The Kindness That Spoiled the Water

About This Talk

Chapter 5 rules that everyone occupied with the red heifer becomes impure and conveys impurity to his garments for as long as he is engaged, so that the only substance able to lift the impurity of death off a person cannot be produced without defiling those who produce it, and it then bounds that rule carefully, since a heifer disqualified at the slaughter defiles nobody's garments while one disqualified during the sprinkling of the blood divides the day between those who worked before and those who worked after, and since carrying these offerings defiles while merely touching them does not. Chapter 6 turns to the water itself, which must be living water drawn with a vessel from a spring, and works through what counts as a vessel and what does not, why a jug plugged from below is unfit while the same jug plugged at the side is fit, and which sources qualify, refusing rivers, the Great Sea, salty and hot springs and any spring that has run dry even once in seven years, while accepting water made murky by a fallen shard and water whose color or taste changed of itself. Chapter 7 rules that any other activity performed while drawing disqualifies the water until the ashes are placed on it and that a wage disqualifies the sanctifying and the sprinkling but never the drawing, and then works the principle through a series of cases, the thousand barrels drawn for others that all hold, the five drawn for oneself of which only the last survives, the borrowed rope, the barrel set aside for the wrong reason, the thorn pulled from a neighbor's hand, and the man who tilted a full vessel toward his mouth and never drank.