What the Other Hand Was Doing

The Hook

A man is walking with water on his shoulder that was drawn for the ashes of the red heifer, which means it is on its way to becoming the only substance in the world that lifts the impurity of a corpse. A scorpion crosses the path. He kills it. If it was blocking him, the water is acceptable and he keeps walking. If it was merely there, threatening nobody, the water is disqualified and the errand begins again.

The killing is identical and the scorpion is identical. What the Rambam measures is whether the act belonged to the errand or interrupted it, and he says so in a clause that governs the next three chapters: the man occupied himself with another matter before placing the ashes on the water. By the end of the third chapter the water has become something stranger than a purifying agent. It is a substance that cannot survive a change of subject.

Parah Adumah 8: The Scorpion That Was in the Way

The list of what ruins the water is not a list of sins. A man stops and delivers a halachic ruling for others. He renders a judgment. A woman performs chalitzah in his presence, or a girl performs mi'un. He gives directions to a traveler. Every one of these is worthy and several are the work of a court, and every one of them disqualifies the water, because he stood still and turned toward something that was not the jar on his shoulder.

The principle follows with unusual precision. Anything that counts as work, done before the ashes are cast, disqualifies whether he stood still or not; anything that does not count as work disqualifies only if he stopped walking. Between those two axes lies the whole geography of distraction. He may take food to eat as he goes and the water holds; take the same food to set aside for later and it is gone. He may breach a gap in a wall to pass through, even intending to close it afterward, and the water holds; close it before the ashes are cast and it is gone. He may dry fruit to eat, and lose the water by drying the rest.

Then a case to be read slowly. He is eating on the road, he has leftovers, he throws them under a fig tree. If he threw them there so the food would not spoil, the water is disqualified, because that is work. If he threw them there because he no longer wanted them, the water is acceptable. The arm moves the same way and the food lands in the same place. Nothing visible distinguishes the pure case from the ruined one, and the Rambam rules on it without hesitation, because the question was never about the arm.

Two rulings keep the chapter from becoming cruel. The first is the watchman. If two men are watching and one goes off to work, the water stands, because the other is watching; if the first returns and the second leaves, it still stands; only simultaneous absence is fatal. The requirement is not that anyone be perfect but that the water never once be alone. The second is stranger. A man may sanctify with one hand and work with the other, and if the water is his own he has ruined it, but if he was sanctifying for a colleague the water is acceptable, because work does not disqualify the act of sanctification at all. It disqualifies water, and only in the hands of its owner or its watchman.

Parah Adumah 9: The Ashes Have to Leave Your Hand

The ninth chapter opens with an order of operations that is not obvious. The water goes into the vessel first and the ashes are laid on top, so that they can be seen floating on the surface, and this is sufficient even for a large barrel; then the whole is stirred. Ashes first, water poured onto them, and the mixture is disqualified. The Rambam anchors this in the verse that says living water shall be placed upon it. The chemistry is the same either way. The sequence is not, and the sequence is the law.

Then the requirement that governs everything after it. The one sanctifying must focus his concentration and must cast the ashes by hand, and from a single phrase the Rambam derives that specific intent is required while sanctifying, while drawing, and while sprinkling. Having derived it, he shows you how narrow the passage is. Ashes that fall from their container into the water, disqualified. Ashes in his hand when a friend jostles him or the wind pushes him, disqualified. Ashes that fall from his hand onto the side of the vessel and slide in from there, disqualified. The ashes are in the water and the water is not sanctified, because what went missing was the last few inches of a human decision.

The middle of the chapter studies what counts as connected, and then what counts as ruin. A small vessel standing inside a large one, their waters touching, is sanctified along with it though its mouth is so narrow that no ash entered. Two troughs cut in one stone are separate unless a hole the width of a pouch mouthpiece joins them or a film of water as thin as a garlic peel lies across the top. After that, the fragility. The least drop of other water disqualifies, even water drawn for these same ashes. Dew disqualifies. Beetles disqualify without breaking open, because they are like tubes and the water passes through them. Every bird ruins it by drinking except the dove, which sucks and does not let saliva fall, and every crawling creature is harmless except the mole, which licks with its tongue.

Two pairs of rulings on appearance say more than they seem to. Water whose look changed on its own is acceptable and water discolored by smoke is not. Water that froze and melted in the sun is acceptable and water melted by fire is not. Nothing about the liquid distinguishes these outcomes; something about its history does. The chapter ends by making the same move with a lid. A vessel left open and found closed is disqualified, because somebody covered it and we cannot know whether he was pure. A vessel left covered and found open may well be acceptable, if no mole could have drunk and no dew could have fallen. Being found sealed is worse than being found exposed, because a seal is evidence of a hand.

Parah Adumah 10: In Front of You, Where You Can See It

The tenth chapter begins by dividing the labor, which after two chapters of severity arrives as relief. The man who draws need not be the man who sanctifies, and neither need be the man who sprinkles; water may be poured from vessel to vessel and sprinkled from a third. Drawn water may be held unsanctified for as long as a person likes, carried from city to city, and sanctified whenever he chooses, and sanctified water may be kept for years and used a drop at a time.

