World of Impurity

One of the remarkable insights of Mira Balberg’s remarkable book on Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature is the contrast she draws between biblical and rabbinic notions of impurity. 

For biblical writers, she says, “the only participants in the impurity system, apart from the primary sources of impurity, are those who have direct contact with these primary sources. In contrast, in the mishnaic system even persons and objects several times removed from the source can be affected in terms of impurity. For the rabbis, impurity does not end with whatever had direct contact with the source. Rather, even an item that did not touch the source directly but only touched something that touched the source (or even only something that touched something that touched the source) is affected by the source’s impurity, albeit in an attenuated manner” (28).

What is transmitted from the source is not only impurity, but the capacity to spread impurity: “to say that A makes B impure is to say that A gives B the capacity to affect C” (28). In the Bible, the “chain of impurity almost always ends with B, the thing that contracted impurity directly from the source,” but in the rabbinic sources “the chain of impurity does not end with B . . . but continues to move further in a graduated manner in such a way that even an item that is five times removed from the source is affected by its impurity in a minor form” (29).

In a way that is not true under the biblical system, “impurity shapes the mishnaic depiction of everyday encounters and activities, in such a way that impurity is constructed as an all-pervasive presence and a perpetual concern” (35). She doesn’t think that this means the rabbis were panicky about impurity, but “impurity served for the rabbis as a marker of harmful and unwanted effect” (36).

Balberg argues that this, along with other shifts in rabbinic notions of impurity, establishes “the self as a new focal point in the discourse of impurity.” This self does not control impurity, but controls only his body and possessions and how they operate in a world of impurity (46-7).