It Defiles Until It Cures

The Hook

Water that has been sprinkled on an impure man and is running off his shoulder onto the road is pure water. You may touch it, carry it, stand in the puddle. Nothing about the liquid changed and nobody added anything to it. What changed is that it was finally needed by somebody, and having been needed, it went quiet.

Then the Rambam adds the detail that makes the arrangement strange. If a man dipped his hyssop intending to sprinkle on something that could never have contracted impurity, the water running off is still a source of impurity, because it is still fit for sprinkling and has therefore not yet done anything. Sprinkling is not what spends this water. Landing on a real case is. Three chapters run on distinctions of that order, and the last of them changes the subject entirely, from a jar of ashes to a white patch on a man's arm, and asks the same question in another language.

Parah Adumah 14: A Pure Place to Set It Down

The chapter is about storage, and it opens with a jar. An earthenware container holding the ashes of the red heifer is touched on its outside by the carcass of a crawling animal, and it is pure, because earthenware does not contract impurity from its back. Now set the same jar down on top of the same carcass. The jar is still pure. The ashes inside it are impure. The verse says the ashes are placed outside the camp in a pure place, and this is not a pure place. Nothing touched the ash. The floor of the jar was between them the whole time and came through unharmed. The ash is ruined by what is under the floor it stands on, and not only by a carcass, since a food that is a secondary derivative of impurity, too light to defile a person or a vessel, does the same thing.

Then the same jar over an opening in a house that has a corpse in it. Hanging into the airspace, the ashes are impure however small the opening. Not hanging in, they are impure only if the opening is a handbreadth square. The next line dissolves the measurement: if the container was made of stone, the ashes are pure whether the opening is a handbreadth or not. Stone contracts no impurity, so the space stone makes is a pure place, and the whole question of the handbreadth was never about the hole.

Everywhere else in these laws a tightly sealed lid is a wall, and a sealed vessel under the same roof as a corpse keeps its contents pure. Not here. Ashes and sanctified water sealed shut in a tent with a corpse are impure, because the requirement is about place and a lid does not move you to another place. Unsanctified water is protected by that seal; sanctify it and it loses the protection it had five minutes earlier. The more this substance is capable of, the fewer places it may rest.

The most physical ruling here is the oven. A man who purified himself for this process stands on an oven that was not purified for it, and holds his arms out past the rim so the vessels of sanctified water hang in the air over nothing. They are impure, and the reason is one clause: since they are supported by the oven, it is as if they are placed on top of it. Let him stand beside the oven and reach out over it with the same vessel and the water stays pure. What is under his feet reaches the water in his hands. What is under the water does not.

Parah Adumah 15: The Measure of a Sprinkling

Chapter fifteen states the rule implicit for four chapters. Any person or article touching sanctified water for a purpose other than sprinkling contracts impurity. It is a primary source of impurity by Scriptural law, the slightest amount is enough, and to bring your clothes down with you there is a measure, beautifully concrete: enough water to immerse the tops of the stalks of hyssop. That measure comes from a verse the Rambam first has to rescue. Scripture says that one who sprinkles the water shall launder his garments, which cannot describe the man performing the purification, since if he purifies somebody impure, one can certainly infer that he himself stays pure. So the Oral Tradition read the verse as a quantity rather than a case.

And then the switch. The water imparts impurity only before it has been used for its mitzvah, and afterward it does not impart impurity at all. Water dripping off the impure person onto the ground is pure, and so is water that missed and landed on a pure bystander. But hyssop dipped in order to sprinkle on something that cannot become impure has performed no mitzvah, so what drips from it is still fit for sprinkling and still carries the full weight. Two puddles on the same floor, indistinguishable. One was spent and one was wasted, and only the wasted one is dangerous.

Now the chapter divides its readers. If the water was disqualified, by being mixed with other water or drunk from by an animal, a man who is pure with regard to terumah becomes impure by touching it with hand or body, while a man who purified himself for this process touches the very same water, even with his hand, and remains exactly as he was. Yesterday we learned that the man pure for this process is defiled by things too slight to reach anybody else. Today he is immune to what fells the man beside him, more fragile and more durable in the same body, and which one he is depends entirely on what is coming at him.

The two windows are the hardest ruling here and the most human. Water sprinkled on a man from a window that serves many individuals, then the Temple, then the discovery that the water was disqualified. He is exempt, because water sprinkled on the public may be assumed acceptable. Water from the window of a private individual, the same discovery, and he brings an adjustable guilt offering, because he should have investigated first. Nothing about the water differed. What differed is how many others were relying on it. Then the last line, almost gentle. Lift a vessel that was sprinkled and still carries a sprinkling measure of water, and you are pure, because once the water has performed its mitzvah it does not impart impurity at all.

Tum'at Tsara'at 1: Deeper Than the Shadow

A new set of laws opens, and the first thing the Rambam does is hand us a color chart. The skin turns white, as white as the membrane of an egg or whiter, and anything paler than that membrane is not tzara'at at all. It is bohak, and bohak is nothing. Four shades count: baheret, intensely white like snow; si'ait, like the cleaned wool of a newborn sheep; a shade like the lime of the Temple building, a derivative of baheret called sapachat; and a shade like the membrane of an egg, a derivative of si'ait and also called sapachat. Two which are four. All four join and count as a single blemish, whether that makes the ruling lenient or stringent.

