Which Way the Jars Are Facing

The Hook

A man wants to keep the impurity of a corpse out of half his house. He builds a wall of clay jars, stacked from the floor to the roof beams and packed tight against each other, a barrier of fired earthenware between the dead and the living. The Rambam looks at the wall and asks one question. Which way are the mouths facing?

If the openings face the clean side of the room, the wall holds. If they face the corpse, it does not, and impurity crosses as though nothing had been built there at all. Same jars, same clay, same thickness, same labor. He can still rescue the wall by daubing mud over the mouths, on one condition: the mud has to stand up on its own if the jars were taken away. Mud that needs the jar to hold its shape is not a wall. It is a decoration on a wall.

Nothing in the next two chapters turns on how much material a man has put between himself and the dead. A skin of rock as thin as a garlic peel is a sufficient barrier. A handbreadth of empty air inside a wall turns that wall into a grave to its highest point, so that ten stories built on it are impure. And when the Rambam finishes with walls and turns to the red heifer, he ruins an entire animal with a lead rope somebody folded and laid on her back to keep it out of the mud.

Tum'at Met 24: Which Way the Jars Are Facing

The chapter is a catalogue of partitions, and it moves through them without ever once weighing them. Boards and curtains divide a house lengthwise or widthwise or against the ceiling, and vessels tucked between the partition and the wall are safe if the impurity is out in the room. Move the impurity into that narrow gap and the vessels out in the room become impure, because the partition can hold something in but cannot keep impurity from departing.

Then a house packed to the roof with straw. If there is a cubic handbreadth of clearance between the top of the straw and the ceiling, the straw does not intervene at all, and the Rambam explains why in half a sentence: we assume the man intends to take the straw out. The straw is not a wall because it is inventory, and a thing on its way somewhere else does not divide anything.

Where a wall runs between two houses and impurity is lodged inside its thickness, the house nearer the impurity is impure and the house nearer the clean side is pure, and if it is exactly equidistant, both are impure, because nobody can measure that finely. The same halving governs a ceiling between a house and a loft, and a roof with open sky above it, where a man standing directly over the impurity is pure or impure depending on nothing but which half of the ceiling it occupies.

And then the clause that ought to stop a reader cold. A wall that serves a house, with the roof supported by it but not resting on it and open ground on the far side, is judged by halves in the same way. Impurity in the inner half and the house is impure while the man on top of the wall is pure; impurity in the outer half and the house is pure while the man standing above it is defiled. Now suppose the owner scrapes plaster off the inside face, or adds plaster to the outside, until impurity that sat in the outer half falls in the inner half. The house becomes impure. He has thickened his wall and made his house worse, because the wall was never a quantity of material. It was a ratio, and he changed the ratio.

The chapter ends with two rulings that sit strangely beside each other. Where a wall is stone, or is the earth left standing between two vaults a man dug from either side, halves are irrelevant, and a portion of rock as thin as a garlic peel leaves everything beyond it pure. But if impurity lies between the beams of a roof with a sliver of board under it, and it can be seen from inside the house, the house is impure regardless. The garlic peel of stone works. The garlic peel of board works too, until somebody can see through.

Tum'at Met 25: A Handbreadth of Nothing

The twenty-fifth chapter takes the same instrument and runs it the other way. A pillar stands in a house with impurity flush underneath it, and the impurity pierces upward and downward and reaches nothing but what is directly above and below. Even a flower carved projecting from that pillar shelters the vessels beneath it. Solid stone does what solid material does in these chapters, which is to hold impurity to a single vertical line.

Then hollow out that pillar. A cavity a handbreadth wide and long and high, with the impurity inside it, and the pillar is no longer a pillar. It is a sealed grave, imparting impurity in every direction, and the whole house is impure because the house is standing over a grave. Do the same to a wall and the consequence climbs. The wall is a sealed grave to its topmost point, and every storey built upon it, to ten stories, is an ohel spread over a grave.

Between them the two chapters have a rule about emptiness. Matter, down to the thinnest peel, separates. Space, at the smallest size that counts as space, connects without limit.

The chapter then goes to thresholds. An olive of a corpse stuck to the outside of the doorstep leaves the house pure; flush under the doorstep it is judged by halves; stuck to the lintel, the house is impure and there is no calculation to make. A dog that ate the flesh of a corpse and died within three days lies across the doorway, and the ruling ignores the dog: you look at where the impurity is lodged in its body, and if that spot is under the lintel and inward, the house is impure. Nobody asks how much of the animal is in the room.

And at the end of the chapter, the strangest ruling in either of them. A man swallows an impure ring and then a pure one. Inside him they certainly touched, and touching is how impurity moves. Nothing happens. The impure ring stays impure and the pure one stays pure, because touching in a hidden place is not what the Torah means by touching. The same reasoning keeps a mother clean while a dead fetus is still inside her, and defiles the midwife who reaches in only by Rabbinic decree. Contact with nowhere to register is not contact.

