As Far As a Hand Can Reach

The Hook

A man hires workmen and leaves them in his house. He comes back. What is impure? Only what they could touch by putting out a hand from where they were standing. And then the Rambam adds the sentence these three chapters are really about. We do not say that perhaps they climbed onto a chair or a ladder and touched a vessel or food hanging high on the wall.

Read that again, because it is not a leniency. It is a refusal. The law knows a man can move a chair, and it has already presumed that every one of these workmen is impure and that the clothes on his back defile a bench. With all of that on the table, the accounting still follows the workman exactly as far as his arm goes and not one inch further.

Hold that beside the opening line of chapter ten. An unlearned person, even though he is Jewish and observant of the Torah and its mitzvot, is presumed impure. His garment is a midras. Terumah he touches is burned. His word about the status of anything pure is simply not taken. Two chapters later the same man is standing in a doorway beside a stack of terumah loaves and the loaves are pure, because he would not touch anything without permission.

So which is he. A man whose word about his own barrel is worthless, or a man who can be left alone with bread that is not his.

Metamei Mishkav u'Moshav 10: What It Costs to Be Believed

Notice first what this presumption is not. It is not a judgment about piety. The Rambam is careful to say the man is observant of the Torah and its mitzvot, and then gives his reason in plain technical language. They are not knowledgeable regarding the intricacies of the laws of purity and impurity. He is not suspected of contempt. He is suspected of not knowing where the edges are, which is an entirely different accusation and a far more realistic one.

The way out is a resolve, and the Rambam lists its terms: to be careful with sources of impurity, careful with pure articles, careful about washing his hands, not to take moist food from an unlearned person, not to accept such a person's hospitality, and not to host him while he is wearing his own clothes. That last one is the hardest, because it turns a table into a border, and the two chapters that follow are spent softening what that border does to the people on the other side of it.

The mechanics are exact and strangely humane. He declares it before three chaverim, and his wife, children and household are covered by him, because he will teach them. If he wants to take on everything except one item he is not accepted, which sounds severe until the next line, where a man who says he accepts only the purity of hands is accepted for exactly that. The rule is not about volume. It is about reservation. A small commitment made whole is taken; a large one with a clause carved out of it is not. And the order is fixed. Hands first, pure objects afterwards, and a man who wants the standing without the handwashing is refused even the standing.

Then thirty days of watching, after which his clothes, his food and his drink are pure and his word is accepted like every other chaver, even though, the Rambam adds, he is not a Torah scholar. Scholarship gets you in without ceremony, and the chapter records that the priests after the destruction stopped relying on that and asked even scholars to say the words.

And then the chapter ends on a line that should be carved somewhere. A person suspect in a particular matter may still give testimony about that matter concerning other people, and may sit as a judge in it, because we assume that a person will not transgress so that others will benefit. He may cut corners for himself. He will not lie to hand a stranger an advantage.

Metamei Mishkav u'Moshav 11: The Places Where He Is Believed

Chapter eleven is a list of exceptions, and the exceptions have a shape. The unlearned are believed about the purification of the red heifer, and about the wine and oil brought with a sacrifice, and the reason inverts everything you expect: because the matter is severe, they are careful about it, so their word is taken. Stringency does not produce distrust here. It produces trust, because people rise to what they understand to be weighty.

They are believed about terumah while the winepresses and olive vats are working, since in that season everyone purifies themselves and their vessels to make wine in purity. A man who brings a priest a barrel out of season is turned away, and that same man, if he keeps it at home until the presses run again, is believed, and the priest may accept it knowing full well it is last year's.

Then the geography. Within the radius of Modi'it their word about earthenware is accepted for sacrificial food, and outside it is not, so that the same potter selling the same pots is believed by a buyer carrying them toward Jerusalem and not by one carrying them away. In Jerusalem itself he is always believed, even where the liquid inside is impure and even where his own midras garment went into the vessel. Why such leniency. Because kilns for earthenware are not made in Jerusalem. A fact about zoning becomes a rule about whom you may believe.

And then the festival. During the pilgrimage festivals the impurity decreed upon the unlearned is suspended and they are considered pure, for the entire Jewish people are chaverim during the pilgrimage festivals. Everything they own is pure, and their word is taken about sacrificial food and terumah alike. The border chapter ten built so carefully is simply not there.

The Rambam does not let the moment blur, though, and the next halachah is the sharpest thing in the chapter. If a man opened his barrel of wine or oil during the festival, or began selling his dough, then once the festival passes, what remains is impure. He touched it while he was a chaver, and it was pure while he was, and now he is not and it is not. The elevation was real. It did not launder the leftovers.

Metamei Mishkav u'Moshav 12: What a Person Will Not Do

Chapter twelve is where the apparatus turns over and starts producing purity almost everywhere you look, and its reasons are never about impurity. They are about behaviour.

Hand your house key to an unlearned person and everything inside stays pure, because you handed him a key and not a house. Tell him to watch your cow so it does not get into the house, and the house is pure, because you appointed him over a cow. Tell him to watch the house so the cow does not get in, and the house is impure. Nothing in the physical situation changed. The sentence you spoke changed.

