Whatever Can Hold

The Hook

A man may eat impure bread. He may drink impure wine. He may walk into a house where a creeping animal has died and touch it with both hands, and on an ordinary Tuesday in the middle of the year he has done nothing wrong at all. The Rambam says it without hedging, at the close of an entire treatise on the impurity of foods: everything written in the Torah about purity and impurity applies only to the Sanctuary, to the sacrifices, to terumah and to the second tithe. There is no prohibition at all against eating ordinary food while impure.

Sixteen chapters of careful distinctions, of liquids that make food susceptible, of first and second and third degrees, and then the author turns to the reader and says that for ordinary lunch none of it is forbidden.

And then, on the same day, a new treatise opens, and it asks a question that sounds almost like a riddle. What kind of thing can become impure in the first place? The answer, over two chapters, turns out to be simple and strange. A thing can be defiled if it can hold something. Flat earthenware cannot be defiled at all. A hollow straw that can take one drop can.

These chapters fall on Shabbat Shuvah, two days before Yom Kippur. The question they are asking is not about bread.

Tum'at Okhalin 16: The Permission Nobody Expected

The chapter begins in the marketplace, and it begins with presumptions. Bundles of vegetables in the market are presumed to have been made susceptible to impurity, because sellers keep sprinkling water on them. Flour and fine flour are presumed susceptible, because the kernels are washed before grinding. And everything presumed susceptible is also presumed impure, for a reason the Rambam gives in four words: everyone touches them.

Then comes the question of who is believed. An unlearned person, an am ha'aretz, who says that his vegetables were never wet is believed, even about the goods that carry a presumption. With fish, he is not. Fish are presumed susceptible whatever he says, and if he claims that he never turned the snare over them, his word is not accepted. Fish brine is presumed susceptible too, and the smallest drop of water that falls into pure brine turns the whole mixture into a liquid that can carry impurity.

The chapter then offers a small piece of engineering. A person who buys fish brine from an unlearned seller can connect it to the water of a mikveh. If most of the mixture is water, the water is purified by the mikveh. If most of it is brine, the few drops of water are lost within it. That works, the Rambam says, when the brine is for dipping bread. If it is poured into a pot that already holds water, the small amount of water in the brine finds its own kind and becomes significant again, and since that water was never purified, the pot is impure. A remedy that works on the table fails in the kitchen, because water recognizes water.

And then the turn. Halacha eight declares that the laws of purity apply only to the Sanctuary, to sacrifices, to terumah and to the second tithe. Halacha nine goes further: it is permitted even to make ordinary food impure in the Land of Israel, and permitted to touch every source of impurity. Halacha ten adds one exception with a calendar attached. Every Jew is warned to be pure on each pilgrimage festival, because on those days everyone is ready to enter the Sanctuary.

Purity, then, is not a hygiene code. It is a readiness. It matters only in relation to a place and a moment of approach. When nobody is going anywhere, impurity is simply a fact about a thing. When a person is about to walk up to the house of God, it becomes the question.

The chapter does not end there. Halacha twelve describes the perushim, the pious ones of early generations, who ate their ordinary bread in purity their whole lives and avoided every source of impurity though nothing required it. The Rambam calls it an added measure of holiness and a path of piety, and he lays out a ladder: separation leads to purity of the body from wicked deeds, purity of the body leads to holiness of the soul from wicked traits, and holiness of the soul brings a person to resemble the Divine Presence. He closes with the verse commanding Israel to make themselves holy, because God is holy.

A permission, and then an invitation to decline it. The treatise ends by telling you that you do not have to, and describing the people who did anyway.

Kelim 1: Seven Materials and a Hollow

The new treatise starts with a list. Seven kinds of implements can become impure by Torah law: garments, sackcloth, leather, bone, metal, wood and earthenware. Everything from the sea is pure. Even a garment woven from wool that grows in the sea cannot become impure, because the Torah's garments and leather are things of the land.

Then the materials that can never be defiled. Implements of dung, of stone and of earth are pure, by Torah law and by Rabbinic law, flat or hollow. Even a basket that was already impure, swallowed by an elephant and passed out again, stays impure.

Now the heart of the chapter. Flat earthenware, a lamp or a chair or a table made of clay, cannot become impure at all, because the verse speaks of an earthenware vessel into whose inner space something falls. No inside, no impurity. Metal is different: a metal knife is susceptible just like a metal pot, and even a metal chest large enough to hold forty se'ah, because the verse speaks of anything that passes through fire. Wood, leather and bone follow the rule of the sack. A kneading trough or a drinking pouch is susceptible by Torah law because it has a receptacle. A wooden tablet or a leather mat for eating on is susceptible only by Rabbinic law, unless it is made for lying or riding, in which case the impurity of a zav reaches it by Torah law.

Glass sits in a category of its own. By Torah law it is pure. The Sages decreed impurity on glass containers because glass, like earthenware, begins as sand. But because its inside can be seen from its outside, they did not decree that it becomes impure through its inner space, the way clay does. The impurity has to touch it.

That detail is lovely. Earthenware is defiled through its air, through its hollow, even if nothing touches its walls. Glass, which hides nothing, has to be touched.

