In addition, the assumption in the Mishnah is that every person one comes across, unless publicly known to be stringent in the observance of purity, is potentially impure, and thus contact with this person makes one impure by default. Guided by this assumption, the Mishnah describes the following scene:
If one sat in the public domain, and another person came and trod on his garments, or [the other person] spat and he touched the spittle, on account of [him touching] this spittle they burn the heave-offering, and in regard to his garments, they follow the majority.89
In this scene, Jack (who is presumably pure) is sitting in the public domain when Josh, a man whom Jack probably does not know, comes and treads on Jack’s cloak or spits in Jack’s vicinity. If Josh happens to be a person with genital discharge or scale disease or a Gentile, then every garment on which he treads and everything that touches his saliva immediately becomes impure. While it cannot be known whether Josh is any of these things, the default option is that he was indeed impure and had transmitted this impurity further to Jack. The consequence is that if Jack had contact with Josh’s spittle, Jack will be rendered impure in such a way that he will disqualify a heave-offering if he touches it, and it will have to be incinerated. As for Jack’s garments, here the Mishnah is more lenient and suggests that, instead of automatically rendering the garments impure, it will be considered whether most of the people in this specific place are usually pure or impure. The Mishnah thus creates a picture of daily human interactions, even of the most random and mundane kind, as inherently defined by the risk of contracting impurity.
An especially pronounced example for this view of the lived world as pervaded with impurity can be found in the following passage of the Mishnah:
If there is one mentally inept woman (shotah) in a town, or a Gentile woman, or a Kuthian90 woman—all the spittles in this town are impure.91
As I have mentioned, the saliva of an impure person is itself a source of impurity. The most commonly encountered impure person in the mishnaic system is a menstruating woman (since unlike other forms of impurity that depend on abnormal bodily states, menstruation occurs on a regular basis), and the overall assumption is that Jewish menstruating women are aware of their status and are careful not to convey their impurity to others. Accordingly, they will be careful not to spit in public or at least to conceal their spittle, lest other people touch it and contract impurity.92 However, if in a certain town there is a woman who is not mentally capable of being careful in such a way or a woman who is otherwise considered to be constantly impure and not to be careful about it,93 any spittle found in this town potentially belongs to this woman and is thus potentially impure. Needless to say, in the ancient world spitting in the public domain was an ordinary thing,94 and the streets of the town were always replete with spittle. This passage paints a forceful picture of a world in which it is not only a direct encounter with people or objects that harbors the risk of impurity, but even merely walking in the street exposes one to impurity. This is closely related, as Charlotte Fonrobert observed, to the place of fluids, and particularly bodily fluids, in the rabbinic system of impurity.95 The very fact that saliva and urine, two substances that are commonly found in the public domain, have the same power to make something or someone impure that their original “owner” has marks the marketplace and the street as potentially laden with impurity, and defines one’s very interaction with space—even if this space does not entail actual people or objects—as noxious in terms of impurity.
Maintaining Purity within a World of Impurity
As I hope to have illustrated through the examples above, impurity in the Mishnah is depicted as an ineluctable reality. Not only does impurity potentially lurk everywhere, but it is also highly difficult to discern whether one actually contracted it or not, and thus one is prone to be almost always in a state of doubtful impurity. The mishnaic premise that “everything that can become impure will become impure” makes the task of maintaining oneself and one’s possessions in a state of purity throughout one’s daily interactions and activities seem almost impossible. Nevertheless, maintaining oneself and one’s possessions in a state of purity is unquestionably assumed to be the task of the mishnaic subject. That is to say, while the rabbis of the Mishnah create a world in which impurity is the default, they also direct their text to an idealized agent (real or imagined) who operates in this world with the purpose of avoiding impurity to the best of his abilities.96 To be sure, the Mishnah makes abundantly clear that a state of ritual purity can by no means be a perpetual one, but is rather always a temporary and transient state. By the mere fact of being in a physical body and of engaging with the material world, one contracts impurity, purifies oneself, and before long contracts impurity again, in an unending cyclical process. But it is nonetheless the mishnaic subject’s responsibility to take measures to purify oneself after having contracted impurity, and to try to maintain this state of purity for a certain duration of time, at least for the purpose of engaging in particular activities, which in the Mishnah have mostly to do with the preparation and consumption of food.
Here a short digression is in order so as to contest a common view according to which, in the setting of the Mishnah, impurity is completely inconsequential throughout one’s everyday life, since the only time in which impurity has any repercussions is when one is approaching the sanctuary or handling holy articles.97 According to this view all the intricate considerations of impurity and doubtful impurity throughout daily interactions and spaces that we have seen pertain only to priests, or at most to pilgrims in the vicinity of the Temple. This, however, is not commensurate with the rhetoric of the Mishnah nor with the scenarios it discusses, which assume an overarching commitment to purity in nonconsecrated times, in nonconsecrated places, and in regard to nonconsecrated objects. While the Mishnah acknowledges that not everyone is or can be committed to this high standard of purity, it does posit an idealized subject who is strongly defined by his commitment to this standard.98
The view that impurity is only consequential in the vicinity of the Temple and the sancta is a long-standing one in the Jewish tradition,99 and was most famously and influentially articulated by Moses Maimonides, who contended that “all that is written in the Torah and in the traditions [divrei qabala, that is, in rabbinic literature] regarding the laws of impurities and purities does not concern anything except for the Temple and its holy articles and heave-offerings and tithes.”100 The roots of this prevalent view are in the fact that according to the Hebrew Bible, the only realm in which impurity is proscribed is that of the sanctuary and the sancta.101 However, there is no reason to assume, even in the biblical context, that if impurity is explicitly prohibited only in the context of the sanctuary and the holies, it is overlooked everywhere else.102 The expectation that those who have become impure will purify themselves as soon as they can is made abundantly clear in various Priestly passages, without any suggestion that such purification is necessary only for the priests or only for those approaching the sanctuary.103 Furthermore, it is stressed that anyone who does not take measures to purify himself or herself in due time commits a transgression,104 regardless of whether he or she approached the sanctuary or not. The Priestly rhetoric leaves little room for doubt that constant striving toward ritual purity was expected of all the Israelites at all times, needing no further justification other than the all-encompassing requirement to be holy.105
While we have no way of knowing whether, to what extent, and by whom, if at all, ritual purity was observed in biblical times, it is quite evident that in the Second Temple period ritual purity was observed in everyday life, beyond the precinct of the Temple, and by nonpriests. While the ubiquity of the observance of ritual purity is debatable, the literary and archeological evidence from this period strongly suggest that such observance was not restricted to festival times or to the Temple