The extreme transferability of impurity in the Mishnah, which is expressed in the graded system of impurity, in the principles of “duplication,” and in the expansion of biblical modes of transmission, generates a radically new perspective on purity and impurity and their place in everyday life. This perspective, which is almost completely absent both from the Priestly Code and from the writings of Qumran, is that of the “innocent passerby,” that is, of a person whose body or possessions might contract impurity as a result of various daily interactions and encounters without his or her even being aware of it. The emergence of this new perspective in the discourse of purity and impurity, at the center of which stands not the unusual or noteworthy situation of the source of impurity but the person going about his or her most quotidian activities, constructs the mishnaic discourse of purity and impurity as fundamentally different from what preceded it.
In view of the various principles presented above, it becomes clear that in the Mishnah, unlike in the Priestly Code or in Qumran, the contraction of impurity is construed as a default. The effect of impurity in its rabbinic construction is so far-reaching, and the inadvertent contraction of impurity so probable, that the management of impurity becomes an ongoing daily task for anyone who wishes to remain pure. The concern with impurity, as I will now turn to show, thus profoundly shapes the very experience of everyday life in the mishnaic discourse.
MAPPING THE EVERYDAY AS A REALM OF IMPURITY
Above I presented a number of prerabbinic and rabbinic principles that significantly increase the transferability of impurity, thus transforming the biblical picture in which impurity is confined in its scope and limited in its repercussions to a picture in which impurity is ubiquitous and widely effective. In what follows, I will demonstrate the extent to which this new picture of impurity shapes the mishnaic depiction of everyday encounters and activities, in such a way that impurity is constructed as an all-pervasive presence and a perpetual concern. As I will suggest, it is against this picture of impurity as ever-present and as a defining component of one’s daily life that we can begin to understand how the way in which one manages one’s body and one’s possessions in terms of impurity became, for the rabbis, a critical site for reflections on and construction of one’s relations with the material world and with oneself.
Before proceeding, however, I wish to make clear that by referring to a “concern” regarding impurity, I am not implying in any way that the rabbis or their contemporaries were afraid of impurity. Practically speaking, there is no danger in impurity: if one contracts it, one simply performs the ritual instructions for purification, which for the most part include no more than a quick visit to an immersion-pool. In general, I believe that the category of fear is entirely inappropriate for explaining ancient purity systems. As Robert Parker astutely put it, impurity “is not a product of the ill-focused terror that permanently invests the savage mind, because that terror is an invention of nineteenth-century anthropology.”79 Nevertheless, I find it self-evident that the contraction of impurity was seen by the rabbis as disadvantageous and undesirable, and that the effect of impurity was seen as a detrimental one, although by no means as acutely dangerous. It is difficult to know what, if any, the practical repercussions of a status of impurity in the tannaitic period were; but whether or not a ritual status of impurity actually meant exclusion from certain activities or places, it is clear that the concept of impurity served for the rabbis as a marker of harmful and unwanted effect. Concern with impurity is not tantamount to panic about impurity; rather, it is simply a state of being constantly conscious of the prospect of contracting impurity and of trying to avoid it to the best of one’s ability, while still considering it to be, at times, unavoidable. This is essentially the state of mind depicted in the Mishnah.
Doubtful Impurity: The Certainty of Uncertainty
The extreme transferability of impurity as it was construed in the rabbinic system inscribes the entire lived world with the potential presence of impurity. In the rabbis’ view, every random object that was found on a street corner could have been touched by an impure person, thus becoming impure and thus acquiring the ability to further transmit impurity to anyone and anything that touches it. Every person one comes across—unless specifically known to be scrupulous in the observance of purity—could be a source of impurity that would make whatever she touches impure. For the rabbis, then, to interact with the human and material world was to risk the chance of contracting impurity.80 Nowhere is the overall perception of the human and material environment as impure by default more explicit than in tractate Tohorot of the Mishnah, which sets guidelines for those who attempt to maintain a reasonable level of purity (presumably, mainly in order to have their meals in a state of ritual purity) within an overall impure world.81 The tractate is concerned with various subtopics that pertain to this general theme, and its main portion addresses the topic of doubtful impurity (safeq tum’a), that is, determining the ritual status of someone or something that could have been in contact with a source of impurity, but cannot be said to have had such contact with certainty.
As a rule, the determination of ritual status—that is, the discernment of something or someone as pure or impure—is performed through a tracing of the history of the object or person in question.82 Simply put, it is necessary to determine with what this person or object had contact since the last time the person or object was known to be pure, as well as to determine whether the things or persons with which the person or object had contact were themselves pure or impure. The assumption in tractate Tohorot, however, is that most of the time tracing this history in full is impossible. Let us suppose that Jill was walking in the street and happened to stumble over a rug that someone had left there. According to the mishnaic scheme of transferability, if the rug was impure (for instance, if it was made impure by a corpse or was trodden on by a menstruating woman) and Jill had direct physical contact with it, Jill also becomes impure. But how can it be known if the rug was impure? To answer this question one would have to trace every single person who happened to touch the rug since it was made, which is of course impossible. In other cases, it can be known for sure whether the object or person in question is pure or impure, but it cannot be said with certainty whether contact indeed took place or not. For instance, the Mishnah mentions a case in which a person came across two dead creatures, a dead creeping-crawling creature (for example, a lizard), which is a source of impurity, and a dead frog, which is not impure. This person knows for sure that he touched one of them, but does not know which one he touched, and thus does not know whether he contracted impurity or not.83
Through the many examples that the Mishnah provides for such cases of doubt, it portrays the world as pervaded with impurity. To paraphrase Murphy’s Law, the underlying mishnaic assumption is that everything that can become impure will become impure. For example, the mishnaic rule is that if one lost an article and found it the next day, this article is automatically rendered impure: the night that it spent away from its rightful owner is presumed to have entailed contact with a source of impurity.84 Other passages in the tractate state even more pronouncedly that objects that have been left unattended, even for a short duration of time, can be assumed to have been touched by people in a state of impurity, and thus to have contracted impurity from them. For example:
If a potter left his pottery-bowls and went down to drink—the inner ones are pure, and the outer ones are impure.85
If one leaves artisans inside his home, the house is impure, the words of R. Meir. And the Sages say: [It is impure] up to the place where [the artisans] can reach with their hands and touch.86
In the first passage, the Mishnah describes a scene in which a potter, whose merchandise is lined up in rows against a wall, leaves his merchandise for a short time to get a drink. The rule here is that the outer pottery articles, that is, the ones farthest away from the wall and closest to the road, must have been touched (advertently or inadvertently) by passersby, and have thus become impure.87 Two assumptions guide this ruling: first, that whatever is