Then one incident is recorded and a decree follows it. A container of ashes was once carried by ship on the Jordan, and an olive of a corpse was found lying in the bottom of the boat, and the water was made impure. From that day the High Court ruled that neither water nor ashes may travel on a river or in a boat, may not be floated across, may not be thrown from one bank to the other. A man may wade until the water reaches his neck while carrying them, which tells you the decree was never about danger, and the very next ruling permits sanctified water on the Great Sea and permits floating it there, because the decree covered a river and a river only.

The most physical ruling in the chapter is the smallest. A man carrying this water may not sling the container over his back. He carries it in front of him, and the Rambam grounds this in the phrase that calls it a safekeeping, water for sprinkling: where it is watched it serves for sprinkling, and where it is not, it is disqualified. If he has two jugs, one may go behind him, because it is impossible to do otherwise. The same logic reaches the scales. Water weighed on a balance is disqualified if he turned his attention away and acceptable if he did not, but water used as the counterweight to measure something else is disqualified outright, because a thing being used as a weight is by definition not a thing being watched.

The last movement is the sprinkling, and it holds the sentence this treatise has been building toward. The one sprinkling must intend to sprinkle upon the impure person in order to purify him, and without that intent the sprinkling is void; if he intended to sprinkle in front of himself and sprinkled behind, void, though in front and off to the side is fine. The one being sprinkled needs no intent whatsoever. Water may be sprinkled on a person with his knowledge or without his knowledge. A man may be purified while asleep, while arguing, while entirely unaware that someone is standing near him with hyssop in his hand.

The Unifying Principle

The word the Rambam keeps circling is melachah, work, and it is easy to hear it as an ordinary prohibition. It is not one. Nothing here is forbidden. A man carrying this water is permitted to render judgments and give directions and set food aside, and if he does any of them the water simply stops being what it was. He has not sinned. He has changed the subject. That is why the permitted acts look arbitrary until the axis appears: killing the scorpion in his path, eating as he walks, breaching a wall to pass through, holding the ash container in his hand so nothing scatters, are all the errand continuing, and drying the extra fruit, closing the breach, setting the container down, using the water as a counterweight, are all the errand pausing so that something else can happen.

The Alter Rebbe, drawing on the Tikkunei Zohar, writes that a commandment performed without intention is a body without a soul, and that prayer offered without intention is a bird without wings. It is usually read as an exhortation about quality, as though intention improved a mitzvah that would otherwise be merely adequate. The Rambam has taken the same idea and made it structural. Here the intention is not the soul of the act in a poetic sense. It is a material condition, checkable by a court, and its absence does not weaken the water. It ends it.

The Baal Shem Tov taught that a person is located wherever his thoughts are. Read that against a man standing in the road settling a dispute with a jar on his shoulder and the ruling stops being technical. The jar is standing in the road with nobody, because he is elsewhere, and the water exists only inside somebody's attention. The Lubavitcher Rebbe returned many times to the fact that this whole apparatus purifies others while defiling those who handle it, and here the price becomes concrete. To carry purification for another person, you are required to stop having a day of your own.

Modern Application

Consider what actually appears on the list of disqualifying acts. Ruling on a question of law for someone who asked. Judging a case. Witnessing a chalitzah. Showing a stranger the road. If the Rambam had wanted to teach that distraction is bad he could have chosen idleness, gossip, appetite. He chose service. He chose the most defensible interruptions available, the ones nobody could criticize you for, and ruled that they end the errand all the same. The threats to whatever you are actually carrying are rarely disreputable. They arrive as things you are glad to have been asked to do.

The mercy is in the shape of the exemptions. What may be done is whatever the errand itself requires. Eat, because nobody walks that far without eating. Clear the snake off the path, because the path has to be walked. Hold the vessel steady, because it will spill otherwise. This is not a demand for asceticism. It asks whether the thing being done serves the thing being carried, which is a question a man can honestly answer about his own afternoon. And the two watchmen make the standard livable, because the law protects the coverage rather than the vigilance. Only simultaneous absence is fatal, which means the answer to a person who keeps looking away is not to demand more of him but to make sure somebody else is there when he does.

Then the sprinkling, which quietly rearranges who owes what. The one doing the purifying must intend it precisely, in the right direction, toward the right person, or nothing happens at all. The one being purified may be asleep. Whatever else that is, it is a rebuke to the instinct that help should be withheld until the person needing it demonstrates the right attitude. The Rambam puts every ounce of required consciousness on the side of the one who came to help and asks the one in trouble for nothing, not even his agreement.

The Closing

These chapters fall on the thirteenth of Elul, a working day in a working month, and they suit it almost embarrassingly well. Elul is not a season of transformation. It is a season of carrying something carefully for a while without setting it down, and the temptation in Elul is always to perform some large act of correction instead. The Sfat Emet read the month as the time for preparing the vessel rather than finishing the work, and the Tzemach Tzedek insisted that ordinary service done continuously outweighs extraordinary service done once. The Rambam gives the same instruction in the form of a man on a road with a jar.

Nothing in this water is powerful. Its entire strength is that somebody has not looked away from it, and it can be ended by a good deed performed at the wrong moment. Ask what you are carrying this month, and then ask what you have been quietly setting down in order to do something admirable. Carry it in front of you, where you can see it. That is the whole of the law, and it is the reason the law had to be written down.