The Ones Who Can Be Asked

The Hook

A raven crosses a courtyard with an olive sized portion of a human corpse in its beak. Below, a man is standing, and beside him a set of vessels is laid out for the day's work. Nobody can say whether the bird passed over either of them. The Rambam rules that the man is impure and the vessels are pure, and the reason has nothing to do with flesh or clay. The man is impure because he has the knowledge to respond to questions. The vessels are pure because they do not have the capacity to respond to questions.

That clause does all the work in three chapters. The vessels are not exonerated, since nothing whatever has been established about them. They are let go because there is nobody there to ask. And so the ruling that should stop you arrives on schedule: a blind man, a sleeping man, and a man walking a road at night are all judged impure when a question of contact arises in a private domain. Not one of them could have seen anything. The Rambam convicts all three in five words, saying that they have the knowledge to respond to questions. Not because they know. Because they are the kind of creature to whom a question can be put.

Meanwhile a child is found at the edge of a cemetery with roses in his hand, and even where roses grow only inside the place of impurity, he is pure. A donkey stands in a graveyard with vessels strapped to his back and the vessels stay pure, and the Rambam refuses to say that the animal lay down and pressed against a grave. Both waved through, and a blind man convicted on a doubt he could not have resolved. These chapters are learned on the first of Tishrei, the day the world stands to be asked.

She'ar Avot HaTum'ot 15: What the Verdict Is Read From

Chapter 15 is a list of doubts the Sages ruled pure. A doubt about a matter of Rabbinic law is pure, whether he ate impure food, whether drawn water fell on him, whether he touched anything after. The ordinary food of the perushim, those who eat unconsecrated food in purity, holds its status against every question raised about it. A man with tzara'at sits under a tree, a pure man passes, and whether he walked underneath is unknown, so he is pure.

Then the case that supplies the principle. Someone throws the carcass of a creeping animal in among a row of loaves and whether it touched the pure loaf cannot be determined. The loaves are pure, and the Rambam states the rule that governs everything after it. The status of all questions of ritual impurity depends on the situation at the time the matter is discovered. We do not say that perhaps it touched and then rolled aside. Whatever the arrangement was when a human being finally looked, that is what the law will judge. So a creeping animal found already burnt on food, or a garment worn through, or a needle snapped or eaten with rust, leaves everything pure, because nobody may reconstruct the moment when the needle was whole.

The rule cuts the other way just as sharply. A mole crosses loaves of terumah with a creeping animal in its mouth and the loaves are pure, because the impurity never came to rest, and a dog trotting past with carrion in its jaws leaves what it passes untouched, since the impurity has no fixed place. Let those animals stop and peck their burdens against the ground and everything changes, because now the thing has a location. Doubt in the public domain is pure and the same doubt in a private domain is impure, and then comes the sentence that makes the next chapter necessary: the doubts he has just released stay released even in a private domain, because the objects involved do not have the knowledge to inquire regarding their status.

One scene is worth carrying into a new year. An impure thing sits in a private domain and a pure thing in the public domain, a man touched one of them, and he does not know which. He is pure. He comes to ask, and the court answers with something that is not a ruling at all. If you immerse, you have not lost anything. Immerse and it is praiseworthy; decline and handle pure things, and the pure things stay pure.

She'ar Avot HaTum'ot 16: The Blind Man Is Judged and the Donkey Is Not

Chapter 16 asks why any of this is law, and the answers are the most revealing lines in the treatise. Doubt in the public domain is pure because when most of the nation is impure the community brings the Paschal offering in a state of impurity, and if definite impurity is superseded by the presence of the community, a mere question of it certainly is. Doubt in a private domain is stringent because of the sotah, who entered into privacy with the man she was warned about and is forbidden to her husband on nothing more than a doubt. The arithmetic follows. A sotah case is two people alone, so a doubt involving two in a private domain is impure, and the moment a third person is present the private domain behaves like the street.

Then the qualification that reorganizes the subject. All of this applies where the one who might have contracted impurity has the knowledge to be asked and examined about what occurred, as is true of a sotah. Where a deaf mute, or one whose mind is compromised, or a minor who cannot answer is found in a courtyard that has impurity in it, and whether contact occurred is unknown, they are pure. Wherever there is nobody with the knowledge to respond to questions, a doubt in a private domain is pure exactly as it would be in public.

Having said it, he immediately makes it strange. A blind man, a sleeping man and one walking at night are impure in a private domain, because they have the knowledge to respond to questions. The category is not about access to the facts. It is about standing to be interrogated. A sleeping man will wake and be a man who can be asked, and that alone places him inside the system of judgment for something that happened while he was not present to it. The vessels will never be asked, and so nothing that happens around them ever quite happens to them.

The rest of the chapter tests the limits with a patience that is nearly comic. The leniency holds only where the possibilities are evenly balanced, so an impure child standing beside dough with dough on his hands makes it impure, since a child's habit is to pat dough. Impure liquids and a pure terumah dough sit in a room with animals and teeth marks appear. If a cow had room to wipe her tongue on her lips between the liquid and the dough, the dough is pure; less room and it is impure. A dog present keeps it pure even beside the liquid, because a dog does not leave food and go to water. Even where the presumption stands the terumah is not burnt but held in abeyance, which is the law's way of saying a thing can be too doubtful to eat and not doubtful enough to destroy.

