Daily Talk
A raven crosses a courtyard with an olive sized portion of a corpse in its beak, nobody can say whether it passed overhead, and the Rambam rules the man below impure and the vessels beside him pure. A blind man, a sleeping man and a man walking at night are all convicted on a doubt not one of them could have resolved, while a donkey standing in a graveyard walks out clean. Why should three chapters of unanswerable questions turn out to be about who is worth asking?
The Ones Who Can Be Asked
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About This Talk
Chapter 15 sets out the doubts the Sages ruled pure, holding that a question about a matter of Rabbinic law leaves a person pure while a question about a source of impurity leaves him impure unless the source itself is of doubtful status, that the status of every question of ritual impurity is read from the situation at the time the matter is discovered, so that a carcass thrown among loaves, a burnt creeping animal found on food, a worn out garment and a broken needle all leave everything pure because nobody may reconstruct an earlier moment, that impurity carried in the mouth of a mole or a dog defiles nothing because it has no fixed place until the animal works it against the ground, and that a man who touched one of two objects across two domains is pure and is told only that if he immerses he has not lost anything. Chapter 16 supplies the reasons for the whole system, deriving the leniency of the public domain from the community that brings the Paschal offering in impurity and the stringency of the private domain from the sotah, ruling that two people alone are a sotah case while a third person present makes the room behave like the street, and then confining the entire stringency to one who has the knowledge to be asked and examined, so that a deaf mute, one whose mind is compromised and a minor are pure while a blind man, a sleeping man and one walking at night are impure, before testing the limits with an impure child beside dough, a cow with room to wipe her tongue, a dog that will not leave food for water, murky water that would have left a mark, terumah held in abeyance rather than burnt, and four thresholds by which a child becomes answerable. Chapter 17 carries all of it into the working day with the raven overhead, ten containers filled from one bucket of which only one is impure unless the bucket had a rim, barrels dipped in a cistern, a man who checked and covered his barrels and thereby removed his own explanation, olives that settle into a mound within three days, the majority of a town deciding what a found carcass was, and two women whose hands nobody can now ask about.