As more recent scholarship has shown, the literary evidence for the custom of eating ordinary food in a state of purity is corroborated by archeological findings, and especially by the large number of stone vessels from the Second Temple and mishnaic periods found in various areas in Palestine. Since stone vessels were considered to be “impurity-proof,” this was the material of choice for making utensils that were to be used in settings in which purity had to be maintained. It is not surprising that many remains of stone vessels were found in the vicinity of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, but such vessels were also found in abundance in other parts of the country, especially in the Galilee.112
The Mishnah seems, in this respect, to be in keeping with evidence from the Second Temple period, and it does not suggest in any way that the pursuit of purity is restricted to the priests or to those about to approach the Temple.113 As we have seen and will continue to see throughout this book, in the Mishnah considerations of purity guide one through the most quotidian aspects of life.114 It is hardly clear why the rabbis would bother to elaborate on the ways in which household furniture such as commodes and beds contract impurity,115 or on the ways in which fish, which cannot be brought to the Temple or given to the priests as a heave-offering, contract impurity,116 if impurity is only of consequence for priests or in the vicinity of the Temple during festival times. By and large the assumption in the Mishnah, as it is in Second Temple literature, is that people strive (or should strive) to maintain themselves and their possessions in a state of purity at all times, to the limited extent that this is possible. Furthermore, in most of the legal discussions of the Mishnah the rabbis operate with the premise that nonconsecrated food is ideally handled, prepared, and consumed in a state of ritual purity.117 Indeed, unless specified otherwise, the appellation “pure” in the Mishnah refers to the level of purity required to consume nonconsecrated food.118
Given that ritual purity is assumed to be a desirable and even expected goal of the mishnaic subject, the question arises of whether and how maintaining a state of ritual purity is even tenable in the conditions I described above, namely, in a world in which the transferability of impurity is so great and its incidence so ubiquitous that every person and every object is assumed to be impure unless distinctly known otherwise. Is purity not a lost cause to begin with? How can the Mishnah pose an unspoken expectation that its subjects should strive to be ritually pure, at least for the purpose of certain activities, and at the same time assert that they are inescapably surrounded by impurity and are prone to contracting it, knowingly or unknowingly, at any given point?
On the face of it, one could dismiss this question by saying that the Mishnah does not concern itself with tenability. It describes a world in which impurity is ever present, because this is the result of systematically applying the rabbinic developments in the concept and scheme of impurity unto the lived environment, and it maintains a view in which one strives to be pure because impurity is by definition an undesirable condition and purity a desirable one. Whether or not it is actually feasible for one to be ritually pure for more than a few seconds or minutes at best in the impure world that surrounds him—this, one could argue, was of little interest to the rabbis, who were invested in the production of principles and not in the trifles of practice.119 However, a closer look at the Mishnah’s way of approaching cases of doubtful impurity of the type described, that is, cases in which the guiding premise is that everything and everyone is impure by default, reveals that the rabbis were in fact highly concerned with the tenability of ritual purity. As we see in a series of rulings regarding doubtful impurity in tractate Tohorot (3.5–4.13), the rabbis make a concentrated and conscious effort to neutralize some of the most common settings in which one can contract impurity, and thereby to make the contraction of impurity somewhat more controllable and the pursuit of purity more feasible. As I will argue, had the rabbis not been actively invested in their subjects’ ability to maintain a state of ritual purity, there would be absolutely no reason for them to put forth such peculiar rulings.
Here I will focus on the two most conspicuous rulings in this series, which introduce extremely lenient and completely counterintuitive principles for the determination of purity status in cases in which one cannot know for a fact whether impurity was contracted or not. Both of these rulings essentially present the notion that whenever impurity is most likely to have been contracted, it will be determined that impurity was not contracted.
The first ruling pertains to cases in which a person is suspected to have contracted impurity, but this person is not capable of accounting for him- or herself. For example, a small child or a mentally inept person is found next to a dead rodent. If they touched it, they have become impure; but it cannot be determined with certainty that they are indeed impure, because they cannot provide a reliable answer to the question “did you touch it?” This principle also pertains to animals that are suspected to have wandered into an impure area (for example, a graveyard) and are carrying articles, thus making the articles they were carrying impure (animals in and of themselves, it should be noted, are not susceptible to impurity).120 Such cases are referred to in the Mishnah as cases involving “one who has no mind to be asked” (ein bo da’at lishael). We could assume that in cases of doubt of this sort, the rabbis would rule that the person or articles would be considered impure. After all, is it not especially mentally inept people and animals who are prone to touching things that mentally capable people will be careful not to touch, and to wander into places that mentally capable persons will be careful not to go? But the Mishnah, surprisingly, rules exactly the opposite: in any case of doubt in which one cannot account for oneself, the persons or articles in question are rendered pure. In contrast, in an identical case of doubt involving a mentally capable person, the default ruling is impurity. For example, if an adult capable person says that he is not sure whether he touched a dead rodent or not, he will be determined to be impure, even though he is far less likely to have touched the rodent than a child is:
A deaf person, a mentally inept person (shoteh), and a minor who were found in an entry way in which there is impurity, are held to be pure; and all mentally capable persons (kol ha-piqeah) are held to be impure.
Whoever has no mind to be asked, his doubt is pure (that is, will be considered pure in a case of doubt).121
This ruling is highly counterintuitive, but it is this very counterintuitivity that indicates how invested the rabbis were in making purity a tenable goal. If persons and animals who cannot be responsible for avoiding impurity and who cannot be held accountable for their state of impurity were considered to be perpetually impure, as would have been the predictable ruling based on the premises we have examined throughout this chapter, then one’s ability to maintain oneself and one’s immediate environment in a state of purity would be significantly compromised. Through this overarching ruling the Mishnah does not dismiss the possibility that those who cannot give account of their actions have in fact encountered a source of impurity, but it allows one to ignore the ever-present potential of impurity that children and animals harbor, thus making the pursuit of purity more feasible.
The second mishnaic principle I will mention here pertains to cases of doubtful impurity in public as opposed to private domains. According to this principle, in a case of doubt regarding the contraction of impurity