Nothing in Your Hands

About This Talk

Mikvaot 2-4 is the law of chatzitzah, something interposed, and in all three chapters the governing variable is human attention rather than dirt. Chapter two lists what blocks a body, crusts and bandages, dried blood, dough under a nail, potters' clay and the mud of the thoroughfares which intervenes even in summer, while ordinary mud intervenes only once dry since wet mud dissolves, and honey, ink, milk and the sap of fig and carob intervene dry but not moist where the sap of other fruits does both. The chapter then makes the standard explicit: a married woman's hidden area is presumed to carry barriers unless she washes first and an unmarried woman's is not, because she is not concerned about that area; tight necklaces, rings and plates over a broken bone intervene while loose ones do not; a neck thread does not and a choker does, because she tightens it to look fuller; and one knotted hair intervenes only where the person is particular about it, the Rambam adding against the Geonim that hair is not a separate entity from the body, so one who is not particular has immersed even if every hair were tied. Holding is the chapter's real prohibition: one who holds another person or a utensil has not immersed them even if he opens his hand under the water, a decree lest he not open it, though wetting his hand first saves it; a woman who slings her infant over her back has not immersed, nor has one with hair in her mouth, clenched fists or pursed lips, while a swallowed impure ring is no barrier at all. Ezra ordained combing beforehand, and all of this governs immersion for pure foods, not a return to her husband, where feeding her son cooked food, an old scratch or tightly shut eyes do not bar her. Chapter three asks the same question of vessels and answers it by the owner's objection: tar inside a craftsman's cup intervenes and outside it does not, on a homeowner's cup either side does, on a large pot or bowl it always does; pitch on a clean tabletop intervenes and on a dirty one does not, on a homeowner's bed yes and a poor man's bed no, on Torah scholars' clothes even one side and on unlearned people's only both, and never on a butcher's bloodied garment. Then the ceiling, since the whole leniency rests on indifference: a vessel whose larger portion is covered is invalid even though the owner does not object, and all vessels are alike in this. The remainder is the mechanics of water reaching everywhere, hollow handles upside down or unrinsed or bent being invalid, a container needing to be tipped, four handbreadths of chain for a large bucket and ten for a small one, and tefillin immersed closed because it is not usual to open and fill them. Chapter four turns to the pool: Scripturally any gathering suffices if a whole body can immerse at once, measured a cubit by a cubit by three cubits high, forty se'ah, and drawn water is Scripturally fine, the disqualification being Rabbinic and read from the verse naming a spring, a cistern and a gathering, neither wholly man's work nor wholly heaven's. Three lugim ruin a pool holding less than forty se'ah, while a pool already holding forty takes drawn water poured in all day. Intent is what disqualifies, not the water: barrels left on a roof to dry that fill with rain may be broken and the water is fit, but lifted and poured out it is all drawn, and barrels set under a drainpipe yield drawn water in any season even if he merely forgot them, by decree against the one who forgot, while vessels left out under a dense sky give unfit water and vessels left out once the clouds had dispersed give fit water. Drawn water made to flow does not disqualify where the majority of the forty se'ah is fit, which the scholars of the west read as pure outright with no majority needed, a reading the Rambam answers in one line, that never has anyone been seen to act that way.