The Water You Never Wanted

The Hook

A farmer hears that thieves are working the valley, and he carries his whole harvest down to the river and sinks it under the water to hide it. Every kernel is soaked through. By the rules of these chapters, wet produce is produce that can become impure, and yet the Rambam rules that this drenched harvest is not susceptible at all. The water touched everything. It does not count, because the farmer never wanted it there. He wanted the grain hidden, and the river was only the place he hid it.

Now the other side of the ledger. A man bends down to drink from a spring. The water that comes up on his mustache and his mouth is considered lifted willfully, since everyone who drinks knows the water will come up there. The water that comes up on his nose, his beard and his head is not. One face, one moment, one splash, and the law draws a line across it according to what a thirsty man can be said to have wanted.

These three chapters of Hilchot Tum'at Okhalin, the laws of how food becomes impure, are about a single condition. Food cannot contract impurity until it has been made ready for it by contact with one of seven liquids, and that contact counts only when the owner wanted it. The verse says ki yutan, when water will be placed on seeds, and the Oral Tradition reads the word placed as a word about will. Impurity sounds physical. The Rambam insists that the door to it is opened by desire.

We are learning this on the sixth of Tishrei, four days before Yom Kippur, in the one week of the year built on the claim that what a person truly wants can change what has already happened to him. These chapters make that claim about olives and rainwater.

Tum'at Okhalin 10: Which Wetness Is a Liquid

The chapter opens by narrowing the field. Only seven liquids prepare food for impurity. Everything else is called fruit juice, and fruit juice neither contracts impurity nor prepares anything for it. Then come the derivatives, and here the Rambam begins to sort the human body. The fluids of the eye, the ear, the nose and the mouth count as water, and so does human urine, whether released consciously or not. The urine of animals does not, and neither does salt that has melted into liquid.

Blood is sorted the same way. The blood that counts is the blood that flows at the end of the slaughter of a kosher animal. Blood from the beginning of the slaughter does not, because the animal is still alive, and it resembles the blood of a wound. Human blood let in order to be drunk is a liquid. Human blood let as a medical treatment is pure and prepares nothing. The same red fluid is sorted by the purpose for which it left the body.

Milk is sorted by need. Human milk that nobody needs is not a liquid, which is why milk from a man is not one. Animal milk that dripped from the teats on its own, or that was milked without intent, is not one either. But a woman's milk, released intentionally or not, is a liquid, because it is fit to be drunk by an infant. Somewhere a child could want it, and that possibility is enough to give it standing.

Then the chapter turns to what passes through a person. Impure water that is drunk and brought back up is still impure, unless he immersed in between, or it became loathsome, or it left him as urine. Sweat is not a liquid at all, so impure liquids sweated out are pure, while a man who bathed in drawn water and then sweated has impure sweat, unless he dried himself first. Moisture on the walls of houses and caves is not a liquid; the moisture of a bathhouse is. And where one house holds two pools, one pure and one impure, moisture exactly between them is impure.

The chapter closes in the Temple. The blood of the sacrifices and the water used to rinse them in the butchering area of the Courtyard are always pure and prepare nothing, a law conveyed by the Oral Tradition, and so sacred meat is not made ready by the blood of its own slaughter. Then the Rambam adds a turn that reframes everything before it. On the level of Rabbinic impurity, consecrated food needs no liquid at all. The cherished nature of holy food is itself its readiness. What is precious is already open.

Tum'at Okhalin 11: The Harvest That Was Ready Before Its Owner

Chapter 11 carries the principle into the vineyard, and its first ruling seems to break it. Grapes harvested for eating or for the market do not become susceptible without a desired liquid. Grapes harvested for the wine press become susceptible with no liquid at all. The Rambam explains why the Sages decreed it, and the explanation is a small portrait of a farmer. He squeezes a cluster to check whether the vineyard is ready, tosses it onto the harvested pile, lets the others crush it, and cares only that its juice not run onto the ground. That care is desire. He will never notice it in himself, and so the Sages treated the whole harvest as wanted.

Where he puts the grapes decides the rest. Grapes laid in a storage pit or spread on leaves are susceptible, because that placement shows concern for the juice. Grapes in baskets or spread on the bare earth are not, even when they split and drip into the press. And a vineyard growing in a beit hapras, a field of doubtful impurity, is not considered ready until its grapes are carried out of the field, because a Rabbinic doubt has met a Rabbinic decree.

Olives run on a different clock. They become susceptible only when the work of preparing them for pressing is complete, because only then does the owner want their fluid, which softens them for crushing. Before that point, the Rambam says, even olives that were crushed, released liquid and stuck together because of it are not susceptible. And the chapter becomes almost tender about the word complete. The work is done when the whole harvest is gathered in one place, ready for the press. But if he intended to buy another kab or two and add them, the work is not done. If he meant to borrow money and buy more, and was prevented by forces beyond his control, or became caught up in a celebration and never added them, the olives remain unfinished, and even if zavim and zavot tread on them they stay pure. Only a man who acts with guile loses that protection.

