Sweat Is Pure and Tears Are Not

About This Talk

Chapter 1 establishes the zav, the zavah, the woman in the nidah state and the woman after childbirth as four primary sources of impurity who convey impurity to vessels by touch and to persons by touch and by being carried, and whose bed, seat and saddle become primary sources in their own right, flattens every internal distinction so that a minor and a major zavah convey identically, reaches down to an infant girl of one day for nidah impurity and a boy of one day for the impurity of a zav, keeps the male and female systems from crossing while laying the stringencies of both on a tumtum and an androgynus without letting their status harden into certainty, rules blood released in a Cesarean delivery a primary source although the woman herself stays pure, and closes with the inventory of nine fluids sorted into three grades, saliva and semen and urine as primary sources, tears and the blood of a wound and a woman's milk as derivatives that ruin implements and cannot reach a person, and sweat and pus and what the body discards as entirely pure. Chapter 2 divides substances by whether they can still return to themselves, ruling uterine blood impure moist or dry while a zav's discharge, saliva and semen convey impurity only while moist, and measuring dryness by whether twenty four hours in lukewarm water would restore the substance to its natural state, then applying the same instinct to a household, where flax spun by a nidah is harmless unless it is still wet from her lips, a cup a zav declined to drink from is clean and one swallow makes it impure, bread and an onion convey nothing while a zucchini and a cucumber do, blood and saliva and urine mixed into water are pure once nothing distinct remains, a shared urinal goes by the majority, and the decree that gentiles convey impurity like zavim is left deliberately incomplete so that everyone will recognize it as Rabbinic. Chapter 3 turns the same question on time, reading the apparently redundant verse about the bed of a man intimate with a nidah as a demotion rather than an emphasis, setting the retroactive reach of a woman with no fixed pattern at twenty four hours or back to her last inspection, sparing the woman who inspects at her fixed time while making the fixed time itself the starting point for one who let it pass unchecked, writing the individual body into the law by ruling differently for women who bleed at the onset of their signs and women who bleed at the end of them, extending the same reach to stains, and then classing the whole apparatus as Rabbinic decrees instituted because of doubt, so that nothing is burned on their account and the ruling is held in abeyance.