Читать книгу Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature - DR. S Mira Balberg - Страница 11

2

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”; “They immerse artifacts before the Sabbath and [they immerse] persons on the Sabbath”; “Whether one rented a person or an animal or artifacts, the rule of paying on the same day applies”;⁷ and many more such examples can be found. Through these and similar conjunctions, the Mishnah reflects an underlying distinction between a person as a willing, active, self-reflective entity and a person as an object-like body, even though it does not map out this distinction by pointing to two separate constituents of the human being.

The distinction I am offering here between “one” and “one’s body,” then, is a distinction between the aspect of the person that is self-reflective, willing, and deliberative, an aspect to which I refer as “self” or “subject,”⁸ and an aspect of the person that is object-like and is classified in the Mishnah alongside other objects. Again, my intention is not to say that the mishnaic subject is somehow immaterial or nonbodily: I submit that there is no way in which the subject can be in the world, perceive it, and act within it except through a body.⁹ This does not allow us, however, to ignore the fact that the body is often experienced as disparate from the self, as something one has to care for and maintain like one would a car or a coffeemaker, and as an entity that does not always comply with one’s own wills or desires. In the concise words of Bryan Turner, “Our bodies are an environment which can become anarchic, regardless of our subjective experience of our government of the body.”¹⁰

Nowhere in the Mishnah is the nature of the body as “an environment that can become anarchic” more pronounced than in the context of bodily impurity,¹¹ the emergence or contraction of which is, by definition, something that happens to one’s body despite one’s will.¹² Whether one’s body is deemed impure as a result of a physical condition (such as menstruation or scale disease) or as a result of contact with a source of impurity, the entire experience of detecting, managing, and ridding oneself of impurity is underwritten with a tension between the body as an unruly or passive object and the self as a committed and active legal subject.¹³ Thus, I begin my investigation of the construction and development of subjectivity in the Mishnah’s impurity discourse by exploring the mishnaic body—first, as a central site in which the drama of impurity contraction takes place, and then, as a site that the rabbis attempt to make more manageable and more commensurate with the self by introducing subjectivity as a principle that governs its impurity.

THE BODY UNBOUND

In the Mishnah, as in the Priestly Code, the most immediate, urgent, and prominent way in which impurity can affect one’s daily life is through his or her very body. First, one’s body might itself be a source of impurity as a result of various physical conditions, thus requiring him or her to take certain measures and to avoid certain places and encounters for as long as the bodily condition persists. Second, one’s body might contract impurity as a result of contact with a primary source, and thereby require rites of immersion and purification, as well as be subject to various limitations regarding access to the holy. Simply put, the first thing that one needs to monitor and watch, whether for signs of primary impurity or for contraction of secondary impurity, is one’s own body, and the purity of one’s own body is the condition for the purity of everything else that one wishes to maintain in a state of purity—one’s possessions, one’s food, holy articles, and so on. It is quite obvious, then, that the subject’s engagement with impurity is first and foremost an engagement with one’s own body. In order to understand, however, what this engagement means in the mishnaic context, we must first try to characterize what I will call the “body of impurity” of the Mishnah, that is, the way in which the human body is seen to function, interact, and be transformed in its encounters with impurity. As we shall see, the rabbis construct a body that is both extremely fluid in terms of its boundaries and highly modular in terms of its constitution, and these two qualities critically define the way impurity as a bodily phenomenon is shaped in the Mishnah.

Contact and Connectivity

In her seminal work Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas put forth the paradigm that has become almost axiomatic in the study of purity and impurity, namely, that the concept of “impurity” (as well as “pollution” or “uncleanness”) fundamentally pertains to the breaching of boundaries. For Douglas, the body is the ultimate bounded system,¹⁴ and as such it can serve as a symbol for any group or society: it is a self-contained, well-defined unit, whose only vulnerable points are its points of exit and entry, that is, the orifices, and it is through these exit and entry points that impurity makes its way from and into the outside world.¹⁵ Several scholars of purity and impurity in ancient Judaism largely adopted Douglas’s paradigm, albeit sometimes with the necessary reservation that Douglas’s location of the bodily drama of impurity at the orifices applies only partially to the biblical scheme (in which the only orifices that are closely identified with impurity are the genitals, and other orifices do not play a role in the impurity system).¹⁶ A close examination of the rabbinic “body of impurity,” however, strongly challenges the Douglasian paradigm of impurity as a breach of bodily boundaries, since it reveals a body that can hardly be said to be well bounded in the first place. Rather than depicting the body that contracts impurity as a neatly enveloped entity into and out of whose orifices impurity oozes, the rabbis depict the human body as an extremely fluid entity whose boundaries are constantly transformed, and which becomes impure not only through penetration but also and especially through direct and indirect touch. This depiction of bodily boundaries as highly unstable, I suggest, is informed by central mindsets and ideas in Graeco-Roman medical discourse, and speaks to the way in which the rabbis integrated frames of thought from their surrounding intellectual culture into the system of impurity they inherited.

