Those who are inclined to dismiss all concerns with practices of ritual purity and impurity as a thing of the distant past, or perhaps, for some, of the unknown messianic future,2 might want to stop and consider the following question, posted on the Israeli orthodox website Kippa on April 25, 2010:
I am a hozer bi-teshuva (recently became religious and observant), and most of my coworkers are entirely secular, who are in the habit of eating nonkosher food even in our workplace. I try to refrain from touching objects that we all share, yet several questions have come up recently:
1 If someone who sat in my working environment has been eating nonkosher food, should I take any measures in case they dropped some bits of their food in my vicinity?
2 If a person ate nonkosher food and then touched certain objects (folder, fax machine, keyboard), should I refrain from touching these objects? And if such contact took place, does the impurity of the food pass on to the objects? . . .
3 If I happened to touch such an object, how should I go about purifying myself from this impurity?3
The anonymous inquirer’s questions are, to be sure, guided by a number of misconceptions in terms of codified Jewish law. Nonkosher food does not convey impurity of any sort, certainly not to those who happen to touch it by mistake and most certainly not to objects that came into contact with it. But it is exactly these misconceptions and the lack of commensurability between the inquirer’s presuppositions and the governing paradigms in Jewish law that reveal the enduring relevance and power of the concepts and rhetoric of ritual purity and impurity. The person who posed this question did not know what, exactly, constitutes a source of impurity and how impurity is contracted, but he had a strong sense that the difference between his religious self and his nonobservant coworkers must be somehow expressed through palpable “impurity.” Moreover, he had a strong sense that interaction with them, in one way or another, endangers him, and specifically endangers him through the material environment that he reluctantly shares with those different from him. These notions, which dominate almost every cultural system of purity and impurity (even though they are completely misguided in the context of contemporary Jewish law), speak to the force of ideas of purity and impurity in one’s self-making as a pious subject, and to the way these concepts give concrete form to the desire to conduct oneself and one’s body by separation from others and by constant reflection on oneself and one’s surroundings.
Purity and impurity, then, as potent and dominant themes in Judaism’s religious vocabulary, did not become obsolete even when some or all of the practices pertaining to them were no longer performed. Rather, they live on as powerful conceptual and hermeneutic tools through which ideas about self and other can be manifested, through which one’s body and environment can be scrutinized and defined, and through which one constitutes and forms oneself as a subject. This book explores the early rabbis’ comprehensive attempt to recompose and interpret the biblical code of purity and impurity, and examines how this enterprise of recomposition constructed a new and powerful discourse that is deeply engaged with and informed by concerns with body, self, lived environment, and religious subjectivity.
In this book I trace and analyze the ways in which the early rabbis, in their remaking of the biblical laws of purity and impurity, negotiate and develop a unique notion of a bodily self. I argue that the rabbis construct the drama of contracting, conveying, and managing impurity as a manifestation of the relations between oneself and one’s human and nonhuman surroundings, and that they create a new array of physical and mental purity-related practices that both assume and generate a particular kind of subject. This book, then, seeks to introduce rabbinic legal discourse into the landscape of ancient and late ancient modes of reflection on, engagement with, and shaping of the self, and to explore the rabbis’ textual reconstruction of biblical purity and impurity as a site in which inherited scriptural traditions are remolded in the cultural and intellectual climate of the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean of the high empire.
At the center of this study stands the Mishnah, the earliest comprehensive rabbinic legal codex known to us. More specifically, this study focuses mainly on one of the six divisions, or “orders,” that comprise the Mishnah, the division dedicated to the topic of purity and impurity, which is known as Seder Tohorot (the Order of Purities). The final compilation of the Mishnah can be dated with relative confidence to the first quarter of the third century C.E., and is commonly associated with the name of Rabbi Yehuda the Patriarch (who died around 220 C.E.) and his circle. However, the Mishnah consists of hundreds of legal and interpretive traditions, generated and transmitted by different named and unnamed rabbis over a time period that spans between a few dozen years and a few hundred years. While the most dominant sages of the Mishnah, to whom the greatest amount of material in this work is attributed, seem to have been active primarily in the course of the second century C.E., a substantial amount of foundational legal teachings in the Mishnah apparently dates back to the first century C.E., and the Mishnah even contains traditions, albeit few and far between, from sages who presumably lived as early as the mid-second century B.C.E. The diverse and multilayered nature of the Mishnah and the fact that it constitutes a repository of traditions created over a rather long period of time compel us to consider this rich and complex work both in terms of its organic continuity with earlier Jewish legal and interpretive works, and in terms of its active transformation and change of concepts, practices, and legal modes of thought inherited from the rabbis’ predecessors.
The foundation of the Mishnah, and the point of departure of its makers, is the patrimony they received from previous generations: first and foremost, the laws of the Pentateuch, but also various traditions, regulations, and customs that emerged during the time known as the Second Temple period (538 B.C.E.–70 C.E.). Ideas and rules of purity and impurity were undoubtedly among the most dominant components of the legal and cultural traditions the rabbis inherited. In the biblical Priestly Code, the laws of purity play a key role in the cult of the Tabernacle and in the organization of the camp of Israel, and the rhetoric of impurity and purification is also highly prevalent in the books of the Prophets. It is especially in the literature of the Second Temple period, however, that purity and impurity emerge as a central concern and as a source of ongoing preoccupation.4 This preoccupation is manifested not only in the presumed scrupulous observance of ritual purity laws at the time (at least in some circles),5 which led later rabbis to describe this period longingly as “the time in which purity burst out in Israel,”6 but also in the fact that the language of impurity and the metaphors it engenders colored the social and religious discourse of this period in a remarkable way. In the literature of the turn of the first century C.E., the theme of purity recurs as one of the pivots of the consistent effort to distinguish “us” from “them”: non-Jews from Jews,7 Sadducees from Pharisees,8 followers of Jesus from the ones renouncing him,9 and sons of light from sons of darkness.10
The rabbis who created the Mishnah were heirs to the notions and practices of purity and impurity that their predecessors developed, as well as to the emphasis on scrupulousness in observance of purity as a way of differentiating insiders from outsiders and of expressing utmost piety. The twelve tractates that comprise the Order of Purities, and likewise other mishnaic tractates and textual units that discuss matters of purity and impurity, present an ambitious and comprehensive attempt further to develop, systematize, arrange, scrutinize, and augment this biblical and postbiblical inheritance, and to weave out of numerous legal details a rich picture of everyday activities, encounters, and practices that are defined and governed by observance of ritual purity. In essence, the Mishnah’s vast purity and impurity corpus can be seen as a direct continuation of frames of thought and of hermeneutic and legislative endeavors that preceded it,11 and as an edifice whose foundations are firmly grounded in the Second Temple period. However, the construction of this impressive mishnaic edifice cannot be understood merely in terms of the preservation and systematization of past teachings and customs. Rather, it is the result of a creative encounter