What Nobody Meant to Happen

The Hook

A priest cleans his vessels for the grape harvest, uses them, sets them down, and finds them still standing there when the next harvest comes around a year later. The Rambam rules that they are exactly as pure as he left them. The reason has nothing to do with the vessels. Unlearned people do not touch a priest's vessels inside his own winepress, because everyone knows he eats pure food, and that knowledge keeps hands off. His reputation did the guarding for twelve months while he was not in the room.

An Israelite does the identical thing with identical vessels and they are impure. He has no such reputation, so nothing was standing watch. And then comes the ruling that should stop you. He can say that in his heart there had been a resolve to guard against an unlearned man walking into the winepress and touching them, and the vessels are pure. Nothing happened to the vessels or the room. A man reports what he had been holding in mind, and a year of accumulated suspicion lifts.

Now hold that beside the last line the Rambam writes in the day's learning. The thigh bone of an animal that died is pure to touch and pure to carry, because it is sealed on every side and nothing inside it can reach out. Drill the smallest hole in it and it defiles. And if a man thought about drilling that hole and has not yet drilled it, the bone is neither pure nor impure. It stands in doubt, because it could not be settled whether a plan not yet carried out counts as no deed at all.

Between those two rulings sits the definition that gives the new treatise its name. A carcass is an animal that died. Slaughter the same animal properly and its flesh is pure in every circumstance. Slaughter is also death. The difference between the pure body and the impure one is not the ending. It is whether a person meant it.

Metamei Mishkav u'Moshav 13: In His Heart He Was Guarding Them

The treatise ends by leaving its own subject. Twelve chapters of beds, seats, saddles and the weight that travels down through them, and then a final chapter with almost nothing to say about furniture and everything to say about supervision. A man wants to press wine or oil in purity and the workers available to him are unlearned. He immerses them, and he must stand there while they do it, because they do not know the laws of immersion or what counts as an interposition, and a man who does not know those laws can immerse perfectly and accomplish nothing.

Then the workers step outside to relieve themselves behind a fence and come back, and they are still pure. How far may they go? The Rambam does not give a distance. They stay pure until they are hidden from the chavair's sight. The measure is not space. It is the line of vision.

The next ruling makes that explicit and then breaks it in the most elegant way in the chapter. A chavair's donkey drivers and porters are walking ahead of him loaded with pure food. Even more than a mil ahead, the food is pure, and the reason given is that they assume he is watching them, so they are afraid to let anyone touch impurity, because they say to themselves that he is right behind and will arrive any moment. But if he tells them to go on and that he will follow, then as soon as they pass out of his sight the food is impure. The distance is identical in both cases. The load is identical. The men are identical. One sentence changed what they believed about being watched, and the food changed with it.

Then the chapter opens the strangest halacha in the treatise. A man walks along the road wearing a tunic and wrapped in a cloak. He says afterwards that in his heart he had been guarding the tunic and had let his attention off the cloak. The tunic is pure and the cloak is impure. One body, one road, one man, and the two garments part company because his attention did. It goes further. He carries a basket with a pitchfork in it and says he had been guarding both, but only against something that would make them a source of impurity, not against something that would merely disqualify them. The basket is pure. The pitchfork is impure. And the terumah in the basket is disqualified by the pitchfork lying in it. Attention has a grain, and the halacha reads the grain.

She'ar Avot HaTum'ah 1: The Death Nobody Performed

The new treatise begins with the carcass, and it begins by measuring it. An olive sized portion of the flesh of an animal that died imparts impurity to a person and to vessels by touch, to an earthenware container through its inner space, and by carrying to the degree that the carrier's own clothes become impure. And the Rambam separates the two acts. A man who touches the carcass becomes a derivative, and the clothes on his back stay pure, because a derivative does not defile vessels. A man who carries it defiles the clothes he is wearing. The difference between touching and carrying is not intensity. It is a difference in what the act is.

Then the ruling that reframes the whole treatise. The slaughter of a kosher domesticated or wild animal purifies it in all circumstances. The Rambam pushes on that phrase until it hurts. Even an ordinary animal slaughtered inside the Temple Courtyard, which is a violation, and a consecrated animal slaughtered outside the Courtyard, which is a serious one, are pure. And if a disqualifying factor occurs during the slaughter itself, the animal is exactly like one that died on its own, and it defiles when carried. The act either happened or it did not. Where it happened, the gravest misuse of the setting does not undo it. Where it failed in its own terms, nothing else can stand in for it.

Then the case that reads like a riddle. Two half olive portions lying on a hide are nullified by the hide and defile nothing, neither by touch nor by carrying. Skewer them, flatten them, press them together so that they come up as one, and carrying them defiles, while touching them does not, because what a man joins is not considered joined. Leave them as two separate pieces on the same skewer and he can carry them back and forth all day and remain pure. The flesh never changed. What changed was whether a hand made them one thing.

