The Only Side That Can Be Sealed

About This Talk

Chapter 21 derives the protection of a sealed covering from the verse that calls an open vessel without such a covering impure, applies it first to earthenware, which contracts impurity only through its opening, and extends it to every vessel that cannot contract impurity at all, before ruling that any of those vessels inverted on the ground shelters what is beneath it as an ohel with no clay required, while an earthenware vessel inverted and smeared all around protects nothing, since the verse speaks of a covering on top of it and not a closed covering on its back. Chapter 22 asks what a seal actually is and answers with an inventory of failure, from the handles and bulges that cannot be sealed because they are not containers, through the measures of the smallest breach that matters, to the ruling that a wine jug tolerating a breach the width of a rye stalk fails at the slightest hole if a human hand made it, and closing on the substances that may be smeared, the tin and lead that may not, and the covering that has merely come loose. Chapter 23 turns to what a seal is permitted to save, recording that Scriptural law protects everything inside while the Sages narrowed earthenware to food, liquids and other earthenware, and preserving their reason, which is that a law distinguishing the careful man from the common one would have told the common man he was a separate species, so the protection was reduced for everybody.