Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature. DR. S Mira Balberg

“realness” of impurity.¹²⁸ What this emphasis does do, however, is establish the self as a new focal point in the discourse of impurity. The mishnaic self, it should be made clear, does not control the workings of impurity as such: he only controls, to a limited extent, how his own body and his own possessions operate in the realm of impurity. As the following chapters will show, it is in this limited space of control, in which the relations between the self, his body, and his environment are actively constituted, that the rabbis are most avidly interested, and where the most innovative aspects of their impurity legislation emerge.

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      Subjecting the Body

      A reader who is accustomed to associating the concepts of purity and impurity with states of mind or heart, as one who is versed in Jewish and Christian liturgical or moralistic literature might be, could perhaps be surprised by the extent to which purity and impurity in the Mishnah pertain strictly to material entities. In the Mishnah there is no such thing as impure thoughts or pure intentions, an impure soul or pure love. Rather, the rabbinic realm of impurity consists only of concrete physical objects, visible and palpable, which are made impure through direct physical contact with material sources of impurity (or through particular bodily situations), and which dispose of their impurity through a series of distinctly physical actions. As Jonathan Klawans showed in detail, in their halakhic writings the rabbis “compartmentalized” the entire range of moral and behavioral meanings of purity and impurity that can be found in the Hebrew Bible (for example, the notion that the land becomes impure as a result of murder or that evil doings make one impure), and presented instead a systematic view of impurity as an entirely natural phenomenon.¹ Indeed, the rabbinic preoccupation with impurity as a pervasive and ever-present possibility, which I described in the previous chapter, is directed solely toward one’s engagements with the material world and not toward one’s actions, thoughts, or inclinations, except for actions, thoughts, and inclinations that, as I will argue in the sixth chapter, have to do with the management of ritual impurity itself. Human beings, needless to say, can contract and convey impurity in this system only insofar as they are themselves material objects, namely, only insofar as they are bodies.

      It should be noted, however, that “the material world” in which impurity transpires and with which one’s engagement must be carefully monitored, according to the Mishnah, is in fact quite limited in terms of its constituents. I have already mentioned that the primary sources of impurity are very few in number and that the rabbis do not add any further sources to those mentioned in the Priestly Code, but there are also only a few kinds of entities that are capable of contracting impurity upon contact with one of these sources. For one, no natural element that has not yet been processed by human beings can contract impurity. Fountains, rocks, soil,² trees, air, and so forth are completely beyond the reach of impurity and are all categorically pure.³ Similarly, all living animals (except for humans) are completely “immune” to impurity—they cannot contract it and cannot transmit it further. Finally, anything that is firmly connected to the ground is categorically pure, which means, for example, that houses cannot contract impurity.⁴ In short, the only things that are susceptible to impurity are human beings, artifacts (that is, inanimate objects processed by humans), liquids (drawn or contained by humans), and foodstuffs.

      The ongoing management and monitoring of impurity that, as I argued, underwrite the daily life of the mishnaic subject as constructed by the rabbis can thus be examined through the lens of the relations between the subject and these four elements. Put simply, the effort to stave off or at least be cognizant of ritual impurity manifests itself in the manner in which one interacts with or approaches the bodies, artifacts, liquids, and foods in one’s environment: in the manner in which one watches them, handles them, exposes them to the touch of others, and so on. However, a closer look at the ways in which the rabbis parse, subclassify, and develop each of these four categories of things susceptible to impurity reveals that these categories themselves are profoundly shaped and defined by human subjectivity. The mishnaic subject not only determines (to the extent that this is in his control) whether and how to have contact with potentially impure things, but also determines—if only to a limited extent—which things actually constitute the material world of impurity that surrounds him.

      To prevent any misunderstanding at the outset, this does not mean that the subject can control impurity through his volitions or desires in such a way that one will not become impure if one decides not to become impure. Undeniably, one’s desire not to contract impurity has no more impact on his purity status than one’s desire not to get wet when it is raining has on him actually getting wet. Rather, it is the very inclusion of an object in the impurity system (that is, its definition as susceptible to impurity) that depends on the relation between the subject and the object. As I will show in this chapter and the next, the rabbis introduce a revolutionary perception, according to which the mental investment of a person in a thing is a condition for the inclusion of this thing in the realm of impurity. Thus, while the Mishnah describes the material world as pervaded with impurity, it also makes clear that this material world is shaped, defined, classified, and governed by human consciousness and through dependence on human mental processes.

      In the chapters that will follow, we will see how this notion of subjective investment as a condition for susceptibility to impurity unfolds and gains prominence in the mishnaic discourse. Before I turn, in the next chapter, to explore the multifaceted ways in which subjective investment determines the susceptibility of inanimate objects to impurity (most notably artifacts, but also liquids and foods), I dedicate this chapter to discussing the most central and yet the most complex object that occupies the world of impurity—the human body. As I will suggest, in the Mishnah’s discourse of impurity the (living) human body functions as a paradigm for all other potentially impure objects, and it is by examining the most immediate form of relations between the subject and the material world—namely, the relation between one and one’s own body—that we can begin to understand the weight and function of subjectivity in shaping the world of impurity.

      Here I must account for the very distinction or divide between “one” and “one’s body” that I put forth here and that will underlie my analysis in this chapter. To be sure, the divide or duality I am pointing to is by no means akin to a Platonic or Cartesian duality of body and soul or body and mind, and such a duality is not in any way implied in the vocabulary or rhetoric of the Mishnah.⁵ As several scholars have showed, even when various rabbinic sources do mention body and soul as two distinct entities (with the latter seen as what animates the former), they also make clear that these two entities are inextricably linked and codependent, thus not leaving any room for a view of the soul as one’s “real” or pristine self as we find in the Platonic heritage.⁶ In the Mishnah, moreover, a distinction between body and soul is especially irrelevant and indeed does not appear: given the general nature of this work as a legal code, the Mishnah is concerned with what people do or do not do, rather than with the way they are constituted as persons, and internal divisions or tensions within the individual are not addressed in any way.

      Nevertheless, there is absolutely no denying that mishnaic law assumes that each individual has an aspect of will, intention, and self-reflection, as well as an object-like aspect (that is, a material body) in which he or she is not different from animals and inanimate objects, and that these two aspects are not necessarily commensurate. Both these aspects of the human are expressed in the Mishnah through the same single word—adam, meaning “person,” or “mankind,” but an examination of all the occurrences of this word in the Mishnah reveals that adam can be used in two fashions. The word adam is most commonly used to denote a human agent as a legal subject, in such phrases as “a person should not go,” “a person must bless,” “a person can make a vow,” and so on, but it can also be used to denote a human body to which things happen without any will or deliberation on the person’s end. In cases of the latter sort, in which “person” means strictly “human body,” the word adam almost always appears in conjunction with either artifacts (kelim) or animals (behema), making the object-like nature of humans in the given context quite apparent. To take a few typical examples: “If one threw [an item] in order to cause a wound, whether in a person or in an animal”;