Lacking Only Nightfall

The Hook

A man has gone down into the water this morning. He was impure, he immersed, and now he is standing on the bank in a condition the law has a name for. He is a tevul yom, one who immersed today, and there is nothing left for him to do. No further offering, no further washing, no further act. He is waiting for the sun to go down.

The Rambam spends most of two chapters on this man, and what he does with him is strange. If the tevul yom touches one of two loaves that stuck together in the oven, he disqualifies only the loaf he touched. If he touches the bubbles on a pot of water that has just come to the boil, he disqualifies only the bubbles. If he touches the oil floating on top of a cup of terumah wine, the wine is untouched. Touched by anyone else who is impure, even someone whose only impurity came from eating impure food, the whole thing would go.

Then, without warning, the leniency turns around. If a barrel of terumah has a hole in it and the tevul yom puts his hand over the hole to stop the leak, the entire barrel is disqualified. He touched a few drops at the mouth of a hole, and everything behind those drops is gone.

The Rambam gives the reason for the leniency in one line. He has already purified himself, and he is lacking only nightfall. That line is the key to three chapters that look like kitchen science and are really about a single question. When are two things one thing?

Tum'at Okhalin 7: The Column That Belongs to Nobody

The seventh chapter opens with a stream of liquid in the air. Someone is pouring pure liquid into an impure vessel, or even onto the carcass of a creeping animal. The Rambam rules that the column of liquid is pure. If you reached out and caught some of it in mid air, what you caught is pure. And needless to say, he adds, what is left in the upper vessel is pure.

The rule has a name, hanitzok eino chibur, a poured stream is not a connection, neither to impurity below nor to purity above. When impure water is poured into a mikveh, the first drop to reach the pool does not drag the rest into purity. The stream is in between, and the law will not let it carry anything in either direction.

Then comes the exception, and it is one of the most beautiful sentences in the treatise. If the upper liquid is cold and the lower liquid is hot and impure, the stream is joined, and the impurity climbs. Why? Because the vapor of the hot liquid rises like a pillar of smoke, mixes with the falling column and reaches the vessel it is pouring from. And vapor, the Rambam says, is also considered liquid. Cold into cold, hot into hot, hot into cold, nothing travels upward. Only when the heat is below does something rise.

He carries the idea straight into a woman's kitchen. A woman whose hands are pure stirs a hot impure pot, and moisture from the steam gathers on her hand. Her hands are impure, as if she had touched the liquid in the pot. Reverse it, and if her hands were impure and the steam gathered on them, the whole pot is impure, as if she had put her hand in.

The only other stream treated as joined is honey from Zif and Tzapachat, which stretches like glue between jar and bowl. Then the chapter introduces the tevul yom. He does not make ordinary food impure at all. He disqualifies terumah, rendering it a third degree derivative, and sacrificial food, rendering it a fourth. And even there, some things that are joined for everyone else are not joined for him. Unshelled barley and spelt, which any other impure person would affect, are pure when he touches them.

Tum'at Okhalin 8: What Is Joined for the One Who Is Almost There

The eighth chapter is a catalogue, and it rewards slow reading. Loaves that stuck together in the oven when the baker meant to separate them are not joined for the tevul yom. Loaves that stuck together when he had no intent to separate them are joined, even for him. Water boiling with large hollow bubbles, groats in their first boil, new wine starting to ferment, and rice in the pot all produce bubbles that stand apart when he touches them. Water whose bubbles are not hollow, groats in a second boil, old wine, and oil of any age produce bubbles that are one with what is underneath.

A spike of dough smaller than a fingerbreadth is part of the loaf, and so is a small grain of salt. A pebble in the bread is not part of it at all, even for a primary source of impurity. A roll half burnt and half edible is two things.

Then the chapter tightens. The barrel with the hole, as we saw, goes entirely. A tank holding a hundred kor of wine is joined throughout, so that a tevul yom who touches the surface disqualifies a jug of terumah resting at the bottom. The flour for the meal offerings, the frankincense, the incense and the coals of the Yom Kippur firepan are all joined as long as they are held in one vessel, because those coals are carried into the Sanctuary. The coals taken every day are not, and the Rambam proves it: when some of them spill between the silver pan and the golden pan, they are swept into the drain.

The chapter ends with two scenes that show how a person in this in between state actually lives. A woman who immersed today may knead dough, cut off the challah portion, set it in a vessel with the rest of the dough so it is all one entity, and only then declare it challah. Once she has said the words, she does not touch it. And a man may fill bottles that were immersed only today with tithe wine and declare that the wine in them shall become terumat ma'aser at nightfall. It is pure terumah, because by the time the declaration takes effect, the bottles have finished their waiting.

The last halacha is the sharpest. One who immersed from the impurity of a corpse, or from relations with a niddah, may work in an olive press. A zav or zavah on the seventh day may not, even after immersion, lest a discharge come, because a discharge undoes all seven clean days backward.

