Nothing Is Food Until Someone Means It

The Hook

A chick falls into a vat of wine and drowns. A man reaches in and pulls it out, and in the moment his hand closes around the wet little body, a thought crosses his mind. Maybe he thinks of the gentile laborer in the yard who would be glad of a meal. Maybe he thinks of the dog. The Rambam rules that the whole legal identity of that chick turns on which picture flickered through his head. If he thought of the laborer, the chick can now contract the impurity of food. If he thought of the dog, it cannot. Same chick, same wine, same hand. The difference is a thought nobody else saw.

Then comes a twist. If the one who had that thought was a minor, or a deaf mute, or someone whose mind is compromised, the thought counts for nothing and the chick stays pure. But if one of those same people lifted the chick out of the vat in order to feed it to a person, it is impure. Their deeds, he says, are significant, but not their intent.

That is where these three chapters end. They begin somewhere even stranger. A loaf of bread that is soaking wet can be touched by a zav, or by the flesh of a corpse, and remain completely pure, because the liquid that made it wet was berry juice or pomegranate juice rather than one of seven specific liquids. Hilchot Tum'at Okhalin, the laws of the impurity of foods, opens a new treatise in Sefer Taharah by telling you that most of the world is not yet food, and that impurity cannot touch what has not yet become something.

Tum'at Okhalin 1: Seven Liquids and the Owner's Wish

The opening halacha lays down two gates, and nothing passes into the category of impure food without going through both. The first gate is designation. All foods designated for human consumption, bread, meat, grapes, olives, are susceptible to impurity. Anything not designated for human consumption is pure and stays pure unless someone had a specific intent and set it aside to be eaten by people. The second gate is moisture. No food is susceptible until it has first been dampened by one of the seven liquids, a process called hechsher, from the verse in Leviticus about water placed on a seed.

The seven are water, dew, oil, wine, milk, blood and honey, and even they do not work automatically. They make food susceptible only when they fall on it as desired by the owner, and they may not be squalid. Once food has been made susceptible, though, the status stays even after it dries. The door, once opened, does not swing shut.

Everything outside the seven is inert. Fruit juices neither make food susceptible nor contract impurity themselves. The liquid pressed from grapes and olives that have not reached a third of their growth is treated like any other fruit juice and is pure forever. Wine carries impurity; the juice of an underripe grape, which pours much the same, never will.

The chapter then walks through the edges of the word food, and the principle that emerges is not botanical. It is human. Ginger, pepper, asafetida and the primary spices are eaten, but they are not susceptible, because people eat them not to benefit from them as independent things but for the flavor, aroma or appearance they give to something else. Dill put into a pot for flavor does not contract food impurity, and once it has given up its flavor it is waste. Olive leaves pickled with the olives stay pure, since they were pickled for looks. The hairs and flower of a zucchini are not food.

And then a run of rulings in which thought matters, and then does not. Congealed oil is neither food nor liquid, whatever anyone thinks. Congealed milk is neither, but if a person thinks of them as food they become susceptible as food, while thinking of them as liquid does nothing. Snow is the reverse: thinking of it as food is meaningless, and thinking of it as a liquid makes it susceptible as a liquid. The human mind can confer some identities on some things, but not every identity on everything. There is a grain to the world, and intent can only work along it.

The chapter closes with a list that should startle. Orlah fruit, mixed species of the vineyard, the meat of an ox sentenced to stoning, the calf whose neck is broken, the birds of the metzora, the firstling donkey, meat cooked in milk, the red heifer, piggul and notar. Every one of them is forbidden for any benefit at all. Every one of them is still susceptible to the impurity of food. Forbidden does not mean inedible. What makes something food, for these laws, is that it is the kind of thing a human being eats, not whether this particular human being is allowed to.

Tum'at Okhalin 2: Still Holding On to the Ground

The second chapter adds a third gate, and it is the most beautiful of them. Nothing that grows from the earth can become impure while it is still attached. As long as it is connected, even by a small root, provided that root can sustain it, it is beyond the reach of impurity. A fig branch that has snapped but still hangs by its bark and can no longer draw life through it is already susceptible, and the Rambam leaves open whether the rest of the tree counts as a handle to it.

The same logic governs animals. Food from a living creature is not susceptible until the creature dies. A slaughtered animal becomes susceptible even while it is still in its death throes, and the blood of the slaughter itself serves as the moistening that opens the gate for all its meat. If no blood came out, the meat has to be made susceptible like any other food.

Water, too, must be detached before it can do its work. Liquid still attached to the ground does not make food susceptible. Water drawn up in a vessel and then poured back onto the earth has rejoined the ground and does not make food susceptible either. The verse speaks of liquid in any container, and the Rambam reads that as the condition: it must have been lifted. A flowerpot with a hole through which a small root could push is treated as the earth itself, so a zucchini growing in it cannot become impure, even where it spills over the rim. A flowerpot without a hole is a vessel, and whatever grows in it is susceptible.

Then a sharp exception. Impure liquids that fall on food make it impure even against the owner's will, because, the Rambam explains, the food becomes susceptible and becomes impure in the same instant, provided the liquid is not lying on the earth. The owner's wish governs the opening of the door only when the liquid is pure.

