What the Lime Is For

The Hook

There is a short list of things in the world that cannot be made impure, and the Rambam opens these chapters by reading it out. Vessels made from the bones of a fish or from its skin. The green moss on the surface of the water, and anything else that comes out of the sea. Vessels of stone, of dried dung, of raw dirt. Of these he says that they receive no impurity from the Torah and none from the Sages, and he says it twice, for corpse impurity and for every other kind, so that nobody goes looking for a loophole.

Three halachot later he picks up one of those same stones, lays it across the mouth of a grave, and rules that whoever touches it now carries the impurity that lasts seven days. Take the body out from underneath and it is an ordinary stone again. Nothing was added to it and nothing entered it. It sat where it sat, being stone, and for as long as it covered a grave it was one of the most contagious objects in the halachic world. What changed, if the stone did not?

Tum'at Met 6: The Stone That Was Never Susceptible

Chapter six opens as an inventory of the world sorted by what can be ruined. Everything from the sea is out. Stone, dirt and dung are out. Wooden containers built to stay in one place, a chest, a cabinet, a bin holding forty se'ah of liquid, are out, and he names them oversized wooden containers. Of what remains, flat implements are pure and only receptacles are vulnerable. Clay is stranger still: it contracts impurity only through its inner space. A corpse may touch the outside of a jar and the jar is untouched, while a source of impurity entering the airspace without brushing the walls defiles it. Fasten a cover tightly and set the jar in the same tent as a corpse and the jar and its contents stay pure, because impurity reaches it only through its opening. Earthenware is not defiled by contact. It is defiled by admission.

Then the gollel arrives and the scheme turns over. The gollel is the covering of a grave, and the Rambam builds one out of the very articles he has just placed beyond reach: a stone, a vessel of raw dirt, an oversized wooden container, a sealed clay jar, the skin or bone of a fish. Whoever touches any of them while it covers a grave takes the impurity of seven days. Should they cease serving as a gollel, or should the corpse beneath be removed, they are pure. He pushes it further than you would expect. Tie down a living animal and make it a gollel and anyone who touches it takes seven days for as long as it stands there; release it and it is an animal like any other. Seal a barrel of liquid and lay it over a grave and one who touches the barrel takes seven days, while the barrel and the liquids inside remain pure. The object defiles and is not defiled.

The rest of the chapter measures position rather than substance. A beam laid over a grave is a gollel only along the stretch above the opening, and a mound of small stones only in its innermost layer. A vault hollowed out of one great boulder defiles nowhere on the boulder and only at the stone that closes it. And two large stones, four handbreadths square, cover a grave, and standing over either makes a man impure; remove one of them and standing over the remaining stone is pure, and the reason the Rambam gives is that the impurity now has a path through which to depart. Everything turns on what a thing stands over, and on whether anything can get out.

Tum'at Met 7: The Opening, and the Thought That Counts as One

Chapter seven moves from objects to enclosures, and it opens with the hardest case. A corpse lies in a structure that is closed, or in one whose doorframe was destroyed and then blocked up. That building defiles in every direction; touch its back wall or its roof and you have seven days, because it is a closed grave. Now let an entrance be opened in it. Even if it is sealed again afterward, so long as the doorframe was not destroyed, the back and the roof are pure and only the area in front of the door is impure. The difference between a building that defiles from every side and one that defiles at a single point is whether a doorway is still standing there, even a doorway nobody uses.

Then he does something that should stop a reader. A house with many entrances, all closed, defiles at every one of them. Open one and only that one defiles. And if a man merely intended to carry the corpse out through one of them, that saves all the others, even if he formed the thought after the person died, and even if he fixed on a window rather than a door. Because intention is doing real work here, the Rambam has to guard it. A building has a northern entrance and a southern one and the owner intended the north; then the relatives arrive and say they will take him out only through the south. The southern entrance replaces the northern one and purifies it, provided they are not saying so as a ruse. If they are, both defile. He has built a legal instrument out of what a family means, and then told you it holds nothing when the family is pretending.

The chapter ends with what the Rambam himself calls a great general principle. A grave does not defile the space around it unless there is a cavity of empty air above the corpse, a handbreadth long and wide and high. If there is, a structure built over that single cubic handbreadth all the way to the heavens is grave in its entirety. If there is not, the impurity pierces upward to the heavens and downward to the depths and does not touch the sides at all. But lean a sukkah against a wall with flush impurity inside it and the sukkah is impure, because that wall has become one side of a structure, and once a roof goes over it everything underneath is caught. A handbreadth of air, or a roof laid across a wall, and the whole behavior of the thing changes.

Tum'at Met 8: Lime on the Ground Nobody Is Sure About

Chapter eight leaves certainty behind. A grave has been lost in a field, and the Rambam treats the whole field as compromised: its earth defiles by touch and by carrying, because the grave may have been crushed and bone fragments the size of a barley corn may lie in the soil. One who stands over any part of it is impure, and a structure built there is impure throughout. Then a distinction so fine it is almost funny. Build a house with a loft on top in such a field, and if the loft's entrance sits directly above the house's entrance the loft is pure; if the entrances do not line up, the loft is impure, because its doorway may be projecting over the grave. Seeds may be sown there, because their roots will not reach; fruit trees may not be planted, because theirs will.