Tum'at Okhalin 9: The First Drop

The ninth chapter is about the moment a solid becomes a liquid, and it hangs on a single measure, the size of an egg. Impure oil or honey that congeals and then melts again stays a first degree derivative forever, because it is liquid by nature. Sauce, groats or milk that solidify are food, and need intent to become susceptible. If they became impure as solids and then melted, it depends on the size. Up to an egg, the liquid that runs out is pure. More than an egg, it is impure, because the very first drop to melt became impure from the egg sized mass it left, and that drop defiles everything that melts after it.

The same logic governs squeezing. A person impure from a corpse who presses olives or grapes no bigger than an egg, and does not touch the place where the juice runs, produces pure liquid, because liquid inside the fruit is considered set apart from it. More than an egg, and the first drop is lost. A zav who squeezes even a single grape, one never made susceptible, produces impure juice, because the first drop was carried by a zav. A zav who milks a goat produces impure milk for the same reason.

Everything else in the chapter follows that first drop. A mound of impure olives larger than an egg, pressed together and thrown into an oven, makes the oven impure. A hundred separate olives thrown in leave it pure. When an unlearned man reaches into a winepress, the clusters he touched and the ones around them are impure, and that ring protects the rest.

And then the chapter's own version of a sacred exception. Consecrated loaves with liquid in their hollows, touched one after another by a carcass, are primary derivatives even to the hundredth loaf, because of the cherished status of what is holy. Were they terumah, only the first three would be affected.

The Unifying Principle

Read all three chapters together and the word that keeps returning is chibur, joined. And what becomes obvious is that joining is not a fact of physics. A stream of wine is continuous from the jar to the floor, and the law says it is not joined. Two loaves are fused into one crust, and the law asks what the baker wanted. A bubble sits on top of a pot, and the law asks whether it is hollow. A spike of dough is part of the bread at one size and not at another. Whether two things are one thing is a ruling about belonging, and belonging depends on heat, on intent, on holiness, and on who is doing the touching.

The Baal Shem Tov is remembered for teaching that a person is found wherever his will is. The baker who wanted the loaves apart has already separated them, even if the oven fused them. The Rambam himself says, at the very end of the laws of immersion, that immersing is not a matter of water removing dirt but of the intent of the heart, and that one who immerses his soul in the waters of pure knowledge is made pure. The law of joining is written in the same hand.

Now the tevul yom. Why should his touch be so much lighter than the touch of someone whose only impurity was a bite of impure food? The Rambam's answer is not about the strength of his impurity at all. It is about his direction. He has already done everything, and what remains is only time. The law treats a person who has finished acting and is waiting for the sun differently from a person who has not yet moved, even when on paper the second is less impure. The one facing nightfall does not drag everything along with him. What he touches, he touches. It does not spread.

Except when he puts his hand over a hole. When he becomes the thing holding everything in, then everything he holds is his.

The Alter Rebbe, in Iggeret HaTeshuvah, describes the returning person as someone who re-attaches what was cut off, drawing the soul back to its source. The hot pot in chapter seven is the picture of that. Nothing rises from cold. The stream goes down and stays down. It takes heat below for the vapor to climb, and when it climbs it reaches all the way to the vessel that is pouring. Chassidus calls that an awakening from below, and teaches, following the Zohar, that it draws an awakening from above. The Rambam puts it in a sentence about steam.

Modern Application

This week is the one week of the year that everyone is a tevul yom. Rosh Hashanah has passed. The immersion has happened, the words have been said, the shofar was heard on the second day. Yom Kippur is coming, and it is, in a sense, nightfall. Nothing more needs to be invented. The waiting is the work.

The laws of this treatise say that a person in that state should live a certain way. The woman who immersed today arranges the dough before she speaks, and once she has declared the challah she does not touch it. She does not stop working. She simply knows where her hands are. The man with the bottles makes his declaration take effect at nightfall, so the in between hours cannot touch it. These are pictures of someone who has done the teshuvah and is now careful about what the leftover hours can reach.

And then the zav on the seventh day, who may not go near the olive press. He too has immersed. He too is waiting. But his waiting can be undone backward, all seven days at once. The Sfat Emet returns more than once to the idea that the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur exist so that what was accomplished on Rosh Hashanah should hold. There is a kind of return that can be erased by what happens next, and the law knows the difference.

Most people have a hole they are holding a hand over. A habit, a conversation, a leak they have learned to press shut and call it managed. The law is honest about that. The moment you become the stopper, you are joined to everything behind it.

The Closing

The Lubavitcher Rebbe spoke often about the mikveh as the place where a person stops being separate, where the self is not scrubbed but submerged. That is why the waters work. And it is why the man standing on the bank afterward has a different relationship to the world than the man who never went in. What he touches is no longer carried along by him. The column he pours is not joined.

Chapter seven has one more picture worth keeping. Pure cold wine poured into a hot pot is joined, because the heat rises to meet it. The warmth from below reaches the vessel above.

The man on the bank is lacking only nightfall, and the law has already started treating him as if the sun were down. It does not ask him to do anything more. It asks him to be careful where he puts his hands and to keep something warm below. Between now and Yom Kippur, what is the one hole you are still holding shut, and what would it take to let go of it before the sun sets?