Nothing Has to Touch You

About This Talk

Chapter 12 rules that vessels of wood, leather and bone are purified the moment they break and that anything rebuilt from the pieces counts as a vessel that never contracted impurity, while a broken metal vessel melted down and recast returns to its former impurity by Rabbinic decree, enacted lest a man who recasts an impure vessel in a day conclude that immersion also purifies the same day without waiting for nightfall, and that a sprinkling of the ashes before the melting does not join a sprinkling after it; it decides mixed iron by majority and calls equal amounts impure, rules a hatchet by its blade and a pitcher by its base because the status of the whole follows the part that performs the task, and turns to glass, whose impurity is chiefly Rabbinic so that recast glass never returns, where a small bottle whose mouth broke off remains a vessel because one pours from it while a large bottle and a perfume flask become pure because the broken rim would injure hand or finger, and a pane that can hold liquid is pure while a ladle that tips over on the table is impure, since the question is never what a thing can do but what it was made for. Chapter 13 establishes that an earthenware container is defiled only through its inner space while every other vessel is defiled only by contact, so that what defiles the one leaves the other pure, that it defiles food and liquid held in its air untouched but never the vessels standing inside it, whose liquids are defiled by that air and then defile the vessels holding them, that impure liquid defiles its outer surface only where it has an inner space at all, that an inverted vessel covering impurity on the ground is a tent while one inverted over a pit stays pure because the impurity itself must enter, and it applies assumptions of leniency to a carcass or a needle found in the earth below an oven while ruling the same needle impure once found in the swept ash, tests a visible object by whether ordinary dough would touch it during baking, and rules that where three walls stand one inside the next the tallest rim alone draws the room, as with nested frying pans, a bordered clay tray and the compartments of a wooden spice box, which are joined for contracting impurity and for sprinkling when nailed in, for contracting impurity alone when wedged, and for neither when they lift out. Chapter 14 rules that whatever shields as a sealed covering against corpse impurity shields within a clay vessel and that a seal holds impurity out and never holds it in, that a ring sealed in a brick or a needle in a block of wood defiles though terumah touching that wood would stay pure, that what a living creature has swallowed is genuinely held while a man's mouth and the folds of his body are not, that a soaked sponge, a turnip, a reed and new olive dregs defile because the liquid will eventually emerge while dregs of twelve months do not unless liquid is known to still come out, that a partition from rim to floor cannot divide a clay vessel the way boards divide a house, and that a basket or flask lowered into an earthenware vessel saves what it holds only where its rim stands above the outer rim and it has no hole wide enough for an olive to fall through or for liquid to seep in, so that straw stuffed into an opening and a hide hung down into the air save nothing, while a flask broken open to the width of a pomegranate, no longer a vessel at all, still saves what is inside it.