Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature

Introduction

1 Introduction “From the day the Temple was destroyed there has been no impurity and no purity,” medieval and modern Jewish authors often proclaim,1 identifying the Roman demolition and burning of the Jerusalem Temple in the year 70 c.e. as a point of no return, after which the complex array of biblical laws pertaining to ritual purity and impurity became almost entirely inapplicable. According to this prevalent view, to write a book on the ways in which the rabbis of Roman Palestine in the second and third centuries c.e. reinterpreted, reshaped, and reconstructed the biblical concepts of purity and impurity is to be immersed in obsoleteness. It is to engage with an arcane body of legal themes that are not only without consequence for our time, but were, so it is often believed, even without consequence for the rabbis’ own time. 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? 2 Introduction 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...