Daily Talk
The last chapter of Sefer Korbanot is about animals that nobody consecrated. Holiness reached them in the womb, because of what their mothers were, and not one word was spoken over them. Then the book closes, Sefer Taharah opens, and the first thing the Rambam wants you to understand is that a man who puts the tip of his nose across a doorway is impure for seven days. What is it that both books think passes between two bodies that are not touching?
The Roof and the Womb
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About This Talk
Temurah 4 closes Sefer Korbanot with the offspring of consecrated animals, which inherit their mother's offering without any act being performed on them, running from the peace offering that breeds peace offerings to the sin offering whose offspring is consigned to death, and ending with the Rambam's own account of why the Torah forbade exchange at all: to subjugate the evil inclination and improve a person's character. Tum'at Met 1 opens Sefer Taharah with the three channels through which a human corpse conveys impurity, establishing that carrying requires no contact, that moving is carrying, and that ohel, the shelter, belongs to the human corpse alone, so that a fingertip across a doorway makes an entire person impure for seven days. Tum'at Met 2 then measures how much of a body is still a body, from an olive of flesh and a limb with its bone intact through the backbone, the skull, the majority of the structure and the majority of the number of bones, down to a fourth of a kav, a barley corn, two handfuls of rekev and a revi'it of blood.