Daily Talk
An Israelite whose vessels stood untouched for a year is told they are impure, and one sentence about what he was holding in mind reverses the ruling. A man who thought about drilling a hole in a bone, and never drilled it, leaves the bone in doubt. Between them sits the animal that died with nobody's hand on it, which is what the word carcass means. Why should three chapters of beds, hides and bones turn out to be about attention?
What Nobody Meant to Happen
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About This Talk
Chapter 13 closes the laws of couch and seat by leaving furniture behind altogether and ruling on supervision, holding that a priest's vessels keep their status from one pressing season to the next because unlearned people will not touch them while an Israelite's are impure unless he states that in his heart there was a resolve to guard, that unlearned workers must be immersed in the owner's presence and stay pure only until they pass out of his sight, that a locked vat containing vessels of midras impurity is impure even where he watched the workers avoid them, that porters carrying pure food more than a mil ahead stay pure because they assume he is following and go impure the moment he tells them to go on without him, and that a man who guarded his tunic and not his cloak keeps one pure and the other impure. She'ar Avot HaTum'ot 1 opens the treatise on other primary sources of impurity with the carcass, measuring it at an olive sized portion, separating what touching does from what carrying does, ruling that the ritual slaughter of a kosher animal purifies it in all circumstances while a disqualification inside the act leaves it exactly like an animal that died, exempting bones, horns, hoofs, hide and sinews once separated while making them conduct impurity while attached, purifying hides once processed or trodden four millin or once a deed ends their use as flesh, and nullifying two half olive portions on a hide while making the same two defile when a hand flattens and skewers them into one. Chapter 2 works through the animal that is neither alive nor a carcass, the limb from a living animal that defiles at any size, the living fetus that contracts no impurity at all, the slaughter performed by a non Jew that leaves a carcass even under supervision and with an acceptable knife, the thigh bone that is pure only where its marrow rattles, and the unresolved doubt over a thigh bone its owner thought of perforating and has not yet perforated.