Daily Talk
A sound clay container raised over an olive of a corpse defiles the bowl sitting on top of it. Break that same container, stuff the hole with straw, and the bowl is pure and the ruined pottery is holding the line. Nothing was added and nothing was purified, so the protection has to be coming from the damage itself. Why should a thing have to stop working in order to start sheltering?
The Vessel That Had to Break
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About This Talk
Chapter 18 makes a person into a roof and never a barrier: a hand covering a handbreadth of space over a corpse conveys impurity to whatever the other hand covers, two half-olives in adjacent buildings become one impurity when a man reaches an arm into each, and a man lying across a threshold defiles the house because a person is hollow and his upper body stands a handbreadth high, which is why a door held shut by a shoulder rather than by its own latch leaves the house impure. Chapter 19 turns the same principle on objects through the beehive-shaped container the Rambam stands in doorways and open yards, mouth facing out and mouth facing in, on its base and raised and covered and overturned, ruling each position by a single question, whether the thing is a vessel that conveys or a tent that shelters, and answering that a container damaged and plugged with straw, or stuffed until no hollow remains, has stopped being a vessel and begun to protect. Chapter 20 lists the three conditions that keep something out of reach under the roof of a corpse, a sealed covering, an ohel and the fact of being swallowed, shows that the first two shield inward only while swallowing alone works in both directions, and then presses the point down to a ring set in a jug's clay seal that stays pure on the strength of a film of clay as thin as the skin of a garlic clove.