She'ar Avot HaTum'ah 2: The Hole He Did Not Drill

The second chapter opens in the narrow strip of time where an animal is neither alive nor a carcass, and then turns to the limb severed from a living animal, which defiles like a carcass with no minimum size whatever. And a living fetus found inside a slaughtered mother contracts no impurity at all, not the impurity of food and not the impurity of a carcass, even if the mother's own slaughter failed and she is a carcass around it, because a living being does not contract impurity. As long as something in there is still holding itself together, nothing gets in.

Then the ruling the chapter has been building toward. When a non Jew slaughters an animal it is a carcass and defiles when carried. This applies even when a Jew is standing over him, and even if the slaughter was performed properly with an acceptable knife. Every technical requirement was met and the meat is a carcass. What the Rambam does next is rare. He says that according to his own estimation this too is a rabbinic decree, and traces it back to the impurity attached to false deities and to the reason the Samaritans were distanced. Then he raises the obvious objection himself and answers it himself, and adds that a man cannot be held liable to karet on the strength of such impurity unless the claim can be clearly proven. The Rambam is uneasy about this ruling and puts the unease on the page.

And then he ends with the bone. A thigh bone from a carcass is pure to touch and pure to carry, because it is closed on every side, and whatever does not defile by touch does not defile by carrying. Perforate it to the slightest degree and touching or carrying it defiles. But that whole rule holds only where the marrow inside rattles, meaning that it could not have regenerated flesh if the animal were alive. Where the marrow is in its natural place and there is enough of it to have grown flesh on the outside of the bone, the bone defiles by touch and by carrying like any other limb, sealed or not. The seal was never the point. What was inside it was.

And the last halacha in the day's learning is one sentence long and it is about a mind. A person thought of perforating a thigh bone and has not yet done it. Whoever touches it contracts impurity of doubtful status, because it could not be resolved whether the fact that he has not perforated it yet counts as not having carried out a significant deed. The plan is not a hole. It is also not nothing.

The Unifying Principle

Read the three chapters in order and the same claim keeps arriving in different equipment. Purity is what a mind is holding. Impurity is the residue of the unattended.

The vessels are pure because a man was guarding them inwardly for a year. The tunic is pure and the cloak impure because his attention had a direction. The porters are pure at a mil and impure at ten paces depending on one sentence about who is following whom. The slaughtered animal is pure and the animal that died is a carcass, and the only difference is that a person meant the first one. Two half olives are one piece or two depending on whether a hand pressed them together. The living fetus takes in nothing at all, because something in there is still attending. And at the very end, a thought about a bone that never became a hole is not nothing, only unresolved.

The Baal Shem Tov taught that where a person's thought is, there he is entirely. That is usually heard as an encouragement to think about elevated things. In this chapter it is a description of what is legally the case. The man on the road is genuinely present in the tunic and genuinely absent from the cloak, and the halacha treats the two garments as though they had travelled separately, because in the only sense that matters here, they did.

The Alter Rebbe, in Shaar HaYichud VeHaEmunah, takes the further step. Nothing in creation holds itself in being. Every created thing is sustained at every instant by the divine speech that is still saying it, and were that speech to be withdrawn for one moment the thing would not decay, it would simply never have been. What the chavair does with his jar is a small created version of the same act. The jar is pure because somebody never stopped saying so inwardly, and when the saying stops, the purity does not gradually erode. It is over.

And the Sfat Emet reads the labor of Elul as recovery of attention rather than addition of deeds. Most of what a person needs to repair in this month was not chosen. It drifted. It happened while he was facing the other way. The Rambam has just supplied a chapter of evidence that this is not a metaphor. Almost nothing in these laws goes wrong by decision, and the halacha dates the damage from the break in the line of sight rather than from the moment anyone noticed.

Modern Application

The uncomfortable ruling in the whole day is the one about the porters, because everybody has said that sentence. Go on ahead, and I will catch up. It is a small verbal adjustment to the expectation of being followed, and the Rambam prices it at the entire load. Nobody in that story does anything wrong. The men walk the same road at the same speed with the same care, and the food spoils because the belief that someone is coming has been quietly withdrawn.

Then there is the bone. Everyone has made the defense that it was only a thought and nothing came of it, and the Rambam does not reject that defense and does not accept it. He rules doubt. A plan that has not been carried out is not the deed and it is not innocence either, and the honest verdict at the end of a year is that a good deal of what a person carries is in exactly that condition, drilled nowhere and considered often. Elul is the season for noticing how many such bones are in the house.

The Closing

These chapters are learned on the twenty fifth of Elul, which by the tradition the Rebbe returns to again and again is the first day of creation, the day the world was called into being by speech, with man not appearing until the sixth day, which is Rosh Hashanah. The world is older than its birthday by five days, because the year is dated not from the moment there was a world but from the moment there was somebody in it who could notice one.

Six days from now the world will be a year old and everything in it will be weighed. What the day's learning proposes is that the weighing is not mainly about the deeds, which are few and are mostly known, but about the enormous unattended remainder, the cloak you were not guarding while you guarded the tunic, the load you sent on ahead, the hole you have been meaning to drill. None of it was chosen. All of it counts. So before the sixth day arrives, there is one question worth sitting with. What in your life has been going quietly impure, not because you did anything to it, but because you told it to go on ahead and said you would follow?