The chapter's second half is about decay and return. Food that has rotted until it is no longer fit for human consumption is not susceptible, and the same holds for a liquid gone foul. But food that became impure first and only afterwards spoiled stays impure until it is unfit even for a dog, or dries like a shard. Impure food can never be purified in a mikveh. Impure liquid never loses its impurity, even when a dog would not drink it, with one exception: water. Impure water brought into contact with a mikveh until the mikveh's water covers it becomes pure, hot or cold, foul or pleasant.

And here is the image worth holding. Impure seeds that are sown come up pure, once they have taken root. Whatever fell into impurity and then went back into the ground, and held on, comes up clean.

Tum'at Okhalin 3: Intent, Liquid, Both, or Neither

The third chapter builds a grid. There are foods that need moistening but not intent, foods that need intent but not moistening, foods that need both, and foods that need neither. Anything eaten by people everywhere needs moistening but no special intent. Wild vegetables such as very pungent onions and mushrooms, meat cut from a living creature, and the fat of a slaughtered animal need both. The carcass of a kosher animal or fowl needs neither, because it is obviously eaten and because an olive's bulk of it will ultimately impart a more severe impurity by itself, and anything that can ultimately impart a severe impurity does not need the gate of moisture at all.

Geography enters the grid. A food eaten in one place and not in another needs intent where it is not usually eaten. The carcass of a kosher fowl needs neither intent nor moisture, yet in rural areas it needs intent.

Timing enters too. Endives sown as fodder, which the owner then decided while they were still growing to use for people, are not susceptible unless he formed that intent after they were picked, because intent formed while produce is attached to the ground is not significant. Endives gathered for an animal and washed, then reassigned to people, must be moistened again after the change of mind. The earlier wetting belonged to a different identity.

And then the chick in the wine, with its surprising ending. Intent to feed a gentile is intent for human consumption. Intent to feed a dog is not. And the thought of a minor, a deaf mute or one whose mind is compromised is not significant, while their act of lifting the chick out to feed a person is.

The Unifying Principle

One idea runs through all three chapters. Impurity in this treatise does not attach to matter. It attaches to meaning. A thing can only fall if it has first been lifted into the human world, designated as something a person would eat, detached from the earth that sustains it, touched by a liquid that someone wanted there. Before that, it is simply part of creation, and creation as such cannot be defiled.

The Baal Shem Tov read the verse in Psalms about people who are hungry and thirsty, their soul faint within them, as a hint to something hidden in every meal. A person hungers for bread because inside it is a spark of holiness that belongs to that particular soul, and the hunger is the spark calling out to be raised. The Rambam's laws are the halachic shadow of that teaching. Food becomes food when it enters a relationship with a person, and only then does it become capable of being either elevated or lowered.

The Alter Rebbe builds on this in Tanya, where he explains that permitted food eaten for the sake of heaven is elevated into holiness along with the energy it gives to the one who eats it, while the same food eaten purely for appetite is, for the moment, drawn down with the one who ate it. The object is neutral until a human purpose seizes it, and that is the architecture of Tum'at Okhalin. Intent and hechsher are the two ways a person reaches into the world and claims something. From that moment it can be ruined. From that moment it can also be raised.

And the attachment rule is its mirror image. As long as a thing still draws its life from its source, nothing can defile it. The Lubavitcher Rebbe returned again and again to the point that the essence of every Jewish soul is never severed from its source, whatever a person has done, and that teshuvah is not the building of a new connection but the uncovering of one that was never cut. What is still attached is still being nourished, and nothing can defile it there. The impure seed that is planted and takes root comes up pure. That is a description of what reconnection does.

Modern Application

Most of what surrounds you in a day is, in the language of these chapters, not yet food. Hours, conversations and opportunities lie there until you designate them, wet them with desire and pick them up. The moment you do, two possibilities open at once. What you have claimed can now be dragged down, and it can now be lifted. A life that never designates anything is a life that is never defiled and never elevated either.

This year that lesson arrives on a particular date. Today is the third of Tishrei, the Fast of Gedaliah, the first weekday of the Ten Days of Teshuvah, and the chapter you are learning is about food on a day you are not eating it. The fast steps back from the table long enough to notice what you have been reaching for, and why. The Rambam's grid becomes an inventory. Which things in your life did you choose, and which merely got wet by accident and stuck to you?

Teshuvah is usually imagined as beginning in thought. The Rambam's last ruling adds a balance: for some people, intent is not significant, but their deeds are. Nobody needs a perfectly formed inner resolution before doing the right thing with their hands. Sometimes the lifting comes first and the meaning follows.

The Closing

The laws of impure food open by refusing to treat the world as dirty. Grapes on the vine, water in the spring, the animal in the field, the fruit on a living branch: all of it is beyond reach. Defilement is only possible after a human being has reached in and assigned a purpose. The same act that exposes something to falling is the act that makes it capable of rising.

And for what has already fallen, the chapters leave two doors open. Water, the one liquid that can be purified, returns to purity by being covered by more water. The seed returns by going back into the ground and taking hold.

The chick came out of the wine and its fate depended on the thought of the one holding it. Everything in your hands this week is in that same position, suspended between a gentile's table and a dog's bowl, waiting for you to decide what it is for. So what have you been carrying around all year without ever deciding what it is meant to feed?