The Reach That Does Not Pass Down

The Hook

A court orders a man flogged, and the Rambam stops to ask who is holding the whip. If a pure man administers the lashes to a zav, nothing happens to him. Reverse it. Let the zav swing the strap and the pure man take the blows, and the pure man is impure, and his garments are impure with him. Not from the leather. From this: if the man being struck were to step aside, the man striking him would fall over. He was leaning on him the entire time.

Stay with that picture. The man with the instrument in his hand, who by every visible measure is the one doing something, turns out legally to be the one being held up, and the man on the receiving end is the support.

Now set it beside a piece of arithmetic a page earlier. A man sits on a bed and somebody has slid a folded cloth under each of its four legs. All four cloths are impure, because a bed cannot stand on three. A zav rides a donkey with a folded cloth under each of the animal's four feet, and all four are pure. An animal can stand on three, so any one of those hooves might have been the one contributing nothing, and the Rambam's phrase for that possibility is unimprovable. An assist is not significant.

Four supports under a piece of furniture are all implicated. Four supports under a living creature all go free. And the man with the whip is the one leaning.

Metamei Mishkav u'Moshav 7: The Five Ways of Being Held Up

The chapter opens by counting, and what it counts is postures. A zav renders a bed, a seat or a saddle impure in five ways, and not one of them is touching. Standing above it, sitting above it, lying on it, hanging from it, leaning on it. Those five are what the word midras means wherever it appears, and the Rambam adds at once that a stone in between changes nothing. He was in some way supported by it, and that is the entire test.

Then the mirror. Such an object conveys impurity to a person in seven ways, those same five plus touching plus carrying. Scripture speaks of one who sits on the article on which the zav had sat, and the Oral Tradition hears in it the place rather than the object. The spot makes the next man who sits there impure.

Then the threshold, which is not a small one. Nothing happens at all until the majority of the body is being supported. Sprawl a zav across five benches laid end to end and every bench held most of him at some moment, so all five are impure. Lay the same five side by side, so that no single one carries the greater part of him, and all five are pure. Unless he fell asleep on them, in which case they are impure again, because a sleeping man turns over.

The chapter ends on a sentence worth carrying around. An object not made to be sat on and sat on anyway stays pure, because we can say to the man on it: stand up and let us get on with our work. Turn a kneading trough over and sit on it, sit on a curtain or the sail of a ship, and the law refuses to call any of it your seat. But a cloak, a veil, a drinking pouch, a carrying bag, things that can be used for their own purpose and sat on in the same breath, do become midras. The line runs between what your weight interrupts and what can carry your weight and its own work at once.

Metamei Mishkav u'Moshav 8: The Reach That Belongs to Nobody Else

Chapter eight opens by restating a rule and then breaking it. Everywhere else in the Torah, a person who moves a source of impurity contracts it, and a person whom a source of impurity moves does not. The zav reverses the second half. If a zav moves you, you are impure, and the Rambam says so with unusual emphasis. This is the extra dimension of impurity, he writes, that exists with regard to a zav and has no comparison in the entire Torah.

The illustration is a beam laid across a fence. Pure people or pure vessels on one end, a zav on the other, and he presses down. They rise, and having been raised by him they are treated as though he had touched them. Even sealed earthenware, which produces the strangest ranking in these chapters: a zav who touches a sealed jar leaves it pure, and a zav who nudges the same jar across a table makes it impure. A needle buried in a block of wood, sealed away from all contact, becomes impure the moment he lifts the block.

Then the balance scale, which is the chapter in miniature. A zav on one pan, a mattress on the other. If he outweighs it and it rises, he moved it, and it is impure the way things he touched are impure. If it outweighs him and lifts him off the ground, it is impure the way things he stood on are impure, a full grade higher, a primary source, because it carried him. The same beam, the same two objects, the same afternoon. Which way it tipped decides which kind of impurity you are looking at.

And then a page of ordinary life. Two men on a plank that seesaws, or in a tree too thin to hollow a small cavity out of, or on an Egyptian ladder that was never nailed. In every case the pure man is impure, because the thing will shake and the shaking is the zav moving him. Put the same two men in a boat large enough not to notice them, on a bench that does not wobble, on a beam set in mortar, and the pure man is pure even sitting on the same side. Two men closing a door together are pure. One closing while the other opens is not. The chapter ends with the Rambam in his own voice: a finger held above a body with a stone between them defiles, teeth and nails and hair count as joined to the body, and then, it appears to me that this impurity is of Rabbinic origin.

Metamei Mishkav u'Moshav 9: What Your Force Reaches, and What Merely Trembles

Chapter nine narrows to one question, and it is about power. A zav bangs on something. What falls?

If the thing he struck is fixed to the ground and sound, and the blow sends a vessel or food or liquid tumbling off it, all of it is pure. If the thing he struck is shaky, the same fall makes everything impure, and so does a shake without a fall. The rule the Rambam states is one of the cleanest sentences in the book. Whatever falls as a direct result of the power of the zav's movement is impure. Anything that falls due to the trembling of the support is pure.