How does one’s body become impure, then, in the mishnaic scheme? If we leave aside for the moment cases in which impurity transpires independently in one’s body due to a physical condition, the Mishnah makes clear that the primary way in which one becomes impure is through contact with a source of impurity, either direct physical contact or indirect contact that the rabbis construe as direct contact, such as shift or overhang. Penetration through an orifice, to be sure, is one possible form of contact: for example, a menstruating woman makes a man who has intercourse with her impure, and impure food renders the one who eats it impure. The most common and prominent form of contact through which impurity is conveyed, however, is what we may call “surface contact,” that is, touching the source of impurity, whether another person’s body or another person’s bodily fluids, a dead animal or person, and so on. And yet the question remains: How exactly does surface contact transmit impurity from one entity to the other, in such a way that one body changes as a result of touching another? What is the nature of the process that the rabbis have in mind when depicting the contraction of impurity?

We might have been compelled to dismiss this question as unanswerable and to determine that the rabbis are simply adhering to the notions of impurity contraction they inherited from the Pentateuch, if it were not for several passages in the fifth chapter of tractate Zavim of the Mishnah. This chapter, which concludes the mishnaic tractate dedicated to the impurity of genital discharges, presents a series of five rulings regarding the way impurity is transmitted through various forms of contact. These rulings help reveal an underlying perception of contact between bodies as a form of physical connection, in the course of which two bodies become one and partake in the same qualities.

These five rulings discuss the degree of impurity of a person who had contact with a primary source of impurity, and put forth a curious distinction: during the time of contact itself, that is, as long as the secondary contractor is still touching the source, the degree of impurity of the toucher is identical to the degree of impurity of the source. Only after the two have separated, and the secondary contractor is no longer touching the source, does his or her impurity become “once-removed” and attenuated (that is, weaker in its force and shorter in its duration) in accordance with the paradigm I presented in the previous chapter. To put this simply, for as long as one is physically attached to the source of impurity, they both share the exact same level of impurity, and the secondary contractor functions like the source itself. The following two mishnaic passages demonstrate this principle:

One who touches a man or a woman with genital discharge, and a menstruating woman, and a parturient, and person with scale disease, and a litter and a seat [of the aforementioned people]—makes two impure and disqualifies one. Once he has separated himself—he makes one impure and disqualifies one. The same is the case for one who touches, one who shifts, one who carries, and one who is carried.¹⁷

One who touches the emission of a man with genital discharge, and his saliva, and his semen, and his urine, and menstrual blood—makes two impure and disqualifies one. Once he has separated himself—he makes one impure and disqualifies one. The same is the case for one who touches, and for one who shifts. R. Eliezer says: it is also the case for one who carries.¹⁸

The general purpose of these passages and those that follow them is to divide different sources of impurity into different categories according to the mode of contact through which they convey impurity. The most obvious form of contact is direct physical touch (maga), but there are also two forms of indirect contact: carriage (masa), in which one can become impure by either carrying the source of impurity or being carried by it, and shift (heset), in which one can become impure by either causing the source of impurity to move or being made to move on account of it. Those divisions notwithstanding, the same basic rule applies in all cases: at the actual moment of physical contact, whoever touches the source of impurity “makes two impure and disqualifies one.”¹⁹ This is the mishnaic manner of saying that whoever touches these sources of impurity has the same force to convey impurity as the source of impurity itself, that is, it becomes “a father of impurity” that makes whatever it touches a “first” of impurity, whatever touches the “first” a “second” of impurity, and whatever touches the “second” disqualified for use (if it is a heave-offering).²⁰ For example, if Jill is menstruating, and Jack touches Jill, then for as long as he is touching her, Jack is impure in the same degree as Jill. If he touches a bowl at the same time that he is still touching Jill, the bowl will become impure in the once-removed degree; if the bowl contains flour, the flour will become impure in the twice-removed degree, and if the flour will then touch a heave-offering it will disqualify it. Thus Jack makes two (the bowl and the flour) impure, and disqualifies one (the heave-offering). In contrast, once the source of impurity and whatever touched it are no longer in contact, the toucher’s impurity is attenuated in such a way that it is rendered a “first of impurity” that “makes one impure and disqualifies one.” That is, if Jack touches the bowl after he separated himself from Jill, he will make the bowl “second of impurity,” and if the bowl will be used to contain a heave-offering, the heave-offering will be disqualified. Thus Jack, once separated, makes one (the bowl) impure and disqualifies one (the heave-offering).

