Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature. DR. S Mira Balberg
a person or an animal or artifacts, the rule of paying on the same day applies”;7 and many more such examples can be found. Through these and similar conjunctions, the Mishnah reflects an underlying distinction between a person as a willing, active, self-reflective entity and a person as an object-like body, even though it does not map out this distinction by pointing to two separate constituents of the human being.
The distinction I am offering here between “one” and “one’s body,” then, is a distinction between the aspect of the person that is self-reflective, willing, and deliberative, an aspect to which I refer as “self” or “subject,”8 and an aspect of the person that is object-like and is classified in the Mishnah alongside other objects. Again, my intention is not to say that the mishnaic subject is somehow immaterial or nonbodily: I submit that there is no way in which the subject can be in the world, perceive it, and act within it except through a body.9 This does not allow us, however, to ignore the fact that the body is often experienced as disparate from the self, as something one has to care for and maintain like one would a car or a coffeemaker, and as an entity that does not always comply with one’s own wills or desires. In the concise words of Bryan Turner, “Our bodies are an environment which can become anarchic, regardless of our subjective experience of our government of the body.”10
Nowhere in the Mishnah is the nature of the body as “an environment that can become anarchic” more pronounced than in the context of bodily impurity,11 the emergence or contraction of which is, by definition, something that happens to one’s body despite one’s will.12 Whether one’s body is deemed impure as a result of a physical condition (such as menstruation or scale disease) or as a result of contact with a source of impurity, the entire experience of detecting, managing, and ridding oneself of impurity is underwritten with a tension between the body as an unruly or passive object and the self as a committed and active legal subject.13 Thus, I begin my investigation of the construction and development of subjectivity in the Mishnah’s impurity discourse by exploring the mishnaic body—first, as a central site in which the drama of impurity contraction takes place, and then, as a site that the rabbis attempt to make more manageable and more commensurate with the self by introducing subjectivity as a principle that governs its impurity.
THE BODY UNBOUND
In the Mishnah, as in the Priestly Code, the most immediate, urgent, and prominent way in which impurity can affect one’s daily life is through his or her very body. First, one’s body might itself be a source of impurity as a result of various physical conditions, thus requiring him or her to take certain measures and to avoid certain places and encounters for as long as the bodily condition persists. Second, one’s body might contract impurity as a result of contact with a primary source, and thereby require rites of immersion and purification, as well as be subject to various limitations regarding access to the holy. Simply put, the first thing that one needs to monitor and watch, whether for signs of primary impurity or for contraction of secondary impurity, is one’s own body, and the purity of one’s own body is the condition for the purity of everything else that one wishes to maintain in a state of purity—one’s possessions, one’s food, holy articles, and so on. It is quite obvious, then, that the subject’s engagement with impurity is first and foremost an engagement with one’s own body. In order to understand, however, what this engagement means in the mishnaic context, we must first try to characterize what I will call the “body of impurity” of the Mishnah, that is, the way in which the human body is seen to function, interact, and be transformed in its encounters with impurity. As we shall see, the rabbis construct a body that is both extremely fluid in terms of its boundaries and highly modular in terms of its constitution, and these two qualities critically define the way impurity as a bodily phenomenon is shaped in the Mishnah.
Contact and Connectivity
In her seminal work Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas put forth the paradigm that has become almost axiomatic in the study of purity and impurity, namely, that the concept of “impurity” (as well as “pollution” or “uncleanness”) fundamentally pertains to the breaching of boundaries. For Douglas, the body is the ultimate bounded system,14 and as such it can serve as a symbol for any group or society: it is a self-contained, well-defined unit, whose only vulnerable points are its points of exit and entry, that is, the orifices, and it is through these exit and entry points that impurity makes its way from and into the outside world.15 Several scholars of purity and impurity in ancient Judaism largely adopted Douglas’s paradigm, albeit sometimes with the necessary reservation that Douglas’s location of the bodily drama of impurity at the orifices applies only partially to the biblical scheme (in which the only orifices that are closely identified with impurity are the genitals, and other orifices do not play a role in the impurity system).16 A close examination of the rabbinic “body of impurity,” however, strongly challenges the Douglasian paradigm of impurity as a breach of bodily boundaries, since it reveals a body that can hardly be said to be well bounded in the first place. Rather than depicting the body that contracts impurity as a neatly enveloped entity into and out of whose orifices impurity oozes, the rabbis depict the human body as an extremely fluid entity whose boundaries are constantly transformed, and which becomes impure not only through penetration but also and especially through direct and indirect touch. This depiction of bodily boundaries as highly unstable, I suggest, is informed by central mindsets and ideas in Graeco-Roman medical discourse, and speaks to the way in which the rabbis integrated frames of thought from their surrounding intellectual culture into the system of impurity they inherited.
How does one’s body become impure, then, in the mishnaic scheme? If we leave aside for the moment cases in which impurity transpires independently in one’s body due to a physical condition, the Mishnah makes clear that the primary way in which one becomes impure is through contact with a source of impurity, either direct physical contact or indirect contact that the rabbis construe as direct contact, such as shift or overhang. Penetration through an orifice, to be sure, is one possible form of contact: for example, a menstruating woman makes a man who has intercourse with her impure, and impure food renders the one who eats it impure. The most common and prominent form of contact through which impurity is conveyed, however, is what we may call “surface contact,” that is, touching the source of impurity, whether another person’s body or another person’s bodily fluids, a dead animal or person, and so on. And yet the question remains: How exactly does surface contact transmit impurity from one entity to the other, in such a way that one body changes as a result of touching another? What is the nature of the process that the rabbis have in mind when depicting the contraction of impurity?
We might have been compelled to dismiss this question as unanswerable and to determine that the rabbis are simply adhering to the notions of impurity contraction they inherited from the Pentateuch, if it were not for several passages in the fifth chapter of tractate Zavim of the Mishnah. This chapter, which concludes the mishnaic tractate dedicated to the impurity of genital discharges, presents a series of five rulings regarding the way impurity is transmitted through various forms of contact. These rulings help reveal an underlying perception of contact between bodies as a form of physical connection, in the course of which two bodies become one and partake in the same qualities.
These five rulings discuss the degree of impurity of a person who had contact with a primary source of impurity, and put forth a curious distinction: during the time of contact itself, that is, as long as the secondary contractor is still touching the source, the degree of impurity of the toucher is identical to the degree of impurity of the source. Only after the two have separated, and the secondary contractor is no longer touching the source, does his or her impurity become “once-removed” and attenuated (that is, weaker in its force and shorter in its duration) in accordance with the paradigm I presented in the previous chapter. To put this simply, for as long as one is physically attached to the source of impurity, they both share the exact same level of impurity, and the secondary contractor functions like the source itself. The following two mishnaic passages demonstrate this principle:
One who touches a man or a woman with genital discharge, and a menstruating woman, and a parturient, and person with scale disease, and a litter and a seat [of the aforementioned people]—makes two impure and disqualifies one. Once he has separated himself—he makes one impure