Nothing Reaches You by Dripping

About This Talk

Chapter 11 sets out how a person impure from a corpse is purified, with three bound stalks of hyssop dipped and sprinkled on the third and seventh days after sunrise, and rules that dipping at night and sprinkling by day voids the act and turns the water itself into a source of impurity, that a common person must count his three days in our presence while a chaver is sprinkled at once, that zavim, a woman in niddah and an uncircumcised man are all purified of corpse impurity while remaining impure in their other respect, and that only the plant called hyssop without any second name is fit, with the purpose for which it was reaped deciding whether a bundle survives a soaking. Chapter 12 rules that the least amount of water purifies provided it lands from the sprinkling itself rather than dripping off a neighboring vessel, and then sorts household assemblies by a double Rabbinic decree under which nail-joined parts, baskets on a carrier, the feet of a bed and a chain of keys are joined for impurity and never for sprinkling, so the water must reach each key and each beam separately, while sewn garments and counted bundles of blankets and kerchiefs are one entity for both. Chapter 13 gathers the extra stringencies of this purification, where a man who served at the altar must immerse again with this process in mind, all foods and liquids count as impure, no degrees of impurity are counted so that a hundred men in a chain are all defiled, and moving a corpse-impure vessel without touching it defiles the mover, and it closes by accepting the word of any person at all, even a common one, because the stringencies have made everybody careful and the ashes were given to all Israel for safekeeping.