How Far a Thing Can Fall

The Hook

A man walks down into a cave to immerse. The water standing there collected on its own from the winter rains, which is what makes it fit, and it is also dark and stale, which is why he keeps a jug of fresh drawn water at the mouth of the cave and pours it over himself on the way out. His father did that. His neighbors do it. Nobody has confused anything yet.

Then generations pass, and the Rambam records the outcome without drama. The majority of people came to believe that the drawn water at the end was the agent that conveyed purity, and that the immersion was the part a person could be careless about. Nobody decided this. It was inferred, quietly, by a whole population, out of nothing but the order in which two things happened.

The Sages could have taught harder, or forbidden the jug. What they did instead is the reason these chapters are worth a morning. They ruled that the jug makes you impure. A man who lowers his head and the greater part of his body into drawn water, or has three lugim of it fall on them, becomes a secondary derivative of impurity until he immerses in a mikveh. The error was that the rinse purifies. The correction is that the rinse defiles. Whoever holds the mistake gets walked back through the immersion by the mistake itself.

Hold that beside the strangest ruling in the day's learning. In the beginning, the Rambam says, people would set loaves of terumah beside the sacred scrolls, on the sensible reasoning that these are holy and these are holy. Mice came for the loaves and tore the scrolls. The Sages responded by decreeing that a man whose hands are perfectly pure who takes hold of a sacred scroll has hands that are a secondary derivative of impurity. The holiest object in the house makes your hands impure. Then the third chapter lays out a ladder. Ordinary food stops conducting impurity at the second remove, terumah at the third, consecrated food at the fourth. Same impurity, same contact, three depths, and the only variable is how holy the food is. Why should the law be built so that the higher a thing stands, the further into it a defilement can travel?

She'ar Avot HaTum'ot 9: The Rinse Mistaken for the Bath

The decree is measured with the care of something the Sages expected to be argued about for a thousand years. Three lugim of drawn water, falling on the head and the greater part of the body nearest it, arriving in the ordinary way. Water from two containers combines toward that sum, and from three, provided the next began to flow before the one before it had finished. From four it never combines, and he is pure even where each began before the last had ceased. Water on the head and not the body does nothing, and water reaching him from the side or below does nothing.

Then the Rambam states the reason out loud, which he does not always do, and the architecture becomes visible. It is not a punishment for rinsing. The offense was an inference. Water came last, therefore water finished the job. The Sages did not argue with the inference and did not try to educate it away. They attached a consequence to it, so that the man who believes the jug is what cleans him finds himself standing there, jug in hand, needing a mikveh. And the water is now impure too, having touched a secondary derivative, as if the water and the man each told the other that the defilement was mutual.

The rest of the chapter is the other great decree of the same family, legislated with the same precision. Tefillin straps impart impurity to hands while joined to the tefillin and not once they are off. An erased scroll still does it if eighty five letters remain, the count in the passage about the ark setting forth. The case and the mantle do it once sewn on. And it is not the Torah alone. All the Holy Scriptures do it, including Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes, which are words of wisdom, a clause that quietly settles an argument that had run for centuries about whether those two books belong at all.

What does not impart impurity to hands is the more revealing list. A passage translated out of its own language. Scripture written in the Ivri script rather than the Ashuri. Anything not on parchment, in ink. The texts of the blessings, which are full of the divine name and full of Torah, and do not qualify. Scrolls written by heretics. And the passage of the sotah, exempt because it is written in order to be blotted out. A text of the same letters, in the same script, on the same parchment, is exempt on account of what it was written for. Even in the most physical treatise in the code, the deciding fact is a purpose.

She'ar Avot HaTum'ot 10: The Man Who Has Already Immersed

Chapter ten belongs to a person in a condition that has no name in ordinary life. He contracted impurity, he immersed correctly, and he came up. He is not what he was. He is also not yet what he is going to be. Until the sun sets he is a tevul yom, one who immersed today, and the law counts him a secondary derivative. The Rambam anchors it in the verse saying the vessel shall be put into water and be impure until evening, and afterwards be pure, and points out what the verse is doing. It calls a thing already immersed impure.

Nothing about the severity of what he came from changes any of it. A man purifying himself from a corpse and a man purifying himself from a dead teeming creature wait out the identical afternoon at the identical rank. Anyone who owes the day its nightfall, Scriptural or Rabbinic, is a secondary derivative for that stretch. The grave and the trivial converge in the last hours, and the only thing either is waiting for is the sun.

What he can do during those hours is a strange and gentle list. If he touches ordinary food or drink, nothing happens. If he touches terumah he does not make it impure, he brings it to the third remove, which is to say he disqualifies it. Consecrated food he brings to the fourth. His saliva and urine are governed by the same rule as the liquids he touches, so that if his saliva falls on a loaf of terumah the loaf stays pure. His contact matters only where the stakes are high. Nothing in his own kitchen is affected. Everything in the Temple is.

The chapter closes by taking a census of the whole system. A person can be a source of impurity and a primary derivative by Scriptural law, and a secondary derivative only by Rabbinic decree. Vessels run the same way, except earthenware, which can never be a source. Food can never be a source. Liquid can be. And neither a person nor a vessel is ever a third or a fourth remove, under any law, ever. Impurity reaches people and vessels at the top of the ladder and only food and liquid at the bottom.

