These two principles, then, serve as formal legalistic means to inhibit the full implications of the mishnaic system itself. Were the rabbis to follow the logic of their own system all the way through, it would indeed be very difficult to find a time and a place in which one or one’s possessions cannot be at least suspected to have contracted impurity, and thus to be impure by default. The rabbis prevent purity from becoming an entirely lost cause by creating a critical distinction between situations and settings that are at least partially in one’s control and situations and settings that are entirely beyond one’s control, allowing a freer pass for purity in cases of the latter sort. To emphasize, the principles described above pertain only to cases of doubt: if one knows for a fact that a person or an object contracted impurity, it makes no difference at all in which domain this took place or what the mental capacities of the person are. But by declaring that in situations which one cannot control there is no default assumption of impurity as there is in situations that one can control, the rabbis turn the maintaining of oneself in a state of purity from an impossible task to a sisyphic yet feasible task. It is in this distinction between controllable circumstances and incontrollable circumstances, I propose, that the key to understanding the rabbis’ stakes in ritual purity as an aspired ideal can be found.
Impurity and the Making of the Mishnaic Subject
The classification of persons, things, places, and bodily conditions as either pure or impure was a critical part of the conceptual framework that the rabbis inherited from their biblical and postbiblical predecessors. This classificatory enterprise is not just a manifestation of an intellectual desire for order and systematization; it also has strong normative implications, since it entails by its very nature an expectation that one should avoid impurity to the extent that this is possible, or otherwise get rid of it as soon as possible. This is not to say that the ritually impure was in any way identified with the immoral or unethical,124 or that concern with purity was expected to override any other legal or social considerations: obviously there are legitimate and even highly condoned activities that generate impurity, such as childbirth or care of the dead, and there is no reason to believe that people refrained (or were encouraged to refrain) from such activities so as not to contract impurity.125 But regardless of how meritorious the situation in which one contracted impurity was, the very condition of being impure was an undesirable condition that, as is evident in all textual sources concerned with ritual impurity, one should want to change. When the rabbis create an elaborate body of knowledge on the workings of impurity as they do in the Mishnah, explaining exactly how it is transmitted and in what situations it is likely to be contracted, the underlying message of this body of knowledge, so obvious that it does not need to be explicitly stated, is “try to be pure.” In this respect, the Mishnah is not different from earlier and much more concise impurity codes, as we find in the Hebrew Bible and in the texts from Qumran. What does make the Mishnah different, however, is the circumstances to which the implicit-but-obvious injunction “try to be pure” pertains. Whereas in the biblical and the Qumranic systems impurity is consequential mainly for those who function as primary sources of impurity, and at most to those in their most immediate vicinity, in the Mishnah impurity is consequential for everyone, all the time. As I put it above, for the rabbis impurity is an ongoing reality, whereas for their predecessors it is a noticeable event. In the mishnaic discourse, then, the injunction “try to be pure” has bearing not only on the way one conducts oneself after intercourse, for example, or after handling the dead, but also on the way one walks in the street, the way one interacts socially, the way one buys food in the market, the way one mends clothes, and so on. The concern with impurity encompasses every aspect of the mishnaic subject’s life, and is manifested in all his actions.
Since the injunction “try to be pure” is the normative pivot of the Mishnah’s discourse of impurity, it seems evident to me that when the rabbis elaborate on the various daily activities and behaviors that make the contraction of impurity likely, they also implicitly discourage certain activities and behaviors and endorse others. To take two simple examples, by drilling the notion that things left unattended are immediately taken to have become impure, the Mishnah discourages its subjects from leaving things unattended, and by making the point that one who eats impure food becomes as impure as what one eats, the Mishnah discourages its subjects from consuming food of whose origin and purity they are not certain, or for that matter from dining with persons of whose purity they are not certain. In constructing a world in which even the most mundane and banal actions have repercussions in terms of impurity, the rabbis also construct an idealized subject who conducts himself with heightened awareness of these repercussions, and whose effort to avoid impurity and maintain his body and possessions in a state of purity underwrites every minute aspect of his life. In other words, the rabbinic discourse of purity and impurity not only constitutes a picture of the lived world, but constitutes—and prescribes—a way of being in the world.
In light of the rabbis’ construction of a way of being in the world through their impurity discourse, and in light of their emphasis on the behaviors and actions that the individual takes on in the course of his daily engagement with impurity, we can gain further understanding of the two counterintuitive rulings discussed above. As we have seen, impurity is the default in a case of doubt, but only in situations in which one has some control over the environment in question (that is, the private domain) or over the transmitters or contractors of impurity at hand (ones who “have a mind to be asked”). Whenever this is not the case, and one has no control over the situation, the rabbis dismiss the possibility of impurity unless one knows in certainty that it has been contracted. The rabbinic decision consciously to disregard situations in which one might be considered impure by default because of circumstances that are entirely beyond one’s control speaks to the rabbis’ directed attention to the actions and choices of the individual, more so than to questions of the probability and likelihood of impurity. Simplistically put, the rabbis can ignore the possibility of doubtful impurity in situations that are beyond one’s control because these situations cannot be seen as manifestations of one’s commitment to purity and of one’s choice of a way of life.
Does this mean that the rabbis turn impurity into a completely artificial construct, a “nominalistic” concept as scholars like to call it,126 which only serves to assess one’s intentions and actions and thus can be tweaked and toyed with as the rabbis desire? Certainly not. Let us be reminded that the rabbis’ lenient rulings that I described above pertain to cases of doubt, that is, to cases in which no decision can be reached based on the facts alone, and therefore a formal legal consideration is warranted. A case of uncertain impurity is no different from a case of disputed property: in both cases the rabbis assume that there is a factual truth out there (one contracted or did not contract impurity, one is or is not the owner), but this truth is not accessible, and thus a formal overarching principle must be applied to solve the case (for example, “in a case of doubt in the public domain, [it] is pure” or “disputed property will be shared”).127 More generally, as I will point out in various junctures in this book, I do not see