Touching the Inside Is Not Touching

The Hook

A kosher fowl dies of itself and a man picks it up. He turns it over, carries it across the yard, holds it long enough for his hands to be warm from it. He is pure. So are his clothes. The Rambam is explicit that this carcass does not impart impurity when touched, does not impart impurity when carried, and does not impart impurity even while it is in a person's mouth.

It imparts impurity in the gullet. Only there. Scripture says that any soul that will partake of the carcass of a fowl shall launder his garments and bathe in water, and the Oral Tradition reads the word for soul as a location, so that impurity registers only once the thing has been ingested into what the Rambam calls the chamber of the soul. An olive sized portion crosses one narrow place in a man's throat and the whole apparatus of severe impurity switches on behind it. And watch the seconds while it goes down. He is holding a copper bowl in one hand and his colleague's shoulder in the other. The bowl becomes impure. The colleague does not. The moment the meat is past the gullet he conveys nothing further, though he himself still needs immersion and nightfall. For a few seconds he was a channel. Then the channel closed and he was left holding only his own condition.

Three chapters follow and none of them leaves that first ruling behind. Birds, then the eight creeping things, then seminal discharge. They look like three unrelated tractates of unpleasantness. They are one argument about where a person ends.

She'ar Avot HaTum'ot 3: The Only Room It Can Enter

The chapter is unusually interested in wrappers. A man winds an olive sized portion in lettuce, so that the meat never brushes his throat, and swallows the parcel whole. He is impure. He winds the identical portion in tree bast and swallows that, and he is pure. Nothing about the meat changed. What changed is whether what went down was food carrying meat inside it or a package that happened to have meat in it. Lettuce goes where the meat goes. Bast is going nowhere, so what arrived was bast.

Skewer a portion of animal carcass, a different source of impurity, on a weaving needle and push it into another person's gullet, and the impurity travels back out the front door, because the man holding the needle is carrying a carcass. The chapter is careful that this is impurity of carrying and not of touch. The gullet is not a magic room. It is one address, and every other rule about the substance stays where it was. Swallow the portion and vomit it before it is digested and it conveys nothing on the way up, not even to the garments it passes, since it imparts impurity in the gullet when swallowed and not when vomited. Direction is part of the law.

Then the chapter measures. An olive of what, exactly? Not the thin feathers and not the wooly hairs, though both are counted as food and can carry the lesser impurity of foods. Not the wing tips, not the tip of the tail, and not the bones, even soft ones. But the soft portions of the beak and the nails close to the flesh are counted like meat and go into the reckoning. A man could swallow an entire small bird and stay pure because most of what he swallowed was never eligible to be counted, and he could be impure over the same bird because two soft nails tipped the scale.

The chapter also rules that a fowl found tereifah but slaughtered properly is pure while the same fowl killed by melikah is not purified by it, that the carcass of a bird from a non kosher species does not impart this impurity at all, which reverses every instinct about what is worse, and that a limb separated from a living bird is pure altogether. Nothing here follows from how bad the thing is. Everything follows from whether it got in.

She'ar Avot HaTum'ot 4: Whole As It Came Into Being

The eight creeping things are named and their impurity is all the same, which is a relief after a chapter of gradations. They defile a person and vessels by touch and an earthenware container through its inner space, they do not defile when carried, and a person who touches them does not thereby make his own clothes impure. The measure is a lentil and all eight combine toward it.

Then the limbs, where the chapter says something that sounds like a contradiction and is not. A limb of a sheretz has no minimum measure and defiles at any size at all. But to be a limb it must be intact exactly as it came into being, with flesh and sinews and bones, and with enough substance inside the bone that it could have regenerated and returned to wholeness. Flesh alone, separated from a living sheretz, is pure, and kidney, liver and tongue count as flesh here though they are organs and will never grow back. The law is not counting mass. It is asking whether this is a piece of an animal or a small complete thing that was once going somewhere.

The hides split the eight species down the middle. Weasel, mouse, ferret and mole have hides that are pure even while fresh. Hedgehog, chameleon, lizard and snail have hides that count as flesh until they are processed, or trodden for as long as it takes to walk four millin. A hide becomes leather at a certain point and the halacha measures that point in walking. The thigh bone returns, one chapter after it closed the previous treatise on a hole nobody drilled, shrunk down now to a mouse. Touching it leaves you pure so long as the marrow rattles inside, since rattling marrow could never have regenerated flesh, while marrow in its natural place and sufficient to grow flesh outside the bone makes touching it defile, and perforating the bone to the slightest degree makes touching any part of it defile. An egg of a sheretz in which the embryo has begun to take form follows the same rule. A sealed interior is not merely hidden. It is legally silent.

Two rulings finish the argument. A sheretz half flesh and half earth, one of those creatures the ancients believed generated out of mud, defiles at the flesh and not at the earth, unless the form of the animal is already apparent along its entire length, in which case even the unformed earth defiles. Form runs ahead of substance. And a sheretz does not impart impurity until it dies, so a decapitated lizard still twitching defiles, while a frog, a snake and a scorpion impart no impurity at all and are not even considered impure food. There are creatures that can kill you and cannot make you impure.