The presumptions that follow are built out of what people no longer know. Low hills near a town and near a cemetery are impure, old or new, because women bury there what they miscarry and lepers bury their limbs there. Hills far from a town are sorted by age: the new are pure and the ancient impure, an ancient hill being one where nobody remembers whether there was a cemetery there. The field of weeping, where women sit near the cemetery and mourn, is the quiet center of it. Its earth is pure, the Rambam says plainly, because nothing has been established there. And still nobody may plant or sow in it, so that people will have no reason to frequent it, since its owner has despaired of the land and someone may come and bury a body there. In the same breath he permits its earth for the ovens that cook sacrificial meat. The same ground is suspect for one purpose and clean for another, and both rulings are correct.

Then the meit mitzvah, the abandoned body a person comes upon. Within a city's Sabbath limits he carries it to the cemetery. Outside them the body acquires its place and is buried where it was found, even in a field of saffron. And the chapter closes with lime. A discovered grave defiles retroactively unless a man comes and says he is certain there was no grave here, reaching back even twenty years, and then it defiles only from the day of discovery. To keep others from walking into it, agents of the court go out during Chol HaMoed, mix lime and pour it over the place. They are told not to mark the exact perimeter but to extend it somewhat, so that pure articles are not ruined, and in the same sentence not to extend it much, so as not to spoil Eretz Yisrael. And when all four boundary lines of a field are marked, the boundaries are pure and the whole field is impure, because a sign is never set far from what it warns about.

The Unifying Principle

Nothing in these three chapters is a property of a substance. A stone is inert until it covers a grave. A wall is harmless until a roof turns it into a side. A field is only soil until nobody can remember. Impurity here is not a stain spreading through matter. It is a relation, decided by geometry, by intention, and by what is still known.

The Alter Rebbe teaches in Tanya that the forces of concealment possess no vitality of their own and live off what they can enclose. That is why the severest impurity in the Torah attaches to a human body, which held more life than anything else in creation, and why the moss and the fish and the raw dirt, which never held it, cannot be defiled at all. Impurity is measured by what has departed, which is exactly why it can be produced by a stone with nothing wrong with it.

The Baal Shem Tov's teaching that a person is wherever his will is directed is usually heard as a remark about prayer. Chapter seven treats it as a fact about masonry: a man decides he will carry the body out through the northern door and every other entrance changes status, and the walls do not care that he has not lifted a finger. The Tzemach Tzedek's instruction to a chassid, think good and it will be good, sounds like encouragement until you set it beside this halachah and see that it is a claim about causation. A settled intention is an event, which is also why the ruse clause has to be there. An instrument that powerful cannot be worked by a family that is only pretending.

And the Rebbe returned constantly to the point that a doubt is neither an emergency nor a verdict, and that a person is asked for an honest accounting rather than a flattering or a crushing one. Chapter eight is that instruction written as land law. It does not declare the doubtful field clean and it does not declare it lost. It sows it and does not plant it. It sends out men with lime who are told in a single sentence to mark generously and not too generously. That is what it costs to hold something you are unsure about: two instructions pulling against each other, given to the same man on the same morning about the same patch of ground.

Modern Application

Most of us handle what we are unsure about in one of two ways. We decide it is fine, which is how the fruit trees get planted. Or we decide it is ruined, which is how a person marks all four boundary lines and discovers he has condemned the whole field. The third option is lime. Extend the mark a little past the edge so nobody is hurt by the margin, and not much past it, because the land is still yours and still worth something. Marking a doubtful place is not the same as calling it a grave.

Notice also what has an outlet and what does not. A building sealed on every side broadcasts in every direction, roof and back wall included. Open one door and the same corpse in the same room defiles only in front of that door. What is sealed does not stay contained; it comes out through the roof. And then the most demanding line in these chapters and the least discussed. A man outside the city limits finds a body nobody is coming for, and that body acquires its place and is buried where he found it, and the Rambam knows the field may be saffron, and rules that it is buried there anyway. The obligation lands where it lands, and the value of the ground is a real loss and not an argument.

The Closing

These chapters arrive on the fourth of Elul, the season for exactly the work chapter eight describes. The agents of the court went out during the festival, when the roads were full of people walking toward the Temple, and they went with lime rather than with fences or pronouncements. They marked what was uncertain so nobody would stumble into it unknowing, and were warned in the same instruction not to make the marks bigger than the doubt.

An accounting made in Elul is not a search for a stain in the material. Nothing here is impure by nature. It becomes impure by what it is standing over, and it stops the moment the thing is lifted off. The work is not to find out what you are made of. It is to walk the field, mark honestly what you are not sure about, refuse to mark all four sides, and leave the ground open enough that whatever is in there has a path through which to depart.