Asked One at a Time

The Hook

Two paths run out of a town. One of them is impure, and nobody knows which. A man walks down one of them and then touches pure food, and another man walks down the other and does the same. The Rambam rules that if they come to the court one after the other, each of them is told that he is pure. If they come together, or if one of them comes alone and says that there were two of them and they walked the two paths, both are impure, and the pure food they handled is burnt.

Look carefully at what has changed between those two rulings. The roads are the same roads. The men walked them at the same hour. The food is the same food. What moved is the question. Asked one at a time, each question still has an open door in it, since perhaps this man took the clean road. Asked together, the door closes, because one of the two certainly took the impure road, and a court cannot pronounce a certainty pure.

And then, one halacha later, the same logic grows teeth. An impure loaf is lost among nine pure ones. Five people come and eat five loaves, and afterwards five others come and eat the remaining five. The first five are impure. The last five are pure. The Rambam's reason is almost conversational. The first five have nobody else to hold accountable, and the last five can hold the first five accountable.

These chapters are learned on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the first day this year on which the shofar is sounded, and they turn out to be asking what it means to be questioned one at a time, and what it means to be questioned together.

She'ar Avot HaTum'ot 18: Doubts Multiplied, and the Night That Passes

The chapter opens with a staircase. However many doubts and doubts upon doubts are multiplied in a public domain, the person is pure, and in a private domain he is impure. A man in an alley may not have entered the courtyard, the impurity may not have been there, it may have lacked the measure, it may not have been impure, he may never have touched it, and because an alley is a private domain, he is impure.

Then the case that should stop you. Nine carcasses of frogs and one carcass of a creeping animal lie in a private domain, and a man touched one of them without knowing which. He is impure, although the odds are nine to one in his favor. Nine creeping animals and one frog lie in the public domain, and he touched one. He is pure, although the odds are nine to one against him. The general principle follows: in the public domain he is pure unless he himself says he certainly became impure, and in a private domain he is impure unless he himself says he certainly did not. Probability is not the measure. The room is the measure.

Time enters next. A carcass found in an alley renders impure everyone who passed through it, backwards, until the last moment someone can say that he checked this alley on such and such a day and found nothing. Even if the alley was swept, if it was not checked, the impurity reaches back past the sweeping. Sweeping is not looking. Only a fresh carcass limits the reach, to as long as it could have lain there and stayed that fresh.

Then the vessels. A man lost a vessel and found it in the public domain. If he lost it and found it on the same day, it is pure. If a night passed, or even a portion of a night, it is impure. But if he did not lose it, if he set it down or forgot it, it is pure even after the night has passed, because putting something down in the street and forgetting it is uncommon, and the Sages made no decree about it. Vessels spread out in a private domain are impure unless he was watching them, and if they fell and he went to fetch them, they are impure, because for that moment they left his sight.

The chapter closes with a man who touched someone in the public domain at night, not knowing whether he was alive or dead, and found him dead in the morning. He is impure, because every question of impurity is read from the moment of discovery. If he had seen him alive that evening, it is a doubt in the public domain, and he is pure. And an impure man speaking at the edge of a cistern sprays a drop of saliva. If the cistern holds oil in a private domain, it is impure. If it holds wine, it is pure everywhere, because the rim of the cistern stops the drop from going in.

She'ar Avot HaTum'ot 19: The Company You Ask In

The shortest chapter of the three has four halachot, and every one of them is about the two paths.

First, a single man. He walked one path, touched pure food, and the food was eaten. Then he was sprinkled with the ashes of the red heifer on the third and seventh days and immersed. Then he walked the other path and touched pure food again. The second food is pure. If the first food still exists, both are held in abeyance, because one set is certainly impure. And if he never purified himself in between, the first set is held in abeyance and the second is burnt, because by then he has walked both roads and is impure beyond doubt. The purification in the middle is a wall, and once the first food is gone, the second question is answered on its own.

Then the two men and the two roads, and the same ruling for two loaves, one pure and one impure, eaten by two different people. That is only a doubt of Rabbinic law, and the Sages ruled such doubts pure, but only when each man asks on his own. If they ask together, or one asks for himself and his friend, both are impure, and the Rambam adds that even one impure loaf mixed into a hundred pure ones makes them all impure and fit for burning.

Then the ten loaves and the two groups of five. And finally, two men and two paths again, where one of the men was already impure, or even only held in abeyance. The one who was pure may place the whole burden on the other. The court says that the pure man walked the pure road and the other man walked the impure one, and this holds even if they came to ask at the same moment.

Read together, the four say one thing. The Rambam is not computing odds. He is treating impurity as a weight that must come down somewhere, and he is asking, each time, whether there is a place for it to land other than on the person in front of him. When there is, the person goes free. When the question is framed so that there is not, nobody goes free.

