Everything Comes Back Except the Coat

About This Talk

Chapter 11 lays out the purification of a person afflicted with tzara'at, with a new earthenware vessel of living water, two kosher sparrows of which the healthier is slaughtered over the water and buried in his presence, a cedar branch, a hyssop with no second name and a crimson strand bound with the living bird and dipped, seven sprinklings on the back of his hand, and a bird cast over the wall again and again, even a hundred times, if it keeps coming back, followed by a shaving of all the visible skin that deliberately excludes the hair of the nose, a week during which he is inside the wall and still conveys impurity by touch, and a second shaving that voids the first if two hairs were missed, with the rule that anyone at all may perform this purification, even a zav or a man impure from a corpse, while an afflicted man may not purify another and two afflicted men are not purified together, since mitzvot are not performed in bundles. Chapter 12 moves the same affliction onto cloth, setting the minimum at a gris and the signs at intense green, intense red and spreading, sorting the two weeks of isolation so that a third color, a switch of color, or a fade all release the garment while an unchanged appearance burns it, and establishing that a blemish which swallows a clean island inside itself has not increased at all, since it must increase outward, while the slightest spread to the adjacent place is decisive, and that only white cloth of a certain size is eligible, though undersized patches sewn together become one garment because sewing is like weaving. Chapter 13 fixes the materials at wool, linen, leather, felt and tents, excludes garments belonging to gentiles, includes utensils nobody sits on such as a ship's sail and a barber's sheet, rules that a connecting strand is not a legal connection unless the affliction crosses it, and then places side by side the two rulings that decide everything: an isolated garment that is dyed, sold or mixed with others is pure, while a garment definitively deemed impure makes every garment it is mixed among impure even one among thousands, before declaring that such a garment is a primary category of impurity analogous to an afflicted person in all respects and is sent outside every city, walled or unwalled, which the Rambam calls a stringency for garments over humans.