Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature. DR. S Mira Balberg
of ritual purity as a means and an end in the rabbinic ethics of the self. I show that the Mishnah’s idealized subjects are distinguished, first and foremost, by their mental disposition toward purity, that is, by their ability to be attentive to impurity at all times. This attentiveness manifests itself in constant reflection on one’s actions and encounters, in regular physical self-scrutiny, and, perhaps most importantly, in unrelenting reflection on one’s own mental dedication to purity. I argue that through the recurring theme of self-examination the rabbis construct one’s relation to the law as entailing a certain relation to oneself. They shape the mishnaic intended subject as possessed of both self-control and self-knowledge, thus turning the everyday engagement with purity and impurity into an arena in which one’s meritorious qualities are both exhibited and cultivated, and turning the quest for purity into a quest for self-perfection as a subject of the law.
1
From Sources of Impurity to Circles of Impurity
The collections of laws in Leviticus 11–15 and Numbers 19, according to which certain creatures, substances, and bodily phenomena constitute sources of ritual impurity, have been daunting to traditional exegetes and modern scholars alike for centuries. The biblical text’s silence as to the principles that govern the rendition of particular things as impure (if any such principles exist), as well as the lack of apparent explanation of the very concept of impurity and its import, posed a significant challenge for interpreters who sought to incorporate the laws of impurity into whatever they perceived to be the general theological or ethical arc of the Hebrew Bible. While some asserted, like William Robertson Smith, that “rules like this have nothing in common with the spirit of the Hebrew religion,”1 many others, from the author of The Letter of Aristeas in the second century B.C.E. to the French-Bulgarian psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva in the late twentieth century, strove to uncover the hidden meanings of the biblical ritual purity code. The main purpose of such readers throughout the generations has been to determine why it is that some particular substances and conditions, rather than others, are identified as sources of impurity, and their premise has been that deciphering the logic according to which certain things are classified as impure is the key to decrypting the biblical concept of impurity at large. Whether they offered symbolic readings of the social imperatives entailed in the purity laws,2 pragmatic explanations of the laws as promoting public health or economic interests, conjectures on the demonological background of the notion of impurity, or reconstructions of the ancient Israelite cosmology,3 exegetes and scholars generally shared the view that understanding ritual purity means finding a paradigm or set of paradigms to account for the specific sources of ritual impurity.
In light of this overarching tendency to interpret biblical impurity laws by asking what it is that makes certain things impure, it is perhaps quite surprising to find that in the entire vast corpus of classical rabbinic literature, arguably the corpus most committed to close and scrupulous readings of biblical law in the ancient world, no attempt whatsoever is made to explain why particular substances and conditions are considered to be sources of impurity and others are not, and no suggestions are raised as to the underlying logic—religious, moral, practical, or otherwise—that governs the biblical classification system. In general, the rabbis seem reluctant to ascribe any intelligible meaning to the peculiarities of the biblical impurity code, and in several passages they identify certain aspects of the impurity laws as ordinances that are so bizarre and unfathomable that they are particularly vulnerable to mocking attacks from insiders and outsiders alike.4 To the extent that they reflect on the nature and purpose of purity laws at all, the rabbis’ prominent approach is to explain the biblical laws of impurity as cultivating obedience for obedience’s sake,5 rather than as laws charged with profound meaning that await an inspired exegete to lift the veil off of their obscure surface.
While this could lead one to believe that ritual impurity was a topic of no interest or importance for the rabbis, and that their engagement with it was limited merely to acknowledging its place within the biblical legal system, nothing could be further from the truth. As I venture to show throughout this book, at least as far as the early rabbis (the tannaim) are concerned, impurity was a central and critical category, which fundamentally shaped and informed the rabbis’ notions of interactions with one’s fellow humans, with one’s physical environment, and with oneself. Not only were the rabbis highly invested in the laws of ritual purity, they also dedicated tremendous intellectual efforts to developing these laws in multiple directions and, more importantly, to making them meaningful and powerful in the cultural world of their own intended audience. Yet the rabbis’ intricate and elaborate discussions of ritual impurity were not in any way geared toward the question of why some particular substances and conditions and not others constitute sources of impurity. For them, the few sources of impurity mentioned in the Hebrew Bible were a nonnegotiable given, a mundane fact of halakhic life like the number of days in a week. Rather, the questions with which the rabbis were most concerned, and which constitute, so to speak, the beating heart of their impurity discourse, are two: first, how a state of impurity can be correctly diagnosed; and second and more prominently, how impurity, once it originates in the biblically determined sources of impurity, is transmitted further.
The vested interest of the rabbis in the transmission of impurity, that is, in the “travel” of impurity from the source to other objects or persons, led them to offer a lens very different from the biblical one when viewing and depicting the lived world in terms of impurity. Whereas the biblical texts zoom in on the sources of impurity themselves and at most on whatever is in their immediate proximity, the rabbis zoom out and include in their frame a whole array of people and things affected by the biblically determined sources of impurity. Thus, as we approach the rabbinic discourse of impurity and seek to understand its shaping forces and its cultural implications, we too must first adjust our lenses accordingly to include not only the sources of impurity but also the expanding circles that surround them. The purpose of this chapter is to offer such a preliminary adjustment of lenses, which will allow us to grasp the picture of impurity that the rabbis put forth in its fuller scope, and will help set the stage for the rabbinic dramas of engagement with impurity that will be discussed in the chapters to follow.
The point of departure of this chapter is an outline of the biblical impurity system, which is proposed partially in order to make the readers familiar with some key terms and concepts that will recur throughout the book, but also and more importantly in order to serve as the backdrop against which the radically innovative aspects of the rabbinic impurity discourse can be understood in all their magnitude. After outlining the biblical scheme of the workings of impurity, I suggest a brief overview of the central ways in which this biblical scheme was developed and approached in the postbiblical period, by pointing to some of the shared themes and principles, as well as divergences, between rabbinic purity legislation and the purity texts from Qumran. The purpose of this general overview is to help us assess in which ways the Mishnah’s legal discourse of purity and impurity is commensurate and correspondent with trends and views that preceded its creators, and in which ways the Mishnah’s purity discourse presents a conceptual shift from those trends and a unique reconstruction of notions and practices of purity and impurity. Focusing on the principles and perspectives that are distinctive to the rabbinic purity discourse, I show that the rabbis significantly expanded the realm of impurity, not by adding new sources of impurity but rather by devising new and far-reaching modes and processes of transmission of impurity to secondary and tertiary contractors. Thereby, I argue, the rabbis turned the contraction of impurity from a noticeable event to an ongoing reality.
I then continue to discuss the implications of this substantial expansion of the realm of impurity for the Mishnah’s construction of impurity as a factor in one’s daily lived experience. Through an examination of various scattered passages in which the rabbis comment on the places and situations in which one might encounter impurity, and on the modes of behavior and action one should undertake in response to potential or actual encounters with impurity, I piece together an account of the ways in which the rabbis conceived impurity to be operating in the lived world and to be defining one’s everyday experiences. I argue that the rabbis of the Mishnah create a picture of a world perfuse with impurity, in which almost every quotidian activity