Which raises the obvious question, and the Rambam asks it himself. If they all join, why did the Sages count them? So that one will understand the appearances, because a priest who does not recognize them and their names after being taught may not assess a blemish until he can say, this is baheret and this is its subsidiary. The names decide nothing about the man being examined. They are a qualification for the man doing the examining, and a licensing requirement has been hidden inside a color chart. There is also petuch, white with a little red in it, measured against four cups of milk holding two, four, eight and sixteen drops of blood.

Then the turn, and it undoes everything before it. None of these appearances is a blemish and none imparts impurity unless it looks deep, under the surface of the skin. Not deep to the finger. Deep to the eye, the way sunlight appears deeper than a shadow. If the whiteness is level with the flesh, or raised above it, it is a rash like the other rashes that erupt on a body. Snow white and the right size, and if it sits on top of the skin the priest has nothing to say about it. That size is a gris of Cilicia, square, a place where thirty six hairs could grow, six by six, so a blemish five hairs wide is pure even if it runs a cubit long.

Then the ruling that ought to be more famous than it is. A baheret as white as snow appears dark on the flesh of an albino, and a dark shade appears intensely white on a black man, so we consider the shade as it would appear on a person of average complexion. The blemish is not read against the body carrying it. It is read against a standard body that nobody in the room actually has. The chapter closes with the three signs, white hair, healthy flesh in the middle of the blemish, and expansion, any one of which rules him definitely impure, and without them seven days closed up and then a second seven and no more. Darkening is not purity unless the blemish goes darker than all four shades, and intensifying is not impurity. The white that got whiter is judged in the state it started in.

The Unifying Principle

Not one of these three chapters is about substance.

The ash is the same ash whether the jar rests on stone or on a dead lizard. The water is the same water an instant before it is sprinkled and an instant after. The whiteness is the same whiteness whether it lies under the skin or sits on top of it. In every chapter the Rambam is handed a material, declines to rule on it, and rules instead on where it stands, what is underneath it, and whether it has yet been spent on anybody.

This is the Alter Rebbe's argument in the Tanya about kelipat nogah, written in stone and water. A piece of meat eaten so a man has strength to serve is lifted by the eating, and the identical piece eaten for the pleasure of eating stays where it was. Not a different food and not a different mouth. A different direction. The sanctified water is that teaching turned into halachah, and it does not even suffice that the sprinkling happened. Somebody had to need it.

The Baal Shem Tov taught that a person is wherever his thought is, entirely, with nothing of him left in the room where he appears to stand. Chapter fourteen says the same about a man's feet. Stand on the oven and there is no distance at which you can hold the vessel. And the Rebbe returned many times, drawing on the Arizal, to the fact that nega and oneg are written with the same three letters, and that everything hangs on where the ayin stands. Affliction and delight are one material in two arrangements. The Rambam has now ruled it in a clinic, where the same white sends one man home and shuts another up for a fortnight, and the only thing examined was its depth.

Modern Application

We are trained to work on substance. Find out what you are made of, fix the material, and the results follow. These chapters keep saying the material is almost never the question, which is why so much sincere effort changes nothing.

Consider what you hold at arm's length, the vessel kept away from what you do not want it near, held out past the rim over open air. If you are standing on that thing, the distance is decorative. The oven under your feet has already reached your hands. And then the water. A capacity you have not spent on anybody is not neutral and not safe; it stays volatile until somebody who actually needed it is in front of you and it lands. Practice does not discharge it.

Then the white patch. The village argues about the shade and the priest looks at the depth. Most of what alarms us about ourselves is on the surface, a rash like the other rashes that erupt on a body. And this, which is harder: you are not assessed against yourself. A shade that looks catastrophic on you reads as nothing on a person of average complexion, and the halachah insists on the average complexion, because a man's own skin is the least reliable background for reading a mark on it.

The Closing

These chapters fall on the fifteenth of Elul, three days before Chai Elul, and the accounting of Elul is where all of this turns practical. The instinct in an accounting is to inventory the material. What am I made of, what is my nature, what is the shade of the mark. The Rambam has spent three chapters refusing that question in every form it takes, and he is not being evasive. He is saying the answer decides nothing.

What decides is underneath. Where the jar was set down. What the man stood on while he held the vessel out. Whether the white lies above the skin or below it. And above all whether the thing you carry, genuinely holy and genuinely able to lift the heaviest impurity there is, has yet been sprinkled on one person who needed it, because until then it is not a resource. It is a hazard, and it is treated as one.

The only substance in the Torah that lifts the impurity of death is impure in your hands until the moment it works, and then it is water. Nothing was added to it and nothing was refined. It was needed, and being needed is what settled it. Find out what you have been holding out over open air, notice what you have been standing on the whole time you held it, and then go and find the one case that is real. The water does not go quiet for practice.