Daily Talk
Set a wide plank over a portion of a corpse and rest it on four stones, and everything lying on top of the plank stays pure. Rest the identical plank on four men, or on four stone vessels that could never become impure in a thousand years, and everything on top is impure, including the objects sitting at the far end where nothing lies beneath them. The plank has not changed. Neither has the height, nor the corpse. Why should the ruling turn on what the roof is standing on?
A Man Is Not a Roof
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About This Talk
Chapter 12 fixes the measurements that turn a covering into an ohel, a handbreadth square with a handbreadth of clearance, then rules that a person or a vessel serving as the covering or merely holding it up conveys impurity and can never block it, and closes with the geometry of beams, barrels and a pillar lying in the open. Chapter 13 sorts every covering in the world into those that convey impurity and block it, those that convey it and cannot block it, and those that do neither, and the line that decides the third category is whether the covering will last. Chapter 14 turns from the roof to the hole in it, ruling that impurity passes through an opening of a handbreadth, or through one the width of a small coin where the opening was made for light, and that a man's intention for an aperture he never cut sets its measure as surely as a chisel would.