By distinguishing the force of impurity at the moment of contact from the force of impurity after separation, a distinction that has no trace in biblical or postbiblical purity legislation, the rabbis indicate that in the realm of impurity physical contact should be understood as connectivity. The moment of contact is a moment in which the items in question are one in terms of their ritual impurity status, as though the source of impurity annexes the thing that has contact with it and makes this thing a part of itself. In other words, for the rabbis impurity is not transmitted as much as it is shared. This notion, according to which physical contact turns different objects into one in terms of impurity so that they all share the same impurity status, can be illuminated through the following passage, which concerns the way in which pieces of dough contract impurity from one another:

If a piece of dough was “first” (that is, impure in the once-removed degree), and one attached other [pieces of dough] to it, they are all “first.”

If they were separated, [the piece that was initially impure] is “first,” and all the rest are “second” (that is, impure in the twice-removed degree).

If [the initial piece] was “second,” and one attached other [pieces of dough] to it, they are all “second.”

If they were separated, [the piece that was initially impure] is “second,” and all the rest are “third.”²¹

As this passage clearly indicates, when several separate pieces of dough are physically connected (note: not mixed together into one lump, but merely touching one another, noshkhot zo ba-zo) and one of them is impure, they all effectively share the impurity status of the impure piece, since they are all considered to be one piece for as long as the contact persists.²² This is the exact logic, I propose, that guides the mishnaic rulings we have seen in tractate Zavim, which consider physical contact to be a manner through which disparate bodies can share the same status of impurity.

I do not suggest, of course, that the rabbis thought of human beings and pieces of dough in the exact same way, or that they actually conceived of contact between humans or humanlike things as generating one physical body. The fact that the logic of contact as connectivity underwrites the rabbinic depiction of the contraction of impurity in tractate Zavim does not need to be taken as an indication that the rabbis considered bodies in contact to be ontologically one body, but rather it should be taken as an indication of how conceptually flexible the human body was for the rabbis, and how they were able to utilize this flexibility in their construction and explanation of the phenomenon of impurity and of the body’s function within it. Attempting to account for the fundamental operative principle of the biblical impurity system, according to which touch generates “contagion” and an annexation of the toucher unto the source in terms of impurity, the rabbis created a paradigm of contact that rests on a particular view of the body as a fluid and malleable entity, whose boundaries temporarily “melt” whenever it touches another body, and thus created an explanatory scheme for the very phenomenon of the contraction of impurity. This explanatory paradigm is, of course, never articulated as such, but it is traceable, as I proposed, through the innovative notion that during the moment of contact two separate entities function as one and share, as it were, one body.

The question does remain why, according to the rabbinic paradigm of contact I attempted to uncover here, the impurity force of the toucher is eventually diminished upon its separation from the source. Presumably, one could assume that once the impurity has been “shared” and the toucher becomes like the source, the toucher’s force of impurity would remain unchanged even after the separation. Here, I believe, the rabbis are bound by the logic of the biblical purity system, in which the explicit and recurring paradigm is that whatever touches the source of impurity always becomes impure in an attenuated degree. The rabbis essentially retained the biblical logic, but restricted it to the level of impurity after separation.

