The Water Has to Be Wanted

The Hook

A man walks out to his cistern, kneels on the stone lip, and puts his arm into the water. If what he wanted to know was whether there is any water down there, the drops that cling to his arm when he pulls it out are, as far as the law is concerned, nothing at all. They came up by accident. If what he wanted to know was how much water is down there, the same drops on the same arm are water he took out on purpose, and from that moment they have the power to prepare food to receive impurity. Nothing about the water is different. The arm is the same arm, the cistern is the same cistern, and the drops will dry at exactly the same rate. The only difference is a question inside the man's head that nobody standing beside him could have seen.

Three chapters of Hilchot Tum'at Okhalin are built on this one strange premise. In the Torah's system, food cannot become impure until it has first been made ready to become impure, and what makes it ready is contact with a liquid. But not any contact. The verse speaks of water placed upon seed, and the Sages read the word placed as though it said that a person places it. The water has to be wanted. A storm can soak a granary to the rafters and change nothing. One drop that somebody was glad to see lands on a single kernel, and that kernel is changed for good.

Which leaves a question that sounds as though it belongs in a different kind of book. Why should the vulnerability of a fig depend on the mood of the man who owns it?

Tum'at Okhalin 13: The Hand That Measures Depth

Chapter 13 is a catalogue of moments when water clings to things, and in every one of them the Rambam asks the same question: did he want it? Water left standing in a drawing cylinder counts as willfully taken for three days, and after three days it no longer does, as though desire itself had a shelf life. A man whose feet, or whose animal's feet, are caked with mud crosses a river and the mud washes off. If he was happy, the water on those feet is considered willfully taken. If he was not happy, it is not. Notice the word. Not if he intended. If he was happy.

When he leads his animal down to a stream to drink, the water that comes up with its mouth is willful, because drinking was the whole point, and the water on its legs is not, unless he meant for the legs to be rinsed. If the animal's feet are diseased, or it is the threshing season, the water on its feet is willful regardless, because a man in that situation wants those feet clean whether or not he says so. The law is reading desire off the circumstances, the way a friend reads it off a face.

Then comes a line that stops the reader. If a deaf mute, a person whose mind is compromised, or a minor led the animal down, even with the intention that its feet be washed, the water is not considered willful, because the deeds of such people are halachically significant but their intent is not. A child can do something. A child cannot want something, at least not in a way that this law is prepared to count.

The chapter keeps tightening the screw. A man who immerses has willful water on his body, and a man who merely passes through water does not. A man who immerses and then crosses a second river has the first water cancelled by the second. A friend who shoves him into a pool cancels it as well, but a friend who shoves him in jest does not, because a joke leaves the first water exactly where it was. The man who measures how deep a cistern is has willful water on his hand and on his measuring stick, and the man who measures how wide it is does not; depth is a question about the water, and width is a question about the walls. A man who reaches in to see whether there is water at all has taken nothing, and a man who reaches in to see how much there is has taken, on purpose, every drop that comes up on his arm. A stone tossed in to find out whether the cistern is dry leaves both the splash and the wet stone untouched by will. He only wanted to hear something.

Tum'at Okhalin 14: Dew That Nobody Asked For

Chapter 14 moves from water on people to water on produce, and the pattern grows sharper. A man carries his produce up to the roof so that worms will not get into it, and overnight the dew settles on it. It does not become susceptible. Everybody knows that dew falls on roofs, and the Rambam states the obvious objection only in order to refuse it: we do not say that since everyone knows dew will descend, it is as if he willfully exposed them to water. He brought them up to preserve them. What a person foresees is not the same as what a person wants.

If he did intend the dew, the produce is susceptible. And here the minor returns, in a way that turns the previous chapter on its head. If a deaf mute, a compromised person, or a minor carried the produce up, even with the dew in mind, nothing happens. But if minors turned the produce over on the roof, it becomes susceptible, because when a minor's intent is evident from his actions, it takes effect by Rabbinic law. A child's wish, kept inside, is nothing. A child's wish carried out with both hands is enough.

A run of cases follows in which the question is no longer whether he wanted the water but whether water is what did the work. Wheat spread on a floor that had been sprinkled grows damp; if the dampness came from the water it is susceptible, and if it came from the stone it is not. A hot loaf laid across the mouth of a wine jug is untouched if it is wheat and made susceptible if it is barley, because barley drinks. Earthenware lets water, wine and vinegar pass through its walls and holds every other liquid back. A man who blows on lentils to check whether they are good for cooking makes them susceptible if moisture collects on them, because breath is a derivative of water, and a man who eats sesame seeds off his finger has done the same.

The last case is the most tender. A man bites into something and it slips from his hand, and the liquid on it was not put there willfully. But if he was eating a split olive or a moist date, the kind of fruit whose pit a person likes to suck, and it dropped from his mouth, the liquid on it counts as placed there willfully. If the olive was dry, it does not. The saliva is the same saliva. What differs is whether he was enjoying it.

