The Part of You That Cannot Be Ruined

About This Talk

Chapter 5 sorts damaged skin into a burn caused by fire and a boil caused by anything else, rules that a scald in the hot springs of Tiberias is a boil because the heat did not come from fire, and then establishes that a fresh festering wound contracts tzara'at not at all, a wound scabbed to the thickness of a garlic peel contracts it through two signs with one week of isolation, and a wound fully healed to ordinary skin contracts it through three signs with two weeks, before ruling that a boil and a burn are never combined so that a gris lying across both leaves the man pure, that not knowing which of the two it is makes no difference at all, and that baldness of any cause takes only two signs since no hair grows there to turn white. Chapter 6 lists the twelve surfaces a baheret can never reach, from the inside of the ear to the nail and the red of the lips, and draws the distinction that decides the next chapter, since those surfaces staying clean does not prevent a man whose whole body has whitened from being declared pure while a bald scalp or a scabbed boil staying clean does prevent it, because only what is fit to be ruined is counted; it then rules a baheret standing beside the eye or a boil pure for want of ordinary flesh to spread into, declares pure five beharot that passed through an interval of exemption, and sets the rule that every doubt resolves toward purity before a man has been deemed impure and against him afterward, closing with the ruling that the verdict does not exist until the priest has spoken it. Chapter 7 turns the whole apparatus over, ruling that tzara'at covering the entire body purifies a man who was in isolation or already deemed definitively impure and condemns a man who had been released, that healthy flesh the size of a square over a lentil convicts while white hair does not, that a lentil of living skin on a fingertip or the tip of the nose holds up the purity of a man otherwise entirely white, that the cycle from pure to impure and back may run a hundred times, and that a man who hurried to show his blemish to the priest can be ruined by his diligence while the man who never reached him walks out clean.