She'ar Avot HaTum'ot 11: Where the Chain Has to Stop

The last chapter of the day opens by defining a word. When the law says a food is disqualified, it means the food counts as impure and hands on nothing. Touch another food with it and that food is pure. It is a term for the end of a line, and the rest of the chapter maps where the lines end.

Ordinary food takes impurity from a primary derivative and passes it on, and its secondary derivative is disqualified and passes nothing, which the Rambam derives from the verse about the creeping creature that falls into an earthenware container, where the food inside is only a secondary derivative and Scripture calls it impure regardless. Terumah runs a rung further, the third remove disqualified, learned from the verse telling the man who immersed to wait for sunset before he eats. Consecrated food runs further still, conveying through the third and stopping at the fourth, reached by an argument from the lighter case to the heavier. A fifth is pure.

Then a decree that sounds arbitrary until the Rambam explains it in his own voice. Ordinary meat is pure, and the Sages nevertheless ruled that it counts as a third remove with respect to consecrated food, though not with respect to terumah. It appears to me, he writes, that they enforced this decree solely so that ordinary meat should not become mixed with sacrificial meat, because a man might then take a piece for ordinary, eat it while impure, and be eating something consecrated. The decree is not about meat. It is about an error easy to make on a crowded counter, and the Rambam marks it as his own reading.

The chapter fills out with the same instinct. Foods stuck together by liquid count as joined for contracting impurity, and whether they then count as one item or as a first and a second remove is left an open question. A man who ate terumah of the third remove may not eat terumah until he immerses and may still handle it, since the stringency was placed on eating and not on touching. And the day ends on a doubt. Dough whose contact with impurity is uncertain is prepared in purity, challah is taken from it, and that challah is suspended, neither eaten nor burned.

The Unifying Principle

Set the three chapters beside each other and one rule stands up out of all of it. Susceptibility here is a function of standing. Ordinary food is almost unreachable. Terumah can be reached a step deeper. Consecrated food deeper again. And at the top sit the Holy Scriptures, which impart impurity to the hands of a man who is entirely pure, while the sotah passage, of the same letters in the same ink, does not, because it was written to be erased. Nothing here is fragile because it is weak. Everything here is fragile in exact proportion to how high it stands.

Chassidus says this out loud and does not soften it. Following the Arizal, the Alter Rebbe works all through the Tanya with the teaching that the husks draw their vitality from a very high place, and that whatever stands higher can fall further, which is why the most refined faculties go wrong in the most interesting ways while the coarsest are almost impossible to corrupt. Nobody's appetite has a crisis. Their love does. The Baal Shem Tov taught that a person is wholly wherever his thought is, which is another way of saying that the more of you a thing occupies, the more of you stands exposed when it goes wrong. There is no caring about something that does not also install a place where it can be damaged.

The other thread is quieter and, this week, harder. Three of these rulings correct not a bad action but a bad conclusion. The jug at the mouth of the cave. The loaves beside the scrolls. The ordinary meat taken for sacrificial meat. Nobody sinned. Somebody reasoned, plausibly, and was wrong, and the wrongness spread by imitation until it was the majority view. The Sages did not answer with an argument. They changed what the mistaken practice does, so that the practice would teach what a lecture could not.

Modern Application

This lands immediately if you are honest about where your damage comes from. The things that spoil in a life are not the peripheral ones. A stranger cannot injure you. An acquaintance can irritate you. The people you have let all the way in can take a week apart with a tone of voice. That is not a defect in the intimacy. It is the intimacy. Impurity reaches the fourth remove because the food was consecrated, and the ache reaches all the way down because you consecrated something. There is a way out. Keep everything at the level of ordinary food. It costs exactly what it looks like it costs.

The second half is the one for this week. Somewhere in the practice of a life there is a jug at the mouth of a cave, something done afterwards that feels like the part that cleans you. The gesture at the end of an argument that is not an apology. The check written in place of the visit. The resolution taken at bedtime in place of the day. Nobody chose to believe these are the real work. It was inferred from the order in which things happen. The chapter suggests the only reliable way to find such a thing, which is to notice what you would be most reluctant to give up if somebody proved it counted for nothing.

The Closing

These chapters are learned on the twenty eighth of Elul, and Rosh Hashanah comes in tomorrow night. Which makes the day's central figure, the man who immersed this morning and is waiting for the sun, less of a curiosity than he looks. He is the reader. The work of the month has been done or it has not, and either way what finishes it is not in anybody's hands, it is in the movement of the sun, and Scripture goes on calling such a man impure to the last minute of the day. The Rebbe returns each Elul to the King in the field, and the point was never that the King is easier to reach out there. It is that a person may come as he is, unfinished, on a working day.

Sfat Emet reads these last hours of Elul as a time when a year is not so much repaired as sealed, and the sealing is done by somebody other than you. Which leaves one thing exactly. Between now and tomorrow night nobody is going to become a different person, and nobody was asked to. All that can be done is to work out which of the things you have been calling purification is the immersion and which is the jug. What have you been rinsing?