Tum'at Okhalin 15: The Finger and the Coin

Chapter 15 brings in the ground. Water sitting in a container contracts impurity and passes it on whether anybody wanted it or not. Water gathered on the earth, in a cistern, a trench, a storage cavern, or a pit holding less than forty se'ah, contracts impurity only through willful contact and passes it on only through willful contact. A corpse falls into such water, or an impure man wades through it, and it stays pure. An impure man drinks from it, and it becomes impure, because drinking is wanting. A terumah loaf drops into it and stays pure as it was; a man who washes his hand in it and then lifts the loaf out has made the loaf impure from the water on his own hand, because the lifting was willful.

During the rainy season all such water is presumed pure, since fresh rain outweighs whatever was there before. Once the rains stop, the pools near a town or a road are presumed impure, because somebody impure has surely drunk from them, while a pit that can only be reached with great effort stays pure unless the footprints of a person or a large animal are found beside it. The Rambam is not suspicious of the water. He is simply realistic about people.

Then the chapter goes inside the body. A man is eating terumah with impure hands, a dried fig that never touched water, and he puts his hand into his mouth to take out a pebble. If he turns his finger over as he does it, the fig becomes impure, because the saliva has been moved from its place by an impure hand. If he does not turn his finger, the fig is pure, because until that moment the moisture in his mouth is like water on the ground, still attached to where it lives, and he wanted the pebble, not the saliva. But if there was also a coin in his mouth, a pundiyon he had put there because he was thirsty, and he reached in to take out the coin together with the fig, the saliva on that coin was already wanted. The fig is impure.

A woman eating terumah while raking the coals out of an impure oven is pricked by a splinter, or burns her finger, and puts the finger in her mouth. The terumah in her mouth is impure. She sucked the finger because it hurt, and that is still wanting. Pain does not exempt the mouth from desire. It is desire at its most urgent.

The Unifying Principle

Set the three chapters beside each other and a single claim comes into focus. The world is not made vulnerable by what happens to it. It is made vulnerable by what somebody wants from it. Floods, dew, a splash from a swimmer, a pebble, a shove from a friend, all of these pass over the produce and leave it exactly as it was. A drop that somebody was glad to see, a breath blown to check the lentils, a coin held against thirst, opens the food to everything that comes after.

More than once, the Rambam's test is not whether he intended but whether he was happy. Chassidus has a vocabulary for exactly this. The Alter Rebbe, throughout his discourses, places two powers at the very summit of the soul, above intellect and above emotion: ratzon, will, and ta'anug, delight. And he teaches that delight is the deeper of the two, because a person wills what he enjoys, and never the other way around. The halacha seems to know this already. It does not ask the man at the river what he decided. It asks what pleased him.

The Baal Shem Tov taught that everything a person sees or hears is meant as an instruction in how to serve G-d. A treatise about damp figs is harder to hear that way than most, which may make it the clearest case of the teaching. Nothing in these chapters is inert. Every surface is waiting to find out what the person wanted.

And the minor explains the rest. His deeds are real and his intent does not register, unless the intent can be seen in the deed. A desire that stays inside does not yet count as desire in this law. A desire that turns the figs over does.

Modern Application

Very little of what makes a person susceptible was ever forced on him. Nobody is undone by the weather. What changes a person is the drop he was happy to see: the praise he enjoyed a little too much, the grievance he took pleasure in replaying, the screen he reached for because he was thirsty for something he could not name. The water would have been there regardless. The susceptibility came from the gladness.

That is uncomfortable, and it is also a relief. Uncomfortable, because nobody can claim to be only the victim of whatever flowed past him; the law is going to ask whether he was happy. A relief, because the reverse is just as true. The things a person did not want, the insults that washed over him, the noise of a culture he walked through without stopping, do not have the power to change what he is. Passing through water is not immersing.

It also means that the question of what a person enjoys is not a trivial one. The Rambam spends three chapters on it for the sake of figs and lentils. A person could spend a few quiet minutes on it for the sake of himself.

The Closing

This is the seventh of Tishrei, a Friday, and tonight begins the Shabbat of Return, with Yom Kippur three days away. Everything in these days is about teshuvah, and teshuvah is usually described as regret, confession and resolution. The Rebbe returned again and again to the teaching of the Zohar that teshuvah can happen in a single moment, in one instant, and explained that it can be that fast because it does not begin in the mind at all. It begins in the will. A person does not reason his way home. He wants his way home.

Chapter 15 said the same thing about a fig. The man with impure hands reached into his mouth, and whether the fig changed depended less on what his finger did than on what else was in there and why he had put it there. The thirst had already been acted on before the hand ever moved.

Water on the earth does not become anything until somebody wants it, and in these days the same is true of a soul. Whatever flowed past you this year has not yet changed you; only what you were glad of has. So the question for the Shabbat of Return is not what happened to you. What were you happy to have happen, and are you ready, for one instant, to want something else instead?