Leave him lying down in your house and go out. Awake and found awake, asleep and found asleep, awake and found asleep, everything is pure; only if you left him asleep and found him awake is the area within his reach impure. A woman goes in to fetch a loaf for a poor man at her door and finds him standing beside the loaves, and they are pure, terumah and all, because it may be assumed he would not touch anything without permission.

Even the thieves get this treatment. They defile only the path they walked, because they are afraid to search a house and take what is at hand. Tax collectors who volunteer that they came in and touched nothing are believed, on the principle that the same mouth which raised the suspicion is the mouth that removed it. Leave the door open, come back, find nothing stolen, and everything is pure, because thieves opened it and thought better of it.

Set against that generosity are the two places where the chapter gives no ground. If a tool is missing, or was left in one corner and found in another, the entire house is impure, because somebody came in and moved it. And wherever the unlearned neighbour has a right to be, the accounting stops: a shared courtyard makes your sealed barrels impure. But two courtyards, one inside the other, and yours the inner one, and your produce is pure even though his hand could reach it, because to reach it he would have to be a thief. Not because he cannot. Because of what he would have to become.

The Unifying Principle

The Rambam tells you himself, in the middle of chapter ten, what all of this is. Impure foods impart impurity to other things only by virtue of Rabbinic decree. This entire structure is a decree built on a doubt, and a decree built on a doubt has to decide how far the doubt travels. That decision is the subject of these three chapters, and the answer is the same every time: exactly as far as a hand can reach, and no further.

What governs is never what is physically possible. It is what a person will actually do, given who he is, what he was told, and whose ground he is standing on. He could climb the ladder. He will not. He could reach across the courtyard wall. He would be a thief if he did. He could take the loaves. He was not given permission. Almost every ruling in chapter twelve turns on that one word, and the question being asked is about authorization rather than opportunity.

The Alter Rebbe makes the same move in Tanya when he requires you to be lowly of spirit before every man, since you cannot know what another person was handed or what pressures sit on him. That is not a sentiment. It is a rule of evidence, and it is precisely the rule chapter twelve applies. You have the man's position. You have nothing about the ladder. Rule on what you have. The Baal Shem Tov pressed it further, teaching that a fault you notice in another has been shown to you as a mirror; which is why the failing of the unlearned man is stated so carefully as ignorance rather than wickedness, and why the chaver's obligation is watchfulness over his own hands rather than a licence to inspect anybody else.

And the festival law is a Chassidic doctrine in halachic dress. Kol Yisrael chaverim hem. The Lubavitcher Rebbe returns again and again in Likkutei Sichos to the claim that the elevated state is the true one and the ordinary state is the concealment, so that a Jew standing in Jerusalem among his whole people is not being flattered but being seen accurately. The Sfat Emet says of the pilgrimage that the going up is what makes the people one, that the sanctity attaches to the gathering itself. What chapter eleven adds is the discipline of the barrel. The revelation was real, the leftovers are still leftovers, and nobody is asked to lie about them once the gathering disperses.

Modern Application

Everyone now lives inside a permanent record of everything they might have done. Logs, histories, timestamps, the whole apparatus that answers the question could he have. Chapter twelve is a sustained refusal to run a life on that question. There is a version of judgment that says he was in the room, the room was compromised, everything in the room is suspect. And there is the Rambam's version, which asks what the man was actually charged with, what he was actually within reach of, and whether he was ever given permission at all. The one told to mind the cow is not answerable for the house, however long he stood in it, and pretending otherwise is not rigour. It is laziness dressed as rigour.

Apply it also to the way people take things on. Somebody wants to change how they live and is told to accept the whole system or nothing. The Rambam refuses a large acceptance carrying a private exemption, and accepts a man who commits to washing his hands and nothing else. Then he gives him thirty days before anyone treats his word as reliable, which is neither suspicion nor formality but the time it takes for a stated intention to become a habit anybody could see.

And apply the tax collectors. A man tells you the thing that makes you doubt him and in the same breath the part that clears him, and the instinct is to keep the first half and discard the second. The halachah says you may not, because the whole suspicion arrived in his own voice.

The Closing

There is a quiet grief in these chapters if you sit with them long enough. A whole society is sorted into those whose word is taken and those whose word is not, and the Rambam records the sorting without softening it. Terumah gets burned. Barrels get turned away at the door.

And then, three times a year, the same law lifts the whole thing and says that all of them are chaverim, and means it in a way that changes the actual status of the wine in their houses. It does not say they have been forgiven. It says that the ordinary presumption is a working assumption about a season rather than a verdict about a person. Which is why the arm's reach matters so much. A system that must sort people is only bearable if it takes the smallest bite it can, and the Rambam, having built the fence in chapter ten, spends two chapters looking for every honest reason to say pure.

The law will presume against a man's knowledge and will not presume against his character. It will not imagine the ladder, it will not imagine the hand over the courtyard wall, and it will not let a suspicion travel one step past the place where a person's own arm ends. If that is how the strictest chapters in Seder Taharah handle a stranger, the question left over is how much further we have been willing to let a suspicion travel about somebody we actually know.