Daily Talk
A jug of clean water poured at the mouth of a cave becomes, by decree, the thing that makes a man impure, because a whole population had drawn the wrong conclusion from the order in which two things happened. A man whose hands are perfectly pure takes hold of a sacred scroll and his hands are impure, while the passage of the sotah, in the same letters and the same ink, leaves them clean. Ordinary food stops conducting impurity at the second remove, terumah at the third, consecrated food at the fourth. Why should the law be built so that the higher a thing stands, the further into it a defilement can travel?
How Far a Thing Can Fall
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About This Talk
Chapter 9 sets out the Rabbinic decree that three lugim of drawn water falling on a man's head and the greater part of his body, or his entering such water, makes him a secondary derivative of impurity until he immerses, a ruling the Rambam explains as a correction for the widespread belief that the rinse rather than the immersion conveyed purity, and it goes on to rule that the Holy Scriptures impart impurity to hands while translations, the Ivri script, blessing texts, the scrolls of heretics and the passage of the sotah do not. Chapter 10 governs the man who immersed today and must still wait for nightfall, ranking him a secondary derivative whatever he came from, leaving ordinary food untouched while disqualifying terumah to the third remove and consecrated food to the fourth, and closing with a census of which entities can occupy which rank. Chapter 11 maps where each chain stops, ruling ordinary food disqualified at the second remove, terumah at the third and consecrated food at the fourth, decreeing ordinary meat a third remove toward sacrificial food so the two are never confused, and ending on dough of doubtful status whose challah is neither eaten nor burned.