Kelim 2: No Minimum Size

The second chapter asks how small a receptacle can be, and answers that there is no minimum. A vessel made of raw hide, or of paper, though paper itself cannot become impure, or of the shell of a pomegranate or a nut or an acorn, is susceptible, even if children hollowed out the shell to measure earth or to use as scale pans. The reason given is striking: the deeds of a child are significant, though a child's intention is not. A child cannot declare what an object is for. But a child can make one, and what was made is real.

What cannot become impure is a vessel that will not last. A hollowed out dried turnip, an etrog or a squash used for measuring is pure, because it cannot endure more than a short while. A receptacle has to be made of something that stays.

Then the halacha that turns the chapter. A receptacle that was made to be filled is not a receptacle. A hollow cut in a block of wood to hold a blacksmith's iron anvil is pure, though it is a hollow, because it exists to be occupied. The same block in a jeweler's shop is susceptible, because the jeweler lifts the iron whenever he wishes and gathers the gold and silver filings that collect beneath it. The hollow is identical. What it is for is not.

A cup carved under the legs of a bed is pure, because it was made to support, not to collect. A hollow straw is susceptible even if it can take only a single drop. And then a sequence about a straw that holds a mezuzah, in which the order matters completely. If the mezuzah was put in first and the straw then placed in the wall, it is susceptible even with its opening downward. If the straw was placed in the wall first and the mezuzah slid in afterwards, the direction decides. If the straw was fixed into the wall, even with its opening upward, it is pure, because it has become part of the building.

The chapter ends with a pearl. A man wraps a pearl in a piece of hide, and when he takes it out, a small hollow remains. That hollow is susceptible until it is smoothed out, because anything that can hold the slightest amount is a receptacle. Coins wrapped in hide leave no such pocket, and the hide stays pure. A pearl leaves a shape behind. The empty space it made is enough to count.

The Unifying Principle

Put the two treatises side by side and a single idea runs through both. Impurity is about readiness, and susceptibility is about capacity. A thing that can receive can be defiled. A thing that cannot receive cannot. And a person who is not approaching the Sanctuary may carry impurity without sin, while a person who is about to approach must be ready.

The Talmud in Berachot draws a contrast that could have been written for these chapters. With a human vessel, an empty one can take something in and a full one cannot. With the vessels of the Holy One, it is the full one that holds, and the empty one does not. A mind already filled with wisdom receives more. The Kelim chapters add a third kind: the vessel that was made to be filled, and so is not a vessel at all. The blacksmith's hollow is never empty, and therefore it never receives anything.

The Alter Rebbe, in the thirty fifth chapter of Tanya, compares the Divine Presence to the light of a lamp, which cannot shine without a wick and oil. The light does not rest on nothing. It needs a body, a material thing, a vessel made of lasting stuff. That is the second chapter's rule about the turnip and the etrog. God does not rest on what is about to rot. A receptacle has to be made of something that stays.

And the Baal Shem Tov taught that everything a person sees or hears is a lesson in the service of God. The jeweler lifting his anvil to gather the dust of gold is such a lesson. The same hollow becomes something else entirely when somebody expects to find something precious in it. What makes a space a receptacle is not its shape but the hope of the one who uses it.

So the Rambam's permission and the Rambam's invitation belong together. The law does not require a person to be ready all year. It requires readiness when he is about to approach. The perushim simply decided that they were always about to approach.

Modern Application

Most people spend the year as the blacksmith's block, every hollow occupied and fitted to the tool that keeps the work going. That is permitted, as permitted as ordinary bread eaten in impurity. And it has one consequence the Rambam spells out without comment: such a hollow does not receive.

The week before Yom Kippur asks a different question. Not whether the space inside is clean, but whether it is a space at all. Whether anything in a life is still open, still meant to collect, still lifted now and then to see what gold has gathered underneath. A person can be so full, so fitted, so efficiently in use, that there is literally no room for anything to fall in, and the result is not holiness. It is a cup under the leg of a bed.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe, who established the daily study of these very chapters, often cited the Midrash that learning the laws of the Temple is counted as though one were building it. That is an odd claim about a treatise on clay lamps and hollow straws. Unless the building in question is a person. Every halacha about what can hold is a halacha about what a heart is for.

Consider also the child who hollows out a nutshell. The child has no standing to declare its purpose, and the deed counts anyway. Anyone who feels unqualified to make room for God this week can take that literally. Make the hollow. The making counts, even when the meaning is still unformed.

The Closing

Yom Kippur is a pilgrimage of sorts, even without a Temple. For one day every Jew behaves like the perushim, setting aside food and drink and ordinary life in order to stand near something holy. The permission of the rest of the year is suspended, not because the rest of the year was wrong, but because this is a day of approach.

Shabbat Shuvah is the day to check the vessels. Not to scrub them first. To find out which of them are still receptacles. The pearl is the image to take into the fast. Something precious was wrapped inside, and then taken out, and a small hollow remained in the shape of what was there. The Rambam says that hollow counts. It can hold. It is a vessel, until someone smooths it out.

Whatever was once held in you and is gone, a faith, a closeness, a year that started with more hope than it ended with, has left a shape. Do not smooth it over before Yom Kippur. That small pocket is exactly what makes you something that can still receive. The only real question for this week is which hollow in your life you have been keeping filled on purpose, like the blacksmith, so that nothing new could ever fall in.