Daily Talk
A stranger left alone in a chaver's house renders impure only what he could touch by extending his arm, and the Rambam refuses to imagine that he climbed onto a chair. Thieves who walk through the whole house leave everything pure except the path they walked. Three times a year every man whose word is refused all year is believed about everything he owns. Why does a body of law built entirely out of suspicion work so hard to keep the suspicion small?
As Far As a Hand Can Reach
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About This Talk
Chapter 10 sets the presumption that an unlearned person, however observant, is impure and his garments a midras, because he is not knowledgeable in the intricacies of purity, and then lays out how that presumption is lifted, by a resolve accepted before three chaverim that must be accepted whole or not at all, with the purity of hands taken first and never last, followed by thirty days of watching after which his word is accepted like any chaver even though he is no scholar; it makes Torah scholars chaverim without formality while recording that the priests after the destruction would not rely even on them, strips the status from a chaver who becomes a tax collector, grades suspicion so that it descends from severe matters to light ones and never climbs, and ends by ruling that a man suspect in a matter may still testify and judge in it for others, since a person will not transgress so that someone else may benefit. Chapter 11 collects the places where the unlearned are believed after all, the purification of the red heifer and the wine and oil of the accompanying offerings because severity makes people careful, terumah while the winepresses and olive vats are working because everyone purifies then, earthenware containers within the radius of Modi'it and always in Jerusalem because no kilns are made there, and the pilgrimage festivals, when the decree is suspended and the entire Jewish people are considered chaverim, with the sharp qualification that a barrel opened during the festival is impure in whatever remains once the festival has passed. Chapter 12 turns to unattended property and rules almost everywhere for purity, so that entrusting a key is not entrusting a house, a man charged with watching a cow has not been charged with the house, craftsmen and a hired grinder render impure only what an outstretched hand reaches with no supposition that anyone climbed a ladder, a poor man found standing beside the loaves has touched nothing because he would not touch without permission, thieves defile only their path and tax collectors are believed when their own account raised the suspicion, while a tool found moved from one corner to another makes the entire house impure and every place an unlearned neighbour has a right to enter is impure from the start.