THE LAW AS AN EASING OF RELIGIOUS BURDENS

Rambam opens up his discussion of the laws of ritual purity by noting that there are times when a system can seem burdensome, but when placed in context is actually less so than what had been there before. As an example, he compares a religious system in which people burned their children (the Molekh-worship referred to in the Torah) to the parallel Jewish system in which they burn a pigeon or a handful of flour.

Verses in Tanakh, he claims, support this notion of mitsvot. Whenever Hashem turns to the Jewish people asking them wherein He has burdened them, wearied them, and so on, Rambam implies that that means that they should recognize how much easier Judaism makes worship of God as compared to other religions.

Clearly, he is prefacing this to his explanation of these laws because of the cumbersome system they create. Rather than seeing tumah and taharah as impediments to easy religiosity, he is suggesting, they actually are the simplest way to get to some goals. Of course, the way Rambam says it suggests that we can only see it as such in comparison to the systems that were prevalent at the time of matan Torah, the Giving of the Torah. He does not explain--- as we have noted in the context of sacrifices—how those laws could be useful even today.

MAKING THE MIKDASH HARD TO GO TO

Much of the purpose of these laws, Rambam says, was to create barriers to going to the Temple, so as to increase one’s fear and awe when one actually got there. Since there were so many ways to become ritually impure—contact with corpses, with certain kinds of vermin, ordinary marital relations, various bodily emissions—it would be rare for a person to go to this place, helping to avoid the contempt that familiarity breeds. One cannot go to the Temple at night, and many forms of impurity stem from the night time, so that the next morning the person could not go, either. In this way, the sanctity of the Temple was preserved.

MEANS OF PURIFICATION

Rambam, moving to the question of the rites of purification, claims that the more frequent the kind of impurity, the more difficult the purification. This would make sense in terms of keeping people from the Temple, since the strongest provisions are made for the most common forms of impurity. The first example he gives is being in the same room as a corpse, which involves seven days of purification and sprinkling with the ashes of a red heifer, a rare item itself.

Without going through Rambam’s list, the last item displays, I believe, a flaw in his reasoning. He notes that childbirth is more rare than menstruation, so that childbirth requires a sacrifice. However, childbirth also requires a much longer period of refraining from the Temple than does menstruation, so that in those terms, the woman’s purification is more difficult, not less.

OTHER REASONS FOR THE LAWS OF RITUAL PURITY

Rambam deals with some of this objection by noting that tumah and taharah are also ways to help people avoid disgusting things. That element might help here, since perhaps the childbearing mother’s greater contact with disgusting things than do menstruating women—those who have children know whereof I speak, those who do not can take my word for it—leads her to have a more elaborate ceremony of purification.

The Sabians make a return to our thoughts in this chapter as well, since Rambam notes (he claims these practices still exist in his time) that the Sabian rituals for impurity (particularly those surrounding childbirth and menstruation) were extensive and difficult to follow. Our laws were a reaction to that as well. A fourth aspect of tunah and taharah that Rambam stresses is that these laws only affect those who want to go to the Temple. Other than that, a person can live a full life without paying attention to these laws (as we have, to our great distress, for the last two millenia).

As a continuation of that last point, Rambam notes that when the Torah refers to becoming holy and purifying ourselves, the Midrash emphasizes that this is through the vehicle of mitsvot, not through any particular purifying ceremonies—tumah and taharah, in other words, are not central avenues of spirituality generally, they are mechanisms for safeguarding our attitude towards the Temple.

There are clearly counterexamples to this last claim of Rambam’s, the most obvious being the laws of Niddah. While some might distinguish the prohibition of ordinary marital relations during the time a woman is menstruating from her impurity in terms of the Temple, they are actually coterminus, in that they start and end in the same ways. In that case, then, everybody has to be affected by the laws of ritual purity, and it becomes problematic to view it as a Temple phenomenon. (In childbirth, at least as envisioned by the Torah, the reverse is true. While the new mother has to experience some Niddah impurity, for the second period of time, she is prohibited from entering the Temple, regardless of her emissions, but is also permitted to her husband, again regardless of her emissions. While today those rules do not apply, since we have stopped distinguishing among the various flows of blood that emanate from women, the principle still fits Rambam’s idea that purity is more Temple-related than anything else.)