She'ar Avot HaTum'ot 17: Judged by What Is Found

Chapter 17 carries the principle into the working day, and it is almost entirely about water, food and vessels, which is to say about things that cannot answer. A man draws water with one bucket and fills ten containers, and a creeping animal is found in one of them. That container is impure and the other nine pure, even though the animal may have been riding in the drawing bucket the whole time, because vessels do not have the capacity to respond to questions. Give the bucket a rim, so water could pour out while the carcass stayed behind, and all of them are impure.

The same logic runs through the cistern. If he dipped each barrel into the cistern and the carcass turns up in the first, everything is impure; in the last, that barrel alone, since the animal presumably fell in after the earlier barrels were drawn. But if he checked all the barrels first, poured, and covered them, the leniency is gone and all of them are impure, because he removed the innocent explanation himself. Olives carried up from a storage pit to a drying roof are judged the same way, and a carcass found in a mound on that roof turns the pit impure only within three days of the olives coming up, because after three days olives settle into a mound on their own.

Where nothing can be reconstructed at all, the law simply counts, and a seed baked into a loaf or a piece of meat found in the street is settled by the majority. The treatise then ends on two women and their hands. One gathers fertilizer and a creeping animal is found down in the load, and she is pure, since such a carcass does not impart impurity when carried; found on top of the load, she is impure, because perhaps she touched it. The other sifts grain, and the animal in the kernels leaves her pure while the animal on top of the sieve leaves her impure. Perhaps she touched it. That is the whole reasoning, and it is the last sound the treatise makes before Rosh Hashanah.

The Unifying Principle

Set the three chapters beside each other and the shape is unmistakable. Doubt is not a property of events. It is a property of persons. The bird flew or it did not, the hand touched or it did not, and the facts are equally unavailable to everyone concerned. What decides the case is whether there exists in the vicinity a being who could be asked. Where there is one, the doubt lands on him. Where there is not, the doubt evaporates, and the law does not even pretend to have discovered anything.

Which means that the leniency granted to vessels is not mercy. It is dismissal. A jar is never guilty, and a jar is never addressed. It gets the benefit of every doubt for the same reason it will never be praised. The donkey leaves the cemetery clean because the law has no business with him. The blind man walks out impure because the law does. Between those two verdicts sits the whole dignity of being a person.

The Baal Shem Tov taught that in the place where a person's will and thought are, there the person is entirely. Usually heard as consolation, here it reads as jurisdiction: the sleeper is judged because he is the sort of being who has a place where his thought is. The Alter Rebbe then built the Tanya around a status very close to this one. The beinoni is not the righteous man and not the wicked man and is not becoming either; he is permanently in the middle, and the Tanya insists this unresolved condition is the rank most people should be aiming at. An unresolved status is available only to a creature who can be questioned. Purity granted because there was nobody to ask is not an achievement. It is an absence.

Modern Application

Everyone alive knows the relief of not being asked. A message goes unanswered and the matter closes itself. A friendship thins to the point where nobody expects an account of your week. Work arrives with no one at the other end who will notice how it was done. It feels like freedom for about a year, and then it begins to feel like the donkey in the cemetery, wandering through the most serious ground there is and coming out with nothing on him at all.

The Tzemach Tzedek said that a person should think good and it will be good, which is usually heard as advice about optimism and is really a ruling about how to hold an open case. Chapter 15 had already said it in the language of law. If you immerse, you have not lost anything. Nobody in that exchange claims to know what happened; the court declines to convict and declines to reassure, and hands the man something to do with his uncertainty rather than a conclusion to believe about it. That is what a live doubt is for. It is not a problem awaiting a solution. It is an assignment.

The Closing

The Rebbe returned constantly to the fact that the first of Tishrei is not the anniversary of the world but the anniversary of its sixth day, the day a creature appeared who could be addressed, and that the year is counted from the making of the one being who could be asked where he was standing. That first question was not an accusation and did not request information. Everything in these three chapters is downstream of it. The vessels were also in the garden, and nobody said a word to them.

Today the shofar is not sounded, because the first of Tishrei has fallen on Shabbat, and the day arrives without its one unmistakable noise. What remains is the harder half. Not the blast, but the standing. The Alter Rebbe taught that the kingship of the new year is not imposed but requested, that the coronation waits on somebody below asking for it, and a request is only ever made by something that can speak.

So the year opens with a doubt, and the doubt is the good news. Whatever is unresolved in your life at this hour, whatever you cannot establish about the past twelve months and never will be able to establish, is evidence of the one thing worth establishing, which is that there is somebody here who can be asked. The vessels have already been acquitted. The donkey has been sent home. You have been left standing in the private domain with the question still open, and that is not the punishment. That is the appointment. So what is the question you have spent the year arranging your life so that nobody would ever be in a position to put to you?