So a loaf stuck to the wall of a firm oven, knocked loose when he pounds on it, is pure, and he adds that this holds even if the loaf is terumah, where the instinct to be strict is strongest. But if a shard of the oven wall comes away clinging to the loaf, the loaf is impure, even if it is ordinary bread nobody was guarding. The loaf came down because the oven shuddered. The shard came off because he hit it.

Then the ruling that reorganizes the whole treatise, and it is easy to read straight past. A surface that has become midras, an actual primary source of impurity, does not convey to vessels or food or liquid unless it touches them. Set them above it or set it above them, and if they are not in contact, even with nothing between them but a sheet of paper, they are pure. And if the impure mattress itself causes a jar to move, the jar is pure.

Read that against last week, where a zav sitting on a stone above a thousand stacked mattresses made every one of them a primary source, and against chapter eight, where his moving a thing was as good as his touching it. All of that belonged to him. None of it passes down. The mattress inherits his rank and not one particle of his reach. It is an av tumah, the highest grade this system has, and it cannot do at a distance the smallest thing he could do at a distance.

The Unifying Principle

Three chapters, three questions, and not one of them is the question you would expect a purity system to ask. Not what did he touch. What was actually holding him up. What did he actually set in motion. And how far did his own force travel before it became the trembling of the room.

That is a system for measuring influence, and it is unusually honest about how influence behaves. It goes through stone. It needs no contact and no intention. It requires the majority of a body, which is to say it will not credit you with a load you were not really carrying. And it separates the effect you produced from the effect that merely happened near you.

The Baal Shem Tov taught that in the place where a person's will is, there he is entirely. Not his attention and not his body. His will. Chapter eight is that teaching written out as a mechanism: a man is present wherever his force arrives, so the man who presses one end of a beam is standing at the other end of it. The Alter Rebbe, opening Shaar HaYichud VehaEmunah, takes the Baal Shem Tov's reading of the verse that God's word stands firm forever in the heavens and insists on the present tense of it. The utterance did not happen once. It is standing there now, holding in existence the thing it made. Which is why the place where a zav sat conveys impurity to the next man who sits there. The event is not finished because the man has gone.

And his hesitation at the end of chapter eight deserves its weight. Having just built a tier of law on a finger held above a body with a stone between, he writes that it appears to him that this is Rabbinic. The Lubavitcher Rebbe returns often in Likkutei Sichos to the places where the Rambam sets the transmitted formula aside and writes that it appears to him, the seams where a codifier stops handing something on and begins reasoning in the open.

Modern Application

Ask the question chapter seven asks. Not who is close to you, but what is bearing the majority of your weight. Five benches end to end and five side by side hold the same man, and the difference in law between them is total. There are people near you constantly who carry nothing, and one person carrying most of you who may never have been named out loud.

Then ask about the balance scale, the most uncomfortable image here. On one pan a person, on the other the people around him. If he outweighs them he moves them. If they outweigh him and lift him, they are marked worse, because they become the thing he stood on. There is no configuration of that scale in which nobody is affected, and most people are very confident about which side they are on.

And the flogging. Everyone can name a relationship in which one party is visibly the one delivering the correction, and the ruling is that if the other stepped aside, the corrector would go down. Leaning is invisible from the inside, where it feels like standing up straight and doing something necessary. It is perfectly visible from the side.

Chapter nine is a chapter about knocking, and the Sfat Emet reads the verse about the sound of the beloved knocking as the standing condition of these particular weeks. What the Rambam adds is a way to tell a knock from a tremor. Whatever falls as a direct result of your power is yours. Whatever fell because the room was already shaking is not. People with a conscience charge themselves for both and people without one charge themselves for neither, and the line the Rambam draws sits precisely between your blow and the shudder.

The Closing

These chapters fall on Shabbat, the twenty third of Elul, when the reading is Nitzavim and Vayeilech together, and the two portions happen to be named for the two mechanisms of these chapters. Atem nitzavim hayom kulchem. You are standing today, all of you. And then, Vayeilech Moshe. And Moshe went.

Standing and going. Omed is the first of the five ways in chapter seven, the first way a person makes something his without ever touching it, and going is chapter eight, the reach that travels out ahead of the body. Moshe on the last day of his life does both, and the Torah gives each its own portion and then, in most years, reads them in one breath.

Notice what Nitzavim is standing on. The verse names everybody, the heads of the tribes and the water carriers and the woodcutters, and the covenant is held up by all of them at once, which is chapter seven's difficulty exactly. With the weight spread that wide, who is bearing it? Nitzavim answers that it rests on all of them, and that the man at the far end of the list, whose name nobody remembers, is not an assist.

The last thing these chapters do is take the reach away. His force went through stone and through a thousand layers and into a sealed jar, and then the mattress he sat on inherits his rank and cannot move a cup. Whatever has been done to a person stops there unless the person carries it forward. Hold that from both ends this week. Nobody gets to say that what reached them was small, and nobody has to accept that it turned them into a source. Somewhere near you there is a plank with two people on it, moving for years, and only one of them believes he is standing still. Which end are you on?