Daily Talk
The Rambam closes a treatise on impure food by ruling that nobody is forbidden to eat ordinary food in impurity, then opens a treatise on vessels by ruling that a clay lamp with no hollow can never be defiled at all. A blacksmith's hollow is pure and the identical hollow in a jeweler's shop is not. On the Shabbat before Yom Kippur, what makes a space inside a person able to receive anything at all?
Whatever Can Hold
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About This Talk
Chapter 16 of Tum'at Okhalin sets the presumptions of the marketplace, ruling that vegetables, flour and cracked wheat are presumed susceptible and impure because everyone touches them, that an unlearned seller is believed about them but never about fish or fish brine, and that brine bought from him can be purified through a mikveh for dipping bread but not for cooking in water, before declaring that all the laws of purity apply only to the Sanctuary, sacrifices, terumah and the second tithe, that ordinary food may be eaten and even made impure, that every Jew must be pure on the pilgrimage festivals, and that the perushim who kept purity anyway walked a path of separation, purity and holiness toward resembling the Divine Presence. Kelim 1 lists the seven materials susceptible by Torah law, excludes whatever comes from the sea and all implements of dung, stone and earth, rules flat earthenware wholly pure because it has no inner space while metal is susceptible flat or hollow, places flat wood, leather and bone under Rabbinic law except for things made to lie or ride on, and explains why glass is defiled only by contact. Kelim 2 rules that a receptacle has no minimum size but must be of lasting material, that a child's deed counts though his intent does not, that a hollow made to be filled is no receptacle unless, as with a jeweler, it is lifted to gather what collects, and follows a hollow straw holding a mezuzah and a pocket left in hide by a pearl.