She'ar Avot HaTum'ot 5: Nothing Counts Until It Is Felt

The last chapter takes up seminal discharge, the most interior subject in the book, and it produces the sharpest sentence of the three. It is a primary source of impurity. It defiles by touch and not by carrying. The measure is a lentil for a person who touches it and the slightest amount for the man from whom it came. And he is not impure until it has left his body and reached the orifice. Until it emerges there is nothing to rule on.

Then the sensation rule. Wherever a person's body does not feel the discharge, no impurity is conveyed at all, and a sensation at the beginning is enough even where the ending was felt by nobody. A man who had sexual thoughts at night, dreamed he had relations, and woke to find his organ warm is presumed impure, on the reasoning that he must have felt something and the moisture was absorbed into his flesh or his clothing. Thoughts without warmth, pure. Warmth without thoughts, pure. Two witnesses are required and neither of them is a stain.

And then the sentence. A woman who has relations is impure, both parties are primary derivatives of impurity by Scriptural law, and the Rambam explains that she is not impure because she touched anything. She is not a toucher at all. The reason he gives is that the substance touched the inner part of her body, and touching the inner part of the body is not considered as touch, so the law reclassifies her as one who discharges rather than one who handled something. A whole category is redrawn around the observation that the inside of a body is not a surface. The rest is time and moisture. The substance conveys impurity for three twelve hour periods and is pure afterward because it has putrefied, and it must be moist, since dried like a shard it is pure unless a day soaking in lukewarm water would bring it back.

The Unifying Principle

Three subjects with nothing to do with each other and one question asked over and over. Where does a person end? The bird cannot reach you from outside; it has to be swallowed, and the law will not accept the mouth as close enough. The sheretz reaches you by touch and never by carrying, its limb counts only if it is whole as it came into being, and its bone is silent until opened by a hole too small to see. The last chapter says outright that the interior of a body is not a surface that can be touched. The seam is not a moral boundary. It is a boundary of transmission.

The Alter Rebbe describes, in the middle chapters of Tanya, a man in whom the evil inclination is entirely present and entirely intact, and who is nevertheless called a beinoni because that evil is never granted permission to clothe itself in the limbs, in thought, in speech, in action. It is not gone. It is not converted. It is sealed. What the Tanya insists on is that such a man is neither a hypocrite nor a failure, because the standard is not whether something is inside him but whether it was given an exit. The Rambam's thigh bone says the same thing in the language of purity. A sealed interior conveys nothing, and it is not because it is empty.

Against that stands the teaching of the Baal Shem Tov that in the place where a person's thought is, there he is entirely. That sounds like the opposite claim, and the tension is worth holding rather than dissolving, because the two answer different questions. Where you are is settled by your thought. What you make impure is settled by what got out. And the Sfat Emet, writing about these weeks of Elul, returns again and again to a point inside a person that nothing ever reached, which is not a consolation prize but the actual location of the work. The halacha of the sealed bone is that theology turned into a measurement.

Modern Application

There has never been an era less able to understand a sealed interior. Everything is transmitted now. The half formed thought is a post, the reaction is public before it has finished being felt, and a person builds a reputation out of material that in any earlier century would have stayed in the gullet. We have abolished the difference between having something inside you and putting it into the world, and then we wonder why everyone feels contaminated by everyone else. A man holding a carcass in both hands is clean, and that is not a legal fiction covering a dirty man. It is a ruling that contact is not conveyance. There is a version of honesty that consists of narrating every internal state, and this material suggests it is not honesty. It is leakage.

Then the other edge, which is less comfortable. The bird requires no intent at all. A man who swallowed without meaning anything by it, without knowing what it was, is impure by Scriptural law, and it is only the lesser impurity of foods that waits for him to have a thought about it. Whatever you have actually taken in has gone to work on you regardless of your position on it. And the last chapter refuses to count what the body never felt, because something that passed through you without ever being registered is not yet part of your account.

The Closing

These chapters are learned on the twenty sixth of Elul. Counting the way the tradition counts, with the twenty fifth as the first day of creation, this is day two, the day of the firmament, the day a division was made between the waters above and the waters below. It is the only one of the six days about which the Torah does not say that it was good. The Midrash offers reasons, that the work of the waters was not completed until the third day, and that division itself entered the world on that day. Both agree on what happened. A boundary was installed in the middle of something that had been continuous, and nobody called it good.

Three chapters of impurity arrive on that anniversary and they are nothing but boundary. A throat, a hide that has become leather, a hole in a bone, a lentil, a surface that is not a surface. The learning does not celebrate any of it. It measures it exactly, the way a person measures something that has to be there and cannot be enjoyed.

Four days from now the year turns and everything is weighed, and what the day's learning quietly proposes is that the weighing will not be of your contents. Contents are not the charge. The charge is transmission, what got out and what it touched and how far it travelled before anyone noticed, and beside that sits a whole sealed inventory that has never made anything impure and never will. The firmament was made so that not everything true about you would have to be contagious. So before the sixth day arrives, one question is worth sitting with. What are you carrying that has never once been given an exit, and would you know the difference between having sealed it and having buried it?