Intent has a deadline. A farmer in the Upper Galilee who planned before the harvest to bring his olives down to the Lower Galilee keeps them unready until they arrive; if the plan came only after the harvest, it is of no consequence. And the chapter ends with the cleaning of a press that was used in impurity, where resinous cane must be left for twelve months, or set in hot or running water for twelve hours, before immersion. Even purity takes its season.

Tum'at Okhalin 12: Water Lifted on Purpose

The third chapter states the foundation the first two assumed. All the laws of preparing food for impurity come from the Oral Tradition, which teaches that the verse about water placed on seeds includes all seven liquids, and that it applies only when the liquid reached the crops by the owner's will after they were uprooted. Every crop was wet while it grew; the law begins only once both the crop and the water have been separated from the ground.

What follows are the finest distinctions in the treatise. Desire at the beginning or at the end is enough: a liquid he wanted and then regretted, or resented and then welcomed, prepares the food. Liquid that came against his will does not, and neither does liquid he accepted out of danger or necessity. That is the farmer and the thieves. A bowl turned upside down on a wall so that the bowl itself will be rinsed collects water that counts, while a bowl set there so the water will not damage the wall collects water that does not.

The drinking man comes next, and then a man filling a jug at a well, where the water on the part of the rope he needs is willful and the water on the rest of the rope is not. Rain falling on a person, even one who is himself a primary source of impurity, remains pure if he shakes it off at once with all his strength; if it trickles down slowly, it contracts impurity as it leaves him. And if he stood under a drainpipe to cool off or to wash, the contact was willful, and if he is impure, the water on his body is impure.

A man who reaches into water for fallen fruit has prepared nothing, unless he also meant to rinse his hand. Produce placed willingly in water that lies on the ground is not prepared while it stays there; once lifted, it is. So a woman who is a niddah may wash radishes in the water of a cave and they remain pure, and if she lifts them out at all, her touch makes them impure. The treatise's middle ends with a container of turmos beans soaking in a mikveh. An impure person may reach in, take beans, and they are pure. If he lifts the whole container out of the water, the beans touching the container are impure, and the rest are pure.

The Unifying Principle

Across these chapters the physical facts barely decide anything. Grain soaked to the core in a river is dry in the eyes of the law. A mustache and a nose a finger apart fall on opposite sides of the line. Blood from one cut is a liquid and from another is not. Olives glued together by their own oil are unready because a man is still waiting on a loan that never came. What makes the difference every time is not how much water there was but whether a person reached for it.

The Rambam says it again by exception in the Temple, where holy food is ready without any liquid because its preciousness has already done the work of desire. The world is not simply exposed to impurity. It is opened to it by wanting. And the corollary is gentle: what a person did not want, even when it soaked him to the skin, has not entered him.

The Alter Rebbe builds Iggeret HaTeshuvah, the third section of the Tanya, on a strikingly similar foundation. In its first chapter he writes that the essential mitzvah of teshuvah is simply to abandon the sin, resolving in the heart never to return to it. The core is a movement of the will. Teshuvah, like the readiness of food, is decided in the place where a person wants.

The Baal Shem Tov taught that wherever a person's thought is, there he is, entirely. These chapters read like a legal commentary on that sentence. A man standing chest deep in a river is not in the river if his mind is on the thieves.

Modern Application

Most of what soaks into a person in a given week arrives against his will. The news pours down, and arguments at work run off like rain. These chapters offer a quiet and real comfort: it does not all count. What you never reached for has not made you ready for anything.

But the same chapters refuse the cheap version of that comfort. The man who stood under the drainpipe to cool off cannot claim the water came against his will, however much it resembles rain. There is a kind of exposure that is chosen while dressed up as weather, and the law names it without embarrassment: standing under the spout because it feels good, and then calling it rain.

The Sfat Emet returns again and again to the nekudah penimit, the inner point in every Jew that nothing from outside can reach, and he describes the days of teshuvah as the time to return to that point. These chapters ask not how wet you are but what you lifted, a question worth bringing this week to the grudge you keep watering and the conversation that was never quite an accident.

The olives add a second lesson. A man who fully intended to add to his harvest, and was stopped by a flood or a wedding, is judged by the intention and not by the empty space where the extra olives should have been. The Lubavitcher Rebbe returned constantly to the Rambam's ruling in Hilchot Teshuvah that a person should see himself and the whole world as evenly balanced, so that a single deed can tip everything toward merit. The olives suggest the other half of that teaching: the law is already reading the intention behind the deed.

The Closing

The Temple ruling is the one to carry into Yom Kippur. Ordinary food waits for a liquid and a desire before anything can happen to it. Holy food does not wait. Its preciousness is its readiness, and the law treats it as already open, already able to receive.

On Yom Kippur the whole people steps into the role of consecrated food. For one day there is no eating and no drinking, no water lifted to the lips. What is left is the cherished nature itself, and the question of what, underneath everything that rained on us this year, we actually reached for.

A farmer sank his harvest in a river to save it from thieves, and the Rambam ruled that not a drop of that river had touched it, because the farmer's heart was on the grain and not on the water. Four days remain before the court sits. If the law judged you only by what you truly reached for this year, and not by everything that fell on you, what would it find in your hands?