How did the rabbis’ understanding of the mechanism of the contraction of impurity and their explanatory paradigm of contact as a form of “sharing” a body emerge? It is plausible that this view of contact as connectivity at least partially reflects the impact of Graeco-Roman medical and popular-medical mindsets.²³ The notion that touch, either direct body-to-body touch or the touch of bodily emanations and effluvia, can cause two people to share a condition was apparently quite prevalent in popular conceptions of disease contemporaneous with the rabbis, especially in the Latin-speaking world. Vivian Nutton traced the uses of the word contagio or contagium, literally “to touch together,” in Roman texts, and showed that it is used not only to denote the spread of disease through contact, but also to describe the detrimental moral or cultural influence brought about by physical contact with dubious people.²⁴ Interestingly, the Greek word synanachrosis, which Nutton identifies as the closest counterpart to the Latin contagio, literally means “to color/dye together,” suggesting that the source of pollution, so to speak, transforms the thing it touches so that the latter changes its qualities and becomes identical to the pollutant.²⁵ The resemblance to the rabbinic perception of impurity transmission is immediately apparent. Here it is also important to note that Greek and Roman authors considered not only direct physical contact but also mere proximity to a noxious entity to be a channel through which the body can be detrimentally affected,²⁶ a view that can help us understand why in the rabbinic paradigm it is not only touch that is seen as generating a “sharing” of impurity, but also indirect forms of touch, such as carriage and shift.

The impact of Graeco-Roman views on the permeability of the body to its surroundings, and on the body’s fluid and malleable constitution, can perhaps be traced not only in the rabbinic notion of impurity-sharing through contact, but also in the rabbinic understanding of the effect of food on the body. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, the idea that one who eats impure food (that is, kosher food that was touched by a source of impurity) becomes as impure as this food has absolutely no biblical precedent.²⁷ Moreover, the very notion that one can ingest impurity at all is widely incongruent with the biblical view, and as both John Poirier²⁸ and Yair Furstenberg²⁹ convincingly showed, it is exactly this notion that stands at the center of Jesus’ famous controversy with the Pharisees in Mark 7:1–23.³⁰ When Jesus attacks the Pharisaic practice of hand-washing (which is geared, as Furstenberg observed, to protect the food, and thereby the eater, from the impurity of the hands), he declares “nothing outside a man can make him unclean [koinōsai] by going into him” (Mark 7:15), thus representing the traditional biblical perception in defiance of the Pharisaic (and later, rabbinic)³¹ approach.³² Here too, I believe, the notion that one becomes impure by consuming impure foods reflects the influence of Graeco-Roman views on the way food transforms one’s body. According to the prevalent humoral theory, which dominated Graeco-Roman medicine during the time of the High Empire, one’s body consists of four humors (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile), and the balance between these four humors is the decisive, if not the only factor, in the state of one’s physical and mental health. Since all food that one consumes either increases or decreases each of the humors, one is, quite literally, what one eats: one’s body is immediately affected by what one ingests, and one’s bodily constitution is transformed in accordance with the ingested substance.³³ It seems plausible, then, to understand the rabbinic (or protorabbinic) innovative notion that one becomes impure by digesting impurity in light of broader cultural concepts regarding the impact of food on the eater.³⁴

Clearly, the rabbinic impurity discourse and the Graeco-Roman medical discourse are concerned with very different phenomena and establish very different conceptual tools to approach these phenomena. What these two discourses do have in common, however, is an underlying perception of the body as a fluid and mutable entity, which is constantly transformed through its contact with its human and nonhuman environment. It is a fair assessment, in my view, that the rabbis conceptualized the body and the modes in which it is affected by other things and other persons in light of popular medical ideas and doctrines on the body that prevailed in their time.³⁵ This absorption of Graeco-Roman perceptions does not indicate that the rabbis necessarily thought of impurity in terms of hygiene and health,³⁶ but rather that their understanding of the mechanisms through which one body can affect another was largely shaped by the culture that surrounded them. In this culture, the body was anything but a well-bounded or stable entity; rather, it was seen to be in ongoing flux and to be constantly transformed and changed through contact with other persons and things.³⁷ In the concise words of Dale Martin, “For most people of the Graeco-Roman culture the human body was of a piece with its environment. . . . The self was a precarious, temporary state of affairs, constituted by forces surrounding and pervading the body.”³⁸ The rabbinic “body of impurity,” that is, the human body that the rabbis constructed through their impurity discourse, was thus woven from a biblical fabric, but its seams and stitches are recognizably Graeco-Roman.

By understanding the fluid and unstable nature of the body as construed in the rabbinic purity discourse, and especially by realizing how this body is constantly transformed through contact, we may gain further insight into the rabbinic depiction of impurity as a constant concern and daily preoccupation. For the mishnaic subject, ritual purity is by definition a temporary state, because his own bodily constitution is, in an important sense, temporary: as the body rapidly changes, so does, at least potentially, its purity status. Simply put, if the body does not have clear boundaries, it is also exceedingly difficult to protect it.