She'ar Avot HaTum'ot 20: A Map Drawn by Traffic

It begins with Shabbat. Whatever is a public domain for Shabbat is a public domain for impurity, and so are the four cubits beside it and a karmelit such as the sea or a covered walkway. Then the list of places that are private for Shabbat and public for impurity: the paths leading to storage caverns, cisterns and wine presses, an enclosed valley in the summer, the royal basilica with its many openings, lanes down to the sea where people climb the fences, bathhouses. And then, at the end of the list, the entire Temple Courtyard.

The criterion is not walls. It is traffic. A guarded garden is private, and an unguarded one is public. A great basilica is public while its gates stand open and private when they are shut. A valley fenced in the winter is private, and once a winter has passed over its fence it stays private even through the summer. A vineyard is private in front of the harvesters and public behind them, where many people come in from one side and go out the other.

It works in the other direction too. A tree standing in the public domain, and a hole in the wall of a public street, are private domains for impurity even if they are smaller than four handbreadths, because people do not use them. A man who climbs the tree and may have touched the impurity in it is impure. A single impure store open onto the street leaves a man who may have entered it pure, since the whole store is treated like a carcass lying in the public domain. But where there are two stores, one pure and one impure, and he entered one and does not know which, he is impure, because a store is a private domain.

A container ten handbreadths high in the street holds impurity. If he may have touched the container, he is pure. If he put his hand inside, he is impure. And then the treatise closes on a list of people riding beside a zav, children on their fathers' shoulders, a package brushing saliva on a wall, vessels spread on a high surface, and in every one of those cases the person or the article is pure. A long, hard treatise about impurity ends on the word pure.

The Unifying Principle

Put the three chapters side by side, and the rule underneath them is this. A doubt is not judged by the odds. It is judged by the room it happens in, and a room is defined by whether many people pass through it. Where the many pass, a doubt disperses and comes out pure. Where a person is alone, or alone with one other, a doubt has nowhere to go and comes to rest on him.

Chapter 19 adds the most startling thing of all. The question itself is a room. Two men who each ask alone are standing, as it were, in the open street of possibilities. Two men who ask together have built a small private domain out of their question, one with only two people in it, and a doubt in a private domain is impure.

The Alter Rebbe teaches in the thirty second chapter of Tanya that all Jewish souls are one at their source, true brothers, and that only the bodies are separate. This treatise can sound like an argument against that, since standing together seems to hurt. But look again at the list in Chapter 20. The holiest room in the world, the Temple Courtyard, is ruled a public domain, because of how many people fill it. The place of greatest togetherness is the place where doubt resolves toward purity. What makes two men impure in Chapter 19 is not togetherness. It is a closed room of two, in which each is only the other's alibi.

The Rebbe often pointed out that the Torah portion read on the Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah opens with the words you are standing today, all of you, and that the Zohar reads that today as Rosh Hashanah itself. The judgment of the day, he would say, is carried by the all of you. Not two people accounting for one another in a small room, but a people standing in the courtyard.

Modern Application

Most families know the room of two. Something went wrong, and two people sit across a table and try to establish which of them did it. The framing guarantees the result. Somebody at that table is going to be impure, and the question has been built so that the burden cannot go anywhere else. Very often the better move is to leave that room, to ask a wider question in which the doubt can breathe.

Chapter 18 has a second lesson for the Ten Days of Return that begin today. An alley that was swept but not checked is still impure, back to the last day someone actually looked. Tidying a life is not the same as examining it. A person can sweep a whole year clean of its evidence and still carry its impurity, because the law does not ask whether the alley looks clean. It asks when somebody last looked, and on what day.

And the lost vessel is worth sitting with. What was lost for a single afternoon comes back pure. What passed a night out of your keeping comes back impure. The Baal Shem Tov taught that every person is loved by God like an only child born to parents in their old age, and more. An only child is not left out overnight. The work of these days is to go and find what was lost before it spends another night in the street.

The Closing

Today the shofar is finally sounded. It is a strange sound for a courtroom. It has no words and makes no argument, and it is the same sound for every person standing in the room. And yet the Mishnah insists that on this day each one passes before the King alone, like sheep through a narrow gate, and the Talmud answers that all of them are nevertheless taken in with a single glance.

That is exactly the double ruling of these chapters. Asked one at a time, each person has an open door. Standing together in the courtyard, the whole people is ruled pure. What the law will not accept is the small closed room in between, where two people account for one another and there is nowhere for anything to go.

Go out of that room today. Stand in the courtyard with everyone, and answer for yourself when you are asked. Check the alley, name the day you last looked, and go and find whatever you lost before another night passes over it. And when the shofar sounds, and every voice in the room becomes the same voice, ask yourself this: whose name have you been holding ready, all year, as the one you could hold accountable instead of yourself?