urgent, and prominent way in which impurity can affect one’s daily life is through his or her very body. First, one’s body might itself be a source of impurity as a result of various physical conditions, thus requiring him or her to take certain measures and to avoid certain places and encounters for as long as the bodily condition persists. Second, one’s body might contract impurity as a result of contact with a primary source, and thereby require rites of immersion and purification, as well as be subject to various limitations regarding access to the holy. Simply put, the first thing that one needs to monitor and watch, whether for signs of primary impurity or for contraction of secondary impurity, is one’s own body, and the purity of one’s own body is the condition for the purity of everything else that one wishes to maintain in a state of purity—one’s possessions, one’s food, holy articles, and so on. It is quite obvious, then, that the subject’s engagement with impurity is first and foremost an engagement with one’s own body. In order to understand, however, what this engagement means in the mishnaic context, we must first try to characterize what I will call the “body of impurity” of the Mishnah, that is, the way in which the human body is seen to function, interact, and be transformed in its encounters with impurity. As we shall see, the rabbis construct a body that is both extremely fluid in terms of its boundaries and highly modular in terms of its constitution, and these two qualities critically define the way impurity as a bodily phenomenon is shaped in the Mishnah.

      Contact and Connectivity

      In her seminal work Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas put forth the paradigm that has become almost axiomatic in the study of purity and impurity, namely, that the concept of “impurity” (as well as “pollution” or “uncleanness”) fundamentally СКАЧАТЬ