Liquid life

In Purity Rabbinic Judaism (46), Jacob Neusner comments on the role of liquidity in the purity system: “Dry inanimate objects or food are not susceptible to uncleanness. What is wet is susceptible. So liquids activate the system.” A dead animal on a pile of grain contaminates only the grain that it touches. When the grain is wet, though, the impurity spreads throughout the grain (Leviticus 11).

This applies to humans as much as anything: “The uncleanness of persons . . . is signified by body liquids or flux in the case of the menstruating woman (Niddah) and the Zab (Zabim). Corpse uncleanness is conceived to be a kind of effluent, a viscous gas, which flows like a liquid. Utensils for their part receive uncleanness when they form receptacles able to contain liquid. . . . in material terms, the effect of liquid is upon food, drink, utensils, and man. The consequence has to do with who may eat and drink what food and liquid, and what food and drink may be consumed in which pots and pans.”

It’s intriguing to note that the pollution that liquids activate is also undone by liquid: “What is unclean . . . emerges from uncleanness through the operation of liquids, specifically, through immersion in fit water of requisite volume and in natural condition. Liquids thus deactivate the system.”

In sum, we have a system in which the invisible flow of fluid-like substances or powers serves to put food, drink, and receptacles into the status of uncleanness and to remove those things from that status.”

Neusner isn’t sure whether or not to call this a “metaphysics,” but it certainly carries some intriguing anthropological or metaphysical implications. Human beings are clean so long as they contain the chaotic liquids within the body; once the liquids pass through the flesh, uncleanness kicks into gear. Drawing Mary Douglas into the discussion, we might see here some reflex of the cosmology of creation, according to which God bounds off the waters are bounded off and stabilizing the world order. Human beings are conceived as containers of surging chaos, and become unclean when that chaos surges beyond the bounds.