The Body as a Modular Mechanism

The notion that two separate bodies can become one, which according to my analysis underlies the rabbinic view of the contraction of impurity, indicates that the rabbinic body is not only fluid and unstable, but also to a certain extent modular. That is to say, the individual body can change its qualities and constituency by having other external parts, such as another body, added to it: when the two bodies are connected, they conceptually form (at least in terms of impurity) one shared body, and when they are no longer connected, each of the bodies functions as a separate unit.

In this regard, the human body is no different from other modular inanimate objects to and from which parts can be added or removed. The rabbis refer to such parts that can be removed or added as hibburim, “appendages,” a term they use to discuss things that are detachable from a specific artifact and yet when connected to it function as one unit with it (for example, the drawers of a chest or the handle of a pan). When the “appendage” is connected to the item in question, they form one unit for the purpose of contraction and conveyance of impurity: if the appendage becomes impure, then all of the object will become impure, and if the object becomes impure, the appendage will also become impure. The rabbis of the Mishnah dedicate lengthy discussions to sorting the different components of various artifacts in order to figure out whether and which of these components are “appendages,”³⁹ and they similarly use this term when discussing different components of particular foodstuffs.⁴⁰ Thus, the same principle that we have seen in regard to bodily contact between persons also pertains to the transmission of impurity from one artifact to another, for example:

If a bed was impure on account of treading (teme’a midras, that is, an impure person stepped or leaned on it), and one appended a mattress to it, all of it (that is, the bed and the mattress) is impure on account of treading. Once [the mattress] was separated, [the bed] is impure on account of treading, and the mattress is impure on account of touching [that which is impure on account of] treading (maga midras).⁴¹

The same mechanism of impurity-sharing, then, is evident both in the case of human bodies and in the case of inanimate objects: as long as the two components are “appended,” they function as a single unit in terms of impurity, and they both share the impurity status of the source. Once the physical connection is undone, the “appendage”—whether a person or object—is only residually impure, in such a way that the impurity degree of the person or object is once-removed from that of the source.

The rabbinic view of the human body as a modular mechanism, from and to which things can be removed or added, is evident not only in the notion that two bodies can be “connected” so as to constitute, in terms of impurity, one body, but also in the rabbinic consideration of several bodily components within a single body as “appendages.” This term is used, in the context of human bodies, to refer to hair, nails, and teeth, three bodily constituents with which one is not born and that are disposable throughout one’s life, in such a way that their pertinence to the body is seen as secondary. These three components partake in the impurity of the body as long as they are connected to it, but are no longer impure once they are separate from it: for example, the teeth, hair, and nails of a corpse convey corpse impurity as long as they are connected to the corpse, but not once they are set apart from it.⁴² Accordingly, we find in the Mishnah statements such as this one:

If the appendages of the impure [person] were on the pure [person], or if the appendages of the pure [person] were on the impure [person]—[the pure person] is impure.⁴³

This passage concerns carriage as one of the modes in which impurity is conveyed by persons with genital discharges: as a rule, persons with genital discharges convey impurity to everyone that they carry and to everyone that carries them. The question at hand is what happens if the body parts that are being carried are parts that are considered to be “appendages” of the body. Since they do not fully belong to the body, can they be said not to convey or contract impurity in this situation? While the Mishnah does not explain what it means by “appendages,” it is reasonable to understand this passage in light of the Tosefta, which specifies that the discussion relates to teeth, hair, and nails.⁴⁴ We see, then, that the human body is not a fixed, unified, and monolithic entity: it is seen as consisting of various parts, and its different constituents are subject to different rules when it comes to the contraction and conveyance of impurity.

This perceived modularity of the human body is what enables, I suggest, one of the most perplexing rabbinic (or protorabbinic) innovations, namely, the ruling that one’s hands are constantly impure (in a low degree) regardless of the impurity status of the person as a whole. One’s entire body can be certifiably pure, but unless one has just washed one’s hands this very instant, his hands are considered to be “second to impurity” in such a way that they disqualify a heave-offering just by touching it, and if one’s hands are wet, they also transmit impurity to ordinary food.⁴⁵ The reason for this constant status of impurity, as stated in the Mishnah, is that the hands always “busy themselves” (she-ha-yadayim ‘asqaniyot), that is, one’s hands are likely to do things and touch things of which their “owner” 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.