A more serious counterexample to Rambam’s claim—which he does not mention at all—is the notion of tevel and terumah. In any harvest, the farmer was not allowed to use the harvest for his own purposes before giving terumah to a priest. That terumah was not supposed to be tamei, ritually impure. While it gets a little complicated, since newly-harvested food can only become tamei if it has had water purposely placed on it, it is still true that the general farmer has to have some awareness of these issues in order to preserve the purity of his terumah. The priest, of course, must maintain the terumah in its purity, since he can’t eat it unless he (or the members of his household who wish to partake of it) and the food are still ritually pure. None of this has any connection to the Temple.

I suspect, regarding this last example, that Rambam would envision the giving and eating of terumah as an extension of Temple principles to ordinary life. In the same way that God wished there to be a place that instilled awe in people, and therefore safeguarded it with these rules, He may have also wished to ensure that people would have some mechanism that would force them to confront at least the echoes of that place in their ordinary lives, and that would be the terumah process. Rather than showing that these laws apply outside of the Temple, he would say that terumah insures that the Temple comes to them at least sometimes.

PRIESTS AND TUMAT MET

The difficulty of purifying someone from corpse-impurity (seven days and the ashes of the red-heifer) was what led to the prohibition on priests’ becoming ritually impure in that way. Since they were needed in the Temple, the Torah allowed it only where it would be extremely difficult to avoid, such as for parents, spouse, siblings, or children. The High Priest, who was needed in the Temple at all times, could not even become impure for these relatives. A proof that this was the motivation behind the law that Rambam advances is the case of women, who do not work in the Temple, and are therefore not enjoined from becoming impure.

Rambam’s explanation implies that priests are allowed to become impure for their closest relatives, but in fact (as the Rov, ztllh"h, explained in one of the yahrzeit shiurim) priests are required to become impure for these relatives. In addition, it does not seem particularly difficult to avoid becoming ritually impure for a sibling (as in the case of Rabbenu Tam, who famously did not act as an onen when his sister passed away, since he was in a different city and she had a husband who was taking care of her needs). It would seem more reasonable, then, to say that the Torah had some positive interest in people’s becoming impure for these seven types of relatives, which overrode its general desire to have priests avoid such circumstances.

MIRACLES OF IMPURITY

When it comes to leprosy, Rambam notes that this is a continuing miracle, in that it is a type of impurity (and illness) that comes about by virtue of the sin of slander. He notes that it begins with one’s house and moves to a person’s clothes and body, depending on whether or not that person repents his sin. Relatedly, he mentions that the mayim hamarim, the bitter waters drunk by a woman who is suspected of adultery (and which are supposed to punish her if she indeed committed adultery) are also a continuing miracle. The interesting part of these two is that Rambam—who openly says in other writings that he avoids explaining things as contravening Nature—still verifies that these aspects of the Torah’s view incorporate continuing miracles in everyday life.

One last piece worth noting is Rambam’s explanation of why the parah adumah, red heifer, is called a sin-offering (since there’s no sin in becoming impure), and why the clothing of the person who prepares the parah adumah become impure. Since the parah adumah allows a person to once again eat kodshim, sanctified food, and to enter the Temple, it removes the sin of entering them while impure. Rambam compares this to the plate the High Priest wore on his head (which was seen as expiating that kind of sin) or the sacrifices brought for such expiation. In other words, Rambam sees a ceremony that prevents a certain kind of sin by changing a person’s legal status as functionally similar to the ceremony that removes a sin once committed. That suggests—although here I speculate—that, at least in this area, the sin only depends on the status of the person involved; the expiation after the fact, then, might be retroactively changing that person’s status, so that we can wipe away the sin.

In terms of wiping away sin, Rambam seems to say that the clothing of priest who performs the necessary ceremony become impure because the ceremony itself carries away the sin. Thus, since the parah adumah or the sa`ir hamishtaleah (the goat sent out to the desert on Yom Kippur) carry the sins themselves, the clothing of the priest involved become impure. This is a remarkably tangible view of sin for a rationalist such as Rambam. We could of course explain his words psychologically—since the people involved are supposed to view the animal as carrying the sin, we treat it that way—but worth noting nonetheless.

Next week, we’ll do Chapter 48. See you then.