While the Water Is Still on It

About This Talk

Chapter 12 lists the eleven stringencies that apply to consecrated food and not to terumah, ruling that vessels may not be immersed inside other vessels lest the outer mouth be narrower than the mouthpiece of a drinking pouch, that an impure outer surface takes the whole vessel rather than leaving the inner space pure, that a bed must be untied and wiped and immersed piece by piece, that vessels whose manufacture was completed in purity by a scrupulous scholar must still be immersed in case the spittle of an unlearned person landed on them while they were moist, that everything inside a container counts as joined so that separated figs and raisins go impure together, and finally that the cherished quality of consecrated food causes it to count as susceptible to impurity without ever having met water, so that a man with impure hands may not eat it even by way of a weaving needle or from the hand of a friend. Chapter 13 sets out five categories of clothing in which each level is a midras for the level above it while insisting that none of the people are zavvim, rules that immersion takes its ceiling from the intention behind it and that one who immerses for the red heifer is fit for everything, holds that a man who diverted his attention from terumah is impure although he protests that his hands touched nothing, since hands are busy, presumes found vessels and saliva impure everywhere except Jerusalem, excepts slaughtering knives from that exemption and fixes what is done for one found on the thirteenth of Nisan and one found on the fourteenth, reverses the map of the Jerusalem road during the festivals, and names six doubtful sources for which terumah is burned while ruling that a compounded doubt leaves the terumah neither eaten nor burnt. Chapter 14 lists the twelve doubtful situations the Sages deemed pure, works through floating impurity and floating purity, gives one cistern in a winepress two answers at once, clears the hands in four permutations, tells a man who cannot say which of his hands is impure not to handle pure articles while ruling that whatever he touched stays pure, and rules the loaf found with liquid on it pure where it is brought at once and impure where the water was allowed to dry.