WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23
Nothing Has to Touch You
Kelim 12-14 | Sefer Taharah
A dead creature can press against the outside of a clay pot all day and the pot stays pure, and it can fall cleanly through the mouth without grazing the wall and the pot is impure. Every other vessel in the world works the opposite way. Three days before you build a structure whose whole point is that it has an inside, which space in your life is the one that actually counts?
TODAY'S CHAPTERS
RECENT
Rust Is Not Purity
A sword left to rust becomes pure, and the same sword scoured and sharpened returns to the impurity it carried before. Nothing was ever washed, and the blade was only briefly unfit for its work. On the morning after Yom Kippur, with the sukkah lumber already in the yard, what in you was actually cleaned and what was only set down for a day?
A New Entity
A vessel that has contracted impurity is made pure again by being broken, and the Rambam measures the break by what the thing was for, a pomegranate for a household basket, a loaf for a breadbasket, a wisp of stubble for the one that belongs to the bathhouse. Perforate it and patch it, perforate it and patch it, until the holes together come to a pomegranate, and it is pure although it is now patched over entirely, because what stands there is a new entity. On the day the gates close, how much has to break before the thing standing there is new?
The Horn That Was Cut
A ram's horn lying in a field cannot become impure by any law at all. Cut it, hollow it, shape it into something that serves a person, and from that moment it can be ruined like anything else. On the afternoon before Kol Nidrei, is there anything about you that is finished enough to be damaged?
Whatever Can Hold
The Rambam closes a treatise on impure food by ruling that nobody is forbidden to eat ordinary food in impurity, then opens a treatise on vessels by ruling that a clay lamp with no hollow can never be defiled at all. A blacksmith's hollow is pure and the identical hollow in a jeweler's shop is not. On the Shabbat before Yom Kippur, what makes a space inside a person able to receive anything at all?
The Water Has to Be Wanted
A man puts his arm into a cistern, and whether the drops on it can make food susceptible to impurity depends only on whether he wanted to know if there was water or how much. Dew that everyone knew would fall changes nothing, yet two children turning the figs over change everything. Why should the vulnerability of a fig depend on the wishes of the person who owns it?
The Water You Never Wanted
A farmer sinks his whole harvest in a river to hide it from thieves, and the Rambam rules that not one kernel has been made ready for impurity. Rain falling on a zav stays pure if he shakes it off at once, and the same man who stands under a drainpipe to cool off is covered in impure water. Why do three chapters about liquids decide nearly everything by what a person reached for?