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

is not aware.⁴⁶ In other words, the rabbis assume a certain dissociation of the hands from the rest of the body insofar as the hands have “a will of their own,” and therefore ascribe to the hands an impurity status that is independent of the rest of the body. This partial dissociation between hands and body brings to the fore situations such as the following:

      If one was eating fig-cake with unwashed hands (yadayim mus’avot) and he put his hand inside his mouth to remove the waste, R. Meir renders [the fig-cake] pure, and R. Yehuda renders it impure.⁴⁷

      The case here is of a person who is overall pure, but his hands are unwashed and thus impure in a low degree. As long as his hands are dry, they do not transmit impurity to the fig-cake he is eating, since his hands’ impurity is too minor to impact it, but once he moistens his hand, his saliva transmits impurity from the hand to the fig-cake and renders the fig-cake itself impure (as we may recall, liquids function as duplicators of impurity). Thereby, once the person ingests the impure fig-cake, he himself becomes impure. The controversy between R. Meir and R. Yehuda seems to pertain to the question of whether one’s saliva can indeed function as such “duplicating” liquid when it is still in one’s mouth, but for our purposes the striking notion here is that a person’s own hands can serve as “external” entities which can, through the mediation of liquids and foods, make the very same body to which they are attached impure. While I cannot get into the very complex and contested history and development of the notion of the impurity of hands here,⁴⁸ I do wish to point out that the rabbis could not have ascribed an independent impurity status to hands had they not held a broader perception of the human body as a modular mechanism, that is, as an entity with different constituent parts that, while operating together as one, also have independent existence. Of course, the rabbis did not consider one’s hands to be “appendages” of the body in the same manner as hair and nails, but they did consider the body to be a divisible entity, which can be parsed and subclassified by drawing distinctions between the parts of which it consists.

      The status of one’s saliva, which I mentioned in passing above, is an even more radical case in point for the modularity of the rabbinic body of impurity. The rabbis maintain that one’s saliva is part of the body as long as it is “attached” to one’s mouth, and thereby it partakes in whatever the body’s impurity status may be. However, once saliva is detached (that is, extracted from the palate), even if it is still contained in the mouth, it becomes separate from the body and functions as an independent entity. The following passage demonstrates this view:

      If a menstruating woman put coins in her mouth and went down and immersed, she is pure of her [menstrual] impurity, but impure on account of her saliva.⁴⁹

      The admittedly bizarre case described here is of a woman who is going to immerse for purification at the end of her menstrual period. Before she immerses, she puts coins in her mouth for whatever reason (perhaps she is afraid they will be stolen?), as a result of which saliva is detached from her palate and is attached to the coins. Now this woman is in an odd state: her body is overall pure, due to the immersion, but in her mouth there is saliva that was detached from her palate while she was still impure (that is, before the immersion). In other words, we have a pure woman in whose mouth there is the saliva of an impure woman, and this saliva actually renders this woman impure again, albeit now as a secondary contractor of impurity and not as a source of impurity. The woman in this passage becomes impure by part of her own body, a seemingly absurd situation, which is made possible because of the modular nature of the rabbinic body, because some of its constituents can be seen as parts of the body in certain circumstances and as external to the body in other circumstances.

      As I will now turn to argue, it is exactly this perception of the body as modular, and the readiness to distinguish between its constituent parts, that allowed the rabbis to introduce subjectivity and consciousness into the relations between one and one’s body. While the modularity of the rabbinic body, that is, its ability to be “annexed” to sources of impurity at any given moment, is what makes the body so precarious in terms of impurity, it is also this body’s modularity and the ability to “remove” parts of it that allow the body’s impurity to become more governable and manageable, and that enable the body to become more commensurate with the self.

      THE RABBINIC MAP OF BODILY SUBJECTIVITY

      At the outset of this chapter, I argued that bodily impurity at its very core is a state of affairs that entails a heightened tension between one and one’s body. I suggested that in the realm of impurity there is an implicit rupture between an active legal subject, whose aim is to maintain a state of purity, and the physical object he or she inhabits, which either passively contracts impurity from others or produces its own impurity. Indeed, the Mishnah’s rhetoric regarding the management of impurity seems to suggest that, from the point of view of the subject, the body is yet another thing one owns to which one needs to attend, and that one’s responsibility to purify one’s own body is not fundamentally different from one’s responsibility to purify one’s property.⁵⁰ In terms of its function in the realm of impurity, the human body is something one has, like a chair or a cup or a satchel, which must be governed, managed, and put up with as part of one’s sisyphic quest for purity. At the same time, the Mishnah leaves little room for doubt that the body is not only something that one has but is also what one is. Completely devoid of a language that distinguishes body from soul or mind, and practically devoid even of a designated word for body as such, the Mishnah knows no other way for a subject to proclaim that his body is impure except by saying “I am impure.” The Mishnaic purity discourse thus assumes an identity between self and body, despite the notable awareness of the incongruity between the body’s condition and the subject’s will.