Parah Adumah 1: The Cow With Nothing Asked of Her

Now the Rambam opens the laws of the red heifer, and a reader who has come through those two chapters is holding the right instrument. When the Torah calls her perfect it means perfectly red rather than perfectly formed; a dwarf heifer is fine. Two hairs of another color from one follicle disqualify her. If the roots are red and the tips black, the roots decide and the tips can be snipped, and the man snipping is not shearing a consecrated animal because shearing is not what he is doing. A hair too short for tweezers does not exist. Black horns and hooves can be cut away; an abnormal growth of the wrong color cannot, because even if red hair returns she is finished.

Then the laws of work, where the chapter becomes something other than a manual on livestock. A yoke disqualifies her whether or not anything was plowed with it. Every other labor disqualifies her only if labor was actually performed, so a heifer set into a threshing team who stands there all morning without threshing is still fit. Ride her, lean on her, take hold of her tail, hang on to her while swimming a river, throw your coat over her, load sacks on her, fold her own lead rope up onto her back to keep it out of the mud, and she is disqualified. Tie her with a rope because she is rebellious and needs holding, and she is fit, and the Rambam adds the line that gives the chapter away: any safeguarding that is unnecessary is a burden. Then the principle in plain words: anything done for her own needs leaves her acceptable, and anything done for another purpose disqualifies her.

The last turn is the one that answers the jars. Suppose work happens to her by accident, with nobody intending it. If the owner is pleased about it, she is disqualified, because the verse says no work was performed with her, and work that satisfies its beneficiary was performed. A bird lands on her back and she is fit. A male mounts her and she is not. Put her among the threshing team so she can nurse and she is fit; put her there so she will nurse and thresh at once and she is finished, and the morning looked identical from the outside.

The chapter closes on the Sadducees, who insisted the heifer could only be burned by a priest who had immersed and waited for nightfall. The court answered by defiling the priest on purpose, immersing him that same day, and putting him to work while he was still what the law calls a tevul yom. They made a man impure in order to burn the ash that removes impurity.

The Unifying Principle

Three chapters and not one decision made by quantity. The jars are decided by which way their mouths point. The rock wall is decided by whether any continuous skin remains, however thin. The hollow is decided by whether it is large enough to be a space at all, and then it is unlimited. The heifer is decided by whether the rope on her back is holding her or being stored on her. The same question in four materials: not how much, but which way is it facing.

The Baal Shem Tov taught that a person is located wherever his will is located, entirely and without remainder, so that a man standing in a study hall thinking about his warehouse is in the warehouse. That is not a remark about distraction. It is chapter twenty-four applied to a person. The straw does not divide the house because it is on its way out, and the man is not in the room for the same reason.

The Alter Rebbe pushes it into the mitzvah itself. In Tanya he writes that a commandment performed without love and awe is a body without wings, entirely real, entirely present, unable to rise. Nobody looking at it could tell it apart from the same act performed with them. The deed has all its material. It is facing the wrong way.

The Tzemach Tzedek is famous for four words about trusting that things will turn out good, and this chapter is why they are not sentimentality. If the owner is pleased, the work counts. His satisfaction is not a report on the event. It is a fact about it.

And the Lubavitcher Rebbe, teaching the red heifer, refused to treat a chok as a law with its reason removed. The heifer purifies the impure and defiles the pure who prepare her, and the Rebbe read that not as an absence of logic but as a logic working above the level where our categories divide clean from unclean at all. The court's answer to the Sadducees is the practical form of it. Impurity contracted on purpose, to keep the tradition standing, is facing the Temple, and so it is not a defect. It is service.

Modern Application

Start with the plaster. A man is worried about what is inside his wall, so he adds three fingerbreadths to the outside of it, and by adding he moves the impurity into his own half and makes his house impure. This is what most self-protection looks like. The effort is real and it shifts the midpoint of the situation in a direction nobody measured. More barrier is not more safety. It is a different ratio.

Then the rope. Nothing in the heifer's day was heavy. Nobody harnessed her, nobody drove her, nobody asked her for an hour of labor. Somebody coiled a rope out of the mud and set it on her back, which cost nothing, and she stopped being the animal she was. Take the inventory of what you have set on other people because it was convenient to put it somewhere. Not the demands, which everybody notices. The things that weigh nothing and were placed there because a person happened to be standing nearby with a flat back.

And take the line about safeguarding. A rope on a rebellious animal is care. The identical rope on a calm one is a burden, and the Rambam says so in those words. The distinction is not in the rope or the knot. It is in whether the animal needed it. Much of what we do to manage the people near us is a rope on a calm animal, tied because we could not tolerate the feeling of an untied one.

The Closing

It is the tenth of Elul, and Elul is usually described as an accounting, which suggests a count. These chapters would tell you the count settles nothing. A man can hold up a wall with a garlic peel of rock and lose a house to a hollow he could fit his fist into. He can stand a heifer through a whole morning of labor and leave her fit, then ruin her with a rope he was tidying away.

The jars were always going to be the same jars. What the Rambam wants known before Elul is over is that a barrier is a direction and not a mass, and that this is good news, because a direction can be changed in an afternoon by a man too tired to build anything. Turn the mouths around. Nothing has to be carried, nothing has to be added, and the house is